Examining Chance and Fastening it with Future

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 contributor Mandira Pattnaik

When I was asked to write what led to my fiction piece "Box," I really had no clue. Did it germinate out of the cookery shows on TV I'd watched as a young girl growing up in India, newly open to global cultures, and international icons through the liberalization of the economy? Or was it fancying an unachievable dream that's bound to collapse, given the constraints under which children in these parts grow up? 

I'm not sure which, but to write it in future tense, as if happening in an imaginary time through the eyes of this motherless boy, felt the most natural thing to do.

The small-town conversations I've heard on my commutes form an essential part of this story:

     Once inside the bus, he'll survey the passengers' faces, boarding and de-boarding, in the dim light of pre-dawn. The 5:45 will snake down the curve of the hill, climb onto the next and next. Most will not bother about the boy travelling alone, but the butcher will recognize him.
     "Where to?" he'll ask. The boy will cook up a story about an ill grandmother.

     "Never had a Granma, did you? She lived across the border, been dead long, no?"
     "Sorry, she's--she's--an aunt, mother's third sister. Fractured hips."
     "Oh, I see. But where's your father?"
     "Home. Old enough to go alone!"

The picture of an exquisite countryside, the bustling eatery by the roadside, the apple orchard are all drawn from my travels within India.

     The bus will leave the perches of the hills, slither into the plains where the district town the boy has never been before will have just woken up. At a bustling eatery, he'll get off with the others, trailing one particular family with three howling toddlers...

The story ends with a note, open to interpretation:  

     The tight box in life nobody escapes out of.

These themes of fate, choices, and one's own endeavors find expression in several of my published stories available online through my blog. 

*   *   *

Read Mandira Pattnaik's "Box" (pp. 30-32) and other Fiction,
Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Prose Poetry
in Bacopa Literary Review 2021

Dying Back

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor, Patrick Cabello Hansel

I wrote "Dying Back" after several days of walking through my neighborhood, and sitting on our porch watching the beauty of autumn. It struck me, as I say in the poem, that the process . . .

. . . ordered by an ancient
call: earth and her creatures
loosing what they love to die back
into winter

I don't understand it, and maybe they don't either, but . . .

                               Every autumn
their goodbyes ravish our eyes
with color.

*   *   *

Patrick Cabello Hansel is the author of the poetry collections The Devouring Land (Main Street Rag Publishing) and Quitting Time (Atmosphere Press). He has published poems and prose in more than 70 journals and has received awards from the Loft Literary Center and Minnesota State Arts Board.

Read Patrick Cabello Hansel's poem and other exciting
Poetry, Prose Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction
in Bacopa Literary Review 2021

 

Disagreeing with Gandhi

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 contributor Jessica Barksdale

My poem, "Disagreeing with Gandhi" emerged from an online writing workshop put together by the good folks at Two Sylvias Press.

The prompt asked us to examine a quote, and I found one from Mahatma Gandhi: "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

At the time, his words did not sit well. Of course, who was I to argue with Gandhi? But it was my feeling that we are all turned from clean to dirty by the acts of a few. Things seemed, at the time, to be going wrong in so many ways: politically, environmentally, personally.

Most pointedly for me was writing about my mother, who continues to slip into a different and new person due to dementia, one who doesn't know who I am. In that way, my connection to her, the world, and the planet seemed to be growing faint. 

My poem lists a number of other wrongs, highlighting the fact that if things are broken, it is our collective fault. I wrote:

Hear the gulls caw
their hunger. Step over
bits of plastic, twists
of dried kelp.

Things are discordant, empty, trashed, but I called for a fix with the last lines: "The ocean is dirty now. / We are all part of the ocean," meaning we are all affected by each other's actions. We are living in "dirty" times, and we have to accept and move onward, together.

As for my mother and my understanding of her and her experience, I keep writing. Recently published in Revolute, my poem "Alice Takes Her Mother to a Funeral" continues my examination of my confused feelings. We are all still in the ocean, swirling together, dirty and living.

*   *   *

Jessica Barksdale's fifteenth novel, The Play's the Thing, and second poetry collection, Grim Honey, were published in Spring, 2021. Recently retired, she taught at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.

