Examining Chance and Fastening it with Future

 by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 contributor Mandira Pattnaik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story ends with a note, open to interpretation:  

     The tight box in life nobody escapes out of.

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

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

Dying Back

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry contributor, Patrick Cabello Hansel

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

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

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

                               Every autumn
their goodbyes ravish our eyes
with color.

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

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

 

Disagreeing with Gandhi

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 contributor Jessica Barksdale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

You Don't Always Know Where a Poem Will Go

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Poetry Second Prize winner Shoshauna Shy

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

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

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

 

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