Nonfiction / Silas Jones

:: The Chino Center for Oral and Facial Surgery ::

Today, my dad got his tooth pulled. He had an abscess. Now, he’s lying down. It’s so fuck­ing hot here. Here equals Ari­zona. All day, I’m wait­ing for the Ari­zona air to cool off and try­ing to decide what to put in the card­board box I’m mail­ing home to my apart­ment in New York. A wig from col­lege, my CD col­lec­tion in two fat black leather binders, a cou­ple half-full jour­nals. My flight home is on Sun­day and I don’t want to check a bag. All week­end, I’m wait­ing to leave. 

How to get to The Chi­no Cen­ter for Oral and Facial Surgery (It’s way out on 89): Pass the church that used to be a movie the­atre. Take the exit after Glass­ford Hill, the one that swoops you around to face Ante­lope Val­ley. Notice for the first time since being back at dad’s that Ante­lope Val­ley is fill­ing up with hous­es, iden­ti­cal, unfin­ished, with tem­po­rary blue tarp roofs weighed down with black stacks of shingles. 

Behind the hous­es, there’s Min­gus Moun­tain, and behind that, there’s the Verde Val­ley. My sense of direc­tion is like those children’s books with acetate over­lays that can be peeled away one by one to reveal: the hold of a pirate ship, the inner work­ings of an oil rig, the anato­my of the human body. 

Peel back Ante­lope Val­ley, peel back Min­gus Moun­tain, peel back Verde Val­ley and see a 1000-year-old stone vil­lage beside a 50-year-old heap of grey tail­ings from the cop­per mine up the hill. Peel back the Mogol­lon Rim and see the woods on top of it, see the San Fran­cis­co Peaks. Peel back the San Fran­cis­co Peaks and see a wilder­ness of pur­ple cin­der cones with Pon­derosa pines grow­ing straight from their peb­bled, vol­canic flanks. Behind them, the Paint­ed Desert and Black Moun­tain and then the Ver­mil­lion Cliffs, their feet buried in umber bad­lands. Peel back the Glen Canyon Dam and see Escalante and the white sand­stone piled in mile-high drifts out along State Route 12. 

On the car ride home, my dad speaks to me through a wad of bloody gauze. 

Wait, flip back five or six lay­ers and return to the Mogol­lon Rim; he says he’s con­sid­er­ing mov­ing up there. He’s think­ing about Payson. He’s think­ing about Pine or Straw­ber­ry. Hell, what about Hap­py Jack? Up there, it’s cool­er and the devel­op­ment is under con­trol. It rains still. He’s think­ing of mov­ing to the last intact colo­nial town in Mex­i­co. There’s no air­port; that keeps the riffraff out. We get off 89 and whip around a new traf­fic cir­cle pinned down at its pea-stone cen­ter by a giant, bronze stat­ue of a cowboy. 

The Oral Sur­geon was wear­ing square-toed cow­boy boots and teal scrubs and a wed­ding band made of grey sil­i­cone. I won­der if, after he pulls his hand out of the last mouth of the day, he trades the sil­i­cone ring for a gold one before dri­ving home to Ante­lope Valley. 

“How are you relat­ed to the patient?” he asked me when I came to grab my dad. I look at his cow­boy boots and weigh my options. I’ve made enough mod­i­fi­ca­tions to my body that I look, I think, approx­i­mate to boy; my ID says Sophie. 

“I’m his, uh, daugh­ter,” I said, trot­ting after him to a small room where my dad was reclined, fuck­ing with his IV. The oral sur­geon stands with his hands on his hips and looks at me. Behind him, there’s a framed por­trait of his fam­i­ly: a blonde wife and three small brunette daugh­ters posed in East­er dress­es beside Gran­ite Creek. In the building’s front office, less than an hour ear­li­er, my dad looked up from paper­work to point to an iden­ti­cal pic­ture and said too loud­ly, “Are they scoops or what?” Scoops is what my dad calls Mor­mons. Scoops miss­ing from their brains. 

The scoop sur­geon was wear­ing a mask and so was I, but my dad wasn’t. He looked acti­vat­ed some­how. I adjust­ed my eye­brows to express calm obliv­i­ous­ness to any embar­rass­ing resid­ual dis­ori­en­ta­tion he might be expe­ri­enc­ing. I smiled behind my mask and tried to look like a daughter. 

“When your father was going under, we noticed some irreg­u­lar­i­ties with his heart­beat,” the sur­geon said. I reori­ent­ed my eye­brows to show an appro­pri­ate amount of con­cern plus casu­al dis­re­gard, for my dad’s sake. “Your dad says he exer­cis­es all the time and that he’s a healthy guy,” the sur­geon said. 

“He is,” I said. 

“I am,” my dad said. 

“Well, it’s some­thing he should fol­low up with his pri­ma­ry care physi­cian about,” said the sur­geon (the scoop). He held his hand in a fist; “the heart is like any mus­cle.” He opened and closed his fin­gers, squeak­ing his sil­i­cone band; “it tires, it gets spas­my.” I made a hum­ming sound. 

“Okay,” I said. 

A nurse showed my dad and then me how to irri­gate the hole where his tooth used to be. I won­der what they’ve done with it. She loaded my dad into a wheel­chair and I held the door for her, all daugh­ter­ly. My dad slid into the pas­sen­ger seat of my Sub­aru, told the nurse that he can han­dle his drugs, thank you very much, and then we drove away. 

“The devel­op­ment out here is just out of con­trol,” he says sev­er­al times between the Surgery Cen­ter and home. There’s blood dry­ing on his lips. 

Yes­ter­day, my dad and me went for a bike ride through the raw pink gran­ite boul­ders beyond Glass­ford Hill. The rocks emerge glit­ter­ing from the erod­ing slope in a tum­ble, like mud squeezed in drips from a toddler’s tight lit­tle fist and left to dry in pil­lars and blobs. There are miles and miles of them. The trail is long, wide, and flat; it used to be a rail­road for the mine. We ped­al past four pairs of dads and daugh­ters. The daugh­ters are learn­ing how to ride bikes, or how to enjoy it. Bik­ing care­ful­ly behind my dad, I feel like the old­est mem­ber of a club. 

At the end of the trail, you can see out across Ante­lope Val­ley. To the west, you can see almost out to King­man, out to Bagh­dad and Search­light. Cow­boy towns. Peel them back and see the Mojave; see Cal­i­for­nia (on fire), see the Pacific. 

The land beyond the trail has been cleared and lev­eled and mea­sured out in squares. In the thin strip of shade cast by the near­est gran­ite spire, some kind of bad-look­ing machin­ery is parked. I can hear the beep­ing of some­thing back­ing up. It’s been rainy this sum­mer, and Glass­ford Hill is like Ire­land: green and empty. 

After I get him home from the Surgery Cen­ter, I make my dad a man­go smooth­ie. With it, he takes two Tylenol and three ibupro­fen because the scoop won’t give him opi­ates. Then, he goes to sleep. I dri­ve to CVS and buy ice packs and navy blue liq­uid eye­lin­er that I spend all after­noon try­ing to put on right. When I am not yelling down the stairs to ask my dad if he wants any­thing, I am as qui­et as pos­si­ble. He’s read­ing a huge book called Nixon­land, or maybe he’s sleep­ing. I avoid him because it feels like the kind thing to do; I don’t want him to see me see him in pain. I wor­ry I’m being inattentive. 

I used to date a boy with an ill­ness that required him to sit on an IV drip once every six weeks. He was real­ly sick, but he was also real­ly rich, so the treat­ment was admin­is­tered by a home health aide in the rec room in the base­ment of his par­ents’ brown­stone. The home health aide was an old­er black man in navy blue scrubs and match­ing crocs named Wil­son. The needle’s fold­ed plas­tic sheath looked like a but­ter­fly alight­ed on my boyfriend’s arm. It stayed there for hours. I stared at the TV. I was unsure of how much my boyfriend want­ed to be touched, or of how much was appro­pri­ate to touch him. I didn’t ask. Wil­son sat on a plush ottoman and when my boyfriend’s dad appeared with an arm­ful of hot sand­wich­es drip­ping oil, Wil­son chose turkey. 

Last time I saw my ex-boyfriend, we wan­dered end­less­ly around Fort Greene instead of sit­ting down for a beer like we’d planned because he was in so much pain he said he couldn’t stop mov­ing. He fin­ished a pack of Marl­boros; he start­ed anoth­er. We bought a six pack at a bode­ga and split it, and then we split anoth­er one. When the side­walk was busy, I fell into step behind him so I could watch him walk with a beer in one hand and his aching bel­ly flat beneath the oth­er. I real­ized I’d missed my chance to take good care of him. I put my hand on his back and steered him through a crowd gath­ered around a bad bike accident. 

I used to think he was a girl because when he gets drunk (relaxed) he is floun­cy and inse­cure. When he was sick in the rec room, he was too qui­et and still, sat on the couch with his sand­wich unwrapped and untouched in his lap. That’s how I knew he was a boy for sure. 

My dad keeps the win­dows of his house open all day and all night. Indoors, it is cool. Except today, it’s not. When the sun final­ly pass­es over­head, I escape onto the shad­ed porch. Behind the house, the Brad­shaw Peaks sling black shad­ows over the whole neigh­bor­hood. Hid­den in their wood­ed slopes are shal­low pits cleared by pio­neers a hun­dred years ago. Peo­ple call them mines, but they’re just hand-dug holes grad­u­al­ly refill­ing them­selves with pine nee­dles and crum­bling gran­ite and lit­ter. In front of the house, across 89, there’s a huge machine smash­ing bedrock into lev­el dust; they are build­ing a hotel. This neigh­bor­hood is a fire trap. 

I hear my dad come upstairs and I go back inside to ask him again if he wants soup, a milk­shake, an edi­ble from the unmarked jar in the fridge. There is sweat show­ing through his t‑shirt. He’s stand­ing per­fect­ly still over the kitchen trash can with his foot on the ped­al so the lid is stuck open, like a mouth. His jaw is slack and his eyes are trained on the wall. 

“Dad?” I say, “dad?” and he doesn’t answer, just moves his lips like he’s talk­ing. It dawns on me; I am in one of those moments. In this moment, I am stand­ing half on the porch and star­ing at my dad who is star­ing at the wall. I am real­iz­ing that some­thing is real­ly, seri­ous­ly wrong. I am in the moment of every­thing get­ting fucked up. I am in the moment before every­thing changes. 

I’ve been in these moments before; see­ing my ex-boyfriend stag­ger back when he stood up too fast from tying his shoes; watch­ing my sister’s lumi­nous face grow small­er and green­er the deep­er she sank into the pond; leav­ing Andy alone for ten min­utes, ten min­utes I swear, to run to the phar­ma­cy for anti-nau­sea meds. They’d just had top surgery and had been throw­ing up for hours from the opi­ates. I was sup­posed to be tak­ing care of them. 

From those times, I rec­og­nized the sen­sa­tion of a life about to be dif­fer­ent. But those times, every­thing had turned out okay, stayed the same; my boyfriend caught him­self against the ban­is­ter, I grabbed my sis­ter by her wrist, Andy took the med­i­cine, kept some water down. 

Then, my dad straight­ened up. He opened his mouth wide and began to talk around the mov­ing shape of his own tongue. “They pulled the wrong tooth, those fuck­ers,” I stared into the red black space where his molar had been. They had pulled the right tooth. 

“It’s fine, dad” I said, and then I helped him put his ear­ring back in. The scoop sur­geon had made him take the sil­ver hoop out of his ear and put it in a lit­tle dime bag. 

My dad hat­ed my ex-boyfriend, I think, but he won’t tell me for sure. They met once at my col­lege grad­u­a­tion and then a sec­ond time here, when my boyfriend flew out to vis­it and got imme­di­ate­ly sick from the dry air and high ele­va­tion. There was a dis­tance between them, even though I imag­ined they’d read the same selec­tion of non­fic­tion and nov­els that smart, sen­si­tive boys feel oblig­at­ed to: Von­negut and like, what­ev­er else. 

We had already been late for our flight home when my boyfriend slammed his fin­ger in my car door. From the porch, my dad saw it hap­pen and threw down a bag of frozen peas that left smelly, wet spots on my boyfriend’s cor­duroy lap. With­out tak­ing my eyes off 41 to Phoenix, I lift­ed a hand from the steer­ing wheel and rest­ed it on his head. He radi­at­ed heat. 

“Please, don’t touch me right now,” he said. The fin­ger­nail turned grey and fell off and a few months lat­er, he dumped me. 

The oth­er night, perched beside him on a park bench, I asked to see it. His hands were long and bony and the same; his fin­ger­nails were uni­form. We sat for as long as he could han­dle, and then we kept walk­ing. He asked me if top surgery hurt, and I told him yes. 

“You know how I am with doc­tors,” I said, “I’m a mess.” I looked at him to see if he thought I was a mess. He didn’t say anything. 

“I don’t know what I would have done with­out Andy,” I said. I want­ed him to know; Andy is my best friend. Andy had been unafraid of the IVs and hos­pi­tal smells and asked good ques­tions of the nurs­es; they’d brought a pil­low for the Uber ride from the hos­pi­tal and made me a lit­tle snack plate when we got home and had done every dish. 

Andy got top surgery three months before I did, and I had done these things for them too. I want­ed him to know: I had run through the wet snow to get the med­i­cine, Pedi­alyte, and gin­ger ale, stuff I prob­a­bly should have thought to buy ahead of time. For a ter­ri­ble moment when I returned to the apart­ment, I was sure that they’d aspi­rat­ed on their own vomit. 

I didn’t tell him any of that. 

“No one’s ever known how to take such good care of me,” I said. I laid it on thick. 

I thought about him after I cut my tits off, when I was watch­ing TV, high and nau­seous. Even though we hadn’t spo­ken in near­ly a year, I’d con­sid­ered call­ing him the night before, when I was so afraid I could hard­ly speak to the friends I’d invit­ed over. Andy noticed me wig­ging out and asked every­one to leave soon after we’d fin­ished the piz­za. I didn’t tell him any of that, either. 

“You seem real­ly hap­py,” my ex-boyfriend said over his shoul­der. “Are you happy?” 

“I am,” I said, scis­sor­ing two fin­gers togeth­er until he passed me a cig­a­rette, already lit and canoe­ing in the breeze off the riv­er. Peel back Fort Green and that big hill and down­town Brook­lyn and the cour­t­house and the Duane Reed. Peel back Jorale­mon street. We had walked all the way to his par­ents’ house; he was spend­ing the night there and meet­ing Wil­son in the morn­ing. We kept walk­ing until we got to the river. 

Once, on the way home from a par­ty at a spa­cious loft that belonged to one of his friends’ par­ents, I’d thrown up right exact­ly here while my boyfriend watched ner­vous­ly from far away. The par­ty had been all boys and their girl­friends. The loft had been all high ceil­ings and pol­ished stain­less-steel sur­faces across which our reflec­tions slipped and slid like an upside-down reflec­tion in a cere­al spoon. 

The win­dow to the fire escape was so large that when I want­ed a smoke, I sim­ply stepped through it like a door instead of hav­ing to clam­ber or crouch. I remem­ber how the wet met­al slats left stripes on my socked feet, the flip­book flash of car head­lights between the truss­es of the bridge. Peel back the bridge and see ??? I was drunk and didn’t yet under­stand how any­thing fit togeth­er or stacked up in the city. I threw up and my vom­it slapped the cob­bled street below, scat­ter­ing tourists tak­ing pho­tographs with Man­hat­tan. My boyfriend walked me back through filmy acetate lay­ers to his par­ents’ house. He washed my coat and my pants while I slept. 

