River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

All-american Gong Girl

By Deborah Jang

Eldest daughter of Gong Chow and
Siu Shee, immigrant couple from China.
Born in Richmond, California, north
of San Francisco, just across the bay.

Named Fong Yuet for the ancestors. State-
side she was June. To me, forever Mom.
Fireworks the night before announced
her arrival July fifth nineteen thirty.

Every Independence Day she felt pangs
of affirmative glee -- as if she belonged.
At least to the sky. At nine she was sent
to Chinese school in San Francisco,

an immigrant custom she soon rejected.
She hopped on the Greyhound bus alone,
rode home to her parents’ chagrin.
At Richmond Elementary she joined

the harmonica band, worked the restaurant
after school, did not miss a shift.
During wartime the family moved
to the valley, where June was a big hit.

Team debater, class treasurer, best-dressed
girl at Merced High — she had it going on.
Chinese pilots training at the air base
lined up for her dance card. She tango’d,

cha-cha’d, bunny hopped with gusto
and soft laughter. Got a job downtown
Merced selling ladies dresses. Took up with
the owner who promised to promote her.

Post-war, Gong Chow had made plans
to return to China. The story goes June
said NO, kept her little sister with her
while the ship dipped off horizon.

June and sis stayed with Monroe, the now
betrothed store owner. He promised
her folks his good care but didn’t really
follow through, so June then divorced him

Though not before the three of us claimed
her heart forever. Dave Allen was the next guy.
With him she bore two more sons, of Chinese
Irish extraction. Bridge clubs, soccer,

cul-de-sacs filled her American sky. Especially
on July fourth her urgent eyes scanned
the night for oomph pah pah, or maybe
something keener. By now we lived back

by the bay. It was the flowered sixties.
Her five young grew out their hair,
while she and Dave plied the days
with good times, hard work, harder drink.

He died young, she carried on, the children
ventured forth. Her last man was Ken Wilkins,
though there were others in between - all this
to say, she enjoyed the company of fellows.

When Ken passed it hit her hard. The children
couldn't save her. At sixty-two June was through.
We sprinkled her at sea. I strike the gong.
It rumbles wide, ripples up night sky.

Where do the good, kindhearted go?

To lipstick smiles
left on napkins perfectly
half stuck on rims
where gin and tonics flowed

Gliding long as fingertips
that tucked me into cool
crisp sheets in days when sleep
was easy, a keeper
of shy adorations
nestled in young motherlove

Arpege, Pall Malls, show
tunes, novels, husbands
in a row, loud laughing
midnight parties
turned to shouting
or big whispers
then to fragile mornings after

Scrabble, dim sum, Niners,
grandkids

Now to ashes dancing
at the gate, not
missing one last beat.

© Deborah Jang. All Rights Reserved.

Deborah Jang writes her way through the mysteries, perplexities, and joys of being human — on this planet, at this moment, in this skin. She is also a visual artist, engaging connection through forms and objects. She wanders between Denver, CO and Oceanside, CA; between mind and heart; between land and sea. She invites you to visit her website at deborahjang.com

Crow Quotes Revisited

by MariJo Moore

Many years ago, I had a premonition of starting a little publishing company, and so I did. Crow Quotes was the first book published by rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING. This was in 1996. At the time, I was admonished for being a self-published writer; one well-known book reviewer refused to review my books because of this. My, my, how times have changed. I have always been a bit ahead of my time. (The first edition of the book was published on hemp.)

So it goes. Through the past years I have written many other books: novels, poetry, fiction, non- fiction, and edited several anthologies of Indigenous writers, all which have been teachings and sharings. However, Crow Quotes has always come back to my mind, in bits and pieces of the quotes, reminding me so much about life. And by receiving, even recently, letters and emails from readers who relate how have they kept this little book by their side, relishing the quotes - some over twenty years.

Several months ago I was given another premonition - it was time to offer Crow Quotes again. Time for the book to expand and reach out into the world in a new format. And so I have. Thus, Crow Quotes Revisited.

Sample of quotes:

"Keep in mind you are a part of the whole.
The future is planted within you."

"Want to confuse a crow?
Try explaining human religions."

Cover art by noted Pueblo artist Virgi Ortiz.

For more info and to order, please visit www.marijomoore.com/booksandart.html

Thank you for supporting an independently owned company.

