Audacious Ekphrasis

by Mary Bast

  "Oh hell, here's that dark wood again" by Mary Bast

If you want to know more about me, Googling my name will first evoke echoes of my now retired life as an Enneagram coach and related books. But I've also written several forms of poetry including ekphrasis, an audacious poetic form that's among many we encourage in our print journal.

You'll find a long history and many definitions of ekphrasis. I prefer the most open, contemporary version:

Ekphrasis: the intersection of verbal and visual arts.

As a visual artist I've explored many ways to interpret "the intersection of verbal and visual arts." For example, in response to Kim Addonizio's poem "Divine" (Oh hell, here's that dark wood again . . .), I painted "Oh hell, here's that dark wood again" (above) then reacted to my painting with the poem "Backdraft." 

Virtually any type of artistic medium may be the actor of, or subject of ekphrasis. I first learned about ekphrastic poetry in a workshop with Melanie Almeder, who drew our attention to two famous poems written in response to Pieter Brueghel's painting, The Fall of Icarus: William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts." Note that Williams' poem to some degree follows the tradition of describing the visual scene (a farmer was ploughing / his field / the whole pageantry / of the year was / awake tingling / with itself), while Auden's interpretation is a bit wider (About suffering they were never wrong, / the old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window). 

Almeder invited workshop participants to write our own poems in response to the Brueghel painting, encouraging us to range as far as our muses would go. My poem "plummet" (published in Bacopa Literary Review 2012) imagined Icarus as a woman:

somewhere
there is an Icarus
a woman who flies 

on intricate
feathered web
of covert

sheath
shaft
veins

warm-blooded
she breathes faster
learns to soar

ignores
the admonition
do not fly too high

her efforts full
of sky
of wind

her breasts
still flecked with honey
dripped from wings' wax

heavy with her father's
architecture
heavier than water

when she dives
no sun's light
scuffs the surface

Remember Bacopa's poetry statement: We're looking for well-wrought poems in any form or genre, or none. Intrigue us, move us, surprise us with stunning imagery, lyricism, soundplay, structure. Disturb our well-trod patterns of thought.      

Submissions open until May 31, 2021

Guidelines Don't Limit Your Freedom!

by Mary Bast

Year after year, we're surprised by how many submissions ignore our guidelines. If you want to be published, why would you do that?

Wouldn't you would want to be seen as thoughtful of the editors' time demands when considering the merits of a submission and its fit with a particular issue? If you haven't followed the guidelines, might we fairly assume you haven't read past issues or have any idea of the kind of work we publish?

We are not trying to limit your freedom. We do not want to make your life more difficult. We have these guidelines because we want to give each submission the best chance of an unbiased and positive reaction.

If we've asked for Arial typeface, size 12, why would you ignore that request? Aren't you at least curious about that choice, when you're so familiar with Times New Roman? This matters a great deal because we read submissions onscreen, and Arial size 12 is the best typeface and size for comfortable online reading (we receive more than a thousand submissions per submission period). The familiar serif typeface of Times New Roman ("little feet and embellishments on the tip and base of each letter") is fine for print, but more difficult to read online. Arial's "sans-serif" typeface (no embellishments), size 12 or larger, doesn't use as many pixels and is easier on the eyes, especially for long hours of onscreen reading.

I'll let you in on a secret: I hate Times New Roman. Even on a good day, when I'm feeling patient and haven't yet read ten submissions of up to 2500 words each, I still have to suppress my Times New Roman bias when I hit Ctrl+A ("select all") and change the typeface to Arial so I can read it with my already fatigued eyes.

Submit here to Bacopa Literary Review 2021!

Leave a Trace of a Time and a Place

by Creative Nonfiction Editor Susie Baxter

Back in the 1990s when I was an acquisitions editor at Mosby, a health-science publishing house in St. Louis, a colleague gave me a tiny pillow on which she'd cross-stitched: "So many books . . . so little time." So true.

Frankly, I started out far behind most readers. As a youngster, 18 miles separated our home from the nearest library, and for several years our family owned no vehicle. Granted, we did have our own home library: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Dad's high school world history book, a storybook of tales like "The Three Little Pigs," the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and five copies of the Holy Bible . . . It wasn't until I read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca in high school that I fell in love with reading. 

The thought of becoming a writer myself never occurred to me until I lost my beloved grandmother. I decided I had to write about her, which led to writing down more and more memories, and eventually offering workshops to help others record their stories.

I think of myself as a recorder of history, leaving a trace of a time and a place that is no more, such as the Suwannee River flood of 1948:

Water began seeping up through the ground in early '48, the year Granny died, just as the onion sets were sending up healthy-looking green spikes . . . Since we'd become accustomed to seeing the river rise and fall, a little bit of water around the onions didn't seem like a big deal. After all, Daddy had planted at the right time; he relied on the Farmers' Almanac, which told him when the moon and stars were in the right positions for planting.

