Woundings

We have built fires in the shells
of abandoned automobiles,
pried up the paving stones
with the intent of hurling them
at one another.

Erecting the barricades of yesterday
we pile stone upon stone
into walls to protect ourselves
from the ominous unknown.

Amidst this rise in tensions,
I am calling to you from the other side
as a sister-in-arms
but for you, I am “other”
for I also have my own little pile of stones
that encircles and encloses…
(just in case).

At odd intervals, we lance a dart
towards the province of the “other”
where it finds its mark
in the soft flesh of our bodies.

We hone our skills at sharpening stone
to make them bigger and heavier,
scrambling frantically to crush
the flesh and bone of our inexorable fear.

As the stones pierce the tenderness of flesh
we are confirmed in our cherished notions
about the “alien” other,
they are not quite civilized
- not like US.

“They” disturb our deepest sensibilities
and notions of fairness, where…
behind the walls of our self-made prisons
we have permission to forget
we are also lancing stones.

In our woundedness,
we build the walls ever higher
invent subterranean caves
to ward off further assaults

After warring for centuries, we have grown weary
and so, with the coming spring, by some miracle,
there is a slight thaw
in the timeworn ice of our hostilities

And, for the briefest moment,
the most surprising thing occurs
as bit by bit, all our barriers crumble…

And you come out from behind your wall
of implacable resistance
and begin to recite poems to me
with your eyes
as I stand naked and defenseless before you.

But somehow, we both know
this is only a brief respite
before we return to the task
of piling up stones again…

For we are addicted to walls
having forgotten the strength
of our softness
we have become hounds of stone.

~Lisa Pelletier

To Catch a Muse

For Julián and his many selves

Fernando took out the set of colored pencils that he used for sketching his ideas. Before he began writing, he always drew a quick sketch of the scene in his head. Next, he took out his prized possession, a freshly sharpened pencil, well-chewed along the edges with incisor tracks leading to the worn eraser. It lounged alongside the pad like a balding poet with a lead foot, a veteran of his many tempestuous battles with words. Fernando always wrote everything out longhand before typing it up. He had to feel his way into language through the tips of his fingers curled about the pencil like a blind man reads Braille.

He always observed the same ritual whenever he sat down to write. He placed Neruda's Los Versos Del Capitan and some love sonnets on the shelf; a sprig of jasmine floating in a bowl of rose water; wildflower petals scattered about the bowl; a sepia-tinted photo of his great aunt on her wedding day, and two blood red persimmons to tempt the muse. Lately, he was suffering an incurable case of writer’s block.

At first, his pencils were the only aids to his writing. Gradually, he took to performing little acts to coax the muse to smile on him. While browsing at a local crafts fair, he had picked up a Tibetan singing bowl which he rubbed with a wooden mallet, producing a sound like a pealing church bell in a distant land. He took pleasure in the resonance of the sound and the beauty of the composition before him. Gradually, the whole affair began to resemble an altar to the goddess of his inspirations. He felt a mild compulsion to have everything in its place before he could write. Placing the pencil in his mouth, he twirled it around his teeth and his tongue while contemplating the sonnet in his mind’s eye.

Every once in a while, he cast a preoccupied glance at the video monitor above his head to make sure all was well in the stacks of the Metropolitan. Since he was at work, he would periodically hoist his flashlight onto his belt, don the navy blue captain’s hat he’d cadged from his sea-going brother, and venture out of his tiny cubicle to survey the stacks. The lipstick traces he discovered in the margins of the poetry and literature books convinced him that the culprit was a woman. He had never been able to catch her, but he knew that she was out there. His muse.

She coveted the nights when the library was transformed into a stage for precarious flights of imagination. That was when her real world came alive. Every night, just as patrons were departing, the characters would venture out, timidly at first, then more daringly, once assured that all the patrons had gone. Leaping to life, they took full control of the stage, enacting scenes of all the great books from Shakespeare to Don Quixote. As Fernando drew near, he could hear their voices calling to him. Then suddenly the voices ceased, as if an interloper had interrupted their concentration. In truth, no one knew for sure if she really existed or was just that much-rumored ghost who had always haunted the library as long as there were readers.