MariJo Moore
www.marijomoore.com

Art Works

by Robert Bensen

Sara Bates, “Honoring Circle” (sculpture)

Before a shop built downtown sealed over a spring and a little creek,

excavation turned up the bones of a man, his pipe and some shards of clay

that came from this embankment above the Susquehanna—

clay that made the brick that made the shop that hides the creek

that flows through pipe that’s made with clay that made the pipe they dug

beside the man they found not long ago, long after he had turned to clay.

If spirit lives in everything and everything in spirit

then the young woman with a virus raging in the head

who has fallen asleep beside Sarah's “Honoring Circle” while the rest write

may have dreamed herself one day as pleasant as this

beside a pretty little creek above a bluff and drank from its talkative source

in the warmth of a complicated sun, an agitated sun

flaring with seeds and pods and leaves and shells and petals,

a composed sun from whose center the crossed roads carry

what they always carry down their seven shining paths

until the red sun of evening stripes her face

and she flutters awake to find herself alone

with this work, this disk of gifts on the floor, walk about

and wonder what on earth she saw in it, and what she sees.

An excerpt from Before by Robert Bensen

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, including Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems, and Before. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. His scholarship in the Caribbean and Native America has produced essays, studies, and editions, won fellowships from the NEH and Newberry Library, and led to teaching in St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. He is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College (1978-2017). He teaches at SUNY-Oneonta, and conducts a poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell.

www.robertbensen.com

How Turtle Got Her Shell

by Jenny L. Davis

Did you know
Turtle
didn’t always have
a shell?
She grew it
to keep
from being crushed
fortifying
her own body
ribs
vertebrae
clavicle
into carapace and plastron
learning a whole
new way to
breath to
walk to
live
to protect
her from
predators.
She knew
safety
requires strength
survival
means fortifying
softness

© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved.

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous writer and professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology. Her creative work has been featured in literary journals including the Santa Ana River Review; Transmotion; Anomaly; Broadsided; and as well as anthologies such as As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance.

Author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (The University of Arizona Press). uapress.arizona.edu/book/talking-indian

Dancing to Remember

by Terra Trevor

I am gathered with friends and family under a bead blue sky. Powwow weekend. Santa Ynez Chumash Inter-Tribal. My shawl is folded over my arm. I listen to the wind, spilling through the tree leaves. Time merges with timelessness. Memories circle and carry me to a day forty years ago, when I stood on this good land, near the oak tree for the first time, with my young children gathered about.

The same tree I am standing under today. I lean my back against this oak. This tree, giver of life. She has raised a community with song, dance and prayer. We return to this land, to this tree, in October every year. Laughter, flirting and romance in lives young and old take place all around her. She stands sentry. Her autumn softened leaves, swept up from a cool mountain breeze, fall gently on American Indian fathers holding sleeping babies. Mothers trading stories, their shiny cut beads reflecting light while braiding their children’s hair, with feathers in the colors of the earth, trailing.

There were difficult times too for this oak tree, when she witnessed wild fires raging, drought years with dust rising against the clear sky. The times when her branches sheltered human arguments and angry outbursts, but mostly she is surrounded by love and caring.

I stand high upon a flat rock, my eyes roaming, taking in the day, the years. Filling my lungs with sweet fragrances of the damp Mother Earth. Feeling my body grow light, like the feathers of the red tail hawk touching the soft clouds.

For the record I am not California Indian. I am mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and for forty years I have lived near a creek in an area that makes up the traditional Chumash homeland. I’m walking gently, a guest on this good land and I hold the culture, traditions and history of the Chumash people in my heart. For my Chumash friends this is their landscape of time.

I remember the words of my aunties, my grandmother, about how each person is a link to history and that when it comes to powwows all Native people gathered around the arena are participating as we form a circle around the drums, singers and dancers. And how every Native person gathered is connected, making a statement that American Indian people are still here. This is our celebration of life past, present and future.

First published in the Spring 2019, vol. 2, issue 3 of News From Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to California's Indian peoples. This essay also appears in We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir by Terra Trevor.

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). She is a contributor to fifteen books in Native studies, Native literature, nonfiction and memoir. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including, Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, and in numerous other books. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. terratrevor.com

On I-66

by Kimberly L. Becker

At Manassas the highway stained with blood
from where you hit the deer or seepage from
the Civil War (you didn’t hit the deer
but might have or perhaps you hit the person
whose bicycle—front wheel and severed frame
was one of three incongruous symbols
seen that day as you drove towards Roanoke,
the others being a group of three white horses

and a stone bridge to nowhere now--now here?)

