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Tony
D’Souza
MFA University of
Notre Dame 2000, Best Graduating Thesis MA Hollins
University 1998, Best Graduating Thesis
Peace Corps Ivory Coast 2000-2002 Peace Corps Madagascar 2002-2000
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Office: Room 935
Office phone: (530) 225-4781
e-mail: td'souza@shastacollege.edu
Publications:
“Whiteman” –
novel forthcoming from Harcourt;
projected publication date Spring ‘06.
“Wu Didi” –
short story forthcoming in The New
Yorker, TBA date summer '05.
“Sonnenizio on a Line from Addonizio” –
poem forthcoming in Fall ’05 Nimrod.
“Necropolis” –
short story forthcoming in the Spring
'05 The Bend.
“Solitaire” –
poem forthcoming in the Spring ’05
Tea Party.
“Old Friends” –
poem forthcoming in the Summer ’05
Notre Dame Review.
“Middle Falls Sonnet,” “The Poems I
Wrote”–
poems appearing in the
Spring '05 Excalibur.
“The Act” –
short story appearing in 4/19/05 issue
of The Lance.
“The Hard Life” –
short story appearing in the Fall ’04
Front&Centre
(Canada).
“The
Red Coat” –
short story appearing
in the Fall ’04 The Literary Review.
“For
the Intrepid Traveler” –
travel article
appearing in the Summer ’02 Drumbeat (Ivory Coast).
“Africa Unchained” –
short story appearing
in the Summer ’02 Notre Dame Review.
“Taggers” –
short story appearing
in the Winter ’01 Notre Dame Review.
(Recognized as ‘One of the Best Entries’
in the ’00 Prentice Hall Competition)
“Last Story On Earth”
–
short story appearing
in the Winter ’01 Takahe (New Zealand).
“North Country Interlude” –
short story appearing in the Spring ’01
Imago (Australia).
“We’re Real Cool” –
short story appearing
in the Sept. ’00 Barbaric Yawp.
(Nominated for a ’00
Pushcart Prize)
“A
Guy in Lansing” –
short story appearing in the ’00
Elysium.
“The
Plague” –
short story appearing
in the fall ’00 Iron Horse.
“Two
Days After Noel,” “Shut Up, Sherrie!,” “Nice Things Late At Night,” “But
We’re So Delightful” –
poems appearing in ’00
The Juggler.
“Young” –
short story appearing in Winter ’99 Scholastic Magazine.
“A
Blue Moon in Poorwater”
– book review appearing in the Winter ’99
Notre Dame Review.
“Something’s Got To Happen”
– short
story appearing in the Winter ’99 Stand Magazine (UK).
(3rd place
prize winner in the 1999 Stand Magazine International Fiction
Competition)
“Ovid’s Concrete Labyrinths”
– book review appearing in the Summer ’99
Electronic Book Review.
“In
The House of Blue Lights” –
book review appearing in the June ’99
Hollins Critic.
“Wirtschaftswunder”
– short
story appearing in the Fall/Winter ’98 Black Warrior Review.
(Winner of the
1998-1999 Black Warrior Review Fiction Award)
“Dogfight and Other Stories”
– book review appearing in the Winter ‘98
Notre Dame Review.
“Cigarette Time” –
poem appearing in the Spring ‘98
Album.
“Pulled Triggers”
– short story excerpts appearing in David
Michael Kaplan’s Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing and
Rewriting Fiction by Story Press, 1997.
Appointment with Beauty
Just when you’ve given up on her,
a half hour or hour, say, of grocery shopping
in the discount supermarket notorious
as the place the rich don’t go,
and confront again the great raft of what this thing
is we are; riddled on its broad face with pale
moles and black moles and liver spots and wine-
stains; and chinhairs and nosehairs and earhairs
and hairy legs; and the cracked teeth and curdled
bellies and webbed veins and limping gaits
and shriveled limbs and absent chins and turkey
necks and chicken legs; and wattles and fat, there she is:
hurrying across the lot, keys in hand,
to her big, yellow truck and the next appointment.
On Discovering Poetry at
Thirty
It was worth the wait. And continents
and oceans and lovers I will manage
to parcel away in tidy paper packages
tied off with neat strings. I see it as
exhausted Columbus, spying through his glass
a shore of birds and green. I’m not here
to rape it. Or am I? Am I simply again
dim Cortes aching to be better than he was?
This poetry I’ve found won’t be about
puppies, though there may be puppies in it,
and it won’t rhyme. And when I write
about love, everybody is going to get hurt.
A thin wind fills the topsails.
I’ve been waiting for this voyage for years.
Galatea
I.
Pygmalion smokes Marlboros while Galatea
hunts shells on the shore. What’s she looking for?