In the bright light of the day, she was just another crazy lady muttering to herself in whispered tones, as if sharing dark secrets with the books. She never molested their pages during day, but hid out in the seldom-visited poetry stacks of the library until nightfall. The patrons avoided her almost as avidly as they circumvented the poetry books themselves. Mostly they left her in peace, while she skitted from stack to stack, evading the guards -- a demented Ophelia in flowered tresses and gypsy dress. No one knew where she lived or how she occupied her time. The patrons referred to as “Our Lady of the Stacks.” But by night, she was transformed into a diva of the theatre who interacted with the host of characters hidden in the leaves of musty books. She heard their incessant whispering in her ear: “Come tonight….yes, tonight! Let us meet upon the stage!”

Fernando flashed his light around like a strobe, hoping to unsettle the rush of birds in her heart. Just when he was sure that this time he had caught her “in flagrante delicto” with her crayon poised over some tome, she danced away with swift, gazelle-like steps. Elusive as a dream, she never appeared to him as a woman of flesh and bone. At times, Fernando wondered if he had not simply hallucinated her. In truth, he cared very little whether she defiled the books or left them alone. They were mostly yellowed and neglected copies of the unsung poets of yesterday. Books that merely sat on the shelves year after year, collecting ancient patinas of dust. For Fernando, this was just another ritual, one more task he felt compelled to perform before he could sit down to write.

But then, on the evening the hussy purloined his favorite pencil, Fernando had a sudden change of heart. She had taken to cadging it night after night, filling his favorite tomes with cryptic messages and fanciful arabesques scribbled in the margins with her lipstick. At first, she simply left rhapsodic little billets doux to his favorite poets. Over time, she progressed to revising their work, and substituting her own reworked versions in their place. The final straw came when she began leaving little notes to Fernando himself, notes that started showing up in the margins of his manuscripts. Occasionally, she heaped sweet praise upon his work. More often, the notes were taunting and saucy, laden with scorn: “You call yourself a writer? Hah! I know a real ship’s captain who writes better poetry than you!”

“That’s it. This is war!” Fernando shouted. That night, he devised a trap.

{An aside: Now, you may not know this, but the muses have a weakness for lime blossom tea in a bone china cup, gently stirred with a silver spoon. They love to dunk their madeleines in the steaming tissane, while dreaming of comely sirens and writers shipwrecked on the shores of inspiration. So this, dearly beloved, is how the muses spend their time when they’re not whispering nice turns of phrase into the ears of the poets.}

With sudden resolve, Fernando erected a small, oval tea table in his cubicle, a battered antique he borrowed from his great aunt -- the same aunt in the sepia-toned photo. He covered the scruffy tabletop with a lace cloth, and atop this, he placed his treasured manuscripts. To this, he added the requisite bone china cup-and-saucer with a silver-plated spoon filched from his grandmother’s tea service. He complemented the assemble with her prize teapot, filled to the brim with a tisane suffused with lime blossoms. Next to the pot, he placed genuine madeleines from Commercy, France, where madeleines were first inspired by a baker’s muse. Finally, he erected a set of concealed cameras in the rafters of his cubicle, together with a hidden monitor on the main library floor and camouflaged by a palm plant near the poetry stacks.

As night fell, Fernando got ready to make his rounds. He went through the usual nightly ritual of assembling his alter. Placing Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair next to Los Versos Del Capitan, he struck the singing bowl, then sat down at his desk, taking the much-purloined pencil into his mouth. As he chewed it, he pretended to be lost in erotic contemplation of a maiden in a distant land.

At the appointed hour, he set the pencil down next to the hastily composed Ode to Forbidden Love. As he rose from the table, as if to he were about to make his rounds, he heard the hushed voices of characters climbing out of the books. Their shadowy presence danced along the walls, filtered only by the light of a ripened moon who observed their play through wide windows. As usual, when he approached too closely the voices filtered off into titters of silence like children playing a game of hide-and-go-seek. Fernando made his way nonchalantly down the aisles, aiming his flashlight down each of the stacks in turn. When he reached the palm plant, he parted the branches.

“Ah ha!” Fernando said to himself. “Just as I thought.” He peered closer at the scene emanating from the monitor. She was in his cubicle.

The muse was tasting his pencil, caressing its bald head with her tongue. It was his first real glimpse of her. She stared into the eye of the camera in the cubicle, as if she knew she were being watched, taunting him with her glance. For a moment, he stopped breathing for she was as comely as a maiden on the masthead of a ship to the imagination. When she opened his manuscript, her sheer skirt fluttered in the wind from an open window, revealing shapely thighs. Taking the pencil from her mouth, she fondled it with her fingers as she surveyed his latest piece. Once again, he drew a sharp breath, and fidgeted with his flashlight, as he fretted over what she would say.

