July, 1991

The month before
John is ashamed that he fell in the museum
fell right down in front of the escalator
humbled by Parkinson’s, John is ashamed
the fall of Communism in Russia
His legs gave out while everyone waited
their turn to get on the escalator, wondering
at John’s trembling, drug or drunkenness?
New York’s Museum of Modern Art
until they understood and their faces
which John could not see in his misery
were images of goodness, hesitating to help
presented John’s one man show
waiting patiently by the escalator
for John to stand on his own again
which he did, sweaty and sorry and shaken.
as stunning as Vincent’s “Starry Night”
On the phone, weeks after, when the coup
terrified and then – those blue brushstrokes! –
amazed and amazed, John was still ashamed.
and the shock thrilled like sex
all museumgoers pulled down by John’s fall
lifted up by his arising, and his struggle
against gravity, against disease, moved us all
like Yeltsin on the tank, a Jew in Crown Heights
beyond fear, beyond shame, wonders hanging
on the museum walls held up by wires
like everyone one of us by the escalator.
again one of three murdered
I told John I didn’t remember, but I hope
I never forget, I hope no one ever forgets,
one hot day in July and three days in August.
falling raises us all.

It's the 21st Century, America.  Still 10 percent
of your children dart their eyes past evening lovers
in the daylight halls, lest others know for sure we're queer.
It's the 21st Century, America.  Still you intimidate
bachelor sons and unwed daughters, even into their fifties,
with pleas for more and more grandchildren.
Still you train your offspring
to be fruitful and multiply with a vengeance.
It's the 21st Century, and still you feel damned
if just the body plumbing is matched differently
when your children finally learn to love,
and profanely you keep turning on the light.
When will you grow old gracefully, Uncle Sam and Aunt Jemima?
When will you free your gay children from your unlove?
When will you stop exploiting their style, their grace, 
       and their art,
while consigning to a Cinderella attic
all who do not kiss the hetero frog?
Your fairies are growing wings, America,
quite beyond your expectations.
Your fairies' wands are empowered
and by their magic your dullness stands exposed,
your catholicity nothing but a bingo club,
your politics only a stormtrooper's boot camp.
You're dull, hetero America.
You need a bath and a dab of cologne,
a mystery cruise down your alleys,
wearing our disguise of sequined drag,
snorting a quean's giggle
as you try to discover where your soul has gone.

Louie Crew, 73, an Alabama native, is an emeritus professor at Rutgers. He lives in East Orange, NJ, with Ernest Clay, his husband of 36+ years.

As of today, editors have published 2,020 of Crew's poems and essays. Crew has edited special issues of College English and Margins. He has written four poetry volumes Sunspots (Lotus Press, Detroit, 1976), Midnight Lessons (Samisdat, 1987), Lutibelle's Pew (Dragon Disks, 1990), and Queers! for Christ's Sake! (Dragon Disks, 2003).

The University of Michigan collects Crew's papers.

The Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Writer's Digest lists The Externalist at #22 on their list of top online markets! In celebration, we've reopened to submissions and will be posting new material over the weekend. Thanks, WD!

If you have been waiting for an email from The Externalist editor, fiction, or nonfiction accounts, please resend your original email as my email client malfunctioned. I am sifting through emails with a new client now, but am concerned that I may miss some things.

Please note that The Externalist is on a publishing hiatus at this time. If you have an accepted piece that has not yet appeared, you should be hearing from us soon to confirm that you would still like us to publish it. We sincerely apologize for the lack of communication.

