Where Something Might Happen
by Carl Eugene Moore

Stephen Dunn called his court to order. The Pulitzer Prize Winning poet sat at a blue cloth draped folding table in front of a small auditorium, a poetry craft seminar that was beginning five minutes late.

"I have an essay here to read. It's about twenty minutes or so. We can do that. But I was thinking that we might start with you. If you'd like to ask some questions, I'll answer them and then we can move on to some poems I brought to read. Then we can get your reactions and discuss them." He stopped and looked around for an up stretched hand.

Most rooms are filled with people who want to ask questions, but here there was palpable reticence filling the air. No one wanted to be the first to risk embarrassment.

No one but me.

"How do you write a poem?" I asked, innocence wrapped around the sentence, which I blurted out clear and concise so it would carry to the front of the room. I saw the words make their way slowly from my mouth, over the heads of those in front of me; they were in rainbow colors, like a clown's wig, a last minute costume from the dollar store on its way to Stephen's Pulitzer Prize-Winning ears. I tried to recover from my idiocy.

"I mean, how do you write a poem? What is your process? What happens when you get up in the morning and say, "I want to write a poem today?" I hoped words like "process" might overtake the clown words.

They didn't.

Stephen smiled in knowing benevolence. I held my breath. Everyone held their breath. I prepared to receive my sentence for having the unmitigated gall to ask this poet such a naive, amateur question as "how do you write a poem?"

"Well," he began still smiling, "I certainly don't get a poem every day. Sometimes I go days without something new. Every day I do try. I sit and make myself ready to receive a poem."

He paused to let this sink in. The collective began to breathe once more. I realized I was to be spared for my naivete.

"The most important thing," he said, teeth showing through the wide smile under his full graying beard, "is to put yourself in a place where something might happen."

The words shot into me and rattled around like a bullet.

"Put yourself where something might happen," he said again. "Too often we approach a poem or some other writing with some notion of what we want to happen. Those are usually the flat poems, the didactic poems, preachy things with no life. We already know what happened and we're simply trying to press the moments into verse. Contrivances. Doesn't work. You can't pull that one over on a reader. They see it before they get to the last line. No, you have to find a place where something might happen, where something unexpected might sneak up on you and smack you in the back of the head. It's that surprise, that inspiration that makes a poem good or even great."

He leaned back into the red, plastic chair, allowing us time to scramble for the jewels he had tossed in our direction.

"Where," he continued after a moment," is elusive and personal. Where may be a physical location, perhaps the steps of the Parthenon in Greece. Perhaps it is a garden in your back yard. Maybe it's on a subway train. Maybe it's simply a quiet place you use or visit regularly. The point is that you must find a place and use it, visit it regularly. Let what shows up surprise you."

Four words "where something might happen " had grabbed me by the neck and shaken me. How often had I approached writing poetry as an act of informative reflection, a recounting of some personal tale meaning nothing to anyone save me? I remembered Stephen's keynote address the day before. To paraphrase, "Writers are narcissists endeavoring to involve the reader in what involves them. The truth of it is that only the meaning of what involves the writer is important to the reader."

Too often I have tried to merely report facts and events in a journalistic fashion, hoping the reader will indulge in my self-interest. Seldom have I been able, or willing to pursue the meanings of events, or to convey such to the reader, to connect with him across the page.

Stephen went on to answer other questions about the mechanics of craft, but his most important words remained with me.

Then, I had occasion to chat privately with Stephen before he left for the airport. He was sitting alone at a glass table in the deserted, sunlit student commons area. I walked over and asked if he minded some company. He said, "Please," indicating the chrome chair opposite him. I dropped my backpack and sat.

"You ask great questions," he said, smiling from behind mirrored sunglasses.

I don't remember the rest of the conversation.

