update-finally!!!

I am sorry I have not updated in like a month. I moved to North Carolina at the end of July, and I have not been able to get online much.

Well, let's see, what has been happening? "Dark Animus" accepted two of my poems for publication. It is an Australian horror magazine. I get a free contributor's copy.

I have been writing my YA horror novel for the last week, and have managed to write 23,000 words. My goal is to reach 40,000 words, I hope I can make it. I would be satisfied with 27,000 words if I could not think of anything else to write. I usually write the story until I can't think of anything else to add to it.

I am going to have a poem published here soon: www.alittlepoetry.com

Today I heard back from a publisher called Lemon Shark Press, they said they are accepting manuscripts of regional literary fiction, but I don't think any of my manuscripts fit that description. However, they have published poetry books, maybe I can convince them to look at mine. It would be better than going with an e-publisher, that's for sure.

moving

Mom found a house in NC and they're flying back today *sigh.*

Then we're going to be moving in two weeks. :(

under strange and distant stars

My entire family is moving down South. My brother already moved to VA; my aunt is in FL; my sister is moving to FL; and my mom, stepdad, and I are moving to NC. I am not a fan of moving, because I have a feeling that there are some people I might never see again if I move. Sometimes I stay in touch with people, and then they get too busy to contact me, or it gets too expensive. Perhaps I will have a better way of life in NC, but I would miss MI because I was born here, and everything I know is here. I like traveling, but home is always the best place to be-under familiar stars.

I tried to get a job here so I could stay, but MI is slowly going downhill, especially where I live. I will especially miss my friend, Try.

jim baen died!

Not much to update. I am still waiting to hear back from some publishers.

Recently, I had a birthday, too, on June 28th. Also found out that Jim Baen died on my bday, he is the publisher of Baen Books, which is where I sent my fantasy novel.

poetry

by the way, does anyone know of any good poetry publishers? thanks.

new poems published.

Go here to read my newest poems:


http://yasouonline.tripod.com/id59.html

writing juice

If you are a writer, please submit your work here: www.writingjuice.com they publish poetry, stories, and articles.

thanks!

apryl

speculative poetry

I rewrote the article for "Writing Juice" twice, all I have to do is type it up on the computer. It's fun to write articles but I like to write things that I already know about-it was a writing article, but the Editor wanted me to write something about writing groups and I had a hard time figuring out what to write. I have never joined a writing group, around here they only have writing groups for teens or for older people.

Anyway here's a new poem:



How to Grow a Kingdom (24 lines)

I've got to have the
chance to exercise my right
to look out of windows &
see the world for what it is:
shaded and dark
a night without stars
and the ruined portrait
by Leonardo da Vinci leaning precariously against the wall
it will fall
if you touch it
don't let it fa
l
l

life puzzles me but there
are still flowers,

there are purposes to why im here
the lingering smell of coffee
reaches my nostrils
those fresh beans magic beans that ive hidden
in my pocket
hoping to plant them to
grow a kingdom.


(I'll still post that book review sometime this week.)

strange horizons

"Strange Horizons" published my poem. If you want to read it go here: www.strangehorizons.com

AND they paid me twenty dollars. Whoot!!

Apryl

I have not written anything worth posting lately. When I do write something worthwhile I will let you know.

Hope everyone had a good Easter and New Year (Cambodia's New Year is around the same time as Easter).

Here is a good link for publications on the net (and print):

www.clmp.org

Acquaintance With Time

I saw her face, Time, so quiet and still.
I passed before her on the grass,
I did not know it was her until,
my watch moved slow as melting glass,
glass that I wished that I could fill.
She spoke to me; no words I heard,
for her beauty was bright to see,
I could not speak but a word,
my mind fluttering like a frigid bird,
and then she walked away from me,
and I could speak again at will.

Ode To Spring's Lament

It is springtime; the sky is bluer than
the blue upon which I see
Heaven's clouds.

In the thawness of an old winter, we
weep words no one else can hear;
our hidden heartache is steady.