We were best friends
He gave me brass medals

pulled from the coats
in his mother’s closet

He taught me to roll a smoke
like a stoic private

We huddled in the side yard
by the chrysanthemums; cupped

our hands, held a flame
out of the wind

just under the chimney
cleanout…

Summer nights, we torched
little army men

& whirled them about, scorching
each other’s wrists & arms

& thighs… We laughed madly
in pretend tents,

lighters illuminating nylon
sleeping bags––

Chris had blond hair & blue eyes
Nimble on the tennis court

Chris was well versed in the strategies of chess
& Vietcong tactics…

Chris had an affinity for Hitler; I didn’t
understand this…

Chris, whose father never came
home

Scot Siegel is an award-winning urban planner and poet from Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and two daughters and serves on the board of the Friends of William Stafford. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Some Weather (Plain View Press 2008) and the chapbook Untitled Country (Pudding House Publications 2009). Siegel has received awards and commendations from Aesthetica Magazine (UK), Nimrod International (Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, semi-finalist) and the Oregon State Poetry Association (OSPA). In celebration of Oregon's Sesquicentennial, Poetry Northwest and the Oregon State Library selected Some Weather as one of 150 Outstanding Oregon Poetry Books, one for each year of statehood. Siegel’s poem "Autumn Turns Through Stratified Wars" is nominated for a Pushcart Prize (New Verse News) in 2009. His poems are anthologized in Verseweavers (Oregon State Poetry Association) and Oregon Stories, forthcoming from Ooligan Press (Portland State University). Siegel is editor of the online poetry journal Untitled Country Review.

One bus and two unusual, but strangely familiar cities...that's right, we've posted new fiction, thus starting Issue 14! Read stories from Jonathon Crowl, Bayard, and Richard R. DiPirro. Keep an eye out for new poetry and nonfiction in the coming weeks!

The downloadable pdf of Issue 13 will also be available very soon. Thanks so much for your patience!

Larina
Editor

First, let me issue a formal apology to both our contributors and our readers. Both editors of The Externalist have had unforeseeable circumstances in the past several months. We are behind on publishing previously accepted work. We are behind on reading new submissions. We are behind on developing our .pdf's. We were anticipating opening to our first anthology submissions this month, but we're behind on that, too. We're sorry!

In an effort to get caught up on all of these things and to better situate The Externalist as a whole, we are closing to new submissions until summer 2010. We will be publishing previously accepted work and potentially work that has been submitted, but not yet read, throughout that time period. All of this newly-published material will be included in the Issue 13 .pdf. In addition, I'll be sending emails to a few of our former contributors from the last three years requesting permission to republish their work in a "Best of" anthology--our first.

I feel as though I owe our loyal readers and contributors an explanation for my slacking these past months. I lost my father to lung cancer in October, just two weeks after we purchased our home. While I continue to believe that literature is a force for social change and inherently activist in nature, I have been admittedly wrapped up in the very personal since Dad was diagnosed in July. As such, I have not felt that I could fairly represent the wonderful work we've received in the latter half of 2009.

But now it's time to get back on track, to pull myself from the isolated island of grief and move forward. My father taught me that all things are possible, that I could not only observe my surroundings, but have an impact upon them. In that way, the continuation of The Externalist honors him. May it bring us all a little healing and a lot of life.

Larina

In the 1970s my wife and I worked with kids with intellectual disabilities – everyone still called it “mental retardation” back then and many people took their doctor’s advice and put their kids “away.”

At River View, a small institution outside Philadelphia, “going home” was all the kids talked about. And it wasn't memories that kept the flame alive: some of them - like Alyse, one of the TeePee Girls, whose wrists had been broken years before and never set properly - had nothing but bad times to remember. No, home was something deeper than memory; it was something akin to order or justice - they'd been turned out before their time; nothing could go on until that wrong was addressed.

All the kids talked about going home; there was one little boy, though, who had a different twist: he wanted to go home all right - but maybe he was confused about what exactly the word "home" meant.

". . . with you," he always added. "I go home with you?"

This was Aaron. Or as he pronounced it, "Addie . . . Addie Rikkerds." Aaron Richards.

"I go home with you?"

This was the way it was gonna be. He was a little boy obsessed. If he was outside and a car he didn't recognize came up the drive, he was uncontrollable. He would break from his group - he was one of the Wigwam Boys - and run to the driver's window, often not bothering to wait for the car to come to a stop.

"I go home with you. I go home," he'd say shielding his eyes and peering in at the driver even before the window was rolled down.

He was seven years old, a wiry little boy in jeans and a striped T-shirt with a smile to melt lead. His black skin was dry and ashen except for the area under his wide nostrils which was alternately wet or crystal-white with dried moisture. And he was in constant motion.

We’d been hired to be house-parents in a group home. We poured over the kids’ records: Aaron’s mother was in a mental health facility; his father was in jail; Aaron had lived in seven or nine or ten foster homes - different social workers had different counts. Finally, he’d been sent out to River View just months before we came ourselves.

Aaron did come to live with us in the group home – but not like the other kids. Our agency, we found out, had made a devil’s pact with the neighbors: OK to the disabilities, as long as none of the kids was black. We went to court and became Aaron’s legal guardians and he came to live with us as part of our “fam-i-ny,” as Aaron says it. And then, years later, when both his mother and his father had passed away, the three of us went to adoption court and made it official.