And in your highway reach of mind you held
sadness swaddled like an infant, stillborn,
and said goodbye to every inch of it,
examined it the way they say elephants
do their dead, exploring all the contours
in a ritual of grief, saying God be
with you or in Cherokee or German
until we meet again, knowing that you wouldn’t

“On I-66,” was first published in The Dividings, by Kimberly L. Becker © 2014 Wordtech Communications LLC, Cincinnati, Ohio. Reprinted with permission.

Kimberly L. Becker is author of Words Facing East; The Dividings (WordTech Editions), and Flight (forthcoming, MadHat Press). Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Indigenous Message on Water; Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence; and Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press). She has received grants from MD, NJ, and NC and held residencies at Hambidge, Weymouth, and Wildacres. Kimberly has read at venues such as The National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Split This Rock, and Wordfest. She has served as a mentor for PEN America's Prison Writing Program and AWP's Writer to Writer Program. www.kimberlylbecker.com

Hearsay

by Deborah Jang

They say you sang like an angel
on that island in the bay
where foghorns drowned out
nighttime murmurs : children’s
names recited, prayers to deaf
dumb gods, poems chiseled into
barrack walls, lives left out
in the rain.

I heard them say I have your giggle
and your preference for peaches.
I never touched your flesh or face
but this is what I gather:
From Fat Yuen to Gold Mountain,
from girl to wife now claimed,
tides ferried you from village
hearth to far foggy days.

The island where the angels weep
nabbed you just offshore. Offered
a thin blanket, cold rice,
interrogations, and a dreary
three month chill. Finally you
and Gong Chow found a spot
to land on. You served up rice
to sailors and to homesick fellows
hungry for your song.

My mother June, your feisty first,
Roslyn and David followed.
Restaurant shiny, children strong,
then came the day to return,
history called you home to China.
June refused to go along and kept
Roslyn too. The clouds and tides
that brought you here, ushered
you back through.

Within two years word arrived
Gong Chow died in China
like he wanted. One month later
on a whisper you too passed
away. Especially on misty days
I listen for your song:

I know your fathoms of despair,
your gentle grasp on pleasure.
The peace of spirit that you seek
encompasses all in-betweens,
measures life in graces. Though
ocean tides rip heart from heart,
the interwash of time and tide
returns us deep to deep.

© Deborah Jang. All Rights Reserved.

Urban Fauna

by Kim Shuck

You know how the deer on Market Street are
With their stoplight eyes
Picking their way down old runoff paths
Past the disappearing relocated indigenous women
The ravens are here to sing us visible
Drumming on their collection of upended pots and Industrial buckets
Don't you tell me how we've changed
We were right there Near the department store
Near the burial sites Singing to the ancestors
This isn't an abstract gesture
It's not a schoolroom exercise
There are predators here
And the maps of safe passage change every day
And the wind comes up in the afternoon
Don't you tell me how we've changed
The roots of this hill have learned what to call us
Just about
Our clothes collected for the festival
Our family members taken to who knows
You might just sit down and listen for a change
I'm not part of your curriculum
We're a whole other thing
Light reflecting off of the miles of glass
How many feet deep was it?
Can you hear the water like shattered windows
Piled just like them
Just there where the tall buildings lean like stealing

© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

Kim Shuck is a complicated equation with an irrational answer. Shuck is the current and 7th poet laureate of San Francisco and will have a new book out from City Lights Press in the Fall. www.kimshuck.com

Alphabet of the Republic

by Chip Livingston

Always I’m asked what I love about Uruguay.

Because the food, I say, because the people. Because the rhythm of the place, the Culture. Carnaval. Candombe

Drums that demand I dance. It’s different:

Everything. Its Education – free through university and evidently effective. Everyone seems wise, well-read, and worldly. It’s egalitarian. And though I know one Richie Rich, the majority of people are equal. They treat each other as equals. It’s

Fun, I mean, fatal, just

Going to the grocery store, a walk in my

Hawaianas to practice my holas. The Healthcare – universal and fucking fantastic.

lemanja, the goddess of the ocean. Idea Vilariño, the first poet whose collected works I read entirely in Spanish.

Jacarandas.

Karaoke at Il Tempo. Kioskos to buy my tobacco y hojillas.