The almanac didn't tell him where to plant, though, and that year he'd planted the onions--five acres of them--on the lowest spot of ground on our property, an area we called "the bottom" . . . dark, fertile soil, unlike the dirt elsewhere on the place, which was similar to the white sand along Florida's beaches . . . 

Daddy rotated the crops every year to prevent disease, and that year he decided to plant the tobacco next to the onions . . . Mama and Daddy led the way along each row. Mama walked backward, facing Daddy, and we girls followed. Mama carried the plants in a cloth bag slung over one shoulder. She dropped the plants, one at a time, into the metal "tobacco setter," the planter Daddy toted . . .

Some farmers in the area owned modern planters that were pulled by tractors. The planting process, for us, was entirely manual, but the five of us moved together like a machine: 

     Drop plant. Drop setter. Squeeze lever. Step forward. Pack dirt.

Though it took less than ten seconds to put each plant into the ground, planting two or three acres took days.

By the time we finished that year's tobacco planting, water covered most of the nearby onion crop. Daddy said the onions might not make it, but then joked that we now owned "lake front" property.

Mama didn't even smile . . . She had never told us that when she was seven years old, she'd seen the Suwannee River flood the crops. "I spotted the very first sign of the 1928 flood," she told us later. "I noticed water seeping up from insect and gopher holes in the railroad ditch where I played."

~  ~  ~ 

Susie Baxter's memoir Pumping Sunshine: A Memoir of My Rural Childhood, is now available at Amazon.com. You can benefit from her experience as memoir writer and teacher with her recent book, Write Your Memoir: One Step at a Time.

Baxter says "The creative nonfiction Bacopa Literary Review publishes has a moving inner voice. It holds to the same standards as other literary forms while remaining grounded in fact." Examples here, here, here, here, here, and here.  

Fiction: A Compelling Narrative

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

"Much in vogue in recent years," said 2016-2017 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie, "is domestic literary fiction, "which tells true stories of middle-class people in realistic terms.

In this scene from To The Lighthouse, for example, Virginia Woolf artistically paints with words a "downpouring of immense darkness:"

Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say "This is he" or "This is she."  

Notice how Nabokov, in his New Yorker story "Symbols and Signs" (his original title is "Signs and Symbols") alludes to a suicide attempt without once having to rely on the mundane:

The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor's words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

And U.R. Bowie's "Sonny and Jeanne," published in Bacopa 2014, shows how to uniquely spin an obituary:

So what's there to say about a man's life? "He was an avid bowler." That's the best they could do in the Greenville News, on the subject of Ivan C. ("Sonny") Gosnell, 57 years of age. Mike told me about the trophies. Said there was one with a bunch of scattered pins and just the ten pin left standing beside the number 299, that being Sonny's highest score and that ten pin being the only thing that kept him from a perfect game. Then imagine one final fling, an old black ball, paint chipped off, three forlorn finger holes never to be filled again, curving slowly down the lane, spinning in with a just-perceptible spin, rolling and rotating slowly on to the last loud crash: KA-WHOOM!

Bacopa Literary Review: "Dark Beyond Darkness"

(Condensed by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast from Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie's full review here)

I'm ten years late getting around to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but since it has to rank among the most powerful pieces of American fiction written in the past ten years, it remains more than worthy of discussion. McCarthy here tells a tale of nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

We're in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction -- it could have been a nuclear war -- The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Apparently most animals are extinct, and the few human beings who survive face fellow humans who are, largely, living beastly lives. Here's what the world looks like when it's gone:

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe." 

Oddly enough, it is passages like these, what one critic called this violent grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences, that somehow save the reader from descending into total despair.

You don't have to read far into this book to realize that if something like this conflagration ever descends upon our world, the most fortunate of human beings will be those who die quickly. The world of The Road is a dead world. All the old rules by which people live their lives have been abrogated. A father and son wander through the devastation, on their way somewhere in search of survival. When they share some food with an old man they encounter on the road, he never thanks them. "Thank you" has gone out with the going out of the world. 

"You won't wish us luck either, will you?" says the father.

The old man replies, "I don't know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing?"

We meet the mother of the boy and wife of the main protagonist only for one brief scene, but that scene is powerfully written, and it rings true. She tells her husband she is about to commit suicide, and she departs with no loving words for him, or for the universe.

"We're not survivors; we're the walking dead in a horror film. . . I didn't bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I'm done. . . My only hope is for eternal nothingness, and I hope it with all my heart."

She goes on to insist that surviving only for oneself is impossible:

"A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love."

The dire tragedy depicted here can also apply to the human condition in general. The wife's words about how, if one wishes to survive one needs someone to live for, are equally true of old men and women in our un-apocalyptic world who lose their spouses late in life. Cobbling together "some passable ghost" is exactly what bereaved spouses do when they spend time talking alone to their dead loved ones.

Then again, even if we never have to see the world end before our eyes, each of us must face the hurts and pains and losses of any life. We also must face the ending of our own personal worlds and, like the wife of the novel, we haven't brought ourselves to any of this -- we were brought.

