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     MM MM O   O R   R P   P O   O     R   R E     V   V   I   E     W   W
H    M M M O   O RRRR  PPPP  O   O     RRRR  EEE   V   V   I   EEE   W W W
     M   M O   O R   R P     O   O     R   R E      V V    I   E     WW WW
E    M   M OOOOO R   R P     OOOOO     R   R EEEEE   V   IIIII EEEEE W   W
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Volume #9                     April 15th, 2002                    Issue #2
Established January, 1994                                http://morpo.com/
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                                            CONTENTS FOR VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2

    I Don't Know Her Last Name Either  . . . . . . .  Russ Bickerstaff

    For Julio  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Michael Ansa

    canal street, eleven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luis E. Munoz

    Play the Enemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Ian Randall Wilson

    A POEM FOR DAPHNE, NO. 117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duane Locke

    Marbled Composition NOtebooks  . . . . . . . . . . .  Richard Fein

    Avatars Descending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Glenn Osborn

    About the Authors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors

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Editor                               +                       Poetry Editor
Robert Fulkerson              The Morpo Staff         Kris Kalil Fulkerson
[email protected]                     +                     [email protected]

Associate Editor                                            Fiction Editor
Lori Abolafia                                                  J.D. Rummel
[email protected]                                            [email protected]

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_The Morpo Review_.  Volume 9, Issue 2.  _The Morpo Review_ is published
electronically on a quarterly basis.  Reproduction of this magazine is
permitted as long as the magazine is not sold and the entire text of the
issue remains intact.  Copyright 2002, The Morpo Review.  _The Morpo
Review_ is published in ASCII and World Wide Web formats.

All literary and artistic works are Copyright 2002 by their respective
authors and artists.

ISSN 1532-5784

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  I Don't Know Her Last Name Either
  by Russ Bickerstaff


  She showed me her turtles
  she showed me her frogs
  she filled me in on all the intimate details
  of the checkered history of the furniture in her apartment
  we played with the magnetic poetry she had made by hand
  we watched a fishing show that she'd taped off the Independent Film
  Channel
  while drinking scotch on the rocks
  it was around the time she started to list her high school
  achievements
  from years ago
  I went up to use the bathroom
  I couldn't find the light switch
  so I eased nature in the dark
  and I realized:
  I'm going to love her
  and it's not going to matter
  in the long run
  sometimes the best way to enjoy a good auto accident
  is to avoid it.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  For Julio
  by Michael Ansa


  The freshly scrubbed, pubescent-
  Looking
  Puerto-Rican boy who confesses love
  To me tonight on
  A crowded dance floor
  Doesn't know
  Anything
  His name is Julio and he is
  Twenty Two
  He calls me "beautiful" and likes
  "Older men"
  "Older, black men"
  I laugh and want to be kind to him
  When he asks for
  "Only a kiss"
  Strangely tonight,
  My grief is for him-
  Because he wears that hungry look
  Because he doesn't yet know
  This is not a place for love
  But a house of prayer
  Because he doesn't understand
  You must sometimes walk away
  Because he is me
  A thousand different nights ago-
  "I love you too."

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  canal street, eleven
  by Luis E. Munoz


  the procession slips
  through the rain
  the sea of black umbrellas,
  a white dress guiding
  grandmothers and unwed nieces
  to the steeple, clouded
  his hand, malfunctioning,
  shielding his face
  from black soot
  and ash
  as they walk down
  canal street,
  unable to distinguish
  new york drops
  from his eyes or the rain

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  Play the Enemy
  by Ian Randall Wilson


         1.
  Because Jimmy says so
  Five younger boys huddle
  fall chilled and planning,
  lines in the mud drawn by sharp sticks
  send Billy this way
  Kevin to cover our flank
  Robby on the point.
  We're behind my house
  near a scatter of trees,
  the shadowed woods beyond.
  Our breath jets out
  in plumes of steam.
  We are excited.
  We are scared.
  Jimmy is calm.
  We are executing maneuvers
  designed by von Clausewitz and Tsun Tsu,
  the names difficult to pronounce,
  classic runs of Army confrontation
  laid out in dusty books that Jimmy reads.
  We never lose.