It is always springtime when
darkness blooms.
I call Ode to your sweet
lips,

Ode to the crowd of the unlamented eye,
Ode to bliss which comes
straight from Heaven.
Lilacs bloom on garden walls;
it is Springtime.
Hear the birds twitter at dusk.

-From my chapbook, Winter's Light

thunderclouds

Thunderclouds
wrestle with drops
of wet,
giant spit

that fall from the sky
and make love
to the ground.

back

Back to writing my fantasy novel.

that was nice of them.

Dear Apryl,

Thank you for submitting your work to Pebble Lake Review. Unfortunately,
given the volume of submissions that we receive, even QUALITY work often
has to be rejected. Please be assured that your submission was read
thoroughly and given careful consideration by our staff. We wish you best
of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,


Editor, Pebble Lake Review

mmm fortune cookie.

I finished writing my article for "Writing Juice" Magazine. I have not sent it in yet today because I want to edit it first.

Almost finished with the spreadsheet for "The Rose and Thorn Ezine." Also sent in my article to "63 Channels." All they have to do now is reject it for me. :)
Sometimes I wish I had help with getting published, sometimes I want to get it on my own.

I wonder...do I really WANT to be a best-selling author? I mean, if my books sell well, and they make movies out of them, my novels will become a way for someone else to make money off of my hard work, my ideas.

But still...I have to find SOME way to pay my bills.

As they say patience is the path to all wisdom.

If I learn patience, then I will learn true wisdom.

That sounds like someone's fortune in a fortune cookie.

rejection slips.

I got like four rejection slips this week.

Go me!

aqua

6 months had passed since
that day I did not see you in the park.
It was a gorgeous afternoon
and I was
taking my dog, Her Royal
Highness, Princess of the

Dogs, for a walk. I looked for
you for two hours before
the bums came out at twilight,
and one offered to knit
me a homemade afghan if I gave
them fifty dollars. I declined, but the
word afghan made me think:
do afghans come from Afghanastan?

Do they have trees in Afghanastan?
Or toilets? Where did they get their
water, or "aqua," as they say in
Spanish, though I don't
think the Afghans speak Spanish.
Not the rugs, the country.

Princess of the Dogs--or Princess,
for short--is part Dalmation,
part Sharpee, part
something else: Chihuaha, maybe,
or Mexican.

But she doesn't speak Spanish.
I am not bilingual, though
I know a few
words in Spanish:
"Hola," "Adios," "abuela."
Water is "aqua," there is
not much "aqua" in Mexico.

Does Mexico have many beaches?
I ask a Spaniard this question--
perhaps he is a "hombre"?
He shrugs. "No, chica.
No habla ingles. No aqua."
"Water" is "aqua." "Blue" is azuel."
No means the same
thing in every language.

excerpt from my new YA thriller, "Into the Dark"

"Place is said to be haunted," Jimmee told her. "Maybe some ghost called you here, girl. Maybe you was supposed to be here, maybe someone called you here." He grinned, exposing a mouth full of cragged teeth.

Obviously she was dealing with a loony toon.

"I don’t believe in ghosts," Samantha told him in a firm voice. She was proud that her voice held steady. "They don’t exist."

"Don’t make no difference," Jimmy informed her. "Just ‘cause a man says somethin’ don’t mean it’s true. Hey, kid, maybe I’m a ghost."

He threw his head back and laughed, a cold, dry laugh. It was like leaves scraping across the sidewalk.

Samantha took a step backwards, afraid.

"Don’t worry about me, miss," he told her. "I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Sorry if I scairt you. It gets lonely down here, some nights. Why don’ you stay awhile, girl?" he whispered, his eyes hungry and evil and cold. "It gets mighty lonesome."

Samantha didn’t answer. She turned and ran from the room, her feet pounding on the white tile floor.

She wanted to get away from this place—and the strange janitor with his evil eyes—as fast as possible.

Flower Tones

A voice whispers in the calm moving day.
We forge great shadows on hospital walls.
What sun greets us as we fought in May,
the distant Autumn whose eyes lov'd these stalls?