There is no place left for a God in the crozzled hearts of The Road's characters. At the end, the father finally gives up his struggle to survive, tells his son to go on without him, and dies. Then, abruptly, God is back in the person of a "good guy," with two children and a wonderful wife, who ambles into the book and adopts the boy, saving him from a certain death.

In light of the bleak reality McCarthy has been describing for the first 280 pages of the book, I'm not sure what the author is up to with the unbelievable Deus ex machina ending. Is the appearance of the miraculous family in one of the boy's dreams, or that of his dying father?

McCarthy gives us nothing to suggest the scene is other than reality. With his consummate feel for the artistic integrity of the structure, he could not have believed he could get away with this ending. But since this ending is there, we can only look past the final six pages, and exult in the artistry of this brilliant book.

On Father's Day: "Ten Thousand Miles from Home"

(by Poetry Editor Kaye Linden, from Bacopa Literary Review 2010)

Ten Thousand Miles from Home (Fiction)

After five years away from home, I return to my father's house in Sydney. He tells me he'll be back down in a few minutes, that my visit should have been last month, that now he doesn't have time for me. I nod, bite back tears.

Inside the confined space of the living room, air thick and heavy, I take five steps between two walls, six steps back, walk in circles, reverse the circles, slow down, speed up and hop on one leg until I notice my three kung fu swords stuffed under the staircase. One hangs without its scabbard on a bent nail, blade ready to dice and slice. My gut surges as I remember the black belt test my father refused to attend. "Martial arts are for men, not women," he'd said.

I hyperventilate through fifty jumping jacks.

My father's sword collection hangs high above the staircase. There's that one German sword, rusty with blood, a relic from World War Two. I always wondered where he'd picked that up.

I touch my toes twenty-five times.

I watch and wait, in spite of a racing pulse. There are those Persian carpets, threadbare, embedded with red stains -- reminders of violent words and alcoholic binges. Twilight falls like a shroud as I walk to the window, pull aside moldy curtains, view a blurred image of ghost gums through a pair of seldom-washed casement windows.

Antiques crowd the mahogany coffee table: a Roman warrior with wire whip riding a metal chariot, a faded black and white photo of Khartoum, a broken pottery shard found in a wartime excursion to the pyramids. Dreary paintings by dreary artists line the walls in a haphazard arrangement above china cabinets, above my father's swords, next to the staircase, wherever a few square feet beckon. A woman's dirty yellow slippers lie under a green corduroy love seat, a beat up pair of cracked, leather army boots stand on top of the cherry wood armoire. I clear old letters and newspapers from the cedar dining table and reel at dates from two years ago. Sweat rolls down my forehead as I wait for my father to return, but he doesn't. A wave of nausea rises up my throat, and I swallow the bitter taste of vomit. This time, I resolve, I'll never return.

I wait another half hour, sit at my old white desk with the inlaid world map, and punch my fist repeatedly on its dusty surface. I stand up to leave, but my eye rests on the book shelf, packed with books from poets and world historians. My fingers find my old, raggedy high-school text -- T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, inscribed on the front page to my mother from my father. From somewhere upstairs I hear argument, loud and distinct, my name thrown around like a dog's ball.

"Ok, Dad. I get the message," I whisper.

I cross the cobblestone road to the neighborhood taxi stand and turn around to make sure no one follows.

"Airport, US airways."

"Right you are luv," the taxi driver chimes. "Where you headed?"

"Home," I say. I stare straight ahead and take a long swig from the bottle of whiskey that I swiped from my father's china cabinet.

Bacopa Literary Review: Beātitūdō

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

The term beatitude comes from the Latin noun beātitūdō which means happiness or blessedness. In Christian theology the Beatitudes are eight blessings that echo the ideals of mercy, spirituality, and compassion. Third Place Poetry winner in Bacopa Literary Review 2014, Jonathan Travelstead, has mercifully blessed us with a view of earth from an astronaut's perspective, where we see Beatitudes / scrawled in the mountaintops, where heartaches look beautiful and even war looks like a lover's quarrel.

What the Astronaut Said

    From a distance the world looks blue and green--Julie Gold

Goodbye, blue jaw-breaker.
From up/down here
your heartaches look beautiful.
Bodies pendulous from trees,
ripe as grapes.
Mirrored banks aching towards heaven.
Even war looks like a lover's quarrel,
two opposing bodies
twittering little red lights
across the ocean
while the sun like a fat kid
hides behind a billiard ball.
From this distance
I see Beatitudes
scrawled in the mountaintops:
You own nothing. Leave only footprints.
Now a fugitive to this petty world,
how could I return to it?
Goodbye, sea monkeys
in a blue sandwich bag.
Goodbye, fear of abandonment
and anger issues.
There is no economy here
and it's so quiet
I'm getting to know myself better.
Wish you were here.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and also as co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. Winner of the 2013 Cobalt Prize for his poem, "Trucker," Jonathan's many publications include Alexandria Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily,  Baltimore Review, The Oneiric Moor,  Sixfold, and The Boiler. His first collection, How We Bury Our Dead, published by Cobalt Press, was released in March, 2015, and Conflict Tours is forthcoming in Spring of 2017.

