Welcome to Zee Arts!

Some real treats this edition:

• Andy Jones, Poet Laureate of Davis, Ca, provided us "The Blood Jet", a work he read to the Davis City Council about the MRAP flap. (also see our frontpage 'MRAP' story .)
• Frances Kakugawa, provides us six lines of the best anti-war, omoiyari poem of last century. We're not kidding.
• Red Slider offers a change of pace, celebrating the character, resilience and dignity of the homeless instead of the usual endless seasonal vanities of hand-wringing rants and feel-goods that dot the winter landscape of our attitudes about the poor. [also see the Z article on page1 and Orwell's work (below)].
• Mary Swisher is a local photographer gaining national attention. Her recent exhibit of platinum print photographs at CSUS was a rare treat for those fortunate enough to have seen the collection. The photographs presented here lend a quiet, powerful dignity to the unsheltered that Mary's lens captured from the river camps of Sacramento to enclaves in Alabama where she took these portraits. We were fortunate that she permitted us to exhibit them here in the pages of the Z.
• 2 late news-flash poems: A bit of little known history about Juanipero Serra's adventure, and another on a surprise finding of Kafka in the Library. from your ed.
• Z Special Offering: George Orwell's 'London' part of his "Down And Out In Paris and London". It was a work that changed the vagrancy laws of Britain for the better. A must read for anyone who thinks we are "helping the homeless" of today. There's a lot more to helping someone than opening a soup kitchen. When you consider Sacramento's current plans are to bus the homeless to their next meal, a new location every day, you'll get the idea we've learned precious little of the lessons he was tring to teach us - and that was nearly a hundred years ago!

SUBMISSIONS:

Got poems? Got stories,art,music,audio works, dance vids, some genre we never thought of? Send it to us, we'd like to see it. First, check out submissions guidlines here: contributor's guidelines