In yonder early light the sun still shone,
and the windless eaves beat against the back-toned thought,
in early the grass spoke that dawn was gone,
and we liv'd tomorrow in breathless drought.

So we cross great a many leaping tide,
and the seraph was ours to every faithful friend,
the depth of a wild night was theirs to hide,
and light will cross again and strengthen.

We forge each hearth on beating glass wings,
we bang on the golden at crown's distant door,
our silver slender harp as each it sings,
and tomorrow vows its fables like it did before.

When many muse we question the lion's harsh bearing,
the great beast came knocking at zealous hours.
He dregs up those songs that need the hearing,
for his words bellow strongly with the tone of flowers.

untitled

Dearly beloved, these words are not mine,
I am wrapped in a kind of
bliss utterly unlike me.

"Dearly beloved,"
I try to say, over and over again,
my words, oh my words, not wanting to form
correctly in my mouth.
They are in my heart,
not my head.

I'm the boy who's stuttered all through high school,
the freckled-faced, gangly
boy with stick-straight
legs and thick glasses, the boy who loved
science and comics and too much sugar.
Now here I am

saying "Beloved,"
as if the cat had caught my tongue,
and I'm trying to get it back.
"Beloved," I whisper one more time,
and the words curve just right.

In June I am Picking Roses

and it is sweltering.
The wind rocks me back and forth in the hammock,
and whispers:

Sleep, sleep.
I wonder if night will ever come.

A door creaks open behind me, fireflies buzz quietly.
The spaceman in the doorway
hands me stars to hold up the
moon, because I cannot hold them up by myself.

"Are stars fireflies?"
I ask the spaceman.
"No," he says, "they are flowers,
growing in a dead universe."

Fragments

Fragments.
An incandescent speck of light.
Sound, noise, the faded symmetries
of the downed hieroglyph,

another marriage on the rocks.
Forced entry. Doomsday prophets.
How obscene is the hench thug?

Open your eyes to a new summer.
Drink a little, let down your hair,
have an open conversation with the
water lilies about procreation, or
sing a sad tune about
the closing of another year.

Equinox

1.

The old man wanders from his yard.

His family, frantic, searches every hospital

within a forty mile radius.

He’s there, then he's not. Exhausted, the family returns

home to find him sitting on the couch, eating a box

of prunes.

It’s best not to ask questions.

2.

I am cornered in the house.

My toes stick out, raw from metaphors.

The warts on my feet are old and yellow, they start to

peel like a banana. I am old, I am growing old,

my memories gray as ash.

-Published in Underground Window, recently revised

The Treehouse

In my backyard, the tree
house is fringed with memories of despair.
The wind shifts form.

A butterfly perches
on the windowledge,
and is caught in an updraft.

With a slight raise
of an eyebrow,
I challenge its flight.

-published in Mageara Magazine

where has time gone

A tired man sits behind a desk in a tired skyscraper
he is not thinking of anything work-related

in fact he is thinking of last summer when he took the
kids to Disneyland,

where they got to shake Mickey's Hand and rode
the rollercoaster
that was so long ago
the kids are grown up now

Billy has a tattoo and Jenny is just about to get married,
and he wonders where has the time gone and pokes
in his jacket pocket for a slim cigarette.

-published in Winter's Light

Reflections of Morning

No, the sky was not so gray
as it was now, I glimpsed the sun
rising in the dawn, glimpsed it the way
an archeologist would glimpse the first sight
of Atlantis.
It has been snowing since 6am this morning,
and I woke up, shivering, in the dark.
Sweat glistened on my forehead and back,
it hardened into ice. I looked
like the Iceman Cometh, just before
he left for his long trip to Antarctica,
where the other iceman lived and thrived.
I wondered if the icemen had icewomen
or icedogs, wondered if there was an ice family.
It’s something to think about, you know,
just something to think about.
I had never met an iceman myself,
since I was from Cuba, I can’t survive
in the cold, I can’t live without a parka.
I turn the thermostat way up high, past seventy,
but the bill does not matter, I’m shivering
so much it hurts. The sun is out; it is not so gray;
but it is cold, and I rise out of my bed and plod
over to the shower, turn on the hot water and strip
myself naked, look at my body in the
bathroom mirror. The mirror is fogging up.
I think again of the iceman, and how maybe
they did not have mirrors in Antarctica,
maybe they looked at themselves in a sheet of
floating ice, and were never cold because
they wore furs.

can we have our ball back?

can we have our ball back?

memories, reflections.