Bacopa Literary Review: The Heat of the Blues

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Bacopa Literary Review 2014's First Place winner for Creative Nonfiction was "Burned," by Melani (Mele) Martinez. 

In an earlier post, we likened creative nonfiction to jazz, "always with a moving inner voice. . . as experimental as other forms while remaining grounded in fact." Melani's voice is musical, even breathtaking. Her writing captures the best of the blues: "While blues lyrics seldom turn to happy topics, they are often uplifting, empowering. . . a way of dealing with sorrow, rather than wallowing in it."

Her very first sentence rings a chord on which she improvises throughout the piece:

Surrounded by desert, my city was lifted out of caliche.

Martinez describes how she and her brother "lived some independence on downtown streets. . . left to our own thoughts."

In the summer, those thoughts were most often blurred by desert heat.

Still being drawn in, we learn about her father's restaurant, El Rapido. Notice the rhythm in the author's simple naming of foods:

Burros, fajitas, tamales, red chile, chorizo, machaca, frijoles, tortillas.

We readers are surrounded by heat. The food, the air, and an encounter in Tucson's Old Town, where she and her brother "often delivered to a Navajo silversmith there, an older and friendly man who liked my father's red chile." On her last day of work before beginning high school,

I was a pretty girl on that day. . . This teenage threshold made me glow, and the shine on me stretched out many inches from my skin. . . He pulled me close without letting go, his face close to mine. . . his heavy arms bound me, sealed me in silver bracelets. I was calcified there in the shadows of concrete walls and steel piping. My glow was eclipsed. I found myself unable to move or get away. Then he pulled me in hard to kiss me and I suddenly jerked. He released his embrace. . .

At no time that day, that week, that decade did I tell. Not my mother, my father, nor my brother. Like steam, my memory of it floated away into invisible vapor, and hung in the air over my head. Some of it I swallowed down, but still it managed to shoot out my fingertips, my eyes, my breath.

Mele Martinez holds us in thrall, her blues a way of dealing with sorrow but never wallowing, including the last paragraph, where she is at the top of Sentinel Peak:

There I'd sit quietly and contemplate all the fourteen year old girls who got burned like this--the ones who don't tell. And as I waited, on the horizon I'd see thunderclouds and the smell of sprinkled creosote bush would fill my lungs. Soon, I was pounded with late summer monsoons that always came to wash out the roasted earth and drench all of us who find ourselves on spigots.

Melani (Mele) Martinez lives in Tucson, AZ, where she's a Community College Adjunct Instructor and works on her book-length manuscript about her family's Mexican food store. She is co-founder of Flamenco del Pueblo Viejo and instructor at The Flamenco Studio. She and her husband, Jason Martinez, partner with Casa Vicente to present Tucson's Annual Spanish and Flamenco Festival.

Bits and Pieces of Good Writing: Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

by Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

With his first publication, a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock, native of Knockemstiff, Ohio, has perfected the genre known as “hillbilly sleaze.”

The first story in the collection, “Real Life,” is typical in that it features the kind of characters who populate all the stories. The description of a friend Vernon encounters in the rest room is typical of Knockemstiff denizens in general: “a porky guy with sawdust combed through his greasy black hair. A purple stain shaped like a wedge of pie covered the belly of his dirty shirt.”

The first line: “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.”

Full of hard-scrabble rednecks, the stories, as this one, sometimes feature a narrator of sensibility. In “Real Life” this is the boy narrator, nervous Bobby, whose life with his alcoholic father has him in the habit of “chewing the skin off my fingers.”

A typical male representative of the metropolis of Knockemstiff, the father, Vernon, is tough as nails, a man who hates movies and make-believe. As he puts it, “What the hell’s wrong with real life?”

The story describes a scene that Vernon creates in “real life,” when, drunk in the restroom of the drive-in and mouthing obscenities, he is accosted by another man. A big irony is that the men in the rest room enjoy the ensuing fight much more than Godzilla on the big screen outside.

Both men have their sons with them in the rest room. The other man, as large as a giant, doesn’t like Vern swearing in front of his son. After appearing to back down from a confrontation, Vern sucker punches the giant in the head. Then, after the giant is on the floor, he kicks his ribs and punches his face “until a tooth popped through one meaty cheek.” Other men have to pull him off the fallen giant before he kills him.

At this point the giant’s son attacks Bobby, and the old man forces him to fight: “You back down I’ll blister your ass.” As it turns out, Bobby bloodies the nose of the bigger boy and wins the fight.

While others call for an ambulance, Vernon and Bobby jump back in their car with Bobby’s mother and flee the drive-in. For the old man, who constantly complains about his son’s lack of toughness, “This is the best night of my fucking life.” When his wife objects to his drunken shenanigans the old man cracks her in the face with a forearm.