“I always knew you would tran­si­tion,” my ex-boyfriend said, offer­ing me anoth­er cig­a­rette. “Of course,” he added, see­ing my sur­prise in the glow of the riv­er. Peel back the riv­er, peel back the dock where we’d once caught a fer­ry out to the Rock­aways, peel back the finan­cial dis­trict, and Bat­tery Park, and then anoth­er riv­er. Peel back crowd­ed state after crowd­ed state until you get to the one where he and me met, at col­lege. Peel back the woods and wide main­streets and state­ly red brick and then peel back a few more fly-over states and see Ari­zona; see my dad on the porch read­ing Nixon­land, his cat sprawled beside him. 

“At your grad­u­a­tion, when your dad got so drunk?” he said. 

“Yeah?” I said. 

“I was a real­ly good boyfriend then,” he said, “I took good care of you then.” I walked him back to his par­ents’ house. He told me he’d like to see me again, and then I walked home. He has a new girl­friend; they’ve been in love for like, a year. Peel back the fan­ci­est parts of Brook­lyn until you reach the Children’s Muse­um; turn left, and there’s my build­ing. The next morn­ing, I drove to vis­it my dad in Ari­zona. I texted my boyfriend from Penn­syl­va­nia; hi to Wilson. 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’m very attached to the land­scape of the state where I most­ly grew up. I lis­ten to peo­ple I know from my life in New York talk­ing about dri­ving through Ari­zona on their way from L.A. to White Sands and I get real­ly grumpy. Then, when I end up in the actu­al land­scape, vis­it­ing home, I feel real­ly grumpy too. It’s hard to be there because there’s no water and so much smoke and so many bor­der patrol and the vio­lence feels so present in gen­er­al. I wrote this sto­ry about watch­ing a land­scape change, about see­ing rela­tion­ships change. I also grew up part­ly in Wash­ing­ton state and have always loved the way Carv­er throws around the toponyms I know from child­hood to estab­lish a scene. It reminds me of how my par­ents and uncles—outdoor guides and seri­ous know­ers of the West, hip­pie drug­store cowboys—talk about Ari­zona. I tried to do some­thing sim­i­lar here. 

 

Silas Jones’s writ­ing has appeared in Hobart and The Wilder Voice, and is forth­com­ing in this Fall’s Foglifter and in Ice Floe Press’s Pan­dem­ic Love anthology.

Nonfiction / Chanel Earl

:: Names Are Always Changed to Protect the Innocent ::

So when I say that tomor­row my nephews, Peter, James, and John, will be inter­viewed by the police, and that after­ward it will be decid­ed if they will live with one or the oth­er of their par­ents, you know their names have been changed. 

And when I write that my friend Lazarus—who is sev­en years old and spent the last twelve months receiv­ing reg­u­lar injec­tions of chem­i­cal poi­son through a port in his chest—just returned from a trip to Dis­ney World, and decided—after los­ing his leg, his hair, and most of his body weight—to stop chemo, that his name has been changed too. 

So have the names of his par­ents, Phillip and Mary, who have four healthy chil­dren, and will soon have four in the ground. I’ll call the oth­er three—who nev­er took in their first breaths—Bartholomew, Tabitha, and Matthew, and—for my sake, not theirs—imagine a moun­tain of flow­ers on their graves. 

I sit and write in silence, and I know that Anna, Eliz­a­beth, and Thomas are asleep in the next room. Eliz­a­beth has strep throat, which has pro­gressed into scar­let fever. Just a hun­dred years ago I would have been up all night won­der­ing if this was our last, but I have been instruct­ed to relax because she took antibi­otics, and the doc­tor insists she can go to school tomorrow. 

I go to her when she cries. Her fore­head is still cov­ered with bright pink spots, and I place my hands on her face and whis­per, Every­thing will be okay. Our breath­ing aligns. Thomas rolls over. He is hav­ing a dream. And I know we are all going to lose each oth­er some­day, but I can’t believe that mat­ters right now because my name is Martha, and I am going to feel this moment, and the next, and always the next. 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Every­thing in this piece is true. One evening while pro­cess­ing the pain of my sis­ter as she went through a divorce, the pain of my friend whose son was dying of can­cer, and my own wor­ry about my four-year-old daughter’s scar­let fever diag­no­sis, I got real­ly worked up about the inno­cence of the chil­dren and par­ents involved in every one of these sit­u­a­tions. I ate ice cream, and cried, and made lists about what I could do to help. Then this came out. I have tried many times to turn this piece into a poem, adding line breaks and play­ing with the rhythm. Ulti­mate­ly, it is and remains a micro-essay about a moment in my life. A moment of grief, con­fu­sion, and the real­iza­tion of mortality. 

 

Chanel Earl is a recent MFA grad­u­ate, a moth­er of four, and an aspir­ing gar­den­er. Her work has appeared in print and online. For more infor­ma­tion about her and her writ­ing, vis­it chanelearl.com.

Nonfiction / Debra Monroe

 

:: The Makeshift Years ::

For ten years I was a sin­gle par­ent, not the first, last, nor only. Because I adopt­ed, my ideas, my house, my char­ac­ter, and my income were assessed in advance by experts. I planned ahead for like­ly set­backs, and the adop­tion agency dou­blechecked. Pre­emp­tive prob­lem-solv­ing is a skill and a tic. On one hand, it’s plan­ning, and plan­ning helps. On the oth­er, no one can antic­i­pate all future bad luck or glar­ing mis­cal­cu­la­tions always so obvi­ous after the fact. Still, as I wait­ed for my baby, I envi­sioned upcom­ing hur­dles: my wor­ry­ing and ready­ing, and rush­es of ela­tion as I’d clear them. I’ve day­dreamed like this since I can remem­ber, with hope or hubris or willed faith in my abil­i­ty to spot loom­ing pitfalls.

The ele­men­tary school prin­ci­pal lat­er said: “No ex-hus­band, no grand­ma, no aunt, not even an uncle?” My extend­ed fam­i­ly was geo­graph­i­cal­ly afar. I vis­it­ed rarely and called often. Geo­graph­i­cal­ly afar worked: unfix­able his­to­ry and latent erup­tions, even by phone. So I began as a moth­er who hoped to fore­stall all prob­lems and then noticed my daugh­ter was emerg­ing into con­scious­ness with the idea that, if push came to shove, no one else would love her, feed her, and save her. She asked often about her con­tin­gency plan.

She was sick when she was lit­tle, which I did fore­see, that a child might have spe­cial needs. Hers were appoint­ments with med­ical spe­cial­ists in a city an hour away. But a prob­lem I didn’t fore­see was that I would get sick. One day she was wear­ing cozy paja­mas and watch­ing TV. I lay on the couch, won­der­ing why nurs­es rushed me when I phoned to say I hadn’t recov­ered from surgery yet. My daugh­ter said, “How will Aunt Cindy”—a friend in Flori­da, and we lived in Texas—“know to come on a plane and get me?” 

I thought: some fan­ta­sy about going to Disneyworld? 

“When you die,” she said. She’d arranged her expres­sion to con­vey that she need­ed this infor­ma­tion but knew I was overex­tend­ed. I’d trav­eled to my mother’s funer­al. The moth­er of a sit­ter had died a good death at home in the room near the room where my daugh­ter napped and played. “I’m not dying,” I said, ignor­ing my post-op malaise. 

Care­givers had a finite inter­est in her. They wor­ried about their own chil­dren, their own moth­ers. None were ter­ri­ble, though one sev­en­teen-year-old had bulim­ia. I could tell by the can­dy wrap­pers and the state of the bath­room. I won­dered whether to tell her moth­er, whom I’d first met when the moth­er was a child­care work­er at a Methodist Church pro­gram called Mother’s Day Out, which I’d used for day­care when my daugh­ter was two. You left your child there—Tuesdays, Thurs­days, nine to three, steep fines if you’re late for pickup—to relax or shop. The child­care work­er who turned out to be the sitter’s moth­er told me she knew by my clothes I was going to work at the uni­ver­si­ty in the col­lege town a half-hour away. I couldn’t use day­cares there. My hours were errat­ic, mid­day class­es Tues­days and Thurs­days, also a Thurs­day night class requir­ing a sec­ond arrangement. 

“The church board is strict,” she said. “Be discreet.” 

I nod­ded and tried to seem on the verge of shopping. 

This was anoth­er prob­lem I’d failed to fore­see. I owned a small house near a visu­al­ly appeal­ing vil­lage with a low cost of liv­ing, but it had just one day­care cen­ter that every­one described as dodgy, in a pole barn between the dance­hall and auto body shop. Social work­ers must have assumed I’d devise child­care. I did. Here are max­ims I lived by:

Impatience is a virtue. It helps you get chores done quickly. 
Worry is precaution.
If you predict bad outcomes, you’ll have spare solutions stockpiled.
Wait, wait. We’re almost at the palace. It’s not midnight. Something good
will happen. (This began as an ironic aside but, after long repetition, 
turned sincere.)

~

When at last my daugh­ter was enrolled in all-day kinder­garten, I need­ed just one sit­ter one night a week for night class. I said this when I ran across the Mother’s Day Out child­care work­er, who first told me I should put my daugh­ter in Sat­ur­day morn­ing bal­let class­es in the city an hour away, expen­sive yet excel­lent class­es she’d heard. Sure­ly I wasn’t work­ing on Sat­ur­day morn­ings? Then she said I should hire her daugh­ter who had a car.

I hired the daugh­ter and dis­cov­ered the bulim­ia. My habit of mis­giv­ing tum­bled onto a new ques­tion: Was it my place to tell the sitter’s moth­er about the bulim­ia? Telling the moth­er might be wrong, thank­less. This was an eti­quette ques­tion, I real­ized. Eti­quette is about con­vey­ing dif­fi­cult facts kind­ly. Next I had to fire the sit­ter for not pick­ing up my daughter—leaving my daughter’s small, dear self at the top of a hill where the school bus dropped her. One of my neigh­bors’ oth­er neigh­bors, called Crab­by Old Man, but nev­er to his face, drove her back to school where the prin­ci­pal called me at work, and I rushed out of a sem­i­nar in which I let stu­dents keep their cell phones on, a new gad­get then, because I couldn’t object to theirs if, alert to predica­ments, I kept mine on.

After I found a new sit­ter, I found myself odd­ly miss­ing the pre­vi­ous nonur­gent ques­tion of whether I should tell the sitter’s moth­er her daugh­ter wasn’t okay. Next I pon­dered why I’d found the ques­tion mild­ly intrigu­ing. I’d rolled it over in my mind as I drove to and from work, as I vac­u­umed and fold­ed laun­dry, as I’d answered my daughter’s ques­tions about who made the sky and were ani­mals peo­ple, as I’d helped her with her kinder­garten home­work, easy, fun, the two of us past­ing feath­ers onto a draw­ing of a turkey for Thanks­giv­ing or read­ing aloud a list of sea­son­al words as I quelled pan­ic about how super­vis­ing her home­work would get hard­er in years ahead, tak­ing up more focus.

I prob­a­bly nev­er would have found the spare courage to tell the sitter’s moth­er about her daughter’s eat­ing dis­or­der, which was con­cern­ing. A red flag about the sitter’s well-being. A red flag about the sitter’s fit­ness. Some­thing to keep an eye on. But not a fir­ing offense, not yet, I must have decid­ed, com­ing home from teach­ing at ten p.m. to emp­ty the waste­bas­kets and clean the bath­room. Prob­lem-solv­ing in a pros-ver­sus-cons way had turned reflex­ive. Think­ing about some­one else’s prob­lem, hard for them but eas­i­er for me, had felt like a pas­time. Mother’s Day Out had the right idea—I need­ed to relax. But any new pas­time had to over­lap with time I’d spend with my child. Maybe gardening? 

The next sit­ter picked up my daugh­ter right at the school, along with the sitter’s daugh­ter who was the same age, and at ten p.m. I’d dri­ve to this sitter’s, head­ing north off my route home, oth­er­wise west­ern, then south again home, twen­ty extra miles but just one night a week. This sit­ter was affec­tion­ate, big-heart­ed, with a dry sense of humor, but she’d just begun tak­ing an anti­de­pres­sant, the first rough weeks of adjust­ing to a drug. When I knocked on the door to pick up my daugh­ter, this sit­ter was dis­turbing­ly hard to wake.

Don’t wor­ry about keep­ing my sit­ters straight. Think of them as mem­bers of a frac­tious Greek cho­rus, con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er while let­ting spill with advice derived from their cir­cum­stances, dif­fer­ent from mine. But I had to prize them as indi­vid­u­als since I need­ed them to prize my daugh­ter. I didn’t treat them as inter­change­able as they interchanged.

~

I slept light­ly and woke often, and my dreams were as busy as action movies. I’d be dri­ving home but couldn’t deci­pher the infi­nite­ly branch­ing roads just beyond the wind­shield. Or I was in an unfa­mil­iar city, wide express­ways criss­cross­ing before me like lines in an M. C. Esch­er lith­o­graph. In one dream, my car wouldn’t start. So I stole a motor­cy­cle, kick­start­ed it, and sped off, one hand steady­ing the baby draped over the gas tank. I woke, relieved to find myself in bed, my child asleep, nowhere I had to be for two hours. 

Lin­ear time was my roadmap. Mon­day Tues­day Wednes­day Thurs­day (dif­fer­ent due to night class), Fri­day again. Sat­ur­day and Sun­day unstruc­tured but full of to-dos. Week­days, sev­en a.m., eight, nine, ten … Start­ing at four p.m. on week­days except Thurs­days: meet the school bus, fix a snack, see to home­work, chat hap­pi­ly, fix din­ner. We ate. She bathed. For TV, she liked phys­i­cal com­e­dy, extrav­a­gant prat­falls. I’d be in the next room, wash­ing dish­es, and hear her help­less with laugh­ter, chortling. On week­nights, America’s Fun­ni­est Home Videos. Sat­ur­day, British come­dies like Fawl­ty Tow­ers.

I now see that, despite dai­ly progress—the clock map­ping my day, the cal­en­dar map­ping my week and, zoom­ing out for a dis­ori­ent­ing minute, my month—I’d get stuck. Any inter­sec­tion with a fork­ing set of options, with more than one way for­ward, pos­si­bly two, three, or four, all poten­tial­ly the right or wrong way, unset­tled me. Friend­ly land­marks looked strange. I mean those tal­is­man-like assur­ances of rou­tine like the yel­low school bus com­ing on time in the after­noon, the alarm clock’s reli­able beep every morn­ing, Arthur switch­ing to PBS New­sHour my cue for din­ner prep. When new fac­tors forced me to change my nav­i­ga­tion, these tal­is­man-like mark­ers marked a now-obso­lete route. 

When my daugh­ter had asked how Aunt Cindy would know to come and get her, I won­dered if not feel­ing well was psy­cho­so­mat­ic, as the surgeon’s nurs­es on the phone implied. They had respon­si­bil­i­ties too, long lists of patient calls to return. They’d say “every­one has pain,” and I’d say “three weeks lat­er and I have a fever,” and they’d say “but not a high fever,” also “so make an appoint­ment.” I had made an appoint­ment ten days ear­li­er, which required the after­school sit­ter a sec­ond time that week, and I’d used one of my at-home days when I should have grad­ed papers to dri­ve into the city to the surgeon’s. 

