Barbara Barnard

Barbara Barnard was born in Arkansas of Appalachian parents but grew up in 21 different towns and cities across the south and west as a Navy brat. She left “home” at the age of 17 and subsequently earned her BA degree in English, Religions and Philosophy at the University of Redlands, thanks to the Equal Opportunity Program and various merit scholarships, as well as the highly valuable experience of working as a waitress, typist, cashier, sales clerk and various other jobs. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine, while teaching undergraduate courses at UCI and nearby community colleges. Barbara has published poetry and fiction in various literary magazines, including The Cimarron Review, New Letters, Eclipse, The Nassau Review and Gallimaufry and three of her poems appear in the anthology Songs of Seasoned Women (2007). She has also worked as an editor of both commercial and literary publications. Her textbook Access Literature:  An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (coauthored with David Winn) was published by Wadsworth in 2006. She has also published numerous book reviews and has completed the manuscript of a novel entitled Long Devil’s Fork. Recent awards include the Bridge Fund Fellowship for poetry and fiction (2004) and The Nassau Review Poetry Award (2002). Barbara taught creative writing, literature and composition at various colleges in California and New York before coming to NCC.

Florence Dee Boodakian, PhD.

Florence Dee Boodakian is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Nassau. She teaches composition, literature, Creative Writing, Women’s Studies and Human Rights Studies. She is the Coordinator of the college’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Project. She has published individual poems in journals such as Paff House Press' Out of Line and is awaiting publication news on her poetry manuscript, Dancing Naked in Columbus Circle. Meanwhile, she is awaiting publication of Resisting Nudities:  A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism that will be available in Summer/Fall 2008. Her major work has always spun around poetic imagination and in her first publication, Tormenting Angel:  A Psychoaesthetic Theory of Imagination, she began by designing a theory of imagination. She is still playing with it. Her book, Resisting Nudities:  A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism was published by Peter Lang in June 2008.

Une Tranche

every human being

spent about half an hour

as a single cell

so at exactly what biological moment

did it get so complex

creating this bunch of cellular matter

which can’t spell sweetness

with the perfume of your body

so at exactly what biological moment

did the heart and mind conspire

to pump and think simultaneously

leaving pools of fragmented sentences

words swimming backstroke in blood

so at exactly what biological moment

did this eye relinquish its post

follow the beat, get off the couch

find the blue jays out of season

housed in slithery connective tissue

so at exactly what biological moment

do cells divide into wildflowers

or the sound of another’s whisper

visible on the skin

erupting the marrow of this day?

                                                                                     -fdb-                               

Sally Ann Drucker

Sally Ann Drucker publishes poetry and fiction in journals such as Epos, Hyperion, Pig Iron, Bitterroot, Black Mountain II Review, Wittenberg Review, and Nassau Review. A chapbook, Walking the Desert Lion, was published by Ena Press. Her work in anthologies includes: Songs of Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul, 2007); Poets as World Witnesses (Pen and Brush, 2000); Words on the Page, the World in Your Hands (Harper & Row, 1990); and Immigrant Women (SUNY Press, 1984). One poem, “Washday,” rode around Buffalo as winner of a “Poetry on the Buses” contest; her work has been performed by dancers and hung in art galleries. She was a writing fellow at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Weymouth Center, Cummington and a featured reader at locations in NY, NC, VA, MA, OH, FL. She’s also known for recreations of famous women at circus tent Chautauquas and elsewhere. To present Frances Wright, Emma Goldman, Rosie the Riveter, Lucrezia Borgia and Betty Friedan, she writes scripts, does thirty-minute monologues and answers questions in character. Sally Ann Drucker received her Ph.D. from SUNY-Buffalo; currently, she’s an Associate Professor in NCC’s Department of English. Other publications include literary criticism, technical articles and book reviews.

Eve’s Song

I eat apples.

Honey apples

round as breasts

red as robins

setting suns:

a serpent didn’t tell me

I found them for myself.

And I eat apples

still inside the tree.

My knowledge comes

in wine red spurts

of running sap:

feet sucking earth

limbs branching out

fingers flowering.

I eat apples.

I don’t care if I’m thrown out:

they never named

the things I knew,

it never was my garden.

From Songs of Seasoned Women

Duane Esposito

Duane Esposito is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. He has an M.A. from SUNY Brockport and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. In 1994, in conjunction with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Duane was given the Academy of American Poets Award, selected by Diane Glancy. In 2003, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared in dozens of journals and he has published two books of poetry:  The Book of Bubba (Brown Dog Press,1998) and Cadillac Battleship (BrokenTribe Press, 2005). He lives on Long Island with his wife and daughter.