My Tio Ruben Drives en Chinga to Nowhere
by Ruben Rangel

My name is simple as a tortilla and as complicated as making good ones, the kind that puff up on the comal like they might explode. I didn't know the roots of my name until I found my way home, and maybe I shoulda left it that way. It wasn't that I was lost, only I had kept going back to Tejas where my family had migrated from, following the crops of nueces, algoden, and uvas. Until my family settled down in the Northwest where the crops were steadier year around: cherries, jape, vetabel, papas, manzana y menta.

Anyways, I kept going back to Tejas and each time piecing together the shards of a mirror. Then, I met my Tio Ruben, who looks just like my Tio Rafael, who looks just like my Tio Nino, and they all look just like my dad, expect one's fatter, one's taller, one's uglier, and one has a beard.

Tio Ruben is the one with the beard. And a big silver belt buckle. And jeans that fit him too tight. They all wear the same kinda cowboy hat, a dusty white with the brim apachurrado, I think just to confuse people. De todos modos, I met Tio Ruben for the first time at the end of the summer when I went to see my dad, who I'd only ever seen a few times and who didn't never raise me-so I don't call him my apa.

I really don't know any of my tios, which makes it even harder to tell them apart, and makes it hard to understand why this tio wants to take me over to his house after the long visita at my dad's place. Or why he wants me to meet his wife, contimas when I find out that his house isn't his house anymore and his wife isn't his wife anymore, either.

We'd already had a few beers at my dad's, and I don't hardly ever drink, but I didn't want to be rude and insult la Maria de mi dad, plus I play the guitar a little better when I've had a few, or at least it sounds better to me and I'm not so wound-up. Pos mi Tio Ruben wants me to drink a few at his place, which isn't really his place and his ex-ruca gets all teed when she gets home from workin the swing-shift at the mercado and she throws us out. Well, really she throws him out and I have to go with him because he's in no shape to drive, and he's my tio -me entiendes, mendes?

So there we are standing in the pinche dark almost at midnight and arguin over who's gonna drive and my Tio Ruben getting louder and louder que I can drive, cat-damn-it, and que creyes que stoy pedo, sannava-viche, cam on, les go. So I finally give in when the dogs start barkin cuz we're the only thing makin noise in this tiny little town, and I figure what can he hit at this hour? Most of la gente are asleep an have to get up before the sun does.

Tio Ruben guns the engine to his big black troca out of Robeston. It's dark and foggy as hell and he's in a drunk and jealous stupor barreling through the shoelaces of highways headed to Brownsville, no seatbelt, still drinkin a Budweiser and talking loud over the jacked-up Tejano music blasting from his truck stereo, weaving in and out of traffic without hitting a single armadillo or SUV.

My Tio Ruben pulls himself together enough to tell me we're going to a baile and we pull up in front of a noisy little tavern that has a dance floor no bigger than a pool table. On the other side of the waist-high plywood wall that divides the place in half six vatos in white t-shirts are shootin 8-ball. The place is thick with raza, mostly old-timers and has-beens who don't have to get up for work tomorrow in the middle of the week. There's a coupla rucas who'd be worth dancing with, if their faces weren't caked blue and purple and red with makeup like they've been in a bar fight already.

I get really aguitado when my Tio Ruben leaves me alone drinkin a Tecate beer and actually finds somebody who'll dance with him. Suddenly he's not so drunk and gliding around like an airforce pilot, somehow not running into the thick poles that are holding up the plywood partition. The dance floor is like a little holding pen for broncos or cattle ropers, but somehow the vato is swingin his ruca and doing turns and even marching along in a counter-clockwise dance circle, trying to hold back time, trying to capture a memory of some sweet baile from years before. Then the ruca starts to argue with my Tio Ruben and he says cam on, les go and devolvada we're outside, only this time he doesn't fight about who's gonna drive and he plays it off sayin he wants me to check out his ride and he keeps calling me mi'jo, but I'm not really his son an right now, I'm thinkin' we have the same name, but I'm not like him at all. My Tio Ruben is sleepin an snoring all the way home and I wonder, Is he dreaming, as I drive en chinga to nowhere.