 Read Jessica Barksdale's poem and other exciting
Poetry, Prose Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction
in Bacopa Literary Review 2021

 

 

You Don't Always Know Where a Poem Will Go

 by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry Second Prize winner Shoshauna Shy

When I began the poem "Key Lime Pie," I had no inkling of where I wanted it to go, not even what I needed to say. I just knew I wanted to capture an overwhelming happiness that I felt--something I hadn't felt for awhile--before it slipped away. It was that same kind of heady glee that compelled Joni Mitchell to write "Chelsea Morning," so that's what I referred to.

I could not have predicted that in a poem about joy, lone snipers would make an appearance, and manage to fit: . . . another snubbed American male / sprays a school, a theatre, a hot yoga studio with bullets. Nor that Nazis would, as well: . . . when / Anne Frank's diary was yanked from her hands . . . but somehow this poem was about them, too. 

And from there came the bigger references to God's involvement, and a visit from my deceased father: . . . in my joy the way when last December, my dead father joined / me . . . That's what I love about writing poetry: You don't always know where it will take you, nor where you'll end up!  

 

*   *   *

Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published widely, made into videos, displayed inside taxis, and plastered onto the hind quarters of city buses. Author of five collections of poetry, she is the founder of the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program, and the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Awards. Recent publications include "Comfort Words & Cherries;" "No Encore, Christmas Eve at the New Girlfriend's Parents' House," "Tidings of Comfort and Joy;" and "What Happened to My Parents After They Gave Me Up."

There Are No Bad Genres

 by Bacopa Literary Review Associate Editor Mary Bast

". . . realism was the preferred mode of twentieth-century modernism. By relegating fantasy to kiddylit. . . The word genre began to imply something less, something inferior, and came to be commonly misused, not as a description, but as a negative value judgment. . . There are many bad books. There are no bad genres." 

~Ursula K. Le Guin, "Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love," Words Are My Matter

I'll admit, I've been one of those literary elitists who relegated anything but realism to the trash, in spite of being in awe of Ursula le Guin since I was able to read, and a devoted follower of Margaret Atwood since I saw the light of feminism. (Even Atwood has argued that her works are "speculative fiction" and not "science fiction").

As with any change in opinion, only continued expsure will break down the grooves our brains have carefully dug over lifetimes of being influenced by family, teachers, and literary society's votes about the "best" authors (those who vote being part of the social system that has defined "best" in the first place).

That change is now--however slowly--happening. I've recently finished reading Anthony Doerr's  novel, About Grace, whose protagonist wanders the world trying to change the fate his prophetic dreams have proven will come to pass. The New York Times, obviously considering this work a "good" genre (Doerr later won a Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See), described About Grace as "an infinitely subtle algebra of resonance and sympathy between minds, lives, objects, light, senses, weather." 

While Doerr's brilliance as a writer makes it easier to expand our view of what kind of writing can be considered "literary," it wouldn't be fair to expect all writers who toy with so-called reality to reach his level of eloquence. In fact there are many excellent writers who "speculate" about possibilities, and we offer several in this year's Bacopa Literary Review, including both of our Fiction prize winners.

Fiction First Prize winner Tomas Baiza's "Huitzilin" begins with a rebirth:

Sunlight pools, trickles, and then begins to spill over the edge of the mesa. No sooner am I reborn than I am drawn to it, as I am drawn to the flowers that grow in my father's yard. Sun and nectar, Tonatoih and xochinecutli, both of them fuel for the returned warriors, we who have been summoned to face our shames before being called to fight. . .

Already curious about the nature of these "warriors," readers are given an intimation in the second paragraph that this beautifully rendered story will take us somewhere entirely new:

In the kitchen window, my reflection, an orange spark and wings that slash like the flint knives of our ancestors, the obsidian blades that opened veins of eternal life onto the tongue of the Sun Stone.

 

In "The Vanishing Heart," Fern F. Musselwhite's Fiction Second Prize winning story, the author leads us to believe we're reading about the protagonist's husband Jake's reaction to "the latest variant" that has sickened millions, fifteen years after "the last coronavirus scorched the planet." Only after a page and a half of familiar medical details does she invite a stretch of imagination:

At the hospital they'd cracked open Jake's chest. As they continued to shock and compress, to strain and rotate hands, they noticed Jake's heart was shrinking. Dwindling before their eyes until nothing remained. Nothing to shock or compress. Gone.

In neither story could readers possibly predict what comes next, because we're viewing the world through a different lens that invites us into a deeper truth.