Karl Williams has published two books with leaders in the self-advocacy movement (the civil rights work of people with intellectual disabilities). His work has appeared in magazines (most recently in Carpe Articulum) and books, as well as on stage, in videos, and on websites; songs from his five CDs have been aired on NBC and Fox and on radio stations around the world. http://www.karlwilliams.com

REINTERPRETING MASTERPIECES: reflections on the non-traditional family

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."

George Santayan, Life of Reason

‘Las Meninas,’ the 1656 painting by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, is considered to be one of, if not the, most technically perfect pieces of painting ever produced. At first glance the detail, balance and perspective seem crystal clear. The work is very straight-forwards. However, as one enters the sphere created by this work one imperceptibly slides into illusion and enigma emerging from that very clarity. Ultimately, one is left with the paradox that both the clarity and the enigma are somehow correct. Perhaps that is nature of the dream of life and why Pablo Picasso so radically reinterpreted this masterpiece in 1957.

On the waves of the Revolution of 1968 the nature and role of the family has, like much in Western Civilization, also become radically repainted by some. In addition to cultural forces, the economic activity required to maintain a bourgeois living standard has mobilized many women to work outside the home to a degree that it is now the norm. Both have placed a great deal of stress on the traditional nuclear family. Thus, Western societies are beginning to look again at this masterpiece of nature and ask what it means.

Perhaps the best method for examining this question is to begin with defining the term ‘family’ within a Western context. The family has been understood as the basic unit of a male and female in a monogamous sexual relationship who are the care givers to their offspring. The primary rights and responsibility for these children belong to the parents. This has deep roots, in Rome it was reflected in the infamous patria potestas granting the father the power of life and death over his children.

Much like the masterpiece ‘Las Meninas’ a closer look at this definition reveals that the relationships are not as clear as they appear to be at first glance. The reason for this is that there are two components to this definition: the static roles and the dynamic relationship between them. Further, there has always been a degree of fluidity with both sides of the definition.

Adoption is the classic example. This demonstrates that what marks a family as such is not exclusively genetic since the role of ‘offspring’ is fulfilled by a child not produced by the parents. Yet, he completely fulfills that role.

The key question is: what is the scope of this class ‘family?’ Is a lesbian couple who cohabits for six months and has a cat a family? Conversely, are an older, unmarried couple who take-in a troubled teen without legal formality who then matures and regards them as parents not a family?

I would argue there is a double-line of demarcation that sets the boarder: permanence and self-sacrifice. Both of these are rooted in a deeper emotional attachment than friendship.

The illusion and enigma of the family then becomes that there is a very real possibility that the biological family in which a man was born may not fall within these parameters at all. Yet, he may find substitutes which meet all the criteria in people who are outside of the world in which he was raised.

A center-Right critic might well assert that the fact I had to predicate my previous statement about our theoretical lost boy on the biological family demonstrates the primacy of that form. Whatever close ties he may forge are merely a copy or a substitute for the true family.

But, should the non-traditional family conform to the class of a family as outlines, then it is not a ‘copy’ but is the family in se. If one is operating on the archetype of the Cleavers as a true family then the Bradys are excluded since their relationship is not based on the same narrowly defined genetics as the Cleavers. The family is a spectrum not viewed through blood.

A Left reader with a Postmodernist orientation may take this last sentence as an endorsement of the following view: ‘the family is an artificial social construct with manifold forms. Because it is an arc, no primary metaphysical definition can be enshrined to define it so all familial expressions are equal.’ That reader would be incorrect. To begin with, ‘familial expressions’ can be reduced to the random handshake with a stranger. To argue there are no boarders is to reduce all human creation to dust.

The traditional nuclear family has proven to be a valuable and fundamental institution of Western Civilization. This is likely to continue. Given the social disruption caused by divorce and single-parenthood any attempt to further dismantle it will only yield dismal results. But, like all masterpieces, the family too is subject to reinterpretation. Some may produce banal silk-screen knock offs that (thankfully) will be quickly forgotten, others, a more serious attempt at a full reprinting. In the final analysis, stable and strong non-traditional families where individuals may be cultivated into better moral beings only preserves the institution.

Santiago del Dardano Turann's poetry appeared in issues 8 and 10 of The Externalist.