  Because Jimmy says so
  Five warrior children
  charge the south slope
  up a shallow incline, sliding
  on the rotted cover
  of dead leaves and loamy earth.
  We weave through evergreens
  hurling pine cone grenades
  shout our Semper Fi.
  The opposition has no chance,
  the air blues with the pop
  and crack of cap rifles;
  Christmas presents for boys.
  No prisoners are taken.
  We never lose.

  Because Jimmy says so
  we build ice forts and a maze of trenches
  with cardboard overhangs
  that traverse the Feldman's sidewalk
  to end up at the Smith's.
  We take advantage
  of the terrain's natural cover--
  those are Jimmy's words--
  laying in supplies of high-piled hardened snowballs,
  and hot chocolate for drinking during truce.
  The air stings our cheeks red
  we wait for Jimmy's command.
  Then, from across the street
  with a shout and smash
  the battle begins.
  We hurl our snowball cannonades
  as fast as we can grab and toss
  high over the plow-heaped banks
  a white barrage flung at the Enemy beyond.
  Those brave boys who venture out
  in desperate dashes
  across the no-man's land of Aspen Ave
  are easy targets for Jimmy's sure-thrown hand.
  We never lose,
  until our parents call, Dinner.
  We never lose.


         2.
  His letter comes to me
  in the safety of my college dorm
  between classes
  with foliage raging into full color
  during sweater weather
  when the girls still show some leg.
  Here, I plan my strategies
  for bringing Mary to my bed.
  Here, I devise ways
  of answering the calculus tests.
  Here, I read the words
  of dead poets
  analyze their rhyme,
  examine their reason.
  His letter comes to me
  in the safety of my deferment
  behind the defense of bad knees
  and an uncle with a friend
  who knows another friend
  who put in the right word
  with a senator on the right committee
  with the right influence
  for the right amount
  at the right time.
  Jimmy doesn't have those friends.
  It's hot,
  he writes,
  so hot the air is weighted.
  The jungle smells like nothing
  he's known before.
  Sound is swallowed whole
  yet a branch's crack
  gives away a position in a trigger flash.
  He hasn't seen the Enemy, he says,
  but three men in the squad were picked off
  on patrol yesterday
  and another died
  when he stepped on a mine;
  a censor has blacked-out the details.
  The strategies don't work, he says.
  The information is always wrong,
  Intelligence always gets it wrong,
  and how can you pull a flanking maneuver
  in a jungle so thick
  it takes five minutes to hack away five feet.
  The Enemy disappears.
  New men arrive
  old ones die,
  others rotate out.
  His feet swell
  from jungle fungus,
  he can smell himself.
  The strategies don't work, he says,
  he's just trying to stay alive.

  I don't believe in the war.
  I think the country is wrong,
  I think Jimmy was wrong
  to go when the rest of us found ways
  to stay behind.
  But I don't tell him this,
  I write about the high school game,
  some friends of ours
  that moved away,
  the woods behind the house.
  My letter comes back marked deceased.