As she poised the crayon to write, Fernando saw his chance. Dimming his flashlight, he snuck quietly up on her. In that moment, she was rudely flipping the pages of his treasured Neruda books, preparing to mark them with her lipstick.

“Basta!” Fernando screamed, slipping into his native Spanish out of fear and emotion.

He lunged for her. Laughing shamelessly, she spun out of his grasp. As he pursued her around the table, running first one way and then the next, she remained just out of reach. For a moment, they locked eyes like two familiar adversaries, and just stood there appraising each other. Then, as if to taunt him, she began teasing the pages of the book with her tongue, bending their corners and leaving little trails of saliva among the lines of poetry. Loosening her blouse, she caressed the lyrical and erotic passages with her breasts, drenching them with her sweat. As she picked up her lipstick to write, she dipped it in the steaming tea and poised it over the book. She was just outlining her favorite passage when he dove for her again. But it was too late. The deed done, she dropped the crimson crayon in the teapot, and headed for the door. Fernando sprinted ahead of her to block her escape. As they met in the doorway, she shimmied past him with a brazen smile. Grazing his chest with her nipples as she passed, she winked at him saucily, then flitted by him with her feet of a gazelle.

All through the night, he searched for her in the stacks, but it was no use. She was gone. When Fernando went back to his cubicle, he was plagued by a strange curiosity and unsatiated desire. There he discovered Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair opened to Neruda’s Sonnet XIV. She had circled these lines:

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos."


© 2008 Lisa Pelletier

Deaf Orchestra

As Astrid strolled into the common kitchen of International House, she smelled the aromas of onions and peppers sautéing in the iron casserole. When she caught sight of the illicit wine bottles lined up along the stove, she smiled. Diego had somehow managed to smuggle them past the keen eyes of the resident assistants. Actually, this wasn't so hard, since the RA's were guilty of pilfering a glass or two on Friday nights.

On Fridays, the Supper Club gathered for its weekly Saternalian rites. Astrid took a mental picture of the room, noting the balloons that filled the ceiling and the hallways leading down to the basement. As if Diego had just nudged her in the ribs and winked, she understood the language of the balloons. Diego had filled the halls of house with them from the high Moorish ceiling of the living room all the way down to the cellar where they would descend after supper for dancing and intimate conversations.

Astrid took off her shoes and placed her hands on the wall. As she suspected, there was music in the background; someone had put on a CD. The cooks were already dancing to the lounge/dub beats of a Lebanese band. From the resonating walls and floor, Astrid felt the rhythms of the drum through the soles of her feet and palms. As the vibrations flooded up through the floor, penetrating her body, she swayed to the syncopated beats. Slowly, at first, she began to move to the sensual rhythms of the dumbek, rocking in time to vibes she heard only in her head. Watching her, Diego jumped up, grasped a balloon off the ceiling, and bounced it towards Astrid, who caught it in mid-flight. Feeling the flesh of the balloon between her fingers, she sensed the high and low tones of the oud and dumbek, playing counterpoint to each other.

As the music eased into a slow, sinuous taxim, she suddenly remembered her first date with Diego. Of all things, he had taken her to a concert. His strange obsession with music didn't phase her much; she'd had a lifetime of feeling her way into sound. But this was her first concert, and she had no idea what to expect. Diego refused to tell her where they were going or who the headliner was, but he promised her that this concert would be special. Not wanting to reveal the surprise too soon, he led her in blindfolded. When he finally removed the ribbon of cloth from her eyes, she looked around excited and expectant.

The first thing she noticed was the coterie of deaf kids lining the stage. She was stunned at first. The deaf community was so small that she immediately recognized several kids. The odd thing was that they were all carrying balloons -- giant balloons that bobbed above their heads in a fantastic array of whimsical color. She signed excitedly to the kids she knew, "Hey, what's with the balloons?" But no one answered, as the lights grew dim and the band began to saunter on stage. The last person to enter the scene was a tall, red-haired sorceress, cradling a pair of percussion sticks between the fingers of one hand. Barefoot and poised, Evelyn Glennie crossed the stage, stopping before a massive drum.

