{ON THE STANDS}

Believe

The writers and poets in this issue of SalonZine remind us of community and possibility, of what is absurd and beautiful in our world. Take a break from your work and worries and read this issue. Believe that the world is on your side, even in challenging times.

{Editorial}

Why Believe?

Cafe by the Ruins The writers and poets in this issue of SalonZine remind us of community and possibility, of what is absurd and beautiful in our world. Take a break from your work and worries and read this issue. Believe that the world is on your side, even in challenging times.

We dedicate this issue to risk takers, caretakers, and survivors.

-The Editors, Nita Noveno & Caroline Berger
-Assistant Editor, Barbara Sueko McGuire

HELP TEAM CAFÉ AND THE PEOPLE OF BENGUET
Special thanks to writers Padmapani L. Perez and Luisa A. Igloria for connecting our communities.

In early October, devastating typhoons hit regions of Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island. In Benguet Province, families of farmers lost land in the mountains that has been passed on through generations. Entire mountains collapsed. Landslides buried homes and people, rivers flooded and carried away livelihoods. Sunday Salon would like to support Team Café’s on-going efforts in the recovery process.

During the 1991 killer earthquake Café by the Ruins in Baguio City, set up a soup kitchen to feed families that lost their homes in Baguio. With Typhoon Pepeng, Team Café did the same, delivering hot meals to evacuation …

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{Fiction}

Revelations

BY MATTHEW CHENEY

War Devestation When I was a child, we lived inside the war. Our parents went away sometime during the last year, leaving me and my sister, Olly, to fend for ourselves amidst the rubble. Our house was old and solid, made of stone, and the shelling had mostly been to the other side of town, so all the walls of the house were still intact and there were only a few holes in the roof. Most of the windows had shattered, but we covered our bedroom’s windows with trash bags taped to the frames, and that mostly kept the wind and rain out, except for the windiest, rainiest nights, but those were few and far between. It was awfully dry that year, in fact, which created its own problems — after the well ran out, we got our water from the river, but the river water was full of bacteria and we didn’t always have enough fire to boil it. We were often sick.

The day J.C. died, we were healthy, though, because there had been some rain recently, but not enough to bring out lots of mold …

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Death Becomes Us

Requiem for Jimmy
The Community Choir of the Community
birds on a wire BY TIM KREIDER

The news spread quickly that he was gone. And while nobody could deny that a vast emptiness now laid claim to some part of the world, some later would suggest that he had been disappearing for a long time.

Now this needs to be qualified. Nobody really noticed this gradual and subtle disappearance until after he had died. Only then did a contingent led by Hank Mortibund, Old Man Mortibund’s youngest, put forth the claim that he had been gradually disappearing over a length of time, as if to prepare the rest us for the time when he would no longer be with us. Little Ginny Peepholtz, bless her heart, wondered if we don’t start dying the day we are born.

If Hank meant that Jimmy had been such a part of the Community that he had become almost invisible to us most of the time, then maybe they were onto something. Nowadays, it is pretty much consensus throughout the Community that he was the bedrock. That’s much easier to …

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{Non-Fiction}

Poor Her Soul

BY MIRA PTACIN

Child's Mobile Nicole Carpenter used to go through my city like a walking middle finger. She fought, smoked, dipped, drank and skipped school, and by the time she finally reached her junior year of high school, she altogether dropped out. I met her some years ago in my hometown of Battle Creek, the Cereal Capitol of the world (think: Kellogg’s Cornflakes).

Nicole wore sandy blond cornrows that dropped to her waist and wrapped around her like seaweed. She’d sway her head side to side and fling those braids behind her shoulders, rake back the strays with two acrylic nails, then light up a Newport 100. Nicole was exceptionally petite, about four-feet-nine inches, and could’ve passed for an eleven –year old.

When Nicole found out she was pregnant (at age seventeen), she moved out of her parents’, picked up a job at Arby’s, and moved in to the guy she thought (“I mean, shoot, he prolly is, that muthafucker…he the only one who didn’t wear a jimmy cap.”) might be the father of her baby.

Dad was Nicole’s doctor and had been since she was a little baby. He was in …

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One Day

BY ANNABEL SMITH

We arrive in the nameless village early, when the morning light is still thick and golden, marred only by the dark smudge of hills on the horizon. Doctors, nurses, dentists, support staff: a team of ten, we’ve flown into the Dominican Republic for a week of one-day stands. Day four, this is our fourth and final village. Like most foreigners, we’ve brought a sense of adventure and spare memory cards. Unlike them, we won’t be staying at luxury resorts or visiting golf courses. We have come to do good, to make a difference.

Our local partners are waiting for us in blue T-shirts like ours, clipboards ready. They’re clearly excited when our convoy arrives, and greet us with great enthusiasm. We climb off the bus and shake hands warmly. They show us the empty hall they’ve arranged for the doctors and a separate space for the dentists. The neat green community building is ideal, with several private rooms and a large main area filled with benches like pews. We unload the eight black suitcases and mysterious machines from the truck that follows us everywhere. The set-up team gets …

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Pinheads No More

The Quest for Punk Rock on the Road to Ruin

BY CHRIS GRILLO

The Ramones, Chateau Neuf, Oslo, Norway, August 30th 1980 The Ramones by Helge Øverås It must have been ‘89 because I was working at Blockbuster at the time. I remember the oppressive fluorescent lighting, the nauseatingly sweet scent of overly buttered popcorn and, of course, the hideous business casual uniforms—all of these flashbacks pummeled by the screeching tires and gunfire soundtrack of some action movie blaring out of the mounted TVs. Not sure what its hours are now but in 1989 this soul-sucking corporation stayed open until midnight 365 days a year, meaning the high school kids straightening shelves and vacuuming the drab commercial carpeting while the tills were tallied in the back office were let out at around 1am on school nights. We made a wallet-busting hourly wage of about four dollars and fifty cents. These were the pre-DVD days and there were rewinding machines behind the register for the person responsible for checking in the returned videos. (The “Please Be Kind and Rewind” stickers …