         3.
  I have thought about him,
  less and less,
  until I see my sons
  behind the house.
  At the instant the sun folds
  and the outline of their shadows
  run from the trees
  Jimmy isn't dead.
  His name isn't sandblasted
  onto black granite
  in a mall somewhere in Washington.
  Where Jimmy is
  warrior children still run
  through phantom woods
  throwing pine cone grenades
  making gun sounds with pointed sticks
  rushing forward in frantic charges
  to sweep aside their friends
  who this afternoon
  must play the Enemy.
  Where Jimmy is
  the strategies work--
  the flanking maneuver,
  the interlocking fields of fire,
  the enfilade.
  There is no friendly fire misdirected
  gouging out dirt craters of rock and mangled bone
  where the squad's men used to hide,
  there are no dust-offs to ambush
  there are no shit-covered pungi sticks
  there are no hills to climb in pouring rain
  where every wave of new men are repulsed
  by tumbling tracer rounds,
  casualties do not run 70%,
  there are no sucking chest wounds,
  there are no screams in triage,
  no one cries for Jesus
  or his mother,
  no one worries about body counts,
  or punching his ticket,
  or short time,
  or the coming Tet.
  Jimmy doesn't die
  in a firefight
  for a patch of ground
  we win today
  and give back tomorrow.
  Jimmy doesn't die
  in a firefight
  where the choppers can't get in
  where the radio's down
  where the Lieutenant is dead
  no one's in command.
  Jimmy doesn't die
  by a single round
  through the heart
  that stands him up
  like a heavy bag
  before he slumps into the grass.
  Where Jimmy is
  there are only golden afternoons
  where sunset holds off another few minutes
  enough time for a last skirmish
  a last battle among friends
  a last game
  because Jimmy says so.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  A POEM FOR DAPHNE, NO. 117
  by Duane Locke

  Clouds,
  So admired by the drugged, absinthed, syphilitic Baudelaire
  Are still there,
  High up, distant-vaporous,
  To be loved
  By women
  Who spent most of their lives in kitchens or brothels.
  This is what clouds are for, not rain,
  To be
  The only lovers of Baudelaire,
  And the only lovers
  Of these housewives who spent their lives in kitchens,
  Or these whores who spend their lives in brothels.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  Marbled Composition Notebooks
  by Richard Fein

  Islands of white dot the two black hard covers.
  Hardness, marbling, permanence.
  Lasting words deserve being chiseled in marble,
  the psalm of David, the to-be-or-not-to-be of the Bard, Lincoln's
  timeless address,
  would fit well on the heavy-thread-bound paper within.
  Schoolchildren are wrongly assigned these notebooks,
  for the pages are unforgiving of error.
  These pages must be ripped from the binding,,
  with the remaining scraps bookmarks
  for every repented word, sentence, paragraph, or page.
  Only certainties should be inscribed in such notebooks.
  A looseleaf is more relaxed.
  Its pages are already mutilated with trinities of holes.
  On each page something new can be scribbled,
  then with a click of the three metal rings
  each page can be shuffled among previous pages.
  Regretted sheets are slipped off from the rings leaving no trace.
  Don't choose one over the other. Both books are needed.
  First in a barely legible script, jot down all rambling
  and slide the papers into the looseleaf.
  Be patient. Add some sheets. Remove even more. Be patient.
  Finally, carefully copy a few lines
  from the precariously connected looseleaf papers,
  a lifetime's distillation,
  into the tightly threaded pages between the composition covers.
  If the marbled musings are then thrown into the winds,
  the few leaves they're inscribed on will not scatter.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  Avatars Descending
  by Glenn Osborn


  When we came into the club that night--the night that Zinc reinvented
  Avatars Descending--the place was already on fire. The opening band,
  Timequest, had apparently outdone themselves, and the bubbling buzz as
  we moved through the crowd with our instruments was not what we were
  used to--it was warm and musical, but it wasn't about us.

  We'd built our rep over five years on the road. We weren't the Rolling
  Stones, but people in three or four states knew our music. When we
  walked into a club, people cheered. But not tonight. Tonight people
  just moved aside and kept talking as we pressed through. People seemed
  to hardly notice us, in spite of the fact that we were an hour late.

  The owner, Frankie, intercepted us about ten feet inside the door and
  collared Lanny. Over the noise of the crowd I heard him say, "You're
  the luckiest man on earth tonight." He pointed at the stage, where the
  first band was almost done knocking down. "They blew this place away,
  and when you didn't show, they blew it away again. If they didn't have
  to leave for another gig, you'd be out the door right now, man. Go
  ahead, you guys. Let's see if you can top that." Then he just walked
  back behind the bar.

  It took us the usual half hour to set up and we could tell something
  was different. Nobody seemed to care if we were there or not. They
  were talking and dancing to the jukebox and ordering beers. Usually
  there's a kind of lull while you're setting up and people seem
  impatient. Tonight they didn't.