For these and other fine works of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction,
Poetry, and Prose Poetry,
see Bacopa Literary Review 2021

Searching for the Heart of the World

by Associate Editor Mary Bast

Blake Kilgore's "Fluttering Bones of the Fireless Serpent" (below) published in Bacopa Literary Review 2019, is included in his upcoming debut poetry collection, "Leviathan" (12/8/21, Hapless Hip Books, Burlington, New Jersey).

"To enter into the poems of Blake Kilgore's collection Leviathan," writes Ralph Pennell, editor at Midway Journal, "is to be consumed by them, is to all at once race toward exaltation and brace oneself for the fall. At every step, we are met with challenges of faith that invariably become our own, where each of us must 'clamber down into the dark, searching for the heart of the world,' or suffer the consequences of our refusals."

From Jay Armstrong (Bedtime Stories for the Living): "Dripping with the ink of a preacher's Sunday sermon, Kilgore's diction crosses sacred with secular. Exaltation with sadness. Earthiness with the divine. These poems testify while questioning faith, redemption, identity, and love in tightly crafted verses reminiscent of Emily Dickinson."

You can see, in "Fluttering Bones of the Fireless Serpent," these elements of Kilgore's writing--the sacred and the secular: exaltation, earthiness, love--as he has described a sighting of flying geese followed by predators from a cunningly benign distance as a symphony, a light percussion anticipating the big boom, "a sensory marvel, one of those moments that leave you breathless, like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, or rising above the clouds climbing your way to a mountain peak summit."

*    *    *

Blake Kilgore lives in New Jersey with his wife and four sons, where he teaches history to junior high students. You can find some of his stories in Lunch Ticket, Rathalla Review, Midway Journal, and many others. Please visit blakekilgore.com to find more of Blake's prose and poetry.

 

A Well-Told Story of a Small, but Defining Moment

 by Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin

Adam Knight's "Little Bird" in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 is a tender story of an adolescent boy who worries over a baby bird. In this piece, tension is woven through in just the right amounts. I can feel the vulnerability of both the bird and the narrator, in this dugout full of young teenage boys.

      A fluttering movement caught my eye. I looked down. What I had mistaken for some windblown leaves was a bird's nest, probably knocked down from the dugout roof in the previous night's storm. In it lay a baby bird with a bulbous head and wispy feathers. Its beak opened and shut, emitting the tiniest "cheep" that was only audible in the gaps of teenage conversation.

       Hello, I thought. Hello there.

 "Little Bird" is a tight, simple story that is also one of those small moments we build ourselves around, a nugget of self-realization.

      I felt like the bird and I were in a little, private world. He was my secret. I did not know if I could help him, but I could listen to him. You are not alone, I thought. I imagined what it must be like to be the bird, a tiny waif, perhaps days old, disoriented and scared, flailing and crying in a world full of creatures much larger and louder than he. I hear you, little bird. I see you.

The larger metaphor of this story works without being overwrought. I felt this boy, a small bird, trying not to be crushed by the growing expectations of the aggressive masculinity around him. The triumph of this piece, for me, is the exploration of this small defining moment in a life. The realization, "I am different than this."

      Something died that day. Not just a newly hatched sparrow on a high school baseball field, but also something in me. As a boy, I had played baseball on a team with other boys, and though we may have all had different temperaments, we all could play the game we loved. But that morning's events confirmed for me finally that I did not belong. Not on the team and not with other guys. My path to manhood, whatever it might look like, would not look like Nick and Scott's . . .

 *   *   *

Adam Knight is a writer and teacher in northern New Jersey. His debut novel, At the Trough, was published in 2019 by NineStar Press and his fiction and essays have been published in a number of publications, including "Hoping for Red" in Escape Pod, December 2018. He is currently revising a cosmic horror novel about the Titanic.

From The Editors: Bacopa Literary Review 2021

I love the stars because they flicker. I love the stars because they recede.
I love the stars because they trace perfect circles if you plant yourself
on a hill and let the aperture stay open all night, exposed.
—Shana Ross, “If Betelgeuse Explodes, I Will Be Sad”

As we assemble each edition of Bacopa Literary Review, we look for themes. One over-arching focus in both 2020 and 2021 is grief. This theme, pervasive in every aspect of our lives for the last year and a half as we all endure the COVID-19 pandemic, is clearly present in this year’s journal. But some of the other themes this year have surprised us, a fascinating and uplifting set of motifs employed in ways as simultaneously jarring and consoling as the image of the little bird in Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” who sings the tune without the words--/ And never stops—at all--// And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard.  