Dear Heart

These days, being here is just another day,

& most things seem to me a little low & sad.

I mean, a voice is all we have to reconcile history,

but singing clearly & with beauty can’t dissolve emptiness.

Dear heart, what we’ve inherited is why we’re alive.

I wish I could discover solemnity, cure this constant flat.

But, in fact, there may be no more bloody singing--

just another hair-line crack inside a fragile song.

Do you feel, like I do, the panic that disfigures?

Do you know, like I do, love cannot survive?

I want to disappear from all that might chain me--

including you, dear heart, when the worst of it arrives.

Pat Falk

A resident of Amityville, Pat Falk is a Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where she teaches writing and literature. She’s the author of three collections of poetry, In the Shape of a Woman, Crazy Jane and Sightings:  Poems on Discovery, as well as a recently published literary memoir, It Happens As We Speak. Her writing has appeared in several regional and international publications and she’s received numerous awards for her poetry, scholarship and teaching. The American Book Review says that her work “speaks to those who…continue to seek a new language,” that it’s a “reminder that the personal is still political;” the New York Beacon says that “the writer artfully commands our unreserved confidence”; Book/Mark refers to her poetry as “a graceful testament to the pleasure, pain and endurance of a contemporary woman” and Long Island Update refers to her work as a closely examined odyssey in the making,” her poetry “rich in its ability to create lasting mind picture” as it “examines the issues that try the human soul.”

Swan Nesting

I watch, wait, would snap her thin white neck,

tell her to get out, quickly—

before the nest is done,

the warm eggs hatched to be destroyed.

Last spring, the giant turtle

took the cygnets down.

Why doesn't she remember?

Stick by small dry stick, mud-thatch,

pebble, twig—a nest as strong

as any human prayer.

Next week she'll have her children,

in three weeks' time they'll all be dead;

twisted instinct keeps her going,

giving, always giving,

complicit in a crazy chain of silently accepting

the way things are.

Katherine Jason

Kathrine Jason received her M.F.A. in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University.  Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry and numerous literary magazines. Her translations from Italian and Spanish have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She is the editor and translator of Words in Commotion and Other Stories by Tommaso Landolfi (Viking-Penguin) and Name and Tears:  Forty Years of Italian Fiction (Graywolf) and translator of Mothering by Silvia Vegetti Finzi. An Associate Professor, she has been teaching at NCC since 1994. She is currently at work on an historical novel.

Amy King

Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi (BlazeVOX Books), and, most recently, Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country and This Opera of Peace (Dusie Press). She is the moderator for the Poetics List and the Women's Poetry Listserv, and is currently editing an anthology The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. King also curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, "The Stain of Poetry." Please visit faculty.ncc.edu/kinga for more.

HANDS HALF FACE

Don't think of me,
I won't think of you.

You baby pinprick,
rain from the roof of my mouth—
I'm not terrible for them,
I'm terrible for you.

With swarming thunder,
sudden fertile
soil fans itself dark
below your window's belly,
your eternal flame,
your lost ache
regained by touching you.

I am that hand,
that terrible half face
through wooden rooms
under clapboard drains
within the frames of mirrors.
I am that pile of ash
that blows back into you.

Mary Lannon

Mary Lannon earned her PhD from the University of Albany, completing a novel for her dissertation. While there, she was managing editor of 13th Moon, a feminist literary magazine. She worked for two years as a reporter before returning to academe, teaching students at the University at Albany and Fulton-Montgomery Community College. She joined Nassau Community College’s English Department in the fall of 2007.

        At first at first, Charlie and I we were in the same boat: neither of us knew of our complete and utter ignorance.

        No, neither of us had any respect at all for the weather that last semester of senior year when we first met searching—in what can only be understood as a mockery of our ultimate fate—for a meteorology class. We both showed up for "Meteorology 105: The Science of Weather" in the wrong classroom at the wrong time. Later, we liked to tell each other and our friends that we had been lost but found each other so we hadn't been lost at all—just not aware of what we were really looking for.

        Snow lay on the ground that day, and sleet, which usually forms when rain falls through a cold air mass in the upper atmosphere, fell lightly. The temperature high was 25 with winds mild and from the northwest; cumulonimbus clouds blanketed the sky. But at that time, neither Charlie nor I paid the least mind to the weather. You might even say we defied it.

