Novels
The Secret Language of Women
A
Eurasian woman, ZHOU BIN LIAN, clashes with her husband and society to reclaim
her vocation of healer during China's Boxer Rebellion. What she needs is
tenderness in a fierce world, what she finds is death and destruction.
Excerpt: The Secret Language of
Women
Published in Dimsum, Asia s Literary Journal Vol. 10,
Spring, 2005
On a soft, rainy night at vernal equinox, the Year of the Dog, I was born Zhou Bin Lian in Guilin, China, a painter's paradise. I was an only child, and after my father died, I hoped my mother would love again and re-marry, but she kept her only love's mortal remains in an urn that I buried with her. Then, while attending university, I lived with my grandmother, but Fate had numbered the days with Grandmother in double digits. Death is coming for me, she'd said, but I intend meeting it standing and on my own terms. So she took me, in spite of her feebleness, to visit the graves of our ancestors where we left bowls of rice. Mourning doves nested in a banyan tree nearby. A feather glided towards us, and she reached up to catch it. She handed it to me and said, They mate for life, but not all marriages succeed. This I bequeath you, be true to yourself. Would I ever find love like my mother's for my father, or ever be as noble, sure and proud as this bent old woman?
*
Lemon Blossoms
ANGELICA DOMENICO struggles in pursuit of feminine identity and heritage, her life emblematic of Sicily's flowering fruit, the lemon blossom, the novel's title and dominant metaphor. The story unfolds in two points of view: Angelica's and her mother Rosalia's.
Excerpt: Lemon Blossoms
I was born in a lemon grove, the scent of blossoms everywhere. Mamma told me it was paradise on earth, and so she named me Angelica, whispering in my ear that life, like the lemon tree, houses both the bitter and the sweet. A breeze had brought to earth a cover of white blossoms, and Mamma said she imagined a winter playground somewhere else. The day I was born, she removed a veil from my face while lying in a bosk of flowering trees, and looked up to see tiny white zagarelle frame an ocean of sky that mirrored the straits of Messina.
Mamma insisted we speak Italian, the language of angels she called it, but sometimes we'd slip into Sicilian. After she had my brother Peppe,
Mamma lost four children before me and prayed her guardian angel would send her a celestial being. Mamma had a thing about angels she said we are born with a host of 11,000 and she promised that if I were born and lived, she'd make sure that I would be devoted to my own patron and with God's help the seraphim could choose amongst themselves who would guide me. Poor angel didn't have an inkling of what he d be getting into. Angelica the name that caused me difficulty right from the beginning.
*
Novel-in-progress
Cayo Bradley is the story of a man
with a tortured soul, seeking love and redemption. The novel opens with an
Apache attack on the Bradley's homestead, and the young boy's life as he knew it
is over. He undergoes many incarnations and inventions of himself before
seeking the road home.
Excerpt: Cayo Bradley
Cayo had told Darby not to open his
medicine bag until she reached her Aunt Bea's in St. Louis. But she was
curious. And although her conscious tugged at her not to, she threw back the
flap and unknotted the leather thongs. Before she spilled out the contents
on her braided rug, she reached for her pristine, freshly starched white apron
and laid it on top of the rug, like an altar cloth. Overturning the bag,
she counted three seeds: corn, squash and bean. An arrowhead of chiseled
slate. She picked up an awl, fitted the heft of the hammered handle into
her fist. Made for a child? She put it aside, flicking a piece of obsidian
with her pointing finger. Beneath it lay another rock like crackling ice
except pink as kittens paws. An eagle s feather, a bear claw, a hallowed
out piece of bone like the tubular pieces in the necklace he d made for her, a
piece of furry buffalo hide soft with washing with a bow and arrow burned into
the smooth side, a tiny acorn, rolled tobacco leaf tied with a piece of
hemp. Darby shifted her hands and reached for a dried buttercup pressed
between a folded piece of brown paper she sighed, realizing he'd given her back
the flower she d given him the day she said she'd marry him. She placed it
down, took hold of a wedding ring inscribed: Agnes and Robert Bradley July
7,1842. She slipped his mother s ring on and off her ring finger.
Mysterious, mystical, spiritual,
supernatural. Heartrending.
Darby
couldn't fathom any of it, but the buttercup made her weep. She'd picked
the yellow flower the day they'd picnicked under a stand of cottonwoods near the
Rio Grande, where they'd swum bare. Naked, the way these offerings touched
her now with stark simplicity, truth and hurt. She'd written words on the
paper. Love words on a scrap piece from the dry goods store and in
between, she'd pressed the buttercup, weighting it under the family Bible.