I remember you because of tea and scones.

Gift From the Dragon

she who was born in the year of the dragon did
not know of her gifts until 1988, when her husband
pulled into a rundown gas station she sat in the car
while he pumped the gas and suddenly said,
"wait, wait, i am picturing it now, picturing
it as it could be," and then came a poem she
found beauty in that rundown gas station, found beauty in
that nothingness a year came and
went and the beauty
was still there she wrote poetry about everything
and nothing, about the clouds and the
grass and the birds and the people, she found
beauty in the simplest of things "everything and nothing is beautiful,"
she says she always asks God,
"Did You make poetry? Am I the beholder?"
she did not receive an answer, but still
she writes-still
she finds beauty where beauty could
not be found,
in rundown things and rundown people,
she who was born in the year of the dragon.

Stone Pillar

Stones are thrown into piles on the
ground.
They are ten times my
normal weight.

The sun heats up my life
like a furnace.
Under the night stars,
under a gray charcoal sky,

you are heaven—and I,
I am hell.
Speak to me, stones:

you are hard as a boiled egg,
and round as the moon.

An African Outhouse After a Hurricane, Dec. 1983

There was the smell, constant,
that spun with the lightning and rain:
a mixture of dandelions and worms.

The outhouse
was like a great flood. Four walls, one little
room,
a toilet that leaked, water spewing everywhere.
It sat on the edge of a terrain,
looking down into a small animal graveyard in
Southern Africa until a hurricane blew it away.

All that remained was a roll
of wet paper towel
and a newspaper from 1979.

Even the old man who used it was gone.
The last time they saw him he was
humming a tune as he strolled down
the path towards the outhouse,
a magazine tucked under one arm.
He didn't seem to mind the rain
at all.

-Published in Whistling Shade Magazine

It Has Not Been Autumn For Seven Years

Macaroni is boiling in a pot on the stove.
The pot is burnt--it smells
like burnt toast.
The macaroni tastes like rubber.
A tire is rubber.
It tastes like a tire.
A tire is black like the sea,
or maybe like space, endless as my heart.
Or maybe like the burnt stuff at the bottom
of a pot of boiling macaroni.
The astronaut is falling. Falling.
Can you see him, spinning through air,
falling like a leaf in autumn?
It has not been autumn for seven years,
and still you are falling,
dangling on a thin string of hope.

-Published in Aught Magazine

college life

Listening to urban

jazz music in old time coffee shop,

girls in cardigan jumpsuits scurry across

the courtyard with

an armload of books.

eyelids

sagging heavily from too much

partying, a football jock crashes on the couch, sleeps

until monday.

his essay is due at 2pm. he has not started

writing it yet. he corners a nerd in the library,

demanding help.

violence is unnatural, the nerd tells him in a high-pitched

voice, but i will help you just the same.

the rain falls, glistenin.g

from the heavens,

and a

flower opens

into spring.

Life and Death (an interlude)

You played this game of
do or lose, and lost the game of living to a
pale man called Death-but the rooms

found out and the white face of the
clock found out and stopped time just for you.

A year moved forward (went back) and you are still
a young man trying to find out the meaning of Life,
which is as dim as classical music is to your deaf ears.
Sometimes Death is as close as vivid is to
the red eye, and you just want to cry,

but Death leaves you laying there,
bleeding on the doorstep (strawberry red jam
shoots out of your ears).
Then you live once more-you are
resurrected, let’s say-but the living is
only half-living, and the Death is only half-death.