The story ends up being about a way of coming of age in the trailer-trash world of Knockemstiff. The meek Bobby has something of an epiphany in blood. “Real Life” ends with him in bed, contemplating his victory in the fight, which, apparently for the first time ever, has earned him the approval of his father. Interesting developments for Bobby’s future are suggested by the final lines:

“…I lapped the [other boy’s] blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.”

 This tale of a gentle character's baptism in violence reminds me of a story by the great Russian short-story writer, Isaac Babel: "My First Goose."

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review's 2016 Cover

Thanks to judge Stacey Breheny, with support from Bacopa's editorial staff, we have a winner of Bacopa Literary Review 2016's cover contest. We're blown away to discover the creator is our own local phenomenon, artist/writer/poet Christy Sheffield Sanford, author of seven small press books including Italian Smoking Piece, The Hs: the Spasms of a Requiem, and The Cowrie Shell Piece.  

Past covers have been elegant, reflecting six successful years of publication. Our new editorial board sought to maintain the Bacopa flower theme, while refreshing our image in the eyes of the writing public -- a visual invitation to poets and writers from an ever-broadening and diverse population.

In everyday terms, we wanted a cover that someone would see on a table or shelf and be drawn to its unique symbolism, asking "What is THAT??!! I have to see what's inside!!!"


Thank you, Christy Sheffield Sanford, for making that happen.

In addition to her education in art, psychology, philosophy, poetry, creative writing and interarts, Christy was the first Virtual Writer-in-Residence for trAce, formerly at Nottingham-Trent University. She collaborated with German artist Reiner Strasser on a web-specific piece Water~Water~Water, which was presented in Nottingham and Bristol, England as part of Nottingham Now.

Recipient of many awards (National Endowment for the Arts, Harn Museum of Art, New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, to name a few) Chisty's a dedicated contributor to community arts and environmental preservation.She has several times been Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and has led many community efforts such as The Aquifer Project (a three-part grant for sculpture acquisition, a light-water performance by Florida School of the Arts called "River Reflections," and Design Elements Planning that evolved into a Community Greenprint with Dr. Mary Padua's University of Florida students).

Christy Sanford's works might be called mixed genre, hybrid, experimental, innovative, avant-garde -- all are true -- whether web-based or in print. Consider an excerpt, for example, from "This Bride Is Not an Expressway" (Bride Crashing Through History):

You cannot gain access to this Bride
by riding up the ramp 55 mph (88 km),
swerving over her skin, zooming
into the fast lane of her circulatory system. . . .

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: Natural Selection

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

What distinguishes adult fiction from young adult fiction? Having a teen protagonist doesn't make a story young adult fiction. We have to look at writing style and relevant subject matter. Some say the distinction has to do with pacing and presentation, the pacing faster and the presentation simpler in young adult fiction. Often, however, the distinction is not at all clear. For example, the publisher of The Book Thief classifies it as a young adult novel. Really? I'm pretty well-read and far from being young, yet enjoyed both the novel and the film as completely relevant to my life and point of view. It seems to me the distinction is made by publishers for marketing purposes. I think we readers care only that a piece of fiction is well-written and introduces themes with which we can identify.

This is certainly true of "Natural Selection," Third Place Fiction winner from Bacopa Literary Review 2014, which features fifteen-year-old Nina. Author Nancy Scott Hanway's point of view is Nina's as an adult, recalling her childhood in a trailer with her mother, whose passion for Jane Austen led her to "raise me--her untouched and unsullied baby--according to Enlightenment norms. Jane Austen may have symbolized a sort of la-di-da romance to many people, but to my mother, Austen and her work stood for honesty, authenticity, and bedrock values." 

Nina, too, was a book thief--in her case precipitated by her mother's plan that "I would never be allowed to read anything published after the year 1817, when Jane Austen died. . . ." The Iowa Board of Education, however, required Nina's home schooling to be measured by state exams every year, and at age fifteen she finally read Darwin, "feeling as if I had stumbled upon an enormous secret. His ideas--that things progress, that the entire universe of plants and animals could transform dramatically--gave me hope." 

So Nina was at the Prairie Lights bookstore, searching "until I found the most expensive book on Darwin in the store: it was an academic textbook that cost $75. I slipped it into my overalls by leaning up against the shelf and letting the book slide down until it hit my ribs." Of course she was caught, and the police took her home, after giving her a warning. 

Inside, [my mother] sat slowly on one of our oak kitchen seats. "I thought you were different. But you're just like all the sick idiots in the world. Full of yourself."

Fury clutched my gut and rose to my throat. I struggled to speak, finally saying, "I'm like every idiot forced to read Jane Austen from birth--"

My mother stood up. For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. . . When she returned hours later, she was drunk, and she stumbled through the door where I sat reading Persuasion, half-terrified. Her gown was torn at the sleeve. She lay on the daybed beside me, staring at the ugly light fixture and occasionally picking at her sleeve. "Where's that book on Darwin?"

"I threw it in the trash," I said.