Then when she presented it to him, he said, Can't
read no letters, Darby. And her hand instinctively moved to cover her
heart as she began to read. He leaned his head back against the tree
trunk, clenched his fists, and closed his eyes, like she did now with
remembrance. She had uncurled the fingers of his scarred left hand,
placing the flower in it. He opened his eyes. Dahaazhi, he
whispered.
And in her heart, she knew it
meant forever in Apache.
Novel-in-progress
Dark Eyes is the
story of Natasha Ivanova Kirillova an orphaned girl who lives only to
dance. Destined to become a ballerina, she is thwarted in her professional
and personal life and is unwittingly entangled in a crime scheme involving her
husband's family.
Excerpt: Dark Eyes
In the Plaza near the Sacred Blood
Cathedral, Natasha Ivanova Kirillova kneeled down to pick up a matryoshka, a
nesting doll that had fallen off a vendor's cart and rolled to her feet. The
woman vendor, whose name Natasha couldn't remember, was a friend of her
mother-in-law, Calina Danilova Kraevskaya. The vendor was most upset about
the doll falling, and came from behind the stand, flailing her arms. She
screamed, Oh you blundering girl, my Heavens, not that one of all of them that
one for very special customer on order it was. The woman went at Natasha,
almost attacking her. Natasha was now aware of the many hawkers who had
stopped in the middle of their intercourse, staring at her and the fat cheeked
yeller.
I know you? the fat lady
asked.
Did you think I'd pocket it? Natasha
said and thought, Why had the vendor left the doll out if it were so important a
commodity and if it had already been sold?
Important
doll, the woman commented, her voice an octave lower.
I'll pick them up, don t worry, Natasha said in a harsh
voice, annoyed with herself and the situation. She continued, trying to
sound more cordial, Calina sent me around to look at your work and possibly pick
one of them. In fact, I think the message was for you to give me one to
bring to her to look over anyway, she told me how lovely your
What did you touch? the woman asked. This
doll was underneath and in back
No it wasn t, but
please don t trouble yourself, Natasha said to the woman who was clearly out of
breath from the mere exertion of trying to reach down for one part of the
doll.
Carefully Natasha put together each
doll's top and bottom parts and then fit them one inside the other until all
nine dolls pieced together perfectly, and just as she was about to replace it,
the woman seller snatched it from her hand and said, Spaseba. You
said Calina sent you. What about her
son?
I haven't seen him in quite
some time. We're divorced you know.
Your girl, er what's her name? Anya yes, how's she doing? Calina watches
over her. Have you found a job yet? Want to come here and work for
me? We should connect, after all we re all involved
anyway
Involved? I'm afraid I haven t
talent for this she pointed to the dolls, and then said, no creative spark for
making things, except a mish-mosh of my life, and forget selling
altogether.
Natasha could see the
woman wanted to engage her in a conversation where she was not willing to
go. A quick image leaped into her mind of the last time she'd seen her
husband; it made her shiver.
As Natasha started to
walk away, the wind picked up and she tied the kerchief tighter under her chin.
She stopped dead in her tracks as Police cars with sirens blaring were coming
from all directions into the square. Two police cars parked on either side
of a Red Cross Blood Bank trailer. More police sirens. More
police cars. A wave a nervous tension hit her solar plexus made her feel
at once hot and cold and wanting to vomit the little she had in her
stomach.
Wait, the seller yelled. Come
back, girl.
Natasha turned.
Short Stories
I stretched out clad in my leotard in front of the fireplace, limbering up my legs. It was the evening before Thanksgiving the year that I turned sixteen. My mind bustled with images of Alexei Ivanovich Tomeschevsky, whom I d loved since I was six.
I overheard my mother talking on
the telephone to Yelena, my ballet teacher. Her son, Alexei, was about to
become engaged to Lydia Davidova. The news staggered me. I got up
and walked from the living room to where my mother sat at her telephone table
near the kitchen. I made monkey grimaces in front of her until she finally
covered the mouthpiece and said in an exasperated tone, "Ninotchka, what do you
want?"
"To speak to you," I said, but what I really
wanted was news of the impending marriage. And if it was true, I wanted to
slit my wrists in a bath of tepid water like the ancient Romans my history
teacher Mr. Treadwell told my class about. Suicide had to be the only
answer to such a tragedy. Could Alexei actually marry that flighty woman
with the nasal voice, who couldn't walk her way across a ballroom floor?
What I wanted was a chance to confess my love once before I did myself
in.