  Neither did I. I was the reason we were late. I was the one who had
  punched Zinc and bloodied his nose and I was the one who refused to
  play that night until Zinc apologized to me for fucking around with my
  girl Juice. You can't go fucking around with the chicks of other
  bandmembers. Zinc knew that as well as anyone.

  Well, he wouldn't do it. Wouldn't apologize. But then Juice came into
  the room and told Zinc to leave, and she didn't say it very nicely.
  This changed the complexion of things. After he left, Juice told me,
  Look, honey, he was just flirting, and so was I. We're all friends,
  and shit happens. You oughta drop it, Marion.

  I hated it when she called me by my real name. What I did, though, was
  pick up the case for the Roland and walk ahead of her out the door,
  down the hallway of the hotel and out into a cold November night. I
  decided to deal with the Juice situation later. As soon as I climbed
  in the back of the van and shut the door, Lanny floored the fucker and
  set me down hard.

  When we were finished setting up, Chip put Frankie on a mic at the
  mixing board and the guy seemed to have forgotten our tardiness. After
  he spouted a list of upcoming bands, he said We're very glad tonight
  to present a band you all know from their CDs on Record Records--and
  here he started screaming our band name over and over--Elevator Music!
  Elevator Music! Elevator... He didn't seem to comprehend the irony of
  the name, which was only to be sneered.

  Chris just cut him off with a cymbal crash and we were into the first
  chorus of our most popular song, Elvira Madigan's Problem. I figured
  about one percent of the people in the room knew who Elvira Madigan
  was, but who gave a shit. The song was getting some air play in
  Dayton, our home town, and East Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit. And
  this was Toledo, gritty gateway to the sea. They knew us here.

  But they didn't give a damn. You can tell when you're not going over
  and that night you could smell it. Some people stood close by the
  stage and watched--drunks and maybe the local music reporter--but we
  had none of our usual crowd control.

  We finished the song and Lanny plucked a few bottom notes, like he was
  sending out an SOS. Then he took off the Fender and strapped on the
  Gibson. It had a raunchier sound that he usually saved for the last
  couple of songs. I flipped a few switches on the keyboard and bounced
  out a couple of arpeggios to test the sound of the room. Chris rattled
  through a series of reggae rim shots. Zinc just stood there, his
  Stratocaster waving a small arc in time with some beat playing in his
  mind.

  We played dance numbers and we played ballads, and Zinc bled into the
  mic. I almost felt some sympathy for the bastard. Yeah. The Devil.

  When you've got a dead crowd in a club, the best thing to do is to
  play some covers. You learn that fast on the road. So we hit everybody
  from Curtis Mayfield to Talking Heads to Warren Zevon. At one point,
  out of the blue, Chris tapped the first few slow beats and we were
  into CSNY's Guinevere, for Christ's sake.

  Playing three-minute pop songs, you burn through a lot of music real
  fast. We'd only been on the stage half an hour when Lanny blew into
  his mic his usual spiel about tipping the waiters and ordering another
  round and that we'd be back in a few minutes. I watched Chris and
  could tell he was ready to keep on playing until we had them under our
  spell. The way it worked pretty much every night, that was what he had
  in mind. But Lanny unstrapped and walked off the stage. The rest of us
  followed quickly. The crowd couldn't have cared less.

  Chris went to the bar and ordered a margarita. Lanny sulked over a
  glass of water. Zinc and I walked out the back door and into the
  blackness, now crossed at a sharp angle with blowing snow. I'd seen
  Juice in the lobby and just waved. She understood.

  Normally, Zinc doesn't say much. He even has a Bob Dylan attitude
  about his music: It speaks for itself. He doesn't have to explain.
  Lanny gets us organized, and we recognize him as the leader of the
  band, but Zinc is our creative genius.

  Choosing to speak a few syllables, he said to me, Bounce, stay loose.