"You can't do that to books," she said, her words slurring. "Didn't I ever tell you?" She shook her head and fell asleep. I stood watching her for a long time before I rescued Darwin from the garbage and began to read.

Nancy Scott Hanway's writing appears in journals such as Forge, Grey Sparrow Journal, Inertia Magazine, Limestone, Lowestoft Chronicle, Shark Reef, and many more.

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: a god falls from grace

by Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Editor Kaye Linden

Ekphrastic response to the Peter Breughel painting of Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.

an insignificant splash 

after such grandeur. Flying high in the sky next to the sun only to fall down in grace, fall down down slowly at first, tediously tedious when air currents waft his frail body back up up towards the sun only to surrender him down down to fall again, down towards earth in a tilting tumbling somersault that at another time might have felt like such fun but only if he could stay just in that moment and enjoy the ride up and down, but a crow laughs at his fall and Icarus wakes to the screeching in-between of sky and water and looks down (he should never have looked down) to see his face stare back from the water, mouth wide open in a silent scream soaring from the depths of his gaping throat, blue eyes staring, lengthy blonde curls floating around his head like a parachute, but not a parachute, a liability when water wets hair heavy weighing it down as he falls into his reflection, titillating upon the water, hearing the first drop, the second drop of the first splash, now hearing his voice high, tight calling for help, but the ploughman, the picnicker, the little child with a kite, turn to see the stupid disturbance from a stupid boy who really believed, really believed he would never die, that escape from a labyrinth meant wax wings waxing solid forever, that escape from prison meant playtime with sunbeams, not sliding down sunbeams, and the people look away look away from the red- faced god falling into human condition, the wide-eyed culprit who hits watery concrete, regal wings just behind his white legs, until his calls for help gurgle gurgle gurgle

and the world returns to its state of being the world again,

looking away. 

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: On a Good Day

by Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

"You on a Good Day," by Alethea Black, was published in One Story, Issue #163, April 23, 2012, written totally in second person, about all the things you do, don't, on a good day.

Excerpt

You don't give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively, then let go of the wheel to give it two fingers when you see a rainbow-tinted peace sticker on the bumper. You do not call the friend--the one who was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and whom you did not visit or call--you do not call her today because today you need something from her. You do not consider dousing your refrigerator with gasoline and setting it on fire because of the sound its motor makes while you're trying to work. You do not wish the earth would just ignite and everyone would die in a ball of flame simply because it has been hot for a few days. You do not conjure up, in as vivid detail as possible, every time anyone has ever wronged you in any way. You do not think: We're a ruined, useless lot, and we deserve everything we get. You do not say under your breath, while forgoing a pack of cigarettes: It's either pain in the body or pain in the mind, take your pick.

This strikes me as the best story I've read since I've been subscribing to One Story--that covers about twenty stories.

I find myself marking up passages, even writing things down (my best commitment to a writer). So many wonderful passages, so much despair, but leavened with hope and optimism. "Hurt people hurt people." I suppose this expression has been around for awhile, but I never had heard it: wonderful.

I laugh all the way through this story, although the humor is dark.

About the end: in the Q and A section, the ending is described as "unabashedly happy, hopeful." I wouldn't describe it that way. I think the ending is happy/sad, like the rest of the story, like life.

The ending moves me.

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: Winning Words

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Charlotte M. Porter's writing sweeps enthusiastically through poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, fiction. And the first thing you'll notice about every piece of this oeuvre is the imaginative use of language. Her characteristic verbal verve as nom de plume Wanda Legend is evident in a single sentence from N-word (creative nonfiction, Bacopa Literary Review 2011) as quoted in NewPages:

Not for amateurs, small-town chat is a craft masterful as tractor repair or canning.

In Porter's fiction piece, Rip Curl (Duende), foster child Sierra lives in a trailer park: 

Sierra counts out twenty-eight hop-steps to Trailer no. 78, Home Sweet Home. . . Lake Park is a slum of life-size crates, what the social worker calls a community of manufactured homes. Sierra has never been sure what to call the factory colors – dark white, grubby tan, dishwater blond. . .  The one window, covered with baggy Mylar, reminds her of a big eye with a snotty cold.

Swerve: A Life in Three Parts (SLAB|Sound & Literary Art Book) takes us from B.S. (Before Speech) through A.S. (After Speech), and a Coda:

After Speech, words are my pilosity, nettle cowage, stinging hairs.
Lips lacquered, teeth capped, ventral implants, I look like soccer mom or human rage-cage, gagged hostage inside snare.

Burningwood Literary Journal features two of Porter's poems. 

From Snapshot with Suet:

Say, has anyone found the old lorgnettes, those folding opera glasses?
Nice keepsake my musical sisters agree, sorting our dead Mother’s things.
Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore they yodel from Tosca.

From Morning Scrabble:

At my brother Michael’s gravesite, others toss handfuls of earth, stones, flowers. I throw small wooden squares with letters, stuffed in my purse and pockets, pieces from his favorite childhood board game — winning words, our excuse for wagers.