It would be easy to let grief overwhelm us, in times like these, and some of our selections reflect on that ease. There is the dark, all-encompassing existential agony over the family tragedy expressed in Alec Kissoondyal’s “Smudge.” Its complement, the long slog through the initial stages of grief and into something approximating the rest of life for those left behind, is portrayed in Shuly Cawood’s “Not Naming It.” There is also the gentle, even humorous sense of resignation and peace-making with grief expressed in both Janet Marugg’s fictional vignette “Lila’s Last Day” and Lora Straub’s nonfiction essay “A Fragile Inheritance."

In part as acknowledgement of the need to face and work through the individual and collective sorrows COVID-19 has wrought, we open this year’s collection with Megan Wildhood’s probing, elegiac “Oh. There is No Going Back.” Wildhood’s poem takes up grief and turns it around like a many-faceted gem, examining its dark surfaces and acknowledging the ways it impacts even our memory and understanding of life before the grieving time: the first time I remembered the Before world and it was full/ of holes.

But we’ve noticed plenty of other shared themes in this year’s Bacopa. Most are riffs on the great concerns of human existence, and thereby of most literature—love, joy, struggle, pain, pride, humility, endurance. One motif across genres surprised us, though. Birds—those “things with feathers” and wings.

We invite you to keep an eye out for them as you read your way through this year’s offerings. Some, such as the baby birds in Kissoondyal’s “Smudge,” Adam Knight’s “Little Bird,” and the small bird that crashes into a window at the opening of Elizabeth Christopher’s “Dream Catcher,” show up as emblems of fragility, loss, and, yes, grief. Timi Sanni’s pained, prayerful poem “Orison” even presents us with the antithesis to Dickinson’s eternal, undaunted feathered singer: the bird/ of hope folding its wings, its hollow bones// crushing as they welcome the uncanny force/ of darkness. These birds, and some of the others that flit through the pages that follow, are creatures of night, of darkness or at least a liminal space—the edge of shadow where darkness meets, commingles with light. They remind us that time flows unceasing and life proceeds in all its shades—from drudgery and weariness, pain and fear, through excitement, exultation, and joy—and all those shades are certainly represented in a myriad of tints and tones. 

Artists are grappling with the reality that humanity as a whole, the world over, is undergoing a tremendous cataclysm of collective loss and mourning, at this moment of history. People are mourning lost friends and loved ones, lost jobs and businesses, lost opportunities and experiences—from students missing out on graduations and other rites of passage, to families delaying having children, partners delaying marriage, and so much more. For many of us, the pandemic delayed our ability to be physically present with each other, to collectively express and process these many and varied sorrows. For too many of us, a long-delayed process of grieving has only recently begun in earnest.

Our shadow birds remind us, as Shana Ross’s First Prize poem quoted in the epigraph above so presciently puts it, When you live in too much light you cannot see the stars/ yet they exist. 

But most of Bacopa 2021’s birds fly in the other direction, and beautifully so, as exemplified by the powerful mythical bird that lends its name to Sergio Ortiz’s fierce “Yo soy el Fénix.” Birds—strong, fierce and joyful—are central characters in both William Nuessle’s “Hero’s Eyes” and this year’s Fiction First Prize winner, Tomas Baiza’s “Huitzilin.” Flight, uplift, release—these themes are woven through every category of writing. Though too many of us are still inside the edge of the shadow, many here at home and around the world are beginning to see the gilded limning of the other side.

We hope you will find yourself lifted, energized, and inspired as we were by the tremendous outpouring of talent and creativity we received for our 2021 journal. May we move onward and upward together, like the tiny winged warriors of “Huitzilin,” out of the global shroud of this pandemic and into the blaze of a new day dawning. May we be so blessed as to know the joy and triumph that surges through the closing line of Baiza’s magical tale: And so, I become light.

—J.N. Fishhawk & Mary Bast

  

A Fragile Inheritance: Creative Nonfiction 2nd Prize

  by Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin

A beautiful narrative arc in a very short space

When reading through submissions for creative nonfiction I look for beautiful writing, of course, but also for some sense of connection. I want to feel as though I've gotten to know the narrator a bit. In Lora Straub's Second Prize winning A Fragile Inheritance, I felt a connection to this narrator and her family.