  That's all he said. Then he took off running across the parking lot. I
  saw him crouch and slide like a base stealer onto a little drift, then
  make a snow angel and laugh his ass off. I went back inside and looked
  for Juice.

  She was at the bar with Aim--Amy--Chip the sound man's lady and driver
  of what we called the Groupie Van, a 1978 Chrysler sedan that looked
  as if it had been on the set of a Mad Max movie. While Aim drove,
  Juice kept the books and made arrangements. She decided where we'd
  stop to eat and the motels we'd stay in. Sometimes they were joined by
  a genuine groupie, for Zinc or for Chris.

  I walked over to Juice and Aim and didn't know what to say. I felt
  sheepish and guilty but still angry. Just to fill the silence I asked
  Juice for a cigarette, then went back to the stage and stood behind
  the Roland, watching the crowd, catching occasional looks and sending
  back a honky tonk riff in exchange. Chris and Lanny and Zinc ambled on
  together and I knew they'd come from the van and a line of coke.

  Lanny started it off. Pluck, pluck, cluck, cluck. Funky Chicken. We
  played a couple more covers. Van Morrison, Into the Mystic. Fats
  Domino, Blueberry Hill. Steely Dan, Haitian Divorce. People began to
  dance again. They forgot about Timequest and just boogied. That's what
  they'd come there for and we were louder than the jukebox.

  My left hand was sore and swollen. Zinc's nose looked broken and
  streaks of purple and red were spreading under his eyes, but his hands
  on the fret board were sure as the feet of a mountain climber, only
  much faster. After a ballad break for Boz Skags's Pain of Love, from
  "Slow Dancer," which brought out all the damaged romantics, Chris
  tapped us into the first bar of our own Avatars Descending. Lanny
  whomped out enough bass to cover the deficiency I felt in my left hand
  and we caught each other's eyes and smiled. Zinc strode across the
  stage like he always does on that song, which made the crowd push
  toward the stage in mock belligerence.

  Then Zinc did something totally out of character. Over Chris and
  Lanny's continued steady beat and bottom, he stung out the first few
  notes again of Avatars Descending. But like it was a hymn. Chip picked
  it up with a snare ruffle and Lanny dropped in with what looked to
  Chip, at the mixing board, like a boa constrictor undulating on top of
  a parade of fenceposts.

  All of us sing, so all of us had mics. Lanny looked at his as if it
  were there to interview him. In the one beat he missed, Zinc shouted,
  "G!" as if pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  Avatars Descending is in the key of E minor. It rumbles with blues
  undertones through a lament about the death of leadership and descends
  into an anarchic battle, just to prove the point. At the beginning, it
  always gets people dancing and at the end it always makes them go for
  another drink.

  Before the echo of Zinc's demand had faded, I hit a 10-finger G Major,
  held down the keys and stabbed the wah-wah peddle with my right foot.
  Chris hit a couple of triplets and danced off into a ska shuffle that
  Lanny knew instinctively to lope along on right behind the beat. The
  moment was like people have reported in auto accidents or tornadoes;
  time slows down and you can feel nanoseconds, see things happening as
  if they were, ironically, moving slowly.

  I could go on for an hours about those few seconds after Zinc shouted
  "G!" but what's more interesting started with the smile on Zinc's face
  the moment he saw what we had collectively done with his command.

  Many musicians have said, and I'll confirm it, that music is better
  than sex. When the band is in the groove, a Ferrari cranking on all
  twelve cylinders, there is a palpable joy that spreads from player to
  player and then from one dancer or listener to another and you can
  literally see a wave of pleasure spread out over the room.

  Zinc set off a tsunami that night. Some aural god--Pan, perhaps, or
  the Pied Piper--spoke directly to his hands and bypassed his brain
  entirely. From where I stood behind the Roland, I could see him
  leaning into the crowd like a man trying to find his way in the dark.
  But what came out of the amps and flowed out through the Marshal's and
  into the room was like the snap of a whip.

  Crack! And you could see every face in the room snap toward the stage.
  Then Zinc proceeded to deconstruct Avatars Descending, playing it
  backward and upside down. It was the same song we all knew, same song
  the crowd knew, but no one had ever heard it before. Not like this.