If my daugh­ter rode the bus in the after­noon, I had forty more min­utes to work; if I drove her to school in the morn­ing, I had forty more min­utes to sleep. I drove her to school the next morn­ing and, infused with caf­feine, social reserve not yet oper­a­tional, I spoke to some­one else as if to myself. After deliv­er­ing my daugh­ter into the class­room, I walked to the park­ing lot beside a father I knew from vil­lage gath­er­ings, our kids in slip­pery herds around us in Hal­loween cos­tumes or bib tags for field day, clam­or­ing about cup­cakes, hot dogs. Most dads avoid­ed me, sin­gle by choice. Moth­ers were curi­ous. One said, “I have friends who are sin­gle moth­ers and they don’t endan­ger their kids, but they’re so busy they for­get to turn on the old men­tal cam­corder. They miss the fun.”

As the pleas­ant dad and I unlocked our cars, I said, “I had a surgery almost a month ago and don’t feel bet­ter.” He got a look on his face like a good hus­band would get. I even­tu­al­ly had a good hus­band so that’s how I know. But he wasn’t my hus­band. We’d chat­ted as he dropped off and picked up kids because his job was near­by and his wife’s wasn’t. I was wear­ing a sweat­suit. It was a cold day, so I’d thrown on my warmest coat, fake-fur, knee-length. Paired with styl­ish but under­stat­ed clothes, with my hair washed and make­up applied, it could be an inter­est­ing fash­ion state­ment. He looked at my face, my wild eyes. My hair was wild too. I know because a few sec­onds lat­er I got in my car and flipped down the visor mir­ror. “Maybe talk to a doc­tor,” he said, back­ing away. 

I drove to the vil­lage doctor’s. 

I said to the recep­tion­ist, “The doc­tor referred me to have a surgery three weeks ago, and I nev­er got well.” She told me to sit down as oth­er patients arrived. Then a nurse took me to a room and returned with the doc­tor who said he’d do a field test since lab test results wouldn’t come back in time. He’d place a fin­ger on each side of my cervix, deep to the lat­er­al fornix with pres­sure towards the ante­ri­or abdomen, while using his oth­er hand to apply exter­nal pres­sure to the pubic bones in the cen­ter of the pelvis while watch­ing for the chan­de­lier sign, as text­books call it, where­in if the patient has a post-op infec­tion she shrieks and reach­es for an imag­i­nary chan­de­lier, he said, as I shrieked while reaching.

The nurse drew blood for a white blood cell count, which the doc­tor com­plet­ed in his tiny onsite lab. He wrote a pre­scrip­tion for a broad-spec­trum antibi­ot­ic. He said: “I know you’re a sin­gle par­ent. Make child­care arrange­ments.” He explained I’d come back for anoth­er test in the morn­ing. If the count stayed the same or went up, he’d check me into a hos­pi­tal in the city or col­lege town. “If this infec­tion is resis­tant, time is not on our side.” 

I called the big-heart­ed, sar­don­ic sit­ter and asked, if need be, she could watch my daugh­ter. I called the sit­ter I’d used a few years before, JoAnn, whose moth­er had died a good death, for a sec­ond lay­er of my daughter’s safe­ty net. Or third; I was first. JoAnn hadn’t worked since her moth­er died but said to give her num­ber to the oth­er sit­ter in case the oth­er sit­ter had a con­flict. My next white blood cell count was low­er. But, the nurse said, if over the week­end I had ver­ti­go, a spike in fever, changes in vision, I’d go to the ER. On Sun­day my daugh­ter and I stood in line pick­ing up break­fast tacos, and we saw this nurse again. She put her wrist on my fore­head. “No fever. I fig­ured. You look almost peppy.”

~

Anoth­er prob­lem I didn’t fore­see was that since my sched­ule required not just day­care but, once a week, night­care, which isn’t a thing, my night­time sit­ters would be hard to find and unre­li­able because a job so inter­mit­tent is a side­line. I asked to switch this class to day­time but my super­vi­sor, due to a blind spot or preter­nat­u­ral­ly rigid man­age­r­i­al style, said no. When I made the request over his head, he changed my sched­ule to make it harder. 

Who can find a vir­tu­ous woman? Her price is beyond rubies. Proverbs 31:10. That’s about a wife, though. At first, I’d found my sit­ter named JoAnn. I worked at home when I could, and when I couldn’t, I left my daugh­ter at JoAnn’s, her house eight miles away, but I found a semi-short­cut, impass­able in wet weath­er, from JoAnn’s house to the col­lege town, and my daugh­ter was still a babe in arms, easy to car­ry. When she was one, I used Mother’s Day Out to give JoAnn time off, JoAnn’s Day Off. Mother’s Day Out was also said to be good for the child’s social­iza­tion. I still used JoAnn for night class. When my daugh­ter was two and three, I used JoAnn a few days a week and for my night class. 

JoAnn’s car­ing was a low-key mir­a­cle that last­ed until it didn’t. True, she argued about giv­ing my daugh­ter one of her med­ica­tions. It made her heart beat too fast, JoAnn felt. I took my daugh­ter back to the spe­cial­ist who said my daughter’s heart rate was fine, that “some agi­ta­tion is unavoid­able,” and “this med­ica­tion is vital.” JoAnn still said no, she wasn’t giv­ing a baby speedy med­i­cine through a plas­tic mask like a gas mask. One day a week, my daugh­ter missed a dose, which the doc­tor okayed. He said: “I take it this is the grand­ma.” JoAnn also not­ed my daughter’s food aller­gies and cooked and pureed, report­ing foods my daugh­ter loved. My daugh­ter loved JoAnn, call­ing out in baby patois: OJann! 

But after JoAnn’s moth­er died, JoAnn was bone-tired. Peo­ple get this way after a hard stretch of weeks, months, years. Not dur­ing. So for one year, the year my daugh­ter was four, before kinder­garten, which I relied on to go to work, along with the bulim­ic sit­ter and her suc­ces­sor the sar­don­ic sit­ter, I used a Bap­tist preschool, eigh­teen-miles round trip, thir­ty-six extra miles every day. For night class, I hired a grad­u­ate stu­dent who end­ed up hav­ing absen­teeism and, to replace her, an under­grad­u­ate with stel­lar ref­er­ences who one day stopped com­ing. So I called JoAnn, who fin­ished out that semes­ter, my night classes.

JoAnn said years lat­er it had been hard to watch me make plans. Trig­ger­ing, as we say now. She’d been a sin­gle moth­er. “I don’t assume child­care will fall through,” she said, “but it can.” When it did, my week stalled, bro­ken until fixed. JoAnn’s par­ent­hood hadn’t had the pre-super­vi­sion mine did, the inter­views with social work­ers and pre-adop­tion check­lists cre­at­ing false con­fi­dence, no stone unturned. I turned over stones for years.

One night dur­ing the year before kindergarten—so the year I used the Bap­tist preschool, before I fired the grad­u­ate stu­dent with absen­teeism, not a fir­ing offense yet, I’d so far decid­ed, find­ing sub­sti­tutes, ask­ing her to please not can­cel again—the phone rang, my new step­fa­ther. My moth­er was in the ICU. My expe­ri­ence with extend­ed fam­i­ly didn’t match the advice I got from the Bap­tist preschool work­ers. They weren’t my friends, as one of them, not even a super­vi­sor, said. She was a sin­gle moth­er who worked at the preschool to be near her son. “Don’t be friend­ly,” she said in a tense, puz­zling whisper.

But I’d told one child­care work­er, who’d said I looked tired, that my moth­er was in the ICU, and she’d told the oth­ers. Advice based on the advice-giver’s cir­cum­stance mate­ri­al­ized. For con­text, I recount­ed a con­densed ver­sion of my cir­cum­stance. Peo­ple said: Still! Go see her or you’ll feel ever­last­ing regret! The sit­ter I hadn’t fired—I liked her but couldn’t count on her—was close to her moth­er and told me she’d reserved cheap plane tick­ets for me, “bereave­ment fare,” which was a thing then. I just had to con­firm them.

My moth­er had been mar­ried less than a year, her third mar­riage. Her first, to my alco­holic father, had last­ed twen­ty-odd years. Her sec­ond, to an obscene­ly vio­lent man, last­ed anoth­er twen­ty years. He was vio­lent to every­one, so I’d stopped vis­it­ing out of con­cern for my safe­ty, though I remained con­cerned for hers, and, yes, I did advise her to leave him, but she nev­er did. Then he died, lucky break, and she mar­ried an appar­ent­ly pleas­ant man. When I met him and his grown chil­dren at the wed­ding, they seemed nice. Eight months lat­er I flew to see her in the ICU because I hoped not to feel regret, and she died unex­pect­ed­ly while I was on my way, while I was on a plane read­ing a book by Dave Eggers. As we planned her funer­al, her hus­band and his grown chil­dren still seemed nice. 

But I’d dithered before trav­el­ing because rac­ing to and from Ore­gon with a four-year-old sound­ed hard. This deci­sion was anoth­er fork in the road with option­al routes into the future. Who would watch my daugh­ter? The grad­u­ate stu­dent who’d so far can­celed every oth­er week wasn’t good at rou­tines, but she loved emer­gen­cies. She offered to stay overnight with my daugh­ter one night. JoAnn took a few days. Two child­care work­ers from the Bap­tist preschool, younger than me, the age of aunts, each vol­un­teered for an overnight. Peo­ple passed my daugh­ter around, dropped her off, picked her up. 

The short trip to see my moth­er in the ICU to pre­empt regret turned into ten days and nights, none of the nights with sleep for me. Even before I left, I hadn’t slept, decid­ing to stay, go, spec­u­lat­ing how my mother’s death at some far-off future point might be hard to process. The night before I trav­eled I didn’t sleep, typ­i­cal, not sleep­ing the night before trav­el, nor dur­ing, the unfa­mil­iar bed, lights, nois­es. Choos­ing a cof­fin and bur­ial clothes, writ­ing a eulo­gy, deliv­er­ing it, good man­ners by day, grief at night—my brain ran on high, mak­ing new neur­al paths to reg­is­ter that my moth­er, locus of love and regret, was dead. 

I assumed a return to my bed, my neighbor’s dusk-to-dawn yard light mak­ing famil­iar squares on my bed­room walls, would relax me. When I got home, a Bap­tist preschool work­er said, “Some­one is glad to see you!” My daughter’s face was a mix of glee and ter­ror. I put her to bed. I got into bed. I couldn’t have slept forty min­utes when she shook me awake. All night, all week, all month. Weeks into these mul­ti­ple shak­ings-awake per night, I wasn’t sleepy, just dull-wit­ted and, once I bestirred myself, robot­i­cal­ly coherent. 

A Bap­tist preschool work­er advised me to let my daugh­ter sleep in my bed, but nei­ther of us slept. I called JoAnn, who said to put a pal­let in my room, show it to my daugh­ter, and tell her if she went to bed in her room and woke she could move there only if she didn’t wake me. I went to REI in the col­lege town and bought a pal­let. A year lat­er, dur­ing kinder­garten, she was still mov­ing to the pallet—during the months I fell ill, dur­ing the lead-up to surgery, and after­ward, the vir­u­lent post-op malaise. She out­grew it, so I went to town and bought a big­ger pal­let. I’d kiss her good­night in her own room, breath­ing deep the scent of child skin, and go to bed alone. I nev­er woke until daytime’s first placid minute. She’d have slipped across the house, to the pal­let, under the quilt, to sleep.

~

I tried mov­ing the pal­let a few feet from my bed with the plan to bit-by-bit move it far­ther from my small room toward hers. But every morn­ing it was tucked back in the rec­tan­gu­lar spot near my bed. She kept grow­ing until, rolling over, she’d thump the clos­et and wake me. I explained this, and she offered to move to the hall out­side my room and sleep there on a pal­lia­tive pal­let, thin lay­er on a hard, cold floor, hard­er and cold­er in the hall.

Quit­ting the pal­let always reg­is­tered as bet­ter sleep for both of us in a hypo­thet­i­cal future but a bad night right now, tonight. So I didn’t. To be clear, pal­let-reliance wasn’t co-sleep­ing. Co-sleep­ing was when my daugh­ter slept in a cra­dle next to my bed. Co-sleep­ing was when she was too big for the cra­dle and moved to a crib in her room, and a baby mon­i­tor ampli­fied her small cries and I’d go feed her, falling asleep on her floor, my hand through the crib rail­ing. Before my daugh­ter arrived, a social work­er described both bed-shar­ing and co-sleep­ing as good for bond­ing, though not every­one gets enough sleep while bed-shar­ing, she added. Co-sleep­ing, with the baby in your room in a pla­yard, was eas­i­er. Pla­yard? I’d asked her. Pla­yard is anoth­er word for “playpen,” archa­ic now, bad con­no­ta­tions. The social work­er said, “You, if you fall in love, will want pri­va­cy.” She point­ed out that it would be tricky in a new rela­tion­ship to have sex only dur­ing school or daycare. 

When my hus­band and I first began to date—rare, thrilling, phys­i­cal encoun­ters, and con­ver­sa­tion about child­care that made encoun­ters possible—we emailed. Tex­ting wasn’t a thing yet. I most­ly nixed phone calls because, after putting my daugh­ter to bed, I had chores. He had a clean­ing ser­vice. He and his ex-wife lived near each oth­er, with shared cus­tody and dove­tailed sched­ules. When his son was a baby, they’d had a nan­ny. One phone call to the agency will replace an unsuit­able nan­ny, as when, for instance, a neigh­bor informed them their nan­ny smoked a cig­a­rette in the yard as the baby napped. This couldn’t have been a fir­ing offense for me, I’d have rea­soned, think­ing that even non­smok­ers step out­side while a baby is nap­ping. I expressed envy, then self-cas­ti­ga­tion about my pecu­liar, extem­po­rized child­care, per­fect­ed plans for­ev­er foiled, and he added that he and his ex-wife lived in a city with more options and two salaries to pay for options.

The first Sat­ur­day I drove into the city to ini­ti­ate the rare and thrilling phys­i­cal encoun­ters, I paid the big-heart­ed, sar­don­ic sit­ter, who had a daugh­ter my daughter’s age, for my daugh­ter to spend the night, but this sit­ter was still dis­turbing­ly hard to wake. So soon­er than planned, then, I was hav­ing thrilling encoun­ters fre­quent­ly and always at my house. 

I’d put my daugh­ter to bed, then go to bed with my new boyfriend, who so far seemed unob­jec­tion­able. After­ward, I’d open the door, unroll the pal­let. “My daugh­ter has sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety since I made a trip to my mother’s funer­al,” I explained, leav­ing out that years had passed. One night as I unrolled the pal­let, he said he was afraid of step­ping on her when he got up in the night. I told him pal­let-reliance was like a tide-you-over sleep­ing pill, easy to start and hell­ish to stop. I laughed wild­ly as I some­times did when a moth­er in the vil­lage would cri­tique my child maybe in order to check off a devel­op­men­tal mile­stone for hers, say­ing, “she’s not walk­ing!?” or “don’t tell me she still naps!?” 

He asked for my per­mis­sion to pro­pose a plan. The next morn­ing he got down on one knee and held my daughter’s hand. “Is there a toy you real­ly want?” For months she’d asked for an expen­sive pre­tend-CD play­er that played pre­tend-CDs that came with it, four tin­ny, shouty children’s songs. I object­ed. She had a real CD play­er with real CDs, I said. He shook his head no to me. To her, he said, “If you try to sleep one night in your room, I’ll buy it.” She slept all night in her room the first try. She liked this bet­ter, she said in the morn­ing, bet­ter than the floor. My boyfriend and I sipped cof­fee. My daugh­ter put a pre­tend-CD in a plas­tic box, as a song about a muf­fin man flood­ed the kitchen. 