Loros, the small green parrots that top the palmeras. La Paloma in Rocha, where I’ve beached seven summers.

Llaves antiguas – old skeleton keys to open my doors, and, oh man, the beautiful doors of Uruguay. There are photo books and collage posters of the puertas in Montevideo. I take

Mate at merienda, I

Nap at siesta,

Obey the rhythms of my borrowed land.

Public transportation. Public wifi. Public Welfare. Public exercise equipment. Institutions that actually serve the public.

Queso. I guess it makes sense that if Uruguay has the most natural beef in the world, its dairy would be as pure. Quince paste, which they call membrillo, and I have a story about that for another time.

Really it’s remarkable I haven’t mentioned the meat.

Rrrreally rrrremarkable but

Seriously, Uruguay outlawed antibiotics and hormones in its livestock in the 1970s, it’s banned Monsanto and GMOs, imported

Transgenic foods are marked with a yellow triangled T. Tomatoes still taste like tomatoes in

Uruguay; bananas still have seeds. It’s a long trip south but

Vale la pena. Now if I shortened “vale la pena” to just “vale,” it would suggest I’m from Spain. The abridged version in Uruguay is “dale,” used like “okay,” pero ta,

You know I love learning those distinctions between spellings and palabras.

Zorrilla.

Zorrilla’s on the twenty-peso note, which you can imagine as a dollar, Juan Zorrilla de San Martin, an epic Uruguayan poet, whose home, bought by scholars of the state, is now a national museum; a street and park are named for him. Juana de Ibarbourou appears on the thousand peso, another poet. The hundred peso features Eduardo Fabini, a musician and composer. Do you know what I’m getting at? The Uruguayan money has artists and thinkers on it. And I think about the killers I carry in my U.S. wallet.

Zumba, my first onomatopoetic Spanish word, the drowsy bee’s buzz.

Yerba Mate, obviously, if you know me. I’ve nearly always got a mate full of yerba, the Guaraní herb that motors the world’s most nocturnal country, Uruguay.

Xcept Uruguay isn’t really the country’s name. No tiene nombre oficial but is officially known as La República Oriental del Uruguay, the republic east of the Uruguay River, referencing itself by location, by the X on the upside-down map, and uses the indigenous name of the nearby river, this cattle country crossed and bordered by rivers and sea, its bays a sweet and salty mix,

Which are just some of why and what I love about this watery paisito, the first time I met her crossing the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, on a whim, a mention, just the first weekend of a 10-day escape from North American winter with another U.S. writer. We decided within 24 hours to stay the entire holiday in Uruguay.

Verdad. Era verano. It was summer in our wintertime. Carnaval. And we toured the Atlantic beaches, convinced we’d been secreted into a kind of heaven, as if the venteveos saw and sung to us, the velas lit for Iemanja an extraordinary riverside welcome, warm beacons with carnations, coins, watermelons. Y acá volvimos, vivíamos, y yo vivo de nuevo.

Uruguay. Uruguay. Uruguay.
“Ur-u-guay? You’re a guy?”
“Ur-u-guay? You’re a gay?”You’re a single gay guy living in Uruguay? Que suerte, che! Uuuuu!

Ta! It’s tranquilo, and truth be told, todavía no sé what it is to be exact. Todo: los tomates, las tortas fritas, los teros, el tortugon, el tango, los tambores. The drum groups in the streets, the people on their feet, the two beats that keep the culture dancing. Los tambores. Los tangueros. The tango. The tambores. And los Tupamaros.

Spanish as a second language. I’d studied a semester with a Spaniard, had Cuban friends teach me to cuss, heard my share of Puerto Rican pillow talk, but learning to speak Uruguayan Spanish, No es poca cosa. No es Catalán, cierto, pero casi Canario, an idioma of opposites, where a former prison is now a luxury shopping mall and the current prison is called Freedom, where barbaric and fatal are adjectives for amazing, where to experience joy is to die or to be killed by something. Sino es así, no? O sí? Sí no? See?

RR. Errrrrrrrre. Mi perrita, mi porro, mi ferrocarril. Mi fat yankee tongue trying to roll the double RR. Joderrrrrrrr!

Really, I don’t know if that will work on the page. The Rambla: among my first and constant appreciations, Montevideo’s Rambla is 13.7 miles of uninterrupted sidewalk along the river and up the Atlantic coast; it’s where Montevideanos ramble, rest, relax, and meet for mate, to read, to exercise, to take sun, run. Its rhythms still and accelerate me. Requesón.