        Certainly, we didn’t dress with it foremost in our minds. Charlie, sporting a three-day growth of beard, wore an army jacket and blue jeans with holes in them. I wore leggings and a long sweater. Neither of us had bothered with gloves, hats or scarves.

 Marcia L. McNair

Marcia L. McNair is a former assistant editor at Essence Magazine and currently teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College, where she is co-coordinator of the African American Read-In Chain and has been a member of the Black History Month Committee since 1998. Her creative nonfiction story, Before We Were Gangstas, won honorable mention in the National New Millenium Writers Creative Nonfiction contest in 2003 and was published in the 2002 Nassau Review. In 2006 and 2007, she received a grant from the Long Island Council for the Arts for her collaborative performance, Diary of a Mad Black Feminist, which features the poem Long Island Just Isn't Long Enough recently included in the anthology Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul). Aya Press published her first novel E-Males in 2007. Her professional memberships include Sigma Delta Chi (the Society of Professional Journalists) and the Long Island Writers Guild.

Long Island Just Isn’t Long Enough

They call it Long Island, but
it’s just not long enough to
keep moving to where there
are no black people, no yellow people, no brown people,
speaking in two languages, living in two Americas, blending two cultures.
Rikers is a gated community but
i wouldn’t want to live there.
rikers and hempstead have the same racial composition.
i escaped here, merely finding my carefully planned,
secretly executed tunnel led to the prison cafeteria instead of outside
of broken dreams
And you sold the house in Brooklyn for this?
And you left your country for this?
And you spent your life’s savings for this?
The schools still suck and now there’s no one to babysit
Ayesha
wasn’t it they who taught you: taxation without representation just isn’t fair?
He says, “Everywhere we move, white people move away”
I ask him, “Why?”
He says, “They don’t like us.”
Everywhere i move, white people move away
like lemmings to the Long Island Sound.
i am close on your heels,
first walk, then run, now swim
because long island just isn’t long enough
since you can’t have an ark without me
you can’t have an ark without me

Julio Marzan

Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College, Julio Marzan has published two books of poetry, Translations without Originals (I. Reed Books), and Puerta de Tierra. (U. of Puerto Rico Press) as well as poems translated for his Selected Poems: Luis Palés Matos (Arte Público Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, among them, Parnassus:  Poetry in Review, Massachusetts Review, Tin House, New Letters and Harper's Magazine. His poems have appeared in anthologies, and the following college texts:  The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature,( 1999-2007), Latino Boom:  An Anthology of Latino Literature (Longman/Pearson, 2006), The Bedford Introduction to Poetry (1999). US:  The Literature of a Multicultural Society, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), Literature:  Reading, Reacting, Writing (Holt, Rinehart, 1991). Currently, two poems appear in the past four editions of The Bedford Introduction to Literature. As fiction writer, he is the author of the novella-in-stories The Bonjour Gene (U. Wisconsin Press, 2005). Among his non-fiction titles, he edited Luna, Luna:  Creative Writing, Ideas from Spanish, Latin American and Latino Literature (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1997), a T&W “Best Seller,” and authored the groundbreaking The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos (U. Texas Press, 1994), a Choice Magazine Award winner, and the subject of a William Carlos Williams Society Panel at the 2001 MLA Convention. In spring 2006 he was Visiting Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University. In May, 2007 he was appointed by the Queens Borough President the fourth Poet Laureate of Queens (2007-2010).

THE GLUE TRAP

The long-tailed mouse that gnawed

a hemisphere into my box of ginger snaps,

the dust-gray mouse whose dung

speckled the kitchen floor and countertop,

the mold-puff mouse whose claws

roamed through paper garbage bags,

creaking crumpled cellophane,

the pointy-nosed mouse with nostrils trembling,

the defenseless-eyed mouse, cute and sad-eyed,

shocked by sudden light,

the chomping, big-footed mouse that evoked

longer-toothed rodent relations,

the heaving, golf-ball fat mouse

that planned to run on felt-tip toes to digest,

to sleep in his jagged hole in the wall,

has stepped into the glue trap

and spent the night defecating, squirming,

feet stuck, knees unable to unleash,

so it can only rock desperately,

taking dream-lunges into the home

it will never enter again.