~

What the pre-adop­tion check­list missed:

Many single parents have extended family or something like it.
A job with vaunted “flextime” means improvised childcare.
A village is a childcare desert.
You can get so reliant on a schedule planned by the day, the hour, the minute, 
that a small tweak derails you, and you’re bone-tired after, not during. 

Post-adop­tion, your adult daugh­ter won’t care one whit about your ret­ro­spec­tive doubts, your belat­ed clar­i­ty as you real­ize years lat­er that the entire plan, prechecked, checked and dou­blechecked, was flawed, that every week wob­bled on the verge of col­lapse like a house you’d built your­self out of odds and ends creak­ing and shak­ing and shud­der­ing at every unex­pect­ed gust. She’ll blink and say, “That’s not how I remem­ber it at all.” And describe instead a gar­den you once plant­ed, tiny car­rots she pulled out too soon; how she fol­lowed you with a toy vac­u­um when you used the big one; some­thing she calls Wine and Pop­si­cle Night; the tree­house you built for her birth­day a serene porch high, high in branches. 

~

Every week­day except night-class day, I’d wait in my car for my daughter’s school bus and talk by phone to Aunt Cindy in Flori­da, her voice via the cell phone tow­er waves like the voice of a non­in­ter­ven­tion­ist god, con­sol­ing but too far-off for mate­r­i­al help. JoAnn’s help was prac­ti­cal and near­by. Twen­ty years lat­er, which is to say last week, she sent me this unex­pect­ed mes­sage by way of her boyfriend’s social media “chat”:

Debra, this is OJann. I had a dream at dawn about our girl. She lay in my arms. I enjoyed her so much, her sweet face. How pre­cious she was to hold those years ago. When I had this same dream 5 years ago, I ran into her in a restau­rant with her friends when I had an errand in the city that day! I’m not going out today so that won’t repeat, but she is in my heart.

Five years ear­li­er my daugh­ter had come home from a restau­rant near her high school where she’d gone to eat. She’d heard JoAnn call­ing her name. They’d hugged hel­lo, smiling. 

After I got mar­ried and my daugh­ter and I moved to the city, my com­mute to work was long but no longer spi­ral­ing or ever sub­ject to change as it had been in the vil­lage, new byways always added, back when I’d be at work in mid­day and my body, con­di­tioned to mapped blocks of time, shift­ed into pal­pa­ble high-alert before I even saw the clock telling me that Mother’s Day Out or the Bap­tist preschool or the ele­men­tary school was end­ing soon. I’d wrap up my class or meet­ing, think­ing: get in the car and dri­ve. On night-class day, I’d think: sit­ter, arrive! In the city, my hus­band picked up my daugh­ter at onsite after­school care. He made din­ner, then super­vised home­work, get­ting harder. 

A way­ward sit­ter replaced. An ill­ness cor­rect­ly diag­nosed. When my moth­er died, a dis­tress­ing gap in child­care filled as I nego­ti­at­ed tan­gled sched­ules, con­flict­ing phone mes­sages. I strate­gized. I made snap deci­sions about the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the care and car­ing on offer. Stop­gap expe­di­en­cy assem­bled out of short­ages isn’t everyone’s expe­ri­ence. It was mine. 

When the sev­en­teen-year-old sit­ter one after­noon left my daugh­ter alone on a hill, my neigh­bor the oth­er neigh­bors called Crab­by Old Man saw her and drove her back to school, and the prin­ci­pal called me to come quick­ly. I knocked on this neighbor’s door to thank him, and he said: “All on your own then?” I had sit­ters, I said. A few days lat­er as I wait­ed for her bus, he came out­side and said he wished for my sake I was mar­ried so I’d have help. Then he smiled and said: “I guess you’ve thought of that.” I hadn’t. Despite my pen­chant for plan­ning to fore­stall all future glitch­es, I’d nev­er thought about a help­ful hus­band because I couldn’t prob­lem-solve one into being, nor a life in which I wouldn’t be so tired, a life in which more peo­ple than me would love my daugh­ter all day and all night, no strings attached, no caveats, would bound­less­ly and unlim­it­ed­ly love her as my hus­band does now. I was enough, timetabled, adap­tive, assess­ing late-break­ing threats, mak­ing a plan, my relief surg­ing as reward when I cleared hur­dles. I’d have con­tin­ued to be. But future wind­falls are as unex­pect­ed as future pit­falls. I got lucky and didn’t have to be.

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I began to write this essay about the dearth of child­care in a small, rur­al town, I knew its struc­ture wouldn’t be nar­ra­tive. The sto­ry of my life as a sin­gle moth­er was often a sto­ry of fused emer­gen­cies. Even when I used to write fic­tion, I felt out of patience with the idea that causal­i­ty and lin­ear time explain every­thing. I was walk­ing on trails in woods one day, feel­ing lost, and I under­stood that this essay would be about being lost in a zone not ade­quate­ly mapped by cal­en­dars and clocks. While writ­ing, I also read an arti­cle about game theory—about how the gamer’s risk-tak­ing is reward­ed and perpetuated—and I under­stood why, back when I was arrang­ing my extem­po­rized and some­times sub­stan­dard child­care, I was inter­mit­tent­ly and mys­te­ri­ous­ly elat­ed, adren­a­line rush. 

 

Debra Mon­roe is the author of sev­en books, includ­ing It Takes a Wor­ried Woman: Essays (forth­com­ing from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press, 2022) in which this essay will appear. She has also writ­ten two sto­ry col­lec­tions, The Source of Trou­ble (Simon & Schus­ter, 1990) and A Wild, Cold State (Simon & Schus­ter, 1995); two nov­els, New­fan­gled (Simon & Schus­ter, 1998) and Sham­bles (SMU Press, 2004); and two mem­oirs, On the Out­skirts of Nor­mal (The Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press, 2010) and My Unsen­ti­men­tal Edu­ca­tion (The Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia Press, 2015). She is the edi­tor of the anthol­o­gy Con­tem­po­rary Cre­ative Non­fic­tion. Her essays have appeared in many venues, includ­ing Lon­greads, The South­ern Review, The New York Times, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar, Guer­ni­ca, and The Rum­pus.

Nonfiction / Jane Hertenstein

:: Cycle & Circumstances ::

A hybrid mem­oir about rid­ing from the top to the bot­tom of the UK 

 When I was fif­teen, my moth­er worked at the local hard­ware store where she got a dis­count. That’s where I bought my Huffy Scout—I actu­al­ly called it Scout (after the char­ac­ter in To Kill a Mock­ing­bird). I would ride well beyond Cen­ter­ville into the out­skirts of Day­ton and then beyond that. One time I woke ear­ly and left the house. By noon I was in Indiana. 

On the way back I remem­ber get­ting as far as Miamis­burg (see: Stu­pid Kids). I’d call Mom from a pay­phone (remem­ber those?) and beg her to have Dad come pick me up. It got to be a run­ning routine—me rid­ing too far and need­ing a ride home. Often when I called, Mom would be dis­mayed, “I thought you were upstairs in bed!” 

Lat­er she got used to my calls and would sim­ply ask, 

“Where are you now?” 

 

~

 

 

Stu­pid Kids 

Stuff you don’t think about when you’re fif­teen and decide to go for a ride: 

Sun­screen, food, water, mon­ey, sun­glass­es, no cell­phone because they haven’t been invent­ed yet, no maps or GPS, no spare inner tubes or patch kit, or tools, or any way to fix anything 

 

~

 

 

Wak­ing up ear­ly before the dust of night has blown off. There is a dis­tant pale light throb­bing on the hori­zon. Birds are atwit­ter. The dew-grass soaks my sneak­ers as I pull open the garage door and grab my bike lean­ing against the wall. 

Scout is mus­tard yel­low with brown let­ter­ing and accents. A Huffy 10-speed. Just the idea that I can go any­where stirs my blood. 

There is nev­er any plan. I’ll be home before lunch, I think, before any­one even knows I’m gone—or cares. 

The roads are emp­ty, white lines mark the black asphalt sur­face. Ahead of me a rib­bon that I ride, col­lect­ing speed to make it up the next swell. Small white but­ter­flies flit above stalks of corn­flow­ers, fields of gold­en­rod, tiger lilies blow in the wind grow­ing in a ditch by the road­way, a fox skit­ters into a hole in a stone wall, turn­ing a cor­ner on a dew drenched morn­ing and com­ing across a deer, star­tled, it darts into the riv­er. Slow­ly the sun climbs. 

After a while I am hot and thirsty and go faster in order to fan myself. A dog chas­es after me, and I stand up on the ped­als and crank as hard as I can. He runs in front of my wheel and I almost hit him, only man­ag­ing to slow down. His teeth nip at my heels. I escape and mean­while for­get how hun­gry I am. 

Grasshop­pers thud me in the fore­head, leav­ing a tobac­co-stain pee. I’m not wear­ing a hel­met. It’s not a thing yet. I count tele­phone poles, low-hang­ing wires strung like a lady’s neck­lace. Glass insu­la­tors stud the top of the cross bar, glis­ten­ing like gem­stones as the sun bears down. 

I stop, sud­den­ly feel­ing light-head­ed. My breath is ragged and dense with humid­i­ty and exhaus­tion. I reck­on I’ve been rid­ing for four or five hours. At a small gro­cery store I ask about a water foun­tain and drink long and hard before get­ting back on my steed. If I can get as far as Miamis­burg where Dad works at Monarch Mar­ket­ing where they make labels, then I can wait until he’s done and hitch a ride home with him. 

At home I lie on the couch and drink a Coke. Lat­er, I’ll eat sup­per and go to bed, to wake up ear­ly to ride my bike. 

 

~

 

 

I might have been fif­teen or six­teen. I was on my bike rid­ing around in the coun­try on an asphalt road in the mid­dle of nowhere when a car pulled up at a T‑intersection beside me. It was one of those big-boat ’70s cars, the dri­ver had long Lynyrd Skynyrd hair. “Hey!” he called me over. 

And of course I leaned in the open win­dow to see what he wanted. 

He asked me direc­tions, said a street name that I didn’t rec­og­nize. In his lap he fin­gered what looked vague­ly like an ice cream cone, puls­ing with veiny red sprinkles. 

Sud­den­ly dread washed over me. I sped away with­out look­ing back. When I got home I nev­er once thought about shar­ing this inci­dent with my moth­er. I only wished I could tear my eyes out. 

What am I sup­posed to do now? I had thought. Too many girls have this same story.

 

~

 

 

My mom could be arbi­trary. I nev­er knew which Mom I was going to get. The nice one who would promise me any­thing or the one who would sud­den­ly take it all back. Who might one day sign a per­mis­sion slip for camp and the next day rip it up. She was a depres­sive, the daugh­ter of a depres­sive. When things got bad, real­ly bad, she’d go off to the “hos­pi­tal” for a few months of “rest.” The worst was the shock treat­ments. One Christ­mas she came home for a vis­it and pre­sent­ed me and my sis­ter with gifts made dur­ing occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­py. I opened a box con­tain­ing a leather bracelet embossed with my name. Except she had spelled Jane as Jayne. I con­sid­ered point­ing this out, but thought bet­ter. I kept it at the back of my clos­et for years, even­tu­al­ly leav­ing it when I moved out. 

As a kid you have no pow­er. No mon­ey. No con­trol. I was always at the whim of her will. The trick was not to want. To give off the air of what­ev­er. But this was hard; invari­ably I’d show my hand and blow it. 

Cycling became a cop­ing mech­a­nism. Hills. Wind. I couldn’t make them go away, but I could tack­le prob­lems one by one. All I had to do was pedal. 

Rid­ing nar­rowed life down into the now. To the present moment. The wind in my face, tiger lilies wav­ing at me as I passed, the rib­bon of asphalt ris­ing up to meet me, but­ter­flies and bees, the thirst, the sun, the poet­ry of motion. 

Bicy­cling saved me. 

 

~

 

 

When I was a kid back in Ohio, I saw an adver­tise­ment for a talk at the library. A cou­ple had just rid­den their bikes from Alas­ka to the south­ern tip of Argenti­na, a Hemis­tour. Now they were propos­ing just in time for the country’s Bicen­ten­ni­al, Bikecen­ten­ni­al, an event intend­ed to get peo­ple on their bikes for a ride across the coun­try, from Asto­ria, Ore­gon, to York­town, Virginia. 

Bike­cen­ten­ni­al appealed to my vagabond spir­it. I sat spell­bound lis­ten­ing to Dan and Lys Bur­den describe their project. Folks would ride back roads, stay overnight in camp­grounds, city parks, church base­ments, com­mu­ni­ty cen­ters; they’d see the coun­try close-hand from the sad­dle; they’d expe­ri­ence weath­er and the out­pour­ing of hos­pi­tal­i­ty. They’d make friends and come home with stories. 

Count me in! Except I was fif­teen years old and would nev­er be able to get my par­ents on board with my plan. 

But it did plant a seed in my heart and mind—that some­day I would strap a sleep­ing bag onto the back of my bike and ride and ride until tired. I’d sleep and eat beside the road. I’d be free. 

 

~

 

 

At age 58 I had come to a point of reck­on­ing, or what some peo­ple call the buck­et list. 

When a per­son is old but not too old. When on the time­line of life they are more than halfway, far from the begin­ning, clos­er to the end. When the tolling of bells reminds you of mor­tal­i­ty, that death will one day come for thee. 

It is a time of assess­ment, to review regrets and add up cher­ished moments. What is it you did, and what is it you didn’t do? 

Mary Oliv­er, in her poem “The Sum­mer Day,” details the minu­ti­ae of the nat­ur­al world revolv­ing around her before zoom­ing out. The big­ger pic­ture requires us to take stock. She ends the poem with a ques­tion:   

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and pre­cious life? 

 

~

 

 

Was it midlife malaise? Grief from los­ing my par­ents? The feel­ing that I was on the cusp of los­ing my mar­riage?  

St. Antho­ny is the patron saint of lost items / lost peo­ple. He is said to have suf­fered from despair. In this way I think we can all relate to him, from one wound­ed heart to anoth­er.  He was told that any phys­i­cal task done in the prop­er spir­it would bring him deliverance. 

Seek­ing solace, I did what I’d always done in the past—I got on my bike. I would ped­al my way into sal­va­tion, ride to rid myself of the awful­ness inside of me. 

I bought a tick­et to England. 

 

~

 

 

So sigh­ing for new worlds to con­quer, I jumped into a JOGLE. I decid­ed I would ride my bike from John O’Groats in Scot­land to Land’s End in Cornwall—the length of the UK. 

Just to put this into per­spec­tive: it would be a jour­ney of 1,100 miles. 

Just to put this into per­spec­tive: most peo­ple who attempt a JOGLE or LEJOG (if going in the oppo­site direc­tion, south to north) are fit. I, on the oth­er hand, was not fit but a frumpy post-menopausal woman in her late fifties. 

Just to put this into per­spec­tive: I had no idea what I was get­ting into. 

I assumed Eng­land would be one great, big gar­den path with rows of cute thatch-roof cot­tages. I had no idea that the Scot­tish High­lands was lit­er­al. Not only would I have to tra­verse the High­lands but sev­er­al oth­er small­er ranges. The Lake Dis­trict was not only lakes but moun­tains, includ­ing the high­est peak in England. 

I didn’t have the right bike or the right gear. 

Per­haps it was bet­ter that I didn’t under­stand. Most ratio­nal peo­ple would have turned back, stayed on the lake­front path, or nev­er left the com­fort of their couch. 

