Travel in the Time of Covid.

 Sabbatical for 2020-21

Of solitude and love

 

(c) Margaret Cook Leaves of Grass

Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Coachman Hotel

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

 

For What Binds Us

(c) by Leonard J Matthews

For What Binds Us

By Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down —
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest —

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

pride

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

Happy Pride!

 

Survival Guide

 

(c) 2009 Francis Gonzales

Survival Guide

by Joy Ladin

 

No matter how old you are,
it helps to be young
when you’re coming to life,

to be unfinished, a mysterious statement,
a journey from star to star.
So break out a box of Crayolas

and draw your family
looking uncomfortably away
from the you you’ve exchanged

for the mannequin
they named. You should
help clean up, but you’re so busy being afraid

to love or not
you're missing the fun of clothing yourself
in the embarrassment of life.

Frost your lids with midnight;
lid your heart with frost;
rub them all over, the hormones that regulate

the production of love
from karmic garbage dumps.
Turn yourself into

the real you
you can only discover
by being other.

Voila! You’re free.
Learn to love the awkward silence
you are going to be.

 

He Would Not Stay for Me, and Who Can Wonder

 

He Would Not Stay for Me, and Who Can Wonder

by A .E. Housman

 

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
  And went with half my life about my ways.

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party

(c) by °]°

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party

By Chen Chen

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother

more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.

While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation

clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid

in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,

& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily

talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets

slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.

Remind me, he says
to our family.

 

Oración

(c) by Elvert Barnes

Oracion

por Francisco X. Alarcón

Quiero un dios
de cómplice
que se trasnoche
en tugurios
de mala fama
y los sábados
se levante tarde

un dios
que chifle
por las calles
y tiemble
ante los labios
de su amor

un dios
que haga cola
a la entrada
de los cines
y tome café
con leche

un dios
que escupa
sangre de
tuberculoso
y no tenga
ni para el camión

un dios
que se desmaya
de un macanazo
de policía
de un mitín
de protesta

un dios
que se orine
de miedo ante
el resplandor
de los electrodos
de tortura

un dios
que le punce
hasta el último
hueso
y muerde el aire
de dolor

un dios desempleado
un dios en huelga
un dios hambriento
un dios fugitivo
un dios en exilio
un dios encabronado

un dios
que anhele
desde la cárcel
un cambio
en el orden
de las cosas

quiero
un dios
más dios

Dream Ending in a Host of Angels Zipping Me into My Grandmother’s Dress

(c) by JennRation Design

Dream Ending in a Host of Angels Zipping Me into My Grandmother’s Dress

by Bradley Trumpheller

Once & could-be-future girl, believe we’re not like you. Sure,

the pickup was tucked in dusk, shed all carefree w/ its sunburn

shimmer. Still nothing new to say about the creek, how reeds

get moony, or when we saw pelicans hold hands & gossip.

But y’all must wanna get this close to soft, so here goes: spool

heels, silver sleeves w/ pink accents, kind to stifle the trailer

static, same color Dot says Granny passed in. Past since good

& we did keep her pearls for you, kissed the hems holy, darned

the moth marks back to true. Goes: none of it imitation. Goes:

we are her barefoot bloodline, butter in the salt pan. Trust

you’re not from this sweat but still a goodness. You once most

only boy in the yard, laugh into your born polish. Step-joy,

uncousin: home is a name you bless in silk & cinch. Believe

we’re all alive here. Come hum this lace blood-warm. Glisten.

Especial

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

felíz día de los padres! love you dad.
 

xoxo

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

happy bday Susan! <3
 

peas & cucumbers

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

 Happy birthday Dina! <3

original

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

Congrats Akiva! Be not afraid! Go out and shine!
 

Dragon Scales

creative commons

Dragon Scales

by Catherine Garbinsky

 

It started with my stomach. One spot,
hardly noticeable. That’s how it happens.
Slowly, imperceptibly, then all at once.
I scratch thoughtlessly with my long nails, draw blood.
When I remove my shirt I do not recognize the creature underneath.

In the shower I take a stone and scratch
at my skin, red and dry and itching.
I imagine myself a dragon, sloughing off old scales
to reveal soft shimmering skin underneath.
They called it a disease, but I call it a becoming.

I cover my skin in charcoal, the smell of sulfur envelopes me.
I wear long sleeves, try to hide myself, become small,
but the smoke from our fire pit finds me no matter which way I move.
In the morning, I find new scales.

I no longer dread the change.
A dragon’s body inspires fear, yes,
but also awe. Covered in scales, glittering sharp.
When I move my body I imagine wings,
a chest full of fire. I am large and fierce.

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

freak accident

The Danger of Silence

 “The Danger of Silence” -- Clint Smith

 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."

 

As a teacher, I've internalized this message. Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth. And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth.

 

And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so.

 

So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. But one year, I gave up speaking. I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. When the woman at the fundraising gala said "I'm so proud of you. It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids," I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity.

 

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. It is the sound after the noose is already tied. It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you.

 

I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live everyday as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?

Access Road

creative commons

Access Road

by Alison Luterman

 

I don’t know if other people feel like there’s a life

running alongside their so-called real life like an

access road runs alongside the main highway.

It’s funkier, lonelier; you didn’t expect to find yourself on

this one-

lane frontage path, you kept thinking you’d get on the

freeway any minute now, where you fondly imagined

yourself

doing eighty, ninety, hurtling down the untrammeled

autobahn of

free will. That was the life you thought would be yours

when you

were young and everything seemed laid out as at a picnic

with red

gingham tablecloths. Only it was never like that, not

really, you had

just been raised with too many stories, always stories,

not the real,

ancient ones with burning bushes and three-headed

 dogs, but the

whitewashed, idealized, candy-coated pap fed to children

in mid-

twentieth-century suburbs. And so in your fantasies you

neglected

to factor in the reality of ants crawling up your legs at the

actual

picnic, the way they tickle and sting, or the spilled juice

and

crumbled potato chips and your beautiful mother young

again, and

strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy

beauty

because she, too, was always calibrating how reality

didn’t measure

up to the story. So you’ve inherited her dilemma, what

 else is new,

and evening is drawing nigh, and you are still on that

access road, which as it turns out is going to the same

place

the main road was headed all along.

 

Here's to the crazy ones.

creative commons

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

 

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

 

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

 

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones,

we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,

are the ones who do.

 

--Rob Siltanen

art

© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee

Happy Retirement Nancy, teacher par excellence!