I am also a reader who is charmed by small details. I loved the grandmother with an extensive crystal collection who drinks her chianti out of a favorite plastic juice cup and washes all her dishes by hand even though she has a dishwasher. This family, with their quirks and running jokes, felt familiar.

The other thing that felt special about this piece of writing in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 was the growth of the narrator. Twelve hundred words is precious little storytelling space, yet within that, we see this narrator grow from a young woman who resents talk of death, to a woman who wants to be taken seriously enough to be trusted to wrap up her grandmother's crystal, finally to a woman who understands the gift she has been given by both her mother and grandmother.

When my husband and I unboxed them, six years after Grammar's death, Steve unwrapped each with reverence. Held one after the other up to the light and admired the cut. I buried my nose in a goblet like I was smelling a flower, still caught a whiff of mildewed books and Grammar's warm presence in the stale air caught between the glass and newspaper. Perhaps the stemware summoned the scent.

It had nothing to do with trust. Wrapping that crystal was one of the last things Mom could do for her mother, and that doubled as a gift for her daughters: the unwrapping. Grammar's house, most of her books, dishtowels, the gold carpet, her fake fruit: all gone. But the scent: a momentary return of a singular spirit.

And so in this piece I found that wonderful gift of a story, which is to peek in someone else's window and see something that is wholly different but so familiar. Because I also am a woman, missing my beloved grandmother, whose tiny crystal votive holder has pride of place on my shelf.

  * * *

Lora Straub lives in Boston, MA. Her poetry prose chapbook, Id Est, was released in October 2017 by SpeCt! Books. Her work can be found in Construction Mag, She Explores, The Fem, The Elephants, and Wave Composition, among others. She is currently working on a memoir.

Carolyne Wright's New Collection, Masquerade

 by Associate Editor Mary Bast

We've awarded several prizes to fabulous poet Carolyne Wright for her contributions to Bacopa Literary Review over the years, including "Los Olvidados:The Forgotten Ones" in 2011, "Sestina: Into Shadow" in 2013, and "Sestina: That mouth . . ." in 2016. And we're happy to announce her new collection, Masquerade, published this month by Lost Horse Press. As described on Amazon.com:

"Masquerade is a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems, a "memoir in poetry" set principally in pre-Katrina New Orleans and in Seattle, involving an interracial couple who are artists and writers. Moved by mutual fascination, shared ideals and aspirations, and the passion they discover in each other, the two are challenged to find a place together in the cultures of both races and families, amidst personal and political dislocations as well as questions of trust—all against the backdrop of America's racism and painful social history. The twentieth century's global problem, the color line, as W. E. B. du Bois named it, is enacted here in microcosm between these lovers and fellow artists, who must face their own fears and unresolved conflicts in each other. Similar stories have been told from the male protagonist's point of view; Masquerade is unique in foregrounding the female perspective." 

These poems are included in Masquerade:

"Triolets on a Dune Shack"

 

"I Forgive" 

 

Carolyne Wright is author of This Dream the World: New and Selected Poems, whose title poem won a Pushcart Prize and also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. Her ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. She has authored five earlier books of poetry, a volume of essays, and five award-winning volumes in translation from Spanish and Bengali. A contributing editor for the Pushcart Prizes, she teaches at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House and at conferences and festivals worldwide.

Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Prize Winners

POETRY (Editor J.N. Fishhawk)

• First Prize: Shana Ross, "If Betelgeuse Explodes I Will Be Sad"
• Second Prize: Shoshauna Shy, "Key Lime Pie"

PROSE POETRY (Editor Kaye Linden)

• First Prize: Nicole Farmer, "car wash orgasmic whirl"
• Second Prize: Les Epstein. "Grenadine"
  

CREATIVE NONFICTION (Editor Stephanie Seguin)

• First Prize: Gerald Ryan, "And The Road Goes On Forever"
• Second Prize: Lora Straub, "A Fragile Inheritance"

FICTION (Editor J. Nishida)

• First Prize: Tomas Baiza, "Huitzilin"
• Second Prize: Fern F. Musselwhite, "The Vanishing Heart"

 

For Posts Prior to the 2021 issue

 

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