 

~

 

 

I had to remind myself I was that girl who dared to dream, to risk. Who start­ed off ear­ly in the morn­ing with only a small ruck­sack slung over her back. Mus­cle mem­o­ry recalled that gyp­sy spir­it. Deep beneath my grey hair were blonde roots that turned white under the hot sum­mer sun.   

I just need­ed to sum­mon her back, call her forth. 

I had to believe it was possible. 

 

~

 

 

What was I doing? I asked myself this ques­tion a thou­sand times. 

What was I doing all alone in the far-flung High­lands on a bike? This was crazy. Stu­pid. I wasn’t Super­woman. I couldn’t believe what I had got­ten myself into. And, why? 

I ful­ly thought after sep­a­rat­ing from my hus­band that we would be able to begin again. We were smart, we both loved to read, we were on the same page polit­i­cal­ly, we loved our daugh­ter, now grown and out of the house. We had all the tools to fix what­ev­er was bro­ken. But, maybe that was the prob­lem: we didn’t know how bro­ken we were. 

I ped­aled in the mist, crying. 

                    Going down a road hoping to end up somewhere, to be found,  
 
                              unsad

 

 

~

 

It can­not be over­stat­ed, I got lost. A lot.

 

~

 

Get­ting lost is all about per­cep­tions. You start with a cer­tain frame­work and fig­ure out ref­er­ence points. With­out know­ing where I was, I couldn’t even begin to mea­sure how far off route I’d wandered. 

The same could be said of my mar­riage. I had no idea how far off the mark I was or where to go next. 

On my JOGLE I’d zigzag, careen from one cross­roads to anoth­er veer­ing toward my even­tu­al goal. 

In my mar­riage I moved from blun­der to blun­der, hop­ing to get some­where, together. 

I lacked a con­text; I assumed too much, and once I under­stood, I knew a course cor­rec­tion would cost in time and effort. I was far from where I want­ed to be. 

 

~

 

 

Shop­keep­ers, once they saw that I was by myself, would exclaim: You’re all alone!  

Yes. I was con­stant­ly aware that I was a stranger in a strange land. One time I stopped at a cafe. I couldn’t fig­ure out how to open the door. I could see they were open. Final­ly the counter per­son came out and let me in. I was pulling instead of push­ing. While sit­ting there eat­ing the best soup ever I shed a few tears. Alone. By myself. 

 

~

 

 

After fin­ish­ing my JOGLE, cycling back to Penzance—it hit me: I’d reached my goal after nine­teen days, 1,100 miles of wind, rain, round-abouts, get­ting lost, sting­ing net­tles, thigh-burn­ing climbs, and bro­ken spokes. I began to cry. 

I didn’t know I pos­sessed such endurance; I had no idea I was this strong. I deserved a pat on the back, or at least a cream tea. I prac­ti­cal­ly flew back to the hos­tel, pushed along this time by the wind. 

 

~

 

 

I sat in a tea room in late after­noon, my table fac­ing a win­dow look­ing out upon the street. I watched peo­ple flood past, their faces down­turned, hur­ry­ing to escape the rain now com­ing down. I’d plunged head­long, thrown cau­tion to the wind, and gone to Eng­land to cycle the coun­try top to bot­tom, and now I was done. What would I do next? My life, my future seemed to waver before me like heat off a hot high­way. I glimpsed a head­line in a news­pa­per left on an adjoin­ing table. Brad and Angeli­na had separated. 

I con­tem­plat­ed my mar­riage. I vowed I would return and tack­le this prob­lem head-on. I’d pow­er through it. I’d set up coun­sel­ing ses­sions. Ener­gized, I made lists. I was a new woman. 

 

~

 

 

My hus­band agreed to pick me up at the air­port. I texted him when I land­ed in Cana­da for a trans­fer. “In North Amer­i­ca!”  

At the Chica­go air­port I wait­ed with my bike box. And wait­ed. And wait­ed. I cart­ed it up and down the esca­la­tor, the ele­va­tor, bang­ing it against clos­ing doors think­ing I might be on the wrong floor. By this time I’d been awake and in trav­el mode for eigh­teen hours. 

Suf­fice it to say nei­ther of us was in a wel­com­ing mood when we met up. The van ride into the city was filled with awk­ward silence and the hum of traffic. 

Some­time after this he informed me that he had tak­en off his wed­ding ring. 

 

~

 

 

My heart was broken. 

At writer’s con­fer­ences I’d sit invis­i­ble. The mid­dle-aged woman. There was noth­ing remark­able about me. My once blonde hair had turned the col­or of cold shrimp. 

I had no plat­form. I wasn’t on Twit­ter or Instagram. 

Sell­ing books at a book fair, sit­ting behind a table with peo­ple stream­ing by, wait­ing for some­one to final­ly buy my book, I’d for­get I’d done amaz­ing things. I’d have to remind myself that I had a secret pow­er. It was under my clothes. 

                    Tan lines, left by my bike shorts.

 

 

~

 

 

After my divorce I went to New York City to see a friend.  

When Elanor sug­gest­ed we rent Citi Bikes, I hes­i­tat­ed. “C’mon,” she berat­ed me, “you ride your bike all over the world.” 

An exag­ger­a­tion. Though since my JOGLE I’d man­aged a few oth­er trips—one of which took me from Ams­ter­dam along the North Sea and over the Tele­mark Moun­tains in Norway. 

She talked me into it. We jerked the ungain­ly bikes out of iron racks and set off. In busy Brook­lyn traf­fic, my over­sized han­dle­bars jig­gled as I swerved to stay in a bike lane, jug­gling my phone and bag that kept slip­ping out of the loose bungee at the front of the bike. 

At first all I could see was the pot­holes, the cars dri­ving way too close, the trash in the streets. But then, some­thing mag­i­cal hap­pened. I began to forget. 

Soon I was a tourist fly­ing around a big city, see­ing things for the first time. The Ortho­dox Jews push­ing baby bug­gies, dog walk­ers in the new park along the East Riv­er, old men play­ing chess out­side a bar. They waved at us. 

It was weird, peo­ple were stop­ping and smil­ing. Para­noid, I checked to see if my under­wear was show­ing. I was rid­ing in a skirt and pulled at the hem that kept blow­ing up. I tucked my tank top in at the back. 

Slow­ly I came to real­ize we were sum­mer girls. We rep­re­sent­ed free­dom. We had tak­en a step away from the every­day rou­tine and were buzzing around hav­ing fun.   

Life at its best and happiest.

 

~

 

 

These days I dream more and more of riding my bike.  
 
In my mind I ride a thousand roads.  
 
After years, the light has changed, yet still I see,  
                    up around the next curve—a wider world! 
 
          So I keep going.

 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Fragili­ty. That was the theme of the year 2020. Work­ing as a full-time vol­un­teer at a home­less shel­ter, I encoun­tered many peo­ple who con­tract­ed COVID and a few who died from the virus. I got to see first­hand how frag­ile life is—especially for those liv­ing on the mar­gins. As a woman, I’m used to being invis­i­ble, but these past few years have felt like a weight. Under the pan­dem­ic I real­ized I had very lit­tle agency in my life; thus, when lock­down lift­ed in Illi­nois at the end of May, I jumped on my bicy­cle and rode 2,400 miles to the Pacif­ic Ocean, Chica­go to Sea­side, OR, fol­low­ing an approx­i­ma­tion of the Lewis & Clark Trail. 

I had plen­ty of time to think in the 45 days it took me to com­plete the trek. I decid­ed, per the ques­tion put forth in the poem “The Sum­mer Day” by Mary Oliv­er, that I need­ed to live my one wild and pre­cious life, start­ing by tak­ing risks. 

In my piece “Cycle & Cir­cum­stances,” I write about the ori­gins of my cycling passion—and how I believe cycling saved me from a chaot­ic child­hood. Fol­low­ing up on that, in 2016 I rode the length of the UK from John O’Groats to Lands’ End in an effort to make sense of the breakup of my mar­riage. I need­ed to find once again a place of well-being—the fact that I turned my life upside down to do it is doc­u­ment­ed in the piece. 

 

 

Jane Herten­stein is the author of over 90 pub­lished sto­ries both macro and micro: fic­tion, cre­ative non­fic­tion, and blurred genre. In addi­tion she has pub­lished a YA nov­el, Beyond Par­adise (Harper­Collins, 1999), and a non-fic­tion project, Orphan Girl: The Mem­oir of a Chica­go Bag Lady (Cor­ner­stone Press, 1998), which gar­nered nation­al reviews. Jane is the recip­i­ent of a grant from the Illi­nois Arts Coun­cil. Her lat­est book is Cloud of Wit­ness­es (2018) from Gold­en Alley Press. She teach­es a work­shop on flash mem­oir and can be found blog­ging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com.  

Nonfiction / Amie Whittemore 

:: Ten Scenes of Not Being in Love ::

1. Sit­ting on the front porch of a dive bar in Nashville with a man on our first Tin­der date (he drank rail whisky on the rocks; I nursed a local IPA), two very drunk women approached us. Hav­ing heard our dis­cus­sion about poet­ry, they asked to buy copies of my book, they asked to bum cig­a­rettes from the man. I walked back to the grav­el park­ing lot and pulled two copies from my trunk, sign­ing them in the dark, amid the cig­a­rette smoke, on the sour-smelling porch. 

Two years lat­er, one of those women found me on Insta­gram and, since it’s a pan­dem­ic, told me she paint­ed lines from one of my poems on her win­dow. That man? We went out twice more. He kissed like salt­wa­ter, pale and thirsty. Not my thirst. Some­times we wish each oth­er hap­py birthday. 

2. In col­lege my friends and I were very into Björk, so we went to the art the­ater twen­ty miles away to watch Dancer in the Dark. The haunt­ing, trag­ic film filled me with rest­less ener­gy, as if the spring air had stuffed me with lilac buds, as if the night had thread­ed its wings through my ribs. I walked past my favorite cof­fee shop and a man I bare­ly knew called out to me to join him and his friends. It was the kind of night where you say yes to strange things, so I said yes. 

He and I took a long walk around cam­pus, end­ing at his effi­cien­cy on the oth­er side of town. We drank cheap red wine, lis­ten­ing to Mazzy Star, and he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes. 

In those days, I wore my hair in twisty buns, like Björk, like hum­ming­bird nests, held togeth­er by bob­by pins. They fell around us on the bed like met­al rain. After a while, his toothy kiss­es tired me out. It’s late, I whis­pered, his head pil­lowed on my chest, and he offered to dri­ve me home. 

Home, in the bath­room mir­ror, I saw he’d left bruis­es on my neck, my breasts: lilacs unclench­ing their watery vio­lets. I ran into him once more, weeks lat­er, between class­es. He said he still found bob­by pins in his bed. 

3. The night after yet anoth­er Tin­der date, I dreamt my date and I were rid­ing in a self-dri­ving car; the dream turned lucid and I made the car fly, told him we could do any­thing. I woke ecsta­t­ic and texted him in the morn­ing. I was in bed with the Sun­day Times, my cats. It was June, the air balmy with promis­es. Some­times that sum­mer, he’d bite my thigh and leave such bril­liant flow­ers there, blue and crum­pled. Some­times his kiss­es were black holes I didn’t want to leave. He talked and talked and nev­er asked me any­thing. The last time I saw him I left a peri­od stain on his sheets and felt embar­rassed though I had warned him I had a body. I had a body I could bare­ly control. 

4. My first girl­friend asked me if it was impor­tant for both part­ners to orgasm and that’s how I learned I wasn’t giv­ing her orgasms. This made me try hard­er, though it also made me wilt and turn toward the blue light that streams from TVs left on in emp­ty liv­ing rooms overnight. 

My sec­ond girl­friend called our sex-life “cli­torif­ic” at a sex toy par­ty. I blushed. I still feel like some­one who doesn’t know how to give any­one orgasms. 

5. At his cousin’s wed­ding, my hus­band and I were recov­er­ing from one of our—I wouldn’t call them fights. It was less that we fought and more that we retreat­ed, like waves at low tide. Still, the moon swung us back again and again; we too often found our­selves on famil­iar beach­es, exhaust­ed and hurt. We kept touch­ing the parts of the oth­er person’s body where the bruis­es bloomed, crum­pled blue flowers. 

The priest didn’t men­tion the rip­tide of mar­riage. Only that the bride and groom had found “not the per­son they could live with, but the per­son they couldn’t live without.” 

For weeks, my hus­band and I chewed on that phrase, spat it out like gris­tle. The tide turned again. I have lived with­out him for as long as I lived with him: six years. 

6. The woman I was dat­ing invit­ed me to join her and two vis­it­ing friends for a Nashville bar crawl. Their names, occu­pa­tions, the way they wore their hair: unim­por­tant. They were a straight cou­ple and the woman loved Anne of Green Gables as much as I did. We talked about Anne on the roof, Anne in the woods, Ril­la by the light­house in her green dress, poor, doomed Wal­ter. The woman I was dat­ing and the vis­it­ing man looked at each oth­er, bemused out­siders to an unfath­omable intimacy. 

Lat­er, at the woman’s home, we kissed on her bed as she tried to talk me into spend­ing the night for the first time. Her friends in the next room, play­ing with her dog. Some­thing blue haunt­ed her—I imag­ined a bro­ken kite caught in her ribs. I want­ed to go home, to my cats, to my bed. What she didn’t know then is I had learned how not to feel respon­si­ble for the sad things I found in people’s chests—torn kites, wilt­ed bou­quets. Keys to nowhere. 

7. Tak­ing free yoga class­es in a ware­house in Port­land before Port­land was Port­land, I met a white woman named Saige. She had short black hair and two per­fect cir­cle tat­toos on her inner wrists. One cir­cle had a frog inside it, the oth­er some­thing else (a moth?). I was not good at talk­ing to peo­ple I desired then, nor am I now, but some­how I invit­ed her over so I could teach her to knit. And some­how I end­ed up at her house one evening, for sup­per, where I learned she and her room­mates were elim­i­nat­ing processed sug­ar from their diets. I thought this was stu­pid (this was before sug­ar-free diets were trendy) and I led them through a med­i­ta­tion my first yoga teacher taught me. It involves a for­est, a lake, a bear. A key, a throat with a stone lodged in it, if you’re me. 

We lost track of each oth­er; I moved away. Return­ing for a vis­it two years lat­er, a friend and I saw her at the food co-op. I had to look at her wrists to rec­og­nize her. 

In the park­ing lot after­wards, my friend said, damn that girl likes you, and it felt like a drought-thick after­noon, where it feels like it’ll rain but it doesn’t.  

8.  My first boyfriend was 19; I was 14. Some­times we sat on the couch in his par­ents’ base­ment and took turns run­ning our fin­gers through the other’s hair. Some­times he drew sketch­es of my hands or turned us into car­toons. After he kissed me for the first time, my first kiss, which was wet­ter and fuller than I expect­ed, he told me he loved me and I said it back not know­ing if I meant it, which is the same as know­ing I didn’t. But I did feel pow­er­ful and wor­thy when he showed me the blue and bro­ken toys he kept in his chest, and I held them care­ful­ly as if doing so could mend them. I thrilled know­ing no mat­ter how he touched me he could nev­er touch the stone in my throat, the one that hadn’t learned how to sing yet. 

9. Some peo­ple want your whole hand inside them. Your whole hand. As if you could cup their swal­low-nest heart, the mud and weeds of it. As if then noth­ing would be empty. 

I don’t want anyone’s whole hand inside me. I don’t want to put my whole hand inside any­one else. 