This game of Life and Death-of "do" or lose-
is a party to get your young
mind to sleep in bed with Eternity:

Eternity as dark as birth,
as dark as a majestic mountain peak against a purple
night sky,
as dark as her own black Father cursing in his
shallow grave.


---------------------


I wrote the poem like last year but I still think it's cool!

The Star and the Heron

The woman lived a thousand miles away
from her family. She wrote letters to them often,
and posted the replies
on the back of her bedroom mirror.

Out on the balcony she sees a flash of white-it is a
heron out on the water, searching for
signs of life. In the vast purple sky a
white star bursts into flames.

Taking her chances, the woman makes
a wish against the dark night.
Then there is nothing, only the
sound of the heron calling to its wife
and children on the far side of the island,
telling them he will not be home for supper.

How a Horseman Loses His Words

Forget the fly, my love, forget that he is
the bringer of death. I dream of
what I cannot have and how you
dear unequal part which my
flower gladdens and darkens
these words. Lose yourself, my
heart is soothed by the taste of green
tea and devotion; the river does
not stop going onward into the mist.
It is the cold, the etherlies, the slim
morning which I hold in the palm
of my hand.

The horizon is a young woman
who grips the battle of the sky;
whom we lead on into Eternity;
the skilled horseman moves
into the valley and breathes without
his words. That is what a writer
must do: he must be the horseman,
he must learn how to lose his words.

-Published in Burning Leaf Magazine

untitled

The tree stands tall as a skyscraper.
It leans over a house where Mother and daughter
are learning to sew. Daughter knows

that learning to knit is not important as spending
time with
her friends. The mother, she sees an opportunity

for her daughter to acquire a new skill.
There is no sound, only

the rustling of tree branches as a new sapling
rises from the earth, and the snitch snitch of
hands to cloth.

-Published In Underground Window

muse

If you are in fact a blank piece of paper
where are the words? Where is the flower
that snuffs out the bread, where is the
bold metaphor that calls to me
in the dark of the night, wanting to be written,
waiting to be heard? I have
not eaten the bread yet nor have I sniffed
the life out of the flower,
the beginning of a new poem, the beginning of
something that has not yet been written.

new poem published

http://www.writingjuice.com/issues/volume02/issue01/poetry.htm

All For Love

It is such a nice evening that I comment on your appearance,
how your eyes appear deep like the ocean,
and you give me that old eye-roll, as if you could not
believe that I would comment on the ocean when
I know it is forty miles away.

A sprinkler is goes off in the yard next door,
and children are shouting in the still-hot evening as
they play tag or
Follow-the-Leader.

A sea gull screams,
far away from its home.
My t-shirt seems to be second skin, stuck to my back
like melted plastic, and I take a small sip of coca-cola.

Recycle the bottle when you are done, you
say patiently, as if you are a goddess
trying to explain to a mere
mortal how the universe works.
All in the name of love, I answer.

I chuckle to myself, and
trace my fingers over
the three arrows shaped in a triangle on the back of
the bottle that has a secret meaning
I alone am meant to
discover.

-Published in Offcourse Magazine

Struck by a Sparrow

Struck by sparrows flung in a dark
cage, the snow has been gone

for seven long summers. There is cake sitting
out on the stove

but it's none of my concern:

the birthday party was last
week.

Then the postman, someone

who was much like my father, told me I
could
no longer come home anymore:

he didn't like the way my hat
rested
on my head.

That was the last I heard of old

Belfast, the old man
who once gave me my
bread.

-published in Toasted Cheese Journal

The Yellow Haze

Sit down in the yellow haze.
The eye of a flower, the flower
which is complicated
and rotten like
the apple is rotten.

The pear is also rotten, waiting
patiently for someone
to bite into it. It is daytime. The stars
have come out, blissfully
unaware of the apple which is rotten
and contains a red worm.

The red worm ate the flower,
and sat in the yellow haze, then
spat out the yellow seed
in the haze.