Before they dump out drawers at home, let’s see what’s left to play: O B T X R U D Z E S C H I F N A T M A …W. WOMBAT, RATFINK, tags for schoolyard FOES. FAUX, FINCH, short DEFT words like ZED and UR earned quick points. Easy vocab, RUDE, RAIN, SHINE, AFTER, we learned, ate money vowels that better earned their keep in CRUDE, INTRUDE, SHINER, SHAFTED, RAFTER.

About Porter's prize-winning Deaf Uncle (Talking/Writing flash fiction contest), judge Joanne Avallon wrote:

I fell hardest for 'Deaf Uncle' because the language haunted me, both the Uncle's ('virgin cartilage' for 'Virgil's Carthage') and the narrator's ('crafts for girls, sports for boys...same old Scout badges'). The author packs so much intention into every word that each has a long half-life. . . .

So now you know what to expect in Charlotte M. Porter's Pangs (First Place Fiction prize, Bacopa 2014). And you won't be disappointed:

. . . After we split, I should have dug out all the bulbs and tubers, yanked the corms and grafts, peeled the orchids off their small wooden paddles. . .

Bunky never could say no to the unwanted or underperforming office plant. . . After several months in a kind home, these salvaged plants always gained strength and id, huge, office-bossy with drag-along auras from the culture of mid-level management. Pencil cactus hangs overhead transpiring oxygen like a panting creep. Euphorb snivels, shrivels skin, sprouts thorns to snag curious fingers. Croton reaches out like a mission statement and threatens to crawl on those damn leafy polka dots. . . .

Charlotte M. Porter lives in an old citrus hamlet in North Central Florida. In addition to awards mentioned above, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has placed as finalist in The Calvino Prize (outstanding pieces of fiction in the fabulist experimentalist style of Italo Calvino) and Rose Metal Press Sixth Annual Chapbook contest. She's also been published in Baseball Bard, and the Remaking Moby-Dick project of Pea River Journal (international multimodal storytelling performance). Porter's most recent exhibit, Hem-nal, a collaboration with Christy Sheffield Sanford, explores hemlines through poetry and stitched collages.

Bacopa Literary Review: A Teaching Tale

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Reading literary fiction improves empathy. Deep characterization in novels is memorable in part because these characters disrupt our expectations, undermine our prejudices and stereotypes. 

This is equally true of so-called Children's Literature. Think of the Harry Potter series. Is it science fiction? Classical literature? Fantasy? Young adult? Mystery? Adults and teens, as well as children, are entranced by Harry's adventures. What about Charlotte's Web? Clearly a children's book, and yet, there's much more to it than the story of a pig and a spider. These books are powerful because they're teaching tales. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and his crowd have struggles many of us face, including bullying from the likes of Snape and Voldemort. In E.B. White's Charlotte's Web we can identify with the isolation and fears of poor, bullied Wilbur.  

Bullying is a stark reality. According to 2015 statistics, one in three U.S. students say they've been bullied in school. Some stay home, others attend school in a chronic state of anxiety. Workplace threats to adults may be more subtle, but they're bullying nonetheless.

Teaching tales can help both children and adults learn to cope. Bacopa Literary Review 2015's Third Place Fiction winner Michael Allard, a teacher in the Gifted Program in Marion County and in the High School Dual Enrollment program at Santa Fe College, brings us such a tale: "Your Invisible Alligator." 

Your invisible alligator goes to school with you. . . you are at your desk when your bully comes down the aisle with malicious intent. With a flick of your invisible alligator's invisible tail, your bully's feet are flipped forward and up. . . You are tempted to laugh. However, you know that laughing at the misfortune of others is a kind of bullying, so instead, you look in your heart for some sympathy. . . Your bully persists. Your invisible alligator resists. Soon, you no longer have to put a look of concern on your face because, in your heart, you are concerned, and the look comes without bidding. . . Despite all of this, your bully continues his attacks. . . your invisible alligator could simply put an end to all of this with a snap of his mighty jaws, but your invisible alligator knows that causing harm may feel good for a time, but regret will long outlast the satisfaction of revenge. . . "Hey," you say to your bully one day. You've walked down the aisle towards the back of the room where your bully prefers to sit. . . In his eyes, you can see a mix of wariness and fear. . . You want him to know that you will not become a bully yourself. . . You look at your bully with kindness in your eyes and a smile on your lips. You hold out your hand to him. You think your invisible alligator would be proud of you.

Thanks, Michael Allard, for this call to action.

(Look for Michael Allard's "Change to Believe In," upcoming in the Fall 2016 edition of Bacopa Literary Review)

Bacopa Literary Review: It Goes Like This

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

David Antonio Moody, Bacopa Literary Review 2015's Third Place Poetry winner, is a writing instructor at Arizona State University and production editor for The Cortland Review. David received a 2014 AWP Intro Journal Award, and his poetry has appeared in Spillway, Streetlight, The Apply Valley Review, Gingerbread House, Eleven Eleven, Artful Dodge, and Breakwater Review (Peseroff Prize). His prize-winning poem for Bacopa:

Wasp and Pear

Every year I find myself giving up on trees
lightning-struck, brown, full of sawfly larva
but shingling the dog's pen.
                                            Hurricane
season can often leave us just like this:
with wood tacks, lumber, with caulk guns and caulk,
gallons of water, and surplus tape spools.