This condemned, filth-fuzzy tear,

this handball of breath, whose exhausted snout

rested on glue for once and forever,

squeaks in my kitchen cabinet

so I, now glued to its dilemma,

must recall its tiny rolled feces,

the disgust it sowed in my food,

the half-moon signature of its gnaw,

the nightly invasion of its hunger,

to completely forget the innocence of its hunger

trapped in my invasion of its life

deserved to be snuffed out mercifully,

crushed by a mallet, or well poisoned,

or coldly dropped into boiling water

rather than be left to suffer for days,

gasping for food and the freedom of swift legs.

But I have no mallet or poison,

nor the stomach to boil it

and smell its cooked odor,

no way to ennoble my animal role:

my paw hurls the shredded prey

deep into buzzing forest

where second by second its squeak dissolves into the cosmos,

day's wind, night's rustle and the ancient hunger of insects.

Richard Jeffrey Newman

Richard Jeffrey Newman, coordinator of NCC’s Creative Writing Project is a poet, essayist and translator. He has published one book of his own poetry, The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two books of translations from classical Persian literature, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (both from Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 and 2006 respectively). In addition, he collaborated with noted Rumi scholar Professor John Moyne on the poetry section of A Bird in the Garden of Angels (Mazda Publishers, 2007), a new Rumi anthology. He has been publishing his work since 1988, when the essay “His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights” appeared in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays and poems have appeared in Salon.com, The American Voice, The Pedestal, Circumference, Prairie Schooner, ACM, Birmingham Poetry Review and other literary journals. His work has been anthologized in Access Literature (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005) and his poetry has been translated into Dutch. Richard Jeffrey Newman is the Literary Arts Director of the Persian Arts Festival; he sits on the advisory boards of The Translation Project and Jackson Heights Poetry Festival and is listed as a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities. For more information, please visit his faculty Web site or e-mail him at richard.newman@ncc.edu.

Because

Because I refuse to learn to say goodbye,
these words—but because they are not my skin,
and because my fingers are not syllables,
and because your voice on the phone is not
breath I can take into my mouth and taste,
and the phone when we speak is not your body
in my arms or your hand lifting my chin
so our eyes meet when you say I love you,

and because when I imagine your hand
lifting my chin, I want to live within
that moment with you the way language
lives within us, I am here, wrestling these lines
into form, and because the form is me
when you read it, I’ll be there, and we’ll touch.

From The Silence Of Men, (CavanKerry Press, 2006)

Christina M. Rau

A new member of Nassau Community College’s English Department faculty, Christina M. Rau is the founder of Poets In Nassau, a reading circuit for Long Island poets. Her poetry has been published in magazines like Chronogram, Beauty/Truth, and Tipton Poetry Journal and in online magazines like New Graffiti, Pocket Change, JerseyWorks, and Origami Condom. She has written bar, music and movie reviews for Newsday and currently writes a semi-regular column for RealityShack.com about reality television shows she should be ashamed of watching. You can see more information about her courses and her writing on her faculty Web page or contact her directly via e-mail at Christina.rau@ncc.edu .

David Rosner 

Beth Beatrice Smith

Beth Beatrice Smith joined the English department at Nassau Community College in 2006. She holds a B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from the New School, where she completed a book of short stories entitled Lost Souls. After working as an assistant editor at Essence Magazine, she became coordinator of the Open Book Program at PEN American Center. She is also the former editor of BlackBallot.com, a political website. She currently resides in Harlem. 

 An excerpt from a short story titled “West of Manhattan”

The teeter‑tottering of the subway on over worn tracks stirs my anxiety. My heart begins to pound. Through a sliding door from the uptown end of the train comes the Sunday preacher, a homeless man speaking God’s words, a Bible folded to his breast with one arm. On the downtown side a door opens to reveal the homeless Shakespearean actor poised for his dramatic recitation. As they walk toward one another, they begin one at a time and one after the other to raise the volume of their voices.

Louder

            “Our Father, who art in heaven,” 
            “To be, or not to be,”

and louder

            “Hallowed be thy name,”

            “That is the question,”

and louder.

            “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,”

            “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

            “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,”

With deep, baritone voices

            “On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

            “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

            “And by opposing end them?”

When they meet in the center of the car, just as the subway has reached its highest speed, they throw their hands up in the air, gesturing to the words they speak. Their bodies continue to tell stories we can no longer hear above the rattle of the train. The subway slows, pulling into its next stop. I’m reminded of past conversations with lovers—first they talk, then I talk, and we both leave having said what we’ve had to say but not having heard a word. The two men part, never having acknowledged one another. And we all sit silently, watching without staring.