10. Two days before the pan­dem­ic shut every­thing down, I went on a first date with a woman. We vis­it­ed the Frist Art Muse­um, where an exhib­it inspired by the Voy­ager Gold­en Record was on dis­play. Images and sounds were pressed onto the record for the aliens so they could under­stand what it is to be a human on earth, the blue and salt of it. The music qui­et­ly played, the images flick­ered in a dark room. I love the gold­en record and the woman let me go on and on about it. 

Over din­ner, she asked ques­tions. Over din­ner, I hand­ed her a piece of the gray stone I car­ry inside, and she hand­ed me a cloth fox in need of mending. 

After din­ner, we walked in ner­vous time-stretch­ing cir­cles until we passed our cars twice and had to admit the date had end­ed. She gave me a suc­cu­lent. We hugged. We pulled away from each oth­er, the desire to kiss lin­ger­ing in the air like the promise of rain. I thought about pulling her toward me, mak­ing it rain. I thought there would be more time. 

She ghost­ed, or per­haps more apt­ly, the pandemic’s thick grav­i­ty kept her far from my shores. I lis­tened to the songs the aliens might be lis­ten­ing to for days. Some­times I look at her paint­ings on Insta­gram and her palette echoes some­thing inside me—the lilac and blue of them, the green spring of them. The row­dy, man­ic pink. Some­thing bright inside of me call­ing out, remind­ing me of what I want.

From the writer

:: Account ::

At the start of quar­an­tine, I found myself feel­ing both lone­ly and with more time than I usu­al­ly have. I often think about writ­ing cre­ative non­fic­tion but get intim­i­dat­ed by the scope of it; as a poet, I feel much more com­fort­able work­ing with a few hun­dred words rather than over a thou­sand. This means I often have to trick myself into writ­ing a per­son­al essay, usu­al­ly by mak­ing it as much like a poem as possible. 

I have read many love­ly vignette-dri­ven essays by writ­ers (who are also often poets) and have long felt the form might get me over my fear of cre­ative non­fic­tion. Works like The Cry­ing Book by Heather Chris­tle and Julia Cohen’s beau­ti­ful lyric essay “Genius­es of Love: To be held at arm’s length is not to be held at all” served both as maps and light­hous­es for me—offering both direc­tion and assurance. 

I also, in my quar­an­tine lone­li­ness, found myself think­ing about past roman­tic encoun­ters, how some of them held a lot of emo­tion­al heat but were not actu­al­ly moments of love. The moments cat­a­logued here all occur on love’s peripheries—outside it, after it, before it, along­side it. Through writ­ing this essay I have found that these bound­ary waters have taught me some­thing about how and why I love, what fac­tors can lead me into love’s strong cur­rents or nudge me back to shore. 

 

Amie Whit­te­more is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tion Glass Har­vest (Autumn House Press, 2016). She is the 2020 Poet Lau­re­ate of Murfrees­boro, Ten­nessee, and an Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Lau­re­ate Fel­low. Her poems have won mul­ti­ple awards, includ­ing a Dorothy Sar­gent Rosen­berg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Get­tys­burg Review, Nashville Review, Smar­tish Pace, Pleiades, and else­where. She is the reviews edi­tor for South­ern Indi­ana Review and teach­es Eng­lish at Mid­dle Ten­nessee State University. 

Nonfiction / Vanessa Couto Johnson

 

:: my powerlifted Body ::

In youth, there were times when I want­ed to occu­py no space whatsoever. 

When I want­ed to just be a mind. 

*

There are var­i­ous rea­sons to not want to be vis­i­ble to the world / there are var­i­ous ways the world tells us not to be vis­i­ble or fear being vis­i­ble, espe­cial­ly as a woman. 

[If I am vis­i­ble, what am I vul­ner­a­ble to, what am I val­ued by, how do I con­trol my cur­ren­cy and presence.] 

*

Lift­ing has helped me accept that I am a phys­i­cal being. Not only accept but also celebrate. 

When I hear oth­er women’s pow­er­lift­ing ori­gin sto­ries, so often they are tales of recla­ma­tion of the body. The lift­ing help­ing them find and val­ue themselves. 

* 

I am not plan­ning on build­ing a body inside of mine. [Thrust of existence.] 

So, I build the one I have. 

I want this body to be able to do for me in old age: that is the longest-term goal. That the bones be strong and that I can still brute about. If some­thing doesn’t get me (acci­dent, pow­er­ful ill­ness), my genet­ic test­ing has sug­gest­ed a like­li­hood of reach­ing cen­te­nar­i­an state (longevi­ty being some­thing observed among my ances­tors as well). Not that I’m expect­ing to be dead­lift­ing 500 lb. at 80 years old and beyond, but I’d hope to still be able to do 250 lb. at least. That is pos­si­ble. Hel­lo to my 80-year-old self, if she reads this. 

When I see a body low on mus­cle, I won­der-wor­ry for the future of that per­son. It’s not my busi­ness. It’s some­thing I try not to think about. 

But I do look at bod­ies and think: those fin­gers almost at knees—would be a good dead­lifter. And so on. 

Par­don this all—I do believe peo­ple should do what­ev­er they want with their bodies. 

But yes. It’s the heart that dri­ves the ath­lete. The want. 

* 

In terms of lift­ing in a men­stru­at­ing body, I’m weak­est in the week before men­stru­a­tion (sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly researched stuff, this is, and I’m say­ing it’s indeed my expe­ri­ence). I’m then strongest dur­ing menstruation. 

That said, I wouldn’t want to com­pete dur­ing men­stru­a­tion (an addi­tion­al chore to deal with), and that hasn’t coin­cid­ed for me at the time of writ­ing this. 

* 

I’ve won­dered at times what sort of pow­er­lift­ing num­bers I’d be putting up if I start­ed younger (teens or ear­ly 20s rather than mid/late 20s). 

Or if I were a man. But I don’t think of that one much, because that wouldn’t be the body for me, even if it is an (per­haps) eas­i­er one to get stronger. 

I have thought of how, as a trained woman, I should prob­a­bly have as much (if not a bit more) mus­cu­lar­i­ty as an untrained man has, and then on top of that the body fat lev­el I need as a healthy woman, there­fore that I should weigh more than the aver­age untrained man at around my height. That’s def­i­nite­ly not total­ly sci­en­tif­ic though. But it is a part of the think­ing that made me not fuss about the num­ber on the scale to be low. 

The truth is that every body is a unique body. Even ones with sur­face lev­el sim­i­lar­i­ties will have dif­fer­ent attach­ments onto the bone, dif­fer­ent joint thick­ness, seg­ment lengths, etc. that can give advan­tage or dis­ad­van­tage in lifts. 

* 

A day after my third com­pe­ti­tion, a friend who spec­tat­ed spoke on the spot­ters, some strong men: a “how uncom­fort­able could it be to ‘be with’ a hard mus­cled body.” I think I main­ly chuckled. 

I could have said: I think I’m com­fort­able to “be with.” (I real­ize my body is over­all soft­er as being a woman, but I am firm.) 

I could have said: mus­cle is gen­tler than you may realize. 

* 

A friend watched some show, I think it was Say Yes to the Dress, an episode fea­tur­ing a body­builder look­ing for her wed­ding dress. My friend didn’t under­stand why she’d want the dress cut to show so much skin. 

I’m not a bodybuilder—and cer­tain­ly not at the low body fat lev­els body­builders will gen­er­al­ly be in (even when not prep­ping for com­pe­ti­tion, they tend to be lean)—but I under­stand. I pre­fer to wear open backs and sleeve­less (or short—hardly a sleeve) looks. I like look­ing mus­cu­lar in cloth­ing choices. 

And find­ing prop­er fit­ting clothes can be hard: most women’s shirts are designed with the assump­tion that if your chest + back is 42 inch­es, then the rest of the shirt will be boxy. Or it fits okay in the mid­dle, but oh my, if I move my arms I might hulk out of this thing. There­fore, the pref­er­ence becomes for cer­tain stretchy materials. 

* 

I have worn a flo­ral, fem­i­nine, open-backed sun­dress, feel­ing cute but also as if I was cross-dress­ing. The frills on the straps over my shoul­ders par­tic­u­lar­ly more femme than my usu­al. My traps feel­ing mountainous. 

* 

My body is more than its cloth­ing size. 

I loathe the con­cept of mak­ing one’s body fit cer­tain clothes: as if the pur­pose of my body is to suc­cumb to a piece of fabric. 

I loathe the nor­mal­iza­tion of such atti­tudes, which seem par­tic­u­lar­ly imposed on women as if some form of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion: being a size 6, a size 12, etc. 

Eh. The clothes should be hon­ored if they fit me. 

* 

When I start­ed want­i­ng to buy clothes that would announce my pow­er­lifter sta­tus [“Pow­er­lift­ing Made This Body” tank top, “Just Strong” t‑shirt, a heart-shaped weight plate on a shirt], my chest + back were already above what the sell­er had down as typ­i­cal women’s siz­ing, and I’d have to buy the uni­sex to not have a too-tight fit. 

A com­pa­ny that makes bar grip shirts for pow­er­lifters to wear dur­ing bench press­ing (to pre­vent the back slid­ing on the bench) and squat­ting (to help the bar­bell stay gripped to the back) has men’s and women’s sizing. 

Guess which “gen­der size” I have to wear? 

Seri­ous­ly, the women’s largest size is for a 37-inch chest/back. That’s quite small—definitely in favor of women in low­er weight classes.

So I have to order the men’s medi­um. It arrives announc­ing its gen­der expec­ta­tion on a remov­able tag. The inside tag (print­ed direct­ly on the fab­ric) with the sym­bol­ic cir­cle and arrow against my upper back. 

I’m thank­ful for this com­pa­ny and its prod­ucts, but. 

It’s weird to feel like, from this pow­er­lift­ing-focused company’s per­spec­tive, I don’t exist. 

* 

There are cloth­ing com­pa­nies that cater to the low­er half: jeans and pants that fit devel­oped quadriceps. 

That’s nice. Been suc­cess­ful for me over­all. Liv­ing in Texas, though, I find jeans too hot most of the year. 

* 

Back in 2012 when I first learned that dead­lift­ing 300 lb. (and much more) is achiev­able for women—if you told me then I’d weigh 185 lb. when I’d final­ly do it—I’d be a bit bummed, maybe, as I was expect­ing that pull to be dou­ble body­weight. It wouldn’t be until March 2019 at my third pow­er­lift­ing com­pe­ti­tion and weigh­ing around 164 lb. that I’d dead­lift 335 lb., above dou­ble body­weight for the first time. 

So you could say I bulked from sum­mer 2012 to sum­mer 2018, about 5 to 10 lb. a year, and plen­ty of it was suc­cess­ful­ly mus­cle: in my sec­ond com­pe­ti­tion at 184 lb., I squat­ted 281 lb., bench pressed 160 lb., and dead­lift­ed 331 lb. with more to spare. 

When I cau­tious­ly lost body fat from August [185 lb.] to Novem­ber [170 lb.] 2018 with strict nutri­tion and hyper­tro­phy train­ing (4–6 sets of 6–12 reps) four or five times a week for var­i­ous lifts, I real­ized going up flights of stairs was eas­i­er. Pants and skirts that fit me before were now on the verge of falling. 

But it was still a mind­fuck to be get­ting small­er yet putting this weight on my back to squat, as telling myself 200 lb. wasn’t much more than my own body­weight helped with con­fi­dence previously. 

I had to just learn to tell myself: you’ve done this before. Or not even think about it. 

I kept my strength, and that’s what my third com­pe­ti­tion was about: show­ing myself that even though I weighed around 22 lb. less than I did at my pre­vi­ous com­pe­ti­tion, I could lift the same or more. 

And I did. I squat­ted the same, bench pressed just over my body­weight, and dead­lift­ed well over dou­ble bodyweight. 

It’s a phys­i­cal­ly small­er me I see in the mir­ror now at 160 lb., but I know that she has just as much pow­er. I have more to grow from. 

* 

I can love myself at 185 lb. and love myself at 155 lb. Both those women, being me, have val­ue and strength. 

* 

I know what Day 1 feels like of start­ing to train for strength. How the body is a stranger. 

You’ll not be strangers for long if you keep going. The body is a con­stant com­pan­ion that will get more com­fort­able with doing your bidding. 

* 

I’m not sure if my body is one that peo­ple look at and can tell I lift. 

I don’t know. I imag­ine it depends on the clothes and if the view­er knows what such bod­ies look like (I mean, as opposed to a com­pe­ti­tion-ready body­builder body that has stri­a­tions noticeable—the kind of body the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion will imag­ine, prob­a­bly, when asked to imag­ine some­one muscular). 

I want to look like I lift. 

I do calm myself in terms of that by the fact, of course, that I do lift. Have com­pet­ed and placed. A recent medal in my purse. 

Lifters look all sorts of ways. 

* 

I love the vari­ety of women who come forth to the plat­form to squat, bench press, and dead­lift in competition. 

At a pow­er­lift­ing meet, you’ll see lifters of all ages. I’ve shared the plat­form with sev­en­ty-year-olds and sev­en­teen-year olds. 

No mat­ter your size, there is a weight class for you. You can­not be too small or too big to participate. 

Lifters look all sorts of ways. 

*

Mus­cles are not of men only. Mus­cles exist on every­one. Mus­cles are of the/every/any body. They are an inher­i­tance you deserve to know. 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I wrote this piece to par­tic­u­lar­ly think on how lift­ing has changed my rela­tion­ship with my body—my body as a gen­dered thing, social­ized thing, and mor­tal thing. Lift­ing has lib­er­at­ed me from my mind vs. my body: pow­er­lift­ing unites both; both mind and body are need­ed in mov­ing some­thing heavy. Lift­ing has lib­er­at­ed me from out­dat­ed soci­etal gen­der expec­ta­tions. I think there have been var­i­ous changes in soci­ety toward accept­ing mus­cu­lar­i­ty in women—strength sports in recent years have seen an increase in female participation—but until encour­ag­ing phys­i­cal strength in girls is as wide­spread as it is for boys, and/or until encour­ag­ing phys­i­cal strength as a legit­i­mate goal for all bod­ies is wide­spread, I’m not sat­is­fied. Lift­ing, for me, pro­motes my body acceptance/accepting hav­ing a body and how I can have this body on my own terms. And this is a joy I wish for every­one to find (either in sim­i­lar ways to my own or some oth­er path). 

 

Vanes­sa Couto John­son is the author of Pun­gent dins con­cen­tric (Tol­sun Books, 2018), her first full-length poet­ry book , and three poet­ry chap­books, most recent­ly speech rinse (Slope Edi­tions’ 2016 Chap­book Con­test win­ner). Dial­o­gist, Foundry, Soft­blow, Thrush, and oth­er jour­nals and antholo­gies have pub­lished her poems. A Brazil­ian born in Texas (and dual cit­i­zen), she has been a lec­tur­er at Texas State Uni­ver­si­ty since 2014. 