Fascinated, Astrid drew in her breath as the percussion sticks rained down on the drumhead. She heard the conversation between drummer and drum as it electrified every pore of her body with sound. She watched the skin of the drum pulse like a giant lung…felt the air thicken with the rhythms of her own beating heart. Then, as if she had bitten the proverbial Madeleine, memories flooded up with the call-and-response as the other musicians joined in. Like all teenagers, she had spent hours in her room dancing to VERY LOUD music, driving her hearing parents insane. She could almost heard their desperate shouts: "TURN THAT DOWN!" She felt the vibrations in ordinary objects all around her, as a passing car whizzed through the wine glass in her hand. On rainy nights, the hollow wooden door frame was an Andean rain stick, her father's guitar a Peruvian drum. From a young age, she realized that all objects breathed; she felt their unique rhythms deep in her core.

As the band heated up, Diego pulled a shriveled, red balloon from his pants pocket and began to blow it up. When it had fully expanded, he held it out to Astrid like some strange, enticing flower. As he tied the knot, she took it between her fingers, and all at once, she felt it: a sudden, visceral connection with the music that was unlike anything she had experienced before. The balloon vibrated like a giant lung that concentrated all the sounds in the stadium, allowing her to sense individual tones and confluences of sound all at once. Through the balloon, Astrid heard the sounds of an entire orchestra in her head.

That night, they pulled down every balloon they could find from the I-House rafters, and filled Diego's bed with them. Diego put on his favorite jazz album: Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds. As they lay there, blind and naked in the dark, they felt their way to each other through a sea of balloons. Giddy with excitement, they felt the pulse of an entire universe thrum through the lungs of the balloons that filled their bed.

© 2007 Lisa Pelletier

Respiro

The night the traveler arrived on her doorstep, the wind pelted the windows like disoriented birds knocking against the panes. Consuela tried to sleep, but a nervous energy pervaded her dreams. Outside, an anonymous drunk kicked over the dumpster in the alley way outside her door just as the neighbor’s car alarm went off. When she finally succumbed to sleep, she dreamed that a homeless man, dressed in combat boots and fatigues, was breaking down her apartment door, desperate for the warmth of another body. As if on cue, the orgasmic cries of an alley cat in heat jolted her awake. That’s when she heard the rap on the door.

She looked at the clock. It was 3:23 a.m. The wind picked up and she could hear the branches of the giant cypress scraping the roof. Her heart pounded to the rhythm of the hurricane lashing her stomach. As the shingles from the roof crashed down, the storm was just hitting the street, lashing the shutters and window panes in the torrential downpour. Grabbing her robe, Consuela tumbled from the bed stark naked, an unruly mass of dark curls framing her delicate face. Eyes still puffed with visions of dreams, she rose slowly to her feet. Draping the robe about her thin shoulders, she stumbled unsteadily towards the front door.

Peering through the little, triangular windows, she could barely discern the shadows of the swaying cypress through the cords of rain lashing the street. After a moment of tense waiting, she shrugged. There’s no one there, she said to herself. With a sigh of relief, she was just retracing her steps when she heard the rapping again -- louder this time.

"Ay!" The voice was faint but insistent, as if coming from the bottom of a well.

Consuela peeked through the glass once more. Again, she saw nothing. But she could still hear the soft, desperate cry of a male voice, sounding like a sailor stranded at sea.

"! Aayyy!" the voice pierced the glass this time. Still, she couldn’t make out anything through the windows. The wind was now blowing the rain horizontally through the branches of the cypress, tearing off limbs that went flying down the street.

Instinctively, Consuela threw open the door. The apparition at the foot of the stairs was nearly naked, and so covered with grime – like a second skin -- that it looked like some other-worldly creature. It didn’t appear to have skin, but scales that she would later recognized as dried blood caked with mud. It was curled up in fetal position at the foot of her stairs like a vulnerable animal left to fend for itself.

Consuela went over to it, and lightly poked the creature in the side – for she was sure it was some wild thing – like the ghouls in the stories her grandmother told her as a child. When the creature raised its head, his full beard and mass of tangled curls made him look like some tormented Christ figure. She felt a sudden wave of empathy wash over her as she looked into his eyes.

Instinctively, she reached out to help him to his feet, but the man felt heavier than two drunken sailers. Her robe having come undone with the lashing wind, she could feel the scales of his crusted skin against her body. As she struggled to lift him, Consuela was soon covered with the same mud and grime that enveloped the man’s body. In that moment, as they were both wrapped in the same skin – as it were – she felt a strange compulsion to name him.