Patti Tana

PATTI TANA, Professor of English, is Associate Editor of the Long Island Quarterly and editor of Songs of Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul, Inc., 2007), an anthology by 63 poets. She was the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Project 1998-2002. The Nassau Review, Long Island Poetry Collective, Xanadu, and The Shelley Society of New York awarded prizes to her poems, and her poems were selected for the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. "Skin Knows Skin" and "Buy or Lease?" were considered for a Pushcart Prize and Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings for a Pulitzer Prize. People often read "Post Humus" at celebrations of life. You can hear Patti read her poems at www.pattitana.com.

Professor Tana received the Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award for her poetry books:

How Odd This Ritual of Harmony (Gusto Press, 1981)

Ask the Dreamer Where Night Begins: Poems & Postscripts (Kendall/Hunt, 1986)

The River (Birnham Wood Graphics, 1990)

Wetlands (Papier-Mache Press, 1993)

When the Light Falls Short of the Dream (Eighth Moon Press, 1998)

Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings (Whittier Publications, Inc., 2003)

This Is Why You Flew Ten Thousand Miles (Whittier Publications, Inc., 2006)

Pramila Venkateswaran

Pramila Venkateswaran, author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002) and Women Like Us (Plain View Press, 2008) has poems in Paterson Literary Review, Ariel, Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Kavya Bharati, and Calyx, as well as poems in anthologies, including A Chorus for Peace and En(Compass). She has performed her poems nationally, most recently at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She is currently engaged in doing multimedia performances that include dance, poetry and music. She teaches English and women’s studies at Nassau Community College.

Lake Woman
(Dedicated to Lake Superior)

I dive into her icy, mossy depths

and come out numb, speechless.

Didn’t I hear she is generous in giving speech,

not a thief of metaphors?

Yesterday she was so wild, I heard

every curse she screamed into the wind;

the gulls frozen on nearby rocks

flew up in terror. Today she pretends

it never happened; she serenely

lolls in her bath. Did I catch her wink?

The other day, she ate two boats,

yesterday she swallowed my friend’s watch,

sparing my friend.

Tomorrow she will want my stories

despite the ones tucked into her ample

pockets, swelling like her veins.

I could run away from her, no regrets.

It’ll be time anyway, when the moon hides.

But in my dreams, the fathoms

bid me enter her. She is a banshee

calling me to melt into her; only then,

she says, will I pour into words

that which slips from you quicker

than light, finer than sand.

Timothy Wood

A professor in Nassau Community College’s English Department, Tim Wood earned a B.A. in both English and Comparative Religion from Columbia University in 1996. He went on to receive an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Iowa in 1999 and is currently working toward his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. He has had poems published in several journals and magazines including The Iowa Review, The Atlanta Review, and The Nation. He is co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader.

from Sevens Even

14.

Eloined heart return and marry me to this earth again.

Gaining on gaining, the weight of waiting lifts off. A loss

Rose to meet me. Then your inevitable face. Your inconsolable cry. Not pain—

Feigned worry worships a cross

Frozen in indecision. The to and fro. Turn and toss

Slowly your head back and laugh

Above all and at all we know now that we knew not of.

Again in the negative pressure room trying to gain

Loss of self. From birth, you rose

From pain beyond logic that can neither faint nor be feigned

Across indelible distances. Your drowsy gaze froze

Tossed coins, tossed dice. The East River’s imperceptible movement, traffic on the bridge slows.

Laughter after all. Your faces emerge from the above

Of which your first face is love.

Gargamel hearkened back to the dancehall era. He was the very engineer of that time, opening hopping joints on the north side, the south side, and the Blossom District. Back then, it wasn’t rare to see him standing, near the door of any of his dancehalls, tapping his foot, humming softly, a different song than the one pulsing from behind the closed door at his back. But he’d never stay for long – there was always another set list to write, a mathematical model to be built. In those brief moments you saw him, it was obvious that he was a business man, and it was obvious that he loved his customers.

There was a time when sessions at Gargamel’s dancehalls were the brightest nights in town. Capacity would be long surpassed, but Gargamel’s main muscle, El Capitan, might be found to prop open a backdoor, let in a few stragglers. But as fate would have it, mayors came and mayors went again, each one leaving a new distraction, a new recreational legacy. More and more people spent their Fridays at the sack races, under laser lights, or breaking records of speed. Fewer and fewer dancehalls were necessary, until finally, Gargamel’s last interest was forced to shut down.