  He played like the avatars the song was about, like a cross between
  Django Reinhardt and Robert Johnson...

  ...that crippled gypsy,

  your deadly crossroads...

  Same song, same lyric, but the burn Zinc put on it that night...it was
  like a whole new song. Where he came up with switching to the key of
  G, I don't know, but the effect was like spraying butane onto a
  campfire. First, a deep, funky mist arose and then a hissing, the
  vibrato he forced onto the strings of his guitar. Chris switched to
  brushes and Lanny took a step back, plowing a deep furrow under Zinc's
  lead. There was a button on the Roland, one of a hundred, right above
  Calliope and just under Anthem that I couldn't read because of the
  sweat in my eyes. I'd never hit it before. I thought it said Blood.
  What the hell.

  I played a vamp over the top of Zinc's solo. The synthesizer screamed
  like a wild animal. Zinc turned only his head at me, his body still
  leaning into the crowd. I could see in his eyes a question: Are you
  following me? Will you follow me? I answered with a flattened seventh
  that overrode his guitar for a moment then sank like a handkerchief
  thrown onto the crest of a wave. Yes, is what it said.

  No one knows, not even Zinc, probably, what he did with his pedals,
  five or six of them, and his wah-wah bar and the volume controls on
  his guitar. Blazing notes from outer space burst from the Marshals
  like a field of asteroids.

  Out on the dance floor, couples broke apart and groups of people
  formed and danced toward the stage. Then the whole dance floor became
  something like a single couple dancing. They weren't dancing with
  themselves and they weren't dancing with one other person. They were
  dancing with each and every person on the dance floor. They were
  dancing with abandon. Even the shy girls and the nerdy guys came out.
  It was ecstatic for the crowd and it was ecstatic for the band,
  co-conspirators in the ecstasy of music.

  Lanny was the first to rise above the stage. I watched his feet go
  limp as if he were swimming, floating a foot or so over the jumble of
  cables. Then all of us followed, trusting entirely the force that
  lifted us, father music, mother harmony. Zinc shot forward and drifted
  like a mad cloud over the dancers, and the whole place pushed beneath
  him and began to move in synchronicity with our music. The barstools,
  empty of people, gathered and bent themselves into shapes resembling
  trophies. I saw Chris and his kit levitate, the drums rising to become
  vibrating planets. And then the majesty of our music pulled me toward
  the ceiling, gravity impotent. Looks on the faces of the dancers made
  me think they might be penitents at a joyous, tearful shrine.

  Zinc's final note, an A-flat seventh delivered from on high and
  processed through his bank of effects, sounded like the scream of a
  dying bull, an avatar descending. That note granted each of the
  dancers an extra day of life and provided resolution to their lost
  demands. It looked to me as if we had just panned a pie plate full of
  twenty-four-carat gold, which I would gladly have hurled back into the
  river just to have kept that feeling alive for another five seconds.

  That night we treated them the way the wind treats a flag. When we
  finished, they were spent, cruising numbly past the nirvana they'd
  come there for, crashing onto the dance floor, smiling.

  And when the music actually ended, hours later, I still had the Juice
  situation to deal with. But on that night, after that delirious magic,
  that proof that music is better than sex, Zinc could have my girl.
  Hell, he could fuck my mother and I wouldn't care.

                                   ~~~

  It was only a few months later, though, that the tensions overwhelmed
  us all. I told Juice to take a hike and that left Aim alone in the
  Chrysler, which infuriated Chip, and that, in turn, set up a
  side-taking battle that left us all bloody. By mutual decision, we
  called it quits. Another great band joined the parade of broken dreams
  along the musical highway.

  After Elevator Music broke up I used to see Zinc play now and then,
  standing in for any band that needed a guitar. In fact I saw him only
  a couple of months ago, outside the Social Security office. Said he
  was on tour with a warm up band for Phish. I laughed. Phish doesn't do
  warm up bands, I said. They just get out there and put on a show. What
  the fuck are you talking about, Zinc?