She inhabits tidepools, dips her porcelain feet
among anemones, black urchins and the red octopi
that hunt them. She’d called him down to her once:
sea cucumbers like slow slugs, green and translucent
in the pink evening. He hadn’t understood. Gods
be damned, he thinks again. They’re older now,
trying to figure out one another, and what they
once meant to each other. Her mind he doesn’t
understand at all. On the verandah, another
bottle of beer doesn’t help him find it. He’d
gotten what he’d wanted, hadn’t he? In bed,
he doesn’t remember any longer how to turn
this body to him that his fingers once drafted
from dream, every plane and angle. She sleeps
displaying him her back. He misses his art, thinks
there must be another like she is waiting for hands
to cajole her from stone. And he wants this now,
to attempt to find what he knows he never will,
hasn’t found here. He’s made her into something
she’s not. At the farewell: Here’s your t-shirt,
he tells her. She gives him his blue jeans back.
II.
But when she first stood loose from marble,
nude and blinking in the glare of a new way,
she’d stepped from the pedestal to his arms.
And in his arms she rested. Pygmalion assumed
on faith that he was best for her. For a time,
this was true. He even took her hymen; and with it
her heart, or so he thought. On logging roads,
driving in his truck, he showed her the black
granite peaks that inspired him, snow on them,
told her snow meant the mountains would get wet,
though they didn’t know it yet. Galatea examined
the sky, clouds; the pines and pigeons in them.
She snapped gum, wasn’t stone any longer.
Pygmalion glanced at her again to believe this;
watched as she scratched her elbow. Who was she?
What would she say to him? Dimly, he began to know
that art breeds at the root of longing, that life doesn’t,
that she would shape him in the years to come
as much as he had her. They were kids, life long
before them both. Pygmalion, Galatea whispered,
her voice, like her heart, never chiseled, not claimed, I’m going to love you forever. Pygmalion prays
this remains true, wherever her fate has led her.
Why Not?
Let’s let the rivers run backwards, why not?
And the downed leaves to fall to the trees,
and the pigeons to flock upside down,
and the dogs to bark their tails, wag their mouths.
And why not the new mountains to tumble,
and old mountains to gather again from rubble?
And all the women who’ve lost their breasts
to have them back. And let’s all grow young
enough to suck our mothers’ tender breasts
while the ground throws rain at the parched sky.
Why not? And let’s let our fathers untie their ties
each morning, dress their faces in hair, scrap by scrap.
And then let’s stop time. Papa, how
I miss you, even now, hour after hour.
Traveler
The last time I
saw my father,
I set his bags on the curb
at the departures drop-off point— Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport—
like rote I hugged him, said, ‘Goodbye.’
But just before I rounded the van to get back in,
I saw him again: his back to me,
bags in hand:
a small man hesitant before the big glass doors
that slide wide open to lead people away,
and I said, ‘Dad!’ inadvertently, a shout
at an image I hadn’t expected to see:
my father.
Bags in hand, he turned round startled-like,
surprised, I imagine, that one of his children
for once had something more to say to him,
and I said what we’re supposed to say at airports,
‘Have a nice trip.’
He nodded, small still against those doors,
and I drove away.
Looking back, I
wonder,
Was he dead already?
As he cleared
security;
as he passed through detectors
whose beams swept his body and found nothing in it to make them ring;
as he thanked the attendant
who handed him back his keys and change;
as he waited at the gate watching
boys as small as I used to be
press their hands to the windows
and stare at planes;
as he boarded the 737 which would carry him
to New Orleans where he would play
a half-set of tennis and die,
did my parting words,
that ‘Have a nice trip,’
catch off-guard a man
traveling farther than he’d said?
Heroes’ Sonnet
They’ve labored to life another nifty device:
a swiveled Beretta that shoots around corners.
The foul enemy cowers on a digital screen;
one pulls the trigger and stays very clean.
They’ll be issuing it to their soldiers soon,
and their cops. To shoot blacks. To shoot
browns. To shoot yellows. To shoot
liberals, peaceniks, and a poet or two
if they’re lucky. And you know they’re
going to be lucky: they’ve got all the heroes:
in their body armor and dead machines,
in their night vision goggles and stiff platoons.
The Nazis called theirs heroes, too.
The dim folk believed it that time, too.
Echo
Don’t you know, as I
watch you bathe,
Sunday, from the doorway, your shoulders
as though you have no face, your hair,
the mirror steamed, the whiteness
of the walls of this simple place
where we live now? Through the window
the maple’s leaves toss like ribbons
in a faint wind we can’t hear. It’s autumn
and I’m wearing a blue sweater.
Your body in warm water, you don’t know
I’m watching you, watching you breathe.
A drop hangs from faucet’s lip,
doesn’t fall, and won’t somehow
a moment more. My body is young yet;
yours. What country is this? Even now
I know it does not matter.
I know your name in a dozen languages.
Your skin has no color. You soap your shoulders
with a rough and yellow sponge, the echo
of a creature drawn from the sea. My mother raised me to appreciate moments like this:
to find these countries,
these light and foreign vowels,
to keep my body slim, my hair neat,
to know when to lean and gaze,
to know when to say nothing.
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