But yellow cling peaches stored in a can,
how they imply what is kept in the sky,
what message it's got, if something is left.

But soon, always soon, mouths become hungry,
then fruit season leaves.
                                    Chipping potatoes.
Field hands lobbing cabbage over my fence
in trade for water. I offer a watch
and eat well that night.
                                    It goes like this.
The grove drops its flesh.
                                 Some dawns I hear it--
a soft pear's giving up into a fall,
its wet brown pulp a bruise on the earth. Then
wind-jagged wasps come to perch on its rot,
That they love what's dead. That I do, do not.

Bacopa Literary Review: A Universal Truth

by Poetry Editor Kaye Linden

This tiny poem by D.A. Levy offers a wonderful example of writing with a specific image to demonstrate a general truth. Here, the poet has compared kisses to dried flowers to demonstrate that we cannot hold on to anything. The universal truth shines through this “rainy day.” Enjoy the moment because it will not last. The writing rule here? Use the specific to demonstrate the universal.

for a rainy day

kisses
we tried to save
pressed in books
like flowers from
a sun warmed day
only
years later to
open yellowing pages
to find those same
kisses -- wilted and dry

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: Bits and Pieces of Good Writing: George Saunders

by Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

George Saunders'“Mother’s Day” in The New Yorker is a funny story, lots of great humor, but—as with all quality humorous writing—the fiction is anchored in the serious.

Sweeping like a banshee in front of that same tiny former carriage house she’d lived in since she was a girl. With her oddball parents. Mandy and Randy. Both had limps. Different limps. When they walked down the street it was like a freaking dance party.

Note what some might consider offensive writing here. Let them. If you want to write good fiction do not concern yourself with political correctness. Good fiction describes Life, and Life has no truck with political correctness. Is it sin to laugh at a descriptions of limping people? No. Go ahead and laugh. God will absolve you of your sins.

[appearing at the pearly gates]: she didn’t exactly love the idea of showing up at the pearly gates or whatnot and having St. Whoever look her up in his book and go, Whoa, hey, I was just sitting here tabulating the number of guys you had in your life, and, yikes, can you wait here a second while I go check with God on what the limit is?

[caught in a hailstorm]: The hail-thingies bouncing off Debi’s black umbrella looked like sweat flying off a cartoon-guy’s head when he was supposed to be worried. Paul, Sr., had once shown her a porn like that. A cartoon porn. The one Paulie later found. Guy so worried, watching his wife have at it with a big sailor…

[heart attack]: Alma got hold of a fence slat. To pull—pull herself out. Of this. Pain. Something new was happening now. The tightness in her chest was worse. Jesus. Like labor with Paulie. Then it went past that, to labor with Pammy, and she was giving birth to something bigger than Pammy, out her chest.

Funny, the best story I ever read by George Saunders was also in The New Yorker, years ago. It was about a man caught up in a bank robbery. Don’t remember the title. As I recall it, the man in the bank kept making jokes, and the bank robbers did not take kindly to that. Can’t recall what else happened, but it sure was a dang good story!

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

Bacopa Literary Review: what is real

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

It is always satisfying to become reacquainted with poets and writers featured in past issues who have continued to flourish. A great example is Mark William Jackson, one of whose poems was featured in Bacopa 2011. This Sydney, Australia-based writer has many recent publications in print and electronic journals. You can also hear Mark reading his poetry on Sound Cloud.  

Here, from Bacopa Literary Review 2011, is Mark's intriguing poem "what is real":

in this binary world
the liminal is lost
         only space between
         nowhere
and   now here

what is real

is it
the pen that slashes
across the page
in thrusts and swoops
like a swashbuckling hero
defending an honour

or
the dollar
wrestled from the grip of time
         a reward for trading
         hours                  away
calculated rates of
interest and exchange

the needle that digs in
         through skin
to deliver its
chemical images
what if the doors of perception
were cleansed
         and the reality
                 drove us mad

or is it
the flickering visions of the past
captured on the mind's celluloid
or discarded on the cutting room floor
for not being
         of production quality

what is real
         real is the memory of things to come
         real is that love
that did not start
and will not finish

but just is.

(Note: The last 18 lines -- beginning with to deliver its / chemical images -- were to appear on a second page in Bacopa's 2011 issue, but were lost in the production process. We regret that error and share the poet's assessment: "It is a rather important section as it turns the tone of the poem; hopefully it adheres to Robert Frost's theory that a poem 'begins in delight and ends in wisdom.'")

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016

"OCD"

From Poetry Editor Kaye Linden:





Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016