Que tal? How’s it going? Quizás you’re wondering how much love for this little country I’m going to share. I’ll try to be quicker.

Pero el problema es you can’t rush a Uruguayan, and I am growing more Yourugua every day, and there are a lot of things I love in the republic that start with P: poets, there are so many poets, and the people actually read poetry. There are poems etched in marble in public plazas. The people read! And the people are kind, helpful, pretty and peaceful – until it comes to fútbol, then it’s back to the killing metaphors. But Pizza. Pasta. Pan de Azúcar, where I saw a live wild black puma in a sheep pasture. Ah, population statistics: there are seven sheep for every human in Uruguay and there are four cows for each person. Palermo. Piriapolis. Parque Rodó. Cabo Polonio. Punta del Diablo. Palos borachos.

Olímpicos and other sandwiches de miga. Las ondas buenas, ojalá, y obvio eating

Ñoquis on the 29^thof every month.

Niños envueltos, delicious sausage in cabbage with a tortuous name, wrapped children. Riquísimos son.

Mira! Mate, mimos, mercados, murgas, the meat (see “Carne”), medialunas at merienda, the extra meal. They have four meals a day in Uruguay! And merienda suits me, soothes mi hambre at North American dinnertime. I have to mention Mujica, the former president, his example, history, and his changing the face of the republic to el mundo.

Lluvia. I love the fucking rain in Uruguay and it’s a good thing because this country is elemental, water falling into water, sky and sea, sea and earth, sol and sky, where llamadas call me to my feet for their ensayas y desfiles.

Lemeyun, and I’m even allergic to onions, but this Armenian-inspired Uruguayan dish is like, paf!, a grilled pita bread topped with spiced citrus beef ceviche.

Kisses – abundant as bread – and everything starts and ends with a beso. How tender and wholesome and masculine and shattering of macho North American stereotypes of how two humans can so naturally touch each other. Granted this is one kiss on the cheek, but there are exponential expressions of their comfort with intimacy.

JAJAJA is how they text laughter. Y les gusta reir. And I laugh at how distant my language just got when I spoke of showing affection. I have a lot to learn yet. Jamón y queso. Juas?

lemanja, I have mentioned, an important figure in my knowing the country and my gratitude. Part of my introduction,

How we arrived the first time the weekend of her birthday, February 2, and joined Montevideo on Playa Ramirez to light candles and leave her regalos on the sand and in the sea. Olas de hermosas holas. Horneros. Y hombres excepcionales. Guapos. Guapas. Gauchos. And Gooooooooooooooooool! We’ve gotten to Fútbol! And I’ve become a fanatic. Ya fui a mi first clásico, between Peñarol y Nacional, and now only lack one task to becoming unofficially Uruguayan – learning to play truco – but of my fondness for the other game. Obviously it has a lot to do with futbolistas. Fainá. Y bueno ta, no falta mucho para el fin, and

Everything yet to be said yet an expression of some sorts shared. Empanadas. I don’t know if Uruguay invented the tango or empanadas, but it has perfected them.

Desfiles of diversity and marches for more derechos humanos, and the country is already known to be the most humanitarian in the Americas. The first country in the world to legalize marijuana, the first country to allow a woman to file for divorce, one of the few Latin American countries where abortion is safe and legal. Gay marriage, claro, like it was never a question. Uruguay elected a transgender senator and a female vice president.

Chorizos, choripán, chivitos! But Che, escuchame, the way Italian, Spanish, and African genes have mixed with los Charrua.

Carne, the best meat in the world. Happy cows and 52 cuts of beef: pulpón, asado, entrecot, lomo, nalga, peceto, vacío, colita de cuadril, morcilla sweet or salty, chinchulín, chorizo. I dated a carnicero. I dated a cowboy. Carnival drums and murgas, parades and bailarinas, las comparsas, la cumparsita, a never-ending series of cenas and cumples.

But because the rhythm of the place I say, because the people: because the food, which centers on the Asado, the barbecue, and ends with aplausos for the asador.

First published in Carve magazine in 2018

Chip Livingston is the author of a novel, a collection of essays and stories, and two poetry collections. His writing has appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ and the Poetry Academy’s websites; and in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New American Writing, and other journals and anthologies. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

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