Oreste Spano struck a match against the
Regina Coeli prison's kitchen wall. Lighting a cigarette, he thought of
his children and felt he'd risk anything to see them again. When the
cigarette burned down and he could feel the heat on his lips, he took three long
drags and flicked it upwards. The cigarette ricocheted off the rusty iron
window frame and came straight down. It glanced off his shoulder, bouncing
onto the floor. Spano crushed it. He should have field stripped it,
but what the hell. What can they do to me? Kill me? He closed his
eyes, made an audible hmm. I'm fucked anyway.
It was just past four o'clock on one of the hottest
August afternoons ever recorded in Rome, Spano glanced at the headlines in
Il Messagero. President Francesco Cossiga would sign a pardon for
Renato Curcio, a political prisoner and one time head of the Red Brigade,
responsible for killing Aldo Moro. Who cares? Spano only wanted to
know who killed his wife Patrizia. He tossed the paper into an aluminum
bin marked SPQR.
*
Poems from the published collection: Cooking Lessons
In dreams
your India ink
hair streaks white,
silvering
like fractured lights sparkling
in a sky electric
a
coppice
of sultry summer and storm,
like the underside of olive
leaves
in Isola di Capo Rizzuto
where once on a windswept hill
I rode
horseback, and ate grapes
redder than amarene cherries,
so sweet
their aftertaste
almost bitter,
not unlike
memories of
you.
TONIGHT
Drydock living slips and rudders us into September days.
I
spy sailmakers while I prepare an antipasto
of raw ricci di mare sea urchins lemony and lush
I
sprinkle them with Vermentino di Gallura, then take a sip.
Such precision: the sea s bounty, my crisp wine,
sails
measured on a warehouse floor.
Aft of my not too operable yacht,
I watch fish jump clear
out of the water.
Water I have defiled with my soapy dishes.
Water replete
with replica three quarter moon,
a lit lantern over Porto Cervo Marina, Sardegna.
Magic. Magia. I swear it.
I pity everyone who is anywhere else
but in this windless,
cloudless Sardinian port tonight.
Black gypsy hair holds the North Star;
the flood lights of
the shipyard
reflect upon the water,
the 12 meter basin for sailboats.
I am docked beside an almost winner,
the Azzurra
and know exactly how she feels.
I hail the moon, lift my frosted glass to cheer:
Cin-cin,
l chayim, a votre santé, down the hatch!
There is nothing I cannot feel,
Or do not know tonight.
Poems from the collection: Artist's
Portfolio, a work in progress
ROADS
to new beginnings
taper and diverge
to
triangulation
and we slide into death
at the hour of Lauds, I meditate
tell me why
we use mud
bricks
for a heavy load
or spit into the bottomless pit
of a marble
quarry
fighting the wind
we hurl ourselves
into
embraces,
blindness thrusts
us to our fate
beneath zodiacs formed by
stars
incandescent recollections
while dusk descends
farm hands hoe,
landowners stow
tools,
light is consumed
and the last of heaven set afire
by a ginger
orb
remembering the Arab prince
unfurling his blue silk prayer rug
as
you showed his wife diamonds
rolled like ice upon the velvet
gray
plateau, the color of Roman winter sky
I worried so,
pregnant, ill,
holed-up in a winter shepherd s shed,
baita of
succoring warmth
a living desert by the hearth
dry parched prairie
earth
balanced on the world s edge
of your knitted blanket
a far cry
from the horizon
sun rising, a line of brush burned
by our stable, gusts
strong enough to shove
night of the middle universe
cracked open, spewing
forth
a fertilized egg
Mars, its progenitor,
or some other planet in
between
where starbright souls
gaze at us from unseen eyes
I
release myself to wandering
terra firma, Ligurian Cinque Terre
placenta of the al di lá
from nothingness
flecks, sparks,
lightning
cleave blackness
falling star fishtails
firebrand
moment
the surprised infant
cries at its birthing
horn-of-plenty splay
and spray
YOUR NAME
As sunrise, thin and tenacious
Yearns toward
summer,
Fragile shadows scrub away darkness.
Your lust, diamond of
love,
Succumbs to dreams
And sleep that evade me.
At my desk a lamplight sheds
A bright circle on a manuscript
left open
At a page I ve orchestrated poorly.
I sew a white button on your
blue shirt,
Then set it aside to write your name in bold block
letters
With blood from a finger pricked by the needle.
I tear the piece of paper,
Scrunch it into a tiny
ball,
And as light of day streaks across your face,
And dust motes groan
and glide away
Into a stream of pure light,
I, in sleeplessness, close my
eyes.
In the morning sun of a Jerusalem day,
I mount a folding
chair by the Wailing Wall.
On tiptoes, I stretch my arm high above my veiled
head
And squeeze the paper into a crevice
Where even now my prayer for you
abides
Till it and we are dust.