Nonfiction / Tasia Trevino

 

:: The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack ::

A VISIT FROM DRUM

the first time I get dou­ble-bass beats it’s two hours the nurs­es take my pres­sure tell me don’t stand wheel me in a chair to a bed Mom cow­ers in the cor­ner by the crash cart they tear off my clothes attach leads ready a 16-gauge nee­dle the doc­tor says this isn’t going to feel good a feel­ing floods my right arm my body seizes I sit up they push me back on the bed they do it again my beats relax the EMT says that works 9 times out of 10 and the oth­er time I ask

 

 

 

if I keep count I could con­trol this expen­sive som­er­sault phan­tom sev­er­al false starts no mon­ey for fol­low-up is it fatal or just a con­di­tion with­out cov­er­age I devel­op dis­trac­tions code­pen­dence on the strength of strings learn to sing at house shows with shit­ty PAs strain against the squall for years no one can hear me just the Boys on gui­tar bass and drums turn my back to the crowd when I sing over stim­u­lat­ed vagus I can’t stop per­form­ing wish for some assur­ance I’m going to make it

 

 

 

Los Ange­les seeped into my blood­lines when Dad stick-and-poked Mom a fleur-de-lis on her ankle while watch­ing Decline of West­ern Civ Vol. 1 twen­ty years lat­er I move to the city in an ancient Buick I dream to be Jef­frey Lee Sable Starr a sea bird over light-dot­ted hills the Observatory’s for­mal white gown feel for my pulse dur­ing sound check the Boys ask me what lan­guage are my lyrics Perse­phone I say Eury­dice rock myself to sleep in dou­ble-time cross my heart hope to know which feel­ing I’m faking

 

 

 

BE QUIET MT. HEART ATTACK!

I stop tak­ing off my hos­pi­tal bracelet I don’t have insur­ance so I can’t afford to know why I have some ideas but the Boys keep say­ing “you’re fine you’re fine” swat­ting my fin­gers from the right side of my neck me swal­low­ing blues to keep myself at bay am I still their Wendy Bird they were there all the times they stopped my heart maybe the rea­son for it too I ping­pong the aisles at the Last Book­store wait for the calm to kick in search out every iter­a­tion of sunset

 

 

 

on stage singing grief for each of my past selves in a room sparse with soli­tary men most nights I dull my pound­ing with tequi­la rocks lime anoth­er round with the Boys and the Gretsch nev­er get paid to play drag myself home on unlit side streets past box­top shrines stuffed with sweets and sticky rice in a dream I car­ry one of the Boys on my back through the Hol­ly­wood Farm­ers’ Mar­ket I buy peonies and small cab­bages this is this not a dream this is 

 

 

 

I gath­er the hand­writ­ten receipts from the mechan­ic they make a $3000 pile still my Buick bucks stalls it has no AC or heat no defrost have to roll down the win­dows in a storm the arm­rest gets streaked with grime dri­ve out to Altade­na for a job get $10/hr to sur­vey places peo­ple want to film I size up oth­er dri­vers won­der how they afford it I want my ass slid­ing on leather inte­ri­or I want to see the inside of a stranger’s house won­der whether I’ll ever move

 

 

 

DRUM GETS A GLIMPSE

when I’m not onstage I get a job sell­ing things I can’t under­stand to peo­ple I nev­er see I final­ly go to the doc­tor he says I’m fine I just have anx­i­ety need to eat more fiber he gives me a  non-refill­able pre­scrip­tion for Ati­van and sup­pos­i­to­ries tells me buy Meta­mu­cil drink that every day I get reg­u­lar lose a lot of mem­o­ries start to need a big­ger audi­ence almost fight the bounc­er after karaoke at the Blue Goose put the tin­sel Xmas tree up with no gifts underneath 

 

 

 

my boss is a Scorp/Sag cusp he wears ten­nis shoes nice jeans flo­ral dress shirt top two but­tons undone at the Xmas par­ty he puts his hand btwn my legs when he bends down to kiss me hel­lo brings me into his office for my 3‑month- review says he wants to give me a raise thinks I’m smart but not show­ing it seems like I don’t care I make hourly as much as his maids he tells me they’re stu­pid always putting things in the wrong place he tells me earn my raise

 

 

 

Tues­day after­noon I have a pan­ic attack at an impromp­tu audi­tion for a real­i­ty series that’s shoot­ing upstairs from my office they like me for the part of Expert on a show about aliens vis­it­ing Earth I take a Val­i­um walk around the block go to urgent care the nurse slaps adhe­sive elec­trodes to my chest unshaven shins she won’t give me Xanax she says I need a car­di­ol­o­gist when I tell her about the first time how they had to stop my heart

 

 

 

LET’S NOT WRESTLE MT. HEART ATTACK

it’s a catheter-based pro­ce­dure they’ll make a slit in my leg thread a wire up my vein into my heart they’ll jack up my heart rate until the bad rhythm kicks in they’ll burn those path­ways closed I’ll be sedat­ed not asleep I’ll go home the same day nev­er think about it again there are risks per­fo­ra­tion stroke I lose my insur­ance in a week I say how soon can we do it how about in three days the doc­tor says I shake her hand and ask for one day off work

 

 

 

my first surgery is the day before Thanks­giv­ing I don’t want Mom or Dad to come but they do in pre-op two nurs­es dryshave my groin joke about film­ing me talk­ing can­did in twi­light sleep Dad gets ramen down­town after I’m fine every­one leaves I stain the hos­pi­tal bed with blood the nurse changes my tam­pon I go home the same day the next day the Boys come over we drink Wild Turkey and I cook every­one prop­er din­ner with pres­sure dressing

 

 

 

I can’t leave the city bc my Buick shuts off at every stop­light the record label with inter­est wants more demos I’m going to write a song a day so far I haven’t writ­ten one in months the only con­stants are always late with rent for the prac­tice space phone bill gro­ceries and fights I don’t remem­ber pick­ing up the Gretsch damp­en its strings when some­one walks by the Buick catch­es fire on the 5 the mechan­ic cuts out the cat­alyt­ic con­vert­er puts in a pipe I keep driving 

 

 

 

TO HOLD YOU, DRUM

on my lunch break I talk to the head of the label he has me on speak­er­phone sit­ting on a mar­ble memo­r­i­al bench in Hol­ly­wood For­ev­er pre­tend­ing I can under­stand every­thing he says he has to say some­thing to me he doesn’t want to be the stereo­typ­i­cal record label guy but he can’t pro­nounce all of our song names he loves front­women female drum­mers we talk for 36 min­utes he says he will be out in LA lat­er this month we should meet for cof­fee I won­der if he doesn’t drink 

 

 

 

I can’t stop think­ing about my heart my win­dow­less office I get an hour off work to see a social work­er at Kaiser she says I had no guid­ance I’ve been drink­ing that much since I was 16 I should stop play­ing music it seems too stress­ful go back to grad school get into debt like every­one else she doesn’t know what I can do with a degree in his­to­ry I pick a hand­ful of night jas­mine on my walk home the only things I think about more than my heart are mon­ey the dying car how I don’t feel 

 

 

 

the far­thest I can run in the city is Teardrop Park where the view is El Chubas­co Chi­na­town and a city dis­guised my body buzzes bad­ly with want my heart leans out of tem­po some­times it’s inhala­tion sets it off some­times the weath­er not enough water some­times too much food not enough some­times it’s being in bed with some­one being in bed alone it’s extra beats an elec­tri­cal prob­lem not some­thing I con­trol what’s the cho­rus again

 

 

 

YOU, DRUM

on Lou Reed’s birth­day I watch porn on my phone in the bath­room before din­ner with the Boys we bring our own booze I start to cry about Cae­tano Veloso in exile singing in Eng­lish I walk home a man jerks off in a bush out­side the cor­ner liquor store eyes rolled back furi­ous pump­ing I pass Jumbo’s where we went with the Boys for my 21st birth­day me sit­ting close to the stage them sit­ting against the wall in the shad­ows beck­on­ing me with dol­lar bills to give to the girls 

 

 

 

Tues­days are band prac­tice Wednes­days are all night hap­py hour the bar­tendress with huge eyes and French braids makes me at least three tequi­la sodas I think about her naked sit out­side on year-round-bougainvil­lea-shad­ed patio papi­er-mâché petals spiked vines I dim the lights in the bar’s pink bath­room take a pic­ture of myself wish for some­one to send it to walk home under gray­ing skies one of the men out­side 7–11 calls to me hey slop­py girl asks me for a blowjob

 

 

 

I need anoth­er surgery it’s forty-thou­sand dol­lars but it’s cov­ered if I keep my job Mom comes and Gram­ma but Dad already had tick­ets to see John Doe only Mom has a pan­ic attack on my futon so I dri­ve us to Kaiser across the street from the big blue church that took all of Gramma’s mon­ey she holds my hand the nurs­es mis­take her for my mom and me for 19 I’m awake again dur­ing the doc­tor says he found the prob­lem he says my heart tricked them last time

 

 

 

IT’S ALL BLOOMING NOW MT. HEART ATTACK

some­times I think I like Los Ange­les I go down­town to see Tele­vi­sion with the Boys walk through a heist scene that doesn’t stop rolling Tom Ver­laine ges­tures to Venus in the west­ern sky I’m in love with all my friends cli­max in the show­er to Roy Orbi­son falling I’m falling falling in love with heart­beat throb dream one of the Boys has me in pub­lic press the wood­en spoon han­dle against myself in my gal­ley kitchen while the rice cooks on the stove 

 

 

 

the label doesn’t want to sign us I get weepy at the bar with the Boys I let down my love for the city but I only know one kind it’s killing me some­times I feel very sad I tell the Boys that the same ses­sion band played on every Amer­i­can pop hit of the ’60s no one knows their names I start to lose momen­tum trust prac­tice sin­cer­i­ty in the bath­room mir­ror ask for my mem­o­ries back erased or oth­er­wise find myself among scat­tered palm fronds and street roach­es on the edge of San­ta Monica

 

 

 

the doc­tor says anoth­er surgery would risk per­fo­ra­tion my heart has two pace­mak­ers some­times the false one gets the rhythm the real one gets a break after I leave the city I can’t stop danc­ing at the least appro­pri­ate times I come back to the city but don’t make it past Mul­hol­land I stand on a bor­rowed bal­cony over behind-the-scenes streets with­out side­walks so close to all my land­marks I can taste lemon­grass tri­pas and tar­na can see my beat­ing the score is swelling

 

 

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF MT. HEART ATTACK

there is no way to see a city I can’t be any­more at the junc­tion of thick­ly-trav­eled boule­vards a city invari­ably comes into exis­tence I dream wash­ing machine amps rub­bery gui­tar strings mics with no input I let myself go slack the tem­po evens out I wear the skin­ni­est tuxe­do I can find put on lip­stick in the hos­pi­tal bed I allow a place to tame me a heavy qui­et set­tles around me I don’t know what to do with it don’t know how to allow myself this pace wor­ry where will my voice be if not a stage

CONSIDER! 
DIFFERENT! 
FADING! 
SYSTEMS!

grief for me for the part on a dream for som­er­sault phan­tom sparse with sweets and drums CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! turn my past selves into a chair into a bed they tear off my past selves in a dream I can’t stop drink­ing that’s shoot­ing upstairs from my Tues­day after­noon I have a pan­ic attach leads real­i­ty series that’s shoot­ing in my heart CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! are risks per­fo­ra­tion stroke I lose path­ways clothes attack to grad school get into debt like Xanax CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! closed I’ll burn those path­ways I’ll be sedat­ed I’ll go home the stereo­typ­i­cal record label against my body seizes my beats relax the label has me for one of the Boys on my back CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! he doesn’t want to be again in Hol­ly­wood For­ev­er pre­tend­ing he loves from my body CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! when I sit up they tear off my time I tell her hand and ask for a con­di­tion with sweets stuffed with the Boys most nights CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! my clothes attack at an impromp­tu audi­tion stroke I lose my insur­ance and they do it can we do it how about they do it CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! fatal or just the Boys on my lunch break I think to my unshaven shit­ty code­pen­dence on the bed I’ve been drink­ing about aliens vis­it­ing Earth I think about LA lat­er anoth­er hand­ful go back stress­ful go back through the Hol­ly­wood Farm­ers’ Mar­ket for years no one can say how soon can we be the Gretsch nev­er time how soon can we talk to grad school get dou­ble-bass beats ready a 16-gauge nee­dle they’ll make me a slit in a week I say CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! some assur­ance I’ve been drink­ing nev­er any­thing nev­er false stage singing grief CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! nev­er false stage singing grief CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! nev­er false stage singing grief
nev­er false stage singing grief
nev­er false stage singing grief
nev­er false
nev­er false nev­er false
oh you drum
oh you drum
my drum
my drum
my drum

 

acknowl­edg­ments

this con­tains lyrics/references from the following:
Drum’s Not Dead – the Liars
““Falling”” – Roy Orbison
““I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”” – the Beach Boys
““The Strength of Strings”” – Gene Clark
Bri­an Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strate­gies card deck

 

 

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Between 2010 and the present, I’ve lived with an arry­th­mia called AV-Nodal Reen­trant Tachy­car­dia, caused by a con­gen­i­tal heart issue. I’ve had spot­ty health insur­ance, mul­ti­ple doc­tors, and two surgeries.

Through­out this time, I was the lead singer of a band in Los Ange­les. I worked a shit­ty 9–5, while prac­tic­ing, record­ing, and play­ing shows reg­u­lar­ly. I drank a lot. I was in a fierce­ly code­pen­dent, mutu­al­ly destruc­tive rela­tion­ship with the gui­tar play­er in the band.

Most of this piece comes from diary entries I made on my lunch breaks in the Hol­ly­wood For­ev­er Ceme­tery which was right down the street from where I worked. Soon after the gui­tar play­er and I broke up and I moved out of Los Ange­les, he made me a playlist based on our rela­tion­ship. The last song on it was the Liars’ “The Oth­er Side of Mt. Heart Attack,” from their 2006 album, Drum’s Not Dead. We had a poster from the album hang­ing in our East Hol­ly­wood apart­ment, but I had­n’t revis­it­ed the album in years. When I write, I tend to lis­ten to a sin­gle song on repeat for hours, induc­ing a kind of time-tran­scend­ing trance state, which is what I did with this song/piece.

After fin­ish­ing it, I found that the con­cerns of this piece were very much in con­ver­sa­tion with the album. As the band said at the album’s release, it explores the ten­sion between two fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, Drum, “assertive and pro­duc­tive, the spir­it of cre­ative con­fi­dence,” and Mount Heart Attack, ” the embod­i­ment of stress and self-doubt.” The con­nec­tion seemed obvi­ous. Even on a lit­er­al level—my body has two pace­mak­ers; the album has two drum kits.

I’ve strug­gled with the cor­rect form for this con­tent. It ends up some­where between a lyric essay and a nar­ra­tive long poem. It’s both a love let­ter and a break-up let­ter to my favorite city. It’s an attempt to recount and rec­on­cile one of the most dark/difficult and also fun/exciting times in my life.

 

Tasia Trevi­no is a writer and musi­cian from Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Cen­tral Coast. Her poems have/will appear(ed) in Fence, Pre­lude, Yalobusha Review, Dream Pop Press, and Poets.org. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop where she was award­ed two May­tag Fel­low­ships and the 2018 Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets’ Prize. More at tasiatrevino.com.

Nonfiction / Stanley Plumly

:: Extremities ::

Strange what you remem­ber. When I think of my moth­er the first thing I think of is her feet, her flat duck feet, with their bunions and cal­lus­es and size-what­ev­er com­plaints; with their deep bot­tom criss­cross lines, like dry rivers, lin­ing every which way, as if to tell her for­tune. Not that her feet were imme­di­ate­ly-look­ing odd or out­sized, only that in her youth she’d tried, like a Cin­derel­la sis­ter, to squeeze them into shoes that didn’t fit, shoes on sale or that had some spe­cial claim to beau­ty. At least this was her sto­ry. It was the Depres­sion, she’d say, as if pover­ty had any­thing to do with it, which, as I imag­ine the sub­tle­ty of pover­ty, its depra­va­tions and denials, may be part­ly true.