  It was a joke, Bounce. I don't play anymore.

  I thought about that night when I punched him. I felt the weight of
  that in what he had just said, but when he walked off without saying
  another word, I thought, Jesus, can that be true?

  If I'd had a guitar in my hands right then, I'd have thrown it at him
  and yelled, Play this, you asshole! And it's impossible for me to
  believe he wouldn't have picked it up the way any guitar addict would
  and checked out the craftsmanship, the quality of the pegs, the
  distance of the strings from the fretboard and that he wouldn't have
  tested it, wouldn't have burst through one of his leads--maybe from
  Avatars Descending. But I didn't have a guitar to throw and Zinc just
  kept on walking.

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                            about the authors


  ** Michael Ansa [ [email protected] ]

  Michael Ansa is a native of Ghana and a high school English teacher in
  Boston. He also teaches Ashtanga Yoga and is in the process of
  compiling a series of poems on immigration and spiritual/ cultural
  displacement entitled, "The Year We Forgot." Two of Michael's poems
  from this series can be seen in the January 2002 issue of
  coffeepressjournal.com.


  ** Russ Bickerstaff [ [email protected] ]

  Russ Bickerstaff is a performance poet based out of Milwaukee,
  Wisconsin. He has been performing for 6 years. He is currently working
  on a couple of novels that no one else knows about. He is also more or
  less unemployed. There are exactly thirty teeth in his head. He has a
  BA in psychology, which he received at the University of Wisconsin at
  Milwaukee in July of 2000, shortly after identifying a few structures
  in the dissected brain of a sheep. He has been engaged to be married
  twice. In neither circumstance was he the one who popped the question.


  ** Richard Fein [ [email protected] ]

  I have been published in many web and print journals. I'm considered
  by most literary critics to be the greatest poet since Rod Mckuen and
  Jewel. But the highlight of my life was when I was arrested in
  communist East Germany for espionage because of an inflatable doll in
  my possession. But that's another story.


  ** Duane Locke [ [email protected] ]

  Duane Locke lives alone in a two-story decaying house in the sunny
  Tampa slums. He lives isolated and estranged as an alien, not
  understanding the customs, the costumes, the language (some form of
  postmodern English) of his neighbors. The egregious ugliness of his
  neighborhood has recently been mitigated by the esthetic efforts of
  the police force who put bright orange and yellow posters on the posts
  to advertise the location is a shopping mall for drugs. His alley is
  the dumping ground for stolen cars. One advantage of living in this
  neighborhood, if your car is stolen, you can step out in the back and
  pick it up. Also, the burglars are afraid to come in on account of the
  muggers.


  ** Luis E. Munoz [ [email protected] ]

  Luis E. Munoz is an English literature junior at Arizona State
  University outside Phoenix.


  ** Glenn Osborn [ [email protected] ]

  Glenn Osborn is a freelance writer, designer and photographer living
  in Perrysburg, Ohio. He is a founder of the Scrawl: The Writers Asylum
  ( http://www.stwa.net ), a collaborative workshop for writers, and
  has been managing editor and designer of the website's ezine, The
  Story Garden ( http://www.stwa.net/tsg/ ). He operates
  HandsOnWebsites, a site design firm at http://www.HandsOnWebsites.com
  and recently has developed a successful photography business marketing
  prints of his digital photographs of flowers
  ( http://www.HandsOnWebsites.com/blossoms ).


  ** Ian Randall Wilson [ [email protected] ]

  Ian Randall Wilson is the managing editor of the poetry annual 88: A
  Journal of Contemporary American Poetry. Recent work has appeared in
  The Alaska Quarterly Review, Spinning Jenny and Spork. His first
  fiction collection, Hunger and Other Stories, was published by
  Hollyridge Press. He is on the faculty at the UCLA Extension where he
  teaches classes in fiction. He is also an executive at MGM Studios.

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            Our next issue will be published June 15th, 2002.
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