"Francisco," she whispered, caressing the vowels of his name with her tongue. As she spoke his name, she felt that she could sense all the ghosts of his fears and his yearnings...a mosaic of scenes and faces flashed before her eyes. In the act of breathing his name, she voyaged with him through the kaleidoscope faces of men and women like himself -- all fellow travelers, in search of something elusive, always just out of reach. She felt at once that she had never quite met anyone like him before, and at the same time that she had always known him -- as if she’d somehow been carrying him inside her all her life, and only just given birth to him when she dared speak his name.

When it was all over, Consuela still didn’t know how she got him up the stairs that night. Though he was not a large man, the weight of his muscular physique fell on her small shoulders as if he were sculpted entirely of stone. She was reminded of the ballast of ships...a massive anchor erected of water and bone. Although she worked out every day hauling great masses of clay, plaster and stone that she used for sculpting, she felt almost as frail as a sparrow beneath the great somnolent creature. It seemed almost as if the weight of his dreams were bearing down on her. But then, all at once, she felt the great power of his muscular physique sweep through her like a wave coursing through her torso. In that instant, she felt a sudden burst of strength. With herculean effort, she managed to hoist him up the stairs to her loft and onto a daybed in her studio.

When she finally got a good look at him through the slender river of moonlight that flooded across the bed, what she saw surprised her. Under the dirt and the grime, the thickest lashes quivered on his delicately slanted eyes, set off by a wide, sensual mouth. She trembled as she found herself gazing on him, almost like a mother catching first sight of the newborn babe she has been carrying inside her for many months. Instinctively, she felt around for a well-worn wooden scultping tool on her easel and began to scrape the scales from his back and chest as if she were about to begin a new piece. As she worked, uncovering the scaly crusts and grime that covered his body, what she saw astounded her. He was otherworldly in his beauty. He was so beautiful that she wasn’t sure if he was real or she had dreamed him. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, she was glad that he had finally arrived. She was gripped by sudden, fervent desire to know this man beneath the shell that served to protect him, as if she could somehow unravel all his secrets if she just had the right tools. And so it was that she worked diligently through the night, never stopping to rest until the morning, when she fell into an exhausted sleep next to the most beautiful man in the world.

© 2008 Lisa Pelletier

Voyager

Ariel was scouring all the markets in the inner Mission, searching for guascas, when she spotted him. The man was straddling a box with a perfectly round hole in the center, and hammering out an African rhythm with his bare hands. The muscles of his shirtless torso rippled in syncopation with the beat of the drum. His wide, sensuous lips sported an anachronistic-looking pointed mustache, making him look like a cross between Salvador Dali and Che Guevara sans beret. In that moment, Ariel forgot herself. She completely forgot the surprise dinner that she was planning for Diego that evening. Forget all about her search for the elusive guascas, without which Ajiaco just isn’t Ajiaco - according to Diego….and no, oregano won’t do in a pinch. She even managed to forget all about her relentless pursuit of Diego’s love…her elusive dream that if she could nab a little piece of El Dorado for him to conjure the memory of his homeland, he just might fall for her. Suddenly, none of that mattered. And for a solid 15 minutes, she simply stared at this beautiful brown man seated before an outdoor stall decked with musical instruments, beating on this strange, makeshift drum.

Lost in the rhythms of another land, he hardly noticed her at first. As she took him in with a long, appreciative glance, it gradually came back to her. She thought she must know this man, yet she couldn’t remember where she had encountered him. After a while, he slowed the beat, then with a final flourish of hands, his rhythms melded with the sounds of afternoon traffic in the city. The soft trills of Spanish floated through the air as passersby made their way toward the park. As he rested his palms gracefully on edges of the cajon, he caught her glance and held it. All at once, she pictured South American plazas, friends gathered with guitars and drums, couples parading down wide palm-lined squares as they called out to each other in soft cadences of Spanish. She looked in his eyes as as if they held moving pictures, experiencing the scene as he had just described to her through the medium of the drum. But now his hands were still. He regarded her pensively, as if he had seen a great many things on his journey to this place, had so many stories he wanted to tell her.

Ariel smiled flirtatiously, glancing down at the cajon, as if to say, So, what have we here? Suddenly, he grasped her hand, and placed it on the belly of the box, next to the center hole.

"See, it breathes," he told her. "All instruments breathe."

Then he demonstrated with a small flourish of hands, striking the tapas or head of the drum with his open palm, and rapping on the edges of the box with his fingertips in a kind of counter rhythm – the call and response.

