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Contributors' notes

Don Gilliland

Crazy Horse said, "My lands are where my dead lie buried."

Victor the Wise was
an authority on other cultures.

I told him about last Saturday morning,
around ten, when I heard on WJIG-AM
what sounded like the gamelan’s

plunk and ring as accompaniment
to gospel singing; afterwards
the preacher rebuked vegetarian Bibles,

and lauded the muttonous King James.
I thought he sounded like someone
sounds when he means what he says.

Victor, never gullible, said it was charming
and talented of him to mean what he said,
but cautioned me: the underdone spots

in a world can be oddly misleading:
be wary, he said, of the simple folk,
the environed, enveloped, and limited.

The news report said that the co-pilot,
Egyptian, abruptly uttered a religious phrase
as the plane went down to the Atlantic.

Victor, ever discerning, said it was
obvious suicide: they usually utter
religious phrases in moments of distress.

Long ago, my good and upright grandfather,
Calvinist, well-traveled, and fluent in Tagolog,
said he didn’t use Islamic countries’ airlines

because they leave your safety up to God.
Victor, always reasonable, said talk like that
shows the hypocrisy typical of my elders.

Victor, who is gone now, never
said what Crazy Horse meant.

Conquistadors

The instance of the squalid by-product.

The side effects of dirty medications.
       My dry and pasty mouth.

Again the drunken Ricky Bevel at the grocery store
	has dropped the orange juice.

The malnourished water,
	wanting the proper mineral.

Damned unruly phenomena.

The bad luck of the Incas and the Aztecs.

Only the ossified can flex:

The buzz your cochlea makes
	listening to two tones at once.
The iguana bones which shrink
	in the scarcity of algae.