"Do you feel it," he asked, taking her hand in his again.

As she felt the sudden warmth of his palm holding hers, she smiled at the boyish grin enveloping his face. She imagined that he was looking at her now with visions in his eyes of a faraway homeland. At that moment, she thought of Diego and sighed. Suddenly, she pictured the precipitous peaks of the violet-hued Andes rising in the moonlight. Through his pupils, she saw stairways of jagged steps ascending through the ethereal fog into a vast sky. The fog wisped through the windswept corners of the city, as the twighlit city flickered in the galaxy of lights below. Just as suddenly, the scene dissolved as other pictures floated before his eyes. She felt herself arriving in all the ports of the many lands he had visited and feeling like a stranger there. If he had been white, he might have been called an intrepid adventurer, a Latin Indiana Jones. But he was always the wayfarer in exile, without country or home. Always casting a glance back to the mythic homeland for the identity and sense belonging that eluded him. All at once, Ariel felt swept up in the nostalgia that clouded his eyes. It was a momentary hallucination, but she imagined they had taken this journey together. And suddenly she felt herself cast up on the shore of a different port, negotiating her way through sea of strangers, knowing no one.

"I don’t understand it," she said hesitantly, "but somehow I feel we’ve met before."

As she spoke, the drummer suddenly winked at her.

"Ah yes, I remember! We grew up together in Spain, ran away from an abusive family, and travelled all over Europe, India and Africa together. We were free-spirited gypsies…you remember, mija?" He was teasing her.

"Who are you, really?" she persisted.

"Ah, what strange questions you ask," he said. "My name is Juan…what can I tell you. I suppose I am a traveler. Besides that, I am just this Gitano with wandering feet, a musician, raconteur, troubador, African griot, cuentacuentos...but always I am viajero – wherever I go there I am!" he said, throwing her a mischievious smile.

Then, as though suddenly remembering something, he began rummaging around under the table, as if searching for something forgotten. All at once, he pulled a battered-looking guitar that had seen better days, having traveled through as many lands as his gypsy feet would take him. Though old, the guitar was graceful and light of form. Its yellow and reddish tones shone in the afternoon light like an angel in a party dress.

As he tenderly plucked the strings, he began to regale her with stories of his travels. He told her how his wanderlust had taken all over Europe, Africa and Latin America in pursuit of the perfect guitar. He studied with Segovia and Manitas de Plata – or so he claimed. But it was an old Indian woman from Venezuela had taught the true secrets of the instrument.

"As I told you, she breathes….and she told me her secrets – this old Indian woman. It is simply this: you must learn to surrender completely to the rhythms of the breath. You see, it is a bellows...like the lungs in your body," he said.

He demonstrated with a flourish of fingers on the guitar, tapping the face of the guitar in counterpoint to his strumming. As the sounds trailed off into the twilight, Ariel thought she could hear the guitar breathing like a sad pilgrim to a strange new world, lamenting the motherland and a lost love.

Ariel shook her head in amazement. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Who was this man who had traveled across numerous land on his way to the states, and having more near-escapes than a character in a Garcia Marquez tale? Was he truly the Gitano with a ceaseless wanderlust, a griot, or troubador? Who was this poet with a penchant for storytelling? In the end, she decided it didn’t matter.They never did have Ajiaco that night...there was no guascas to be found. Instead, they went out that night to El Majahual where they savored the true flavors of Diego’s paisa. She could never get it right, anyway. Instead of guascas, she served up the story of the traveler…how they had grown up together, fled to other lands and finally discovered each other at a spot in the inner Mission. Suddenly, it no longer mattered to her if Diego loved her or not. She had found a brother, a compañero like herself who had never felt completely at home anywhere he was.... Diego hit her playfully when she told him this. She had traveled, but never known what it was to be truly in exile. And it was true. Yet, Juan had included her in his story and she believed him. She had lost him somewhere in the Mission, but she resolved to find him again. For she had fallen for his stories through the rhythms of the drum, the cadences of his voice and his dark, expressive eyes filled with all the stories he had yet to tell.

©2007 Lisa Pelletier

Orb of Night

Moon loosens her blouse
soft orb laced with clouds peeks through
the Night Sky's caress



© 2007 Lisa Pelletier

L'heure bleue

à l'heure bleue du jour

l'enfant de ma solitude

joue dans la rue des larmes

Translation:

during the blue hour of day

the child of my solitude

plays on the street of tears.

© 2007 Lisa Pelletier