As she got old­er her feet took on fur­ther distortion—they didn’t seem to belong to the nice legs and moth­er body above them. They’d some­times look attached, from anoth­er time, peas­ant feet, field-work­er from a paint­ing. I’m prob­a­bly exag­ger­at­ing, but they seemed, at times, to trod rather than sim­ply walk the ground. And it’s not as if she didn’t try to cor­rect the dis­par­i­ty, so that the dif­fer­ent thing is the degree to which she cared for them: the salt baths, the med­i­c­i­nal creams, the del­i­cate foot files, the inserts to shoes, the high heels relieved with flats.

At home, cook­ing, doing laun­dry or house­work, she wore slip­pers that fit like old gloves, which is to say she might as well have been bare­foot, except for the fact that the slip­per tend­ed to slap the floor while her feet on their own were silent. Once a week she saw what she called her foot doc­tor, Dr. Schucutt—Shoe-Cut, I called him. I met him once, wait­ing in the wait­ing room. He was small and bent a bit—from bend­ing over to per­form his exam­i­na­tions, I thought, like a shoe sales­man or a cob­bler. My moth­er looked for­ward to these vis­its, both because they gave her some relief and because—now that I think about it—they were sen­su­al expe­ri­ences: the lit­tle surg­eries, the hand-han­dling, the min­is­ter­ing of med­i­cines, the mere inti­mate atten­tions, the feet as some­thing utter­ly personal.

I have my mother’s feet, pan­cake feet. Our feet, after all, are the plat­forms of our being and the first parts of our bod­ies the ancients paid car­ing and pub­lic atten­tion to, espe­cial­ly in wel­com­ing vis­i­tors. Think of the thou­sands of years and the mil­lions of miles that our feet have car­ried us on the foot­paths and across the thresh­olds. No won­der we’ve anoint­ed them with oil and blessed their trav­el, though it’s unlike­ly that my moth­er, on her best day, could have cov­ered a walk­ing mile.

Yet those feet were the most human part of her, the most vul­ner­a­ble and reas­sur­ing. As a small child I loved touch­ing them, par­tic­u­lar­ly the cal­lus­es, which were, in imag­i­na­tion, like Grand­pap­py Lyn’s wen—ugly, oth­er­world­ly, mag­i­cal. I think there were moments when she too loved those feet, loved them the way we come to accept our flaws as essen­tial to our iden­ti­ties. I once com­pared the warmth and char­ac­ter of my mother’s feet to a “bricklayer’s hands,” and those hands, I real­ize now, are my father’s hands.

*

That’s the part of his body I remem­ber most, those large hard hands, that could squeeze the juice from an apple. In his prime, my father was six feet, weighed 200 or so pounds, and had a thir­ty-two-inch waist. He had a laborer’s hands, almost as cal­lused as my mother’s feet. To watch him with an axe or ham­mer, the way his right hand swal­lowed the han­dle, was to be impressed. To watch him lift a tray of bricks and car­ry it up a lad­der or hold a shov­el or move an anvil cra­dled between his arms, his hands in fists…

When he stopped work­ing in the woods he turned to weld­ing, most­ly because by then we’d left Vir­ginia for Ohio, and left nature for indus­try, though the farmer in him nev­er left him. Per­haps he saw some artistry in draw­ing a seam of soft hot met­al in order to heal a rift. He looked omi­nous in the welder’s mask, though at both French Oil and Dup­ps he was soon pro­mot­ed out of the welder’s chair and mask to foreman.

Some of my hap­pi­est times with him were help­ing him build our half-built house and watch­ing him use those hands. For him it was an after-work and week­end job, for me an after-school fan­ta­sy. I was nine. He had two work­men from work to fill out with the extras, cheap labor for the least skilled of the dig­ging of foun­da­tions and mea­sur­ing off of rooms and mix­ing hod and gen­er­al­ly hold­ing things togeth­er. I sort of car­ried bits and pieces and stayed out of the way and played the spy. The three of them poured the con­crete floors, but it was my father who laid the brick and lev­eled its flat-face sur­faces and angles, some­times bet­ter than oth­er times.

It was my father who shaped the shape of the roof, his big raw hands han­dling the two-by-six­es as if they were mere lum­ber, which, of course they were—the helper work­men at each end of the longer pieces, just like those years ago in the woods. We were always work­ing against the clock, which is to say the weath­er, since our work hours were always up against sun­set and the rain and, final­ly, the snow. The first year the house was enough of a shell we could work inside on walls and win­dows and doors, none of which seemed quite right, as if my father’s hands lacked the sub­tle­ty of the square.

The thing is that my father was a sober house-builder, then a drunk after dark, when he would disappear—as far as I knew—until the next morn­ing, usu­al­ly late for his reg­u­lar foreman’s job. He final­ly lost his posi­tion at French Oil for being late at least a hun­dred too many times, but by then we’d pret­ty well closed on fin­ish­ing our half-fin­ished house.

It sat in the coun­try­side on Gar­bry Road just out­side Piqua, Ohio, prac­ti­cal­ly in the mid­dle of a corn­field. It ulti­mate­ly turned out to be a small farm­house, with an added small barn and a cou­ple of out­build­ings. When I’d come back sum­mer from col­lege I’d find dif­fer­ent addi­tions and com­bi­na­tions of domes­tic­i­ty that might include a cou­ple of use­less hors­es, a don­key, chick­ens, a half-dozen white-faced Here­fords, a pen of youngish pigs, what­ev­er. My father always wept send­ing off the cat­tle to slaugh­ter. And he seemed just as close to tears each evening talk­ing to his pigs, whom he pet­ted on their pink heads with great care with his great hands.

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

by David Baker 

“Extrem­i­ties” is a remark­able piece of prose, of remem­brance, in the man­ner of a com­pressed mem­oir. It will appear in Stan­ley Plumly’s posthu­mous vol­ume, Mid­dle Dis­tance, in August of 2020 (W.W. Nor­ton), and is one of four such prose works in this book of lyric poet­ry and rich­ness. The present account is a lit­tle unusu­al, since Stan isn’t writ­ing it. I am work­ing with Michael Col­lier, as we assist Mar­garet Plum­ly with Stan’s lit­er­ary mat­ters, and I am hon­ored to have this chance to say a word about “Extrem­i­ties.”

What I can account for here, indeed, is the beau­ty and lap­idary pre­ci­sion of the piece. Much like Stan’s poems, this work is sharply focused in its rep­re­sen­ta­tion of detail—for his moth­er, her feet; for his father, his hands. Synec­doche is the por­trait painter’s not-so-secret secret: let a part speak or stand, as it were, for the per­son­al­i­ty of the whole per­son. So here is his moth­er, stand­ing on her own two feet, stand­ing up to work, stand­ing firm as care­tak­er for the fam­i­ly. Stan’s ear­ly poem from Sum­mer Celes­tial, “My Mother’s Feet,” is a beau­ti­ful fam­i­ly fore­bear to this half of “Extrem­i­ties,” which is about love and pain and the eas­ing of pain for the ones we love.

Notice how deft­ly the metaphor of his mother’s feet, “like a bricklayer’s hands” in that ear­li­er poem, becomes a link to his father, who was indeed at times a bricklayer—and a wood­turn­er, lum­ber­man, welder, and (like Whit­man) a house­builder. He had hard hands, Stan says, hands hard­ened by so much work but capa­ble of affec­tion, pet­ting the pink heads of those pigs.

A home­mak­er and a house­builder, his moth­er and father, both mak­ers. And they were both dear to Stan, as the ten­der­ness and pre­ci­sion of this piece attests. Mem­o­ry is what we car­ry for­ward of the facts of our lives. It seems to select us as much as we select what to recall, and in “Extrem­i­ties” Stan creates—as well as recreates—an indeli­ble dou­ble por­trait of his par­ents. He is still their duti­ful son, two of whose duties have been rapt atten­tion and unmatched styl­is­tic skill. Mak­ers must run in that family.

 

Stan­ley Plum­ly pub­lished 10 high­ly influ­en­tial books of poet­ry dur­ing his life­time, as well as four impor­tant works of prose on the Roman­tic poets and painters. His posthu­mous col­lec­tion of new poet­ry and lyric prose, Mid­dle Dis­tance, will appear in August 2020 from W. W. Nor­ton. He was Dis­tin­guished Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land at the time of his death in April 2019. 

Nonfiction / Sayuri Ayers

:: Surge ::

And it was always our sea­son of per­il: Elec­tric­i­ty, the per­il the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day. 

—Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“Mam­ma, how was I born?” My four-year-old son asks. He leans against me, one hand around my arm, anoth­er on his die-cast Volk­swa­gen Bee­tle. I put down the bed­time book and glean my mind—recall my son as a squalling bun­dle, his fists blue-gray as storm clouds.

“You were so small that I felt like I wasn’t hold­ing any­thing at all,” I began. “When I saw you, I knew that I loved you.” My son gig­gles, buries his dark head in my lap.

“Keep on read­ing, beau­ti­ful Mam­ma,” he says, turn­ing the page.

That night, I dream of giv­ing birth to my son. I’m walk­ing in an open field and I’m struck by light­ning. Our hearts course with cur­rent and he comes surg­ing out of me, singed with fire.

While in the mater­ni­ty ward, I was entan­gled in mind-numb­ing depres­sion. I bare­ly ate and spoke. When I opened my mouth, gar­bled weep­ing poured out. I lay par­a­lyzed in the hos­pi­tal bed, my mind swarm­ing with dark­ness. Shad­ows eased ten­drils over bed­sheets. Black­ened iris roots clawed upwards from the linoleum tile.

With the psy­chi­atric med­ica­tions, the images of the woman sway­ing from a door­frame and the devoured infant fad­ed into shad­owy lat­tices, then into vapor. Final­ly, I could hold my son, mar­vel at his light­ness, the arch of his back, his milk-scent­ed cheeks. As he drew draught after draught from the bot­tle, I gazed down at him, he up at me. Sun­light hemmed us togeth­er, silence bro­ken by morn­ing cho­rus out­side the bed­room window.

But now, three years lat­er, the shad­ows are back again. They flut­ter around the edges of cur­tains like moths. While my hus­band sleeps, I look beyond the bound­aries of the back­yard, deep into the woods. Pines rake at the win­ter moon. The gate is unlatched and swings loose­ly on its hinges. Like a pale arm, it motions to the icy river.

At day­break, my son rush­es into my room and leaps into bed. “You need a hug,” he says. For months my body has been aching, plead­ing for rest. I drag myself from bed, stum­ble across the chilly floor. With lead­en hands, I heap a bowl full of yogurt for my son. It’s been a week and a half since I’ve show­ered. I plow my hands through my hair and change my under­wear and bra. “Stu­pid,” I tell the reflec­tion in the mir­ror. Its fer­al eyes dart back and forth.

“I’m fine,” I tell my hus­band. Tears course down my face.

“No, you’re not,” my hus­band says. When he had returned home, the liv­ing room was lit­tered with toys. My son had been watch­ing tele­vi­sion for hours. I was sprawled weep­ing on the bed.

My hus­band rif­fles through the pages of the Emer­gency Men­tal Health Plan that we’d cre­at­ed. “We have to do some­thing,” he says. I look at my hands, slow spread­ing of creas­es, light­ning ingrained in flesh—the flesh spi­ral­ing down into dark­ness. I dig into my palm with my nails.

In my dreams, my son is cap­tured by a beast with a mil­lion ten­ta­cles. While I slash and scream, the beast squeezes tighter and tighter—my son bulges, black­ens. He bursts into ash and is swept away by the wind. Weep­ing, I search for him, gath­er soot into my arms. I wake up screaming.

My hus­band, son, and I final­ly move in with my par­ents. We lock up our house and leave the front lights on. We pull out of the dri­ve­way. I look back. The house wavers, for­est bristling with snow. The riv­er stirs, ice grinds along its shale bank—fractured teeth in a black jaw.

Every morn­ing after my hus­band leaves for work, my moth­er eas­es me out of bed. She coax­es me to pull on my left sock, then right. She shows me how to brush my hair and teeth. She places a cup of tea and a bowl of broth in front of me. “Sip,” she says. “Swal­low,” she says. “Again,” she says. While my son bounds in the snow, she rocks me as I weep.

Even at my par­ents’ house, there are days when I can’t get out of bed. I lis­ten to my moth­er clang­ing pots in the kitchen down­stairs, to the pad-pad of my son’s feet up to my bed­room. “Tell me a sto­ry, Mam­ma,” my son says, hoist­ing him­self up onto the bed. I can bare­ly lift my head from the pil­low. He cups his hands around my face, and gazes at me, wait­ing. I close my eyes again.

“The mon­sters have stolen my car. You won’t find it,” my son says. His face, pale and solemn. “These mon­sters have lots of legs. They can squeeze through pipes and go down into the base­ment.” We find the Volk­swa­gen Bee­tle smudged and dent­ed, wedged between air vent and desk. “See,” my son says, cradling his car, “they’re everywhere.”

Before tuck­ing him into bed, I tell my son: “There’s a dark for­est. In the cen­ter of it is a mon­ster with many ten­ta­cles. It tries to eat a tree full of baby ani­mals. When you hear the babies scream­ing, you run into the for­est. You’re afraid, but you have a crys­tal sword. You plunge the sword into the monster’s eye, and it runs away—never to be seen again.”

Bur­row­ing into the com­forter, my son smiles. “Tell me anoth­er, Mam­ma,” he says.

One morn­ing, I’m awak­ened by the tap-tap of ice thaw­ing from the house’s eaves. My son bursts into my room. He wraps his small arms around my neck, nuz­zles me. “Are you here for­ev­er, mom­ma?” he asks. “Yes—forever,” I say. Light dis­lodges, glim­mers through my body.

The wis­te­ria has final­ly bloomed, nod­ding its gold­en head in time to song spar­rows. As I wash and dry the dish­es, my son plays near my feet with his Volk­swa­gen Bee­tle. I tell my moth­er about the new poems I’ve writ­ten, the soup recipes I’d like to try, how my son has grown two inch­es. She smiles at me, sun­light gloss­ing her gray­ing hair, dark eyes. “It’s almost time for you to go home,” she says, embrac­ing me.

When I come out­side to gar­den the Sat­ur­day of my family’s return, my neigh­bor comes to greet me. “I haven’t seen any of you for four months,” he says. “I thought I would have to call the cops.” Despite my husband’s week­end attempts at lawn main­te­nance, our home stands in five inch­es of wild grass, the gar­den beds choked with weeds. While my son steers his cars in and out of the shriv­eled tulips, I stab the weed­er into roots of dan­de­lion. I fill four yard-waste bags and lug them to the curb.

At night, my wrists and back crack­le with pain. I stand at the win­dow again, stare deep into the woods. The moon shines down into the whorl of dark­ness, down to the riv­er bed. The white stone path and gate pulse with fire­flies. I slip into bed next to my hus­band. I kiss his stub­bled cheeks until he rous­es; then I take him into my arms.

I pile the shop­ping cart high with daylily, bego­nia, and peony bulbs. I’ve select­ed each one for their hearty blooms, gen­er­ous foliage. Any­thing, I think, to keep the weeds from com­ing up again.

In the cool morn­ing, I emp­ty the bulb pack­ages into dirt with my son. I show him how to plant each bulb upright, light­ly cov­er them all with top­soil. When I unwrap the peony bulbs, my son breaks into gig­gles. “Look!” he says. “Mon­sters!” He kiss­es their gnarled, trail­ing roots. When we plant them, he sprin­kles them with soil and pats them with his small hand.

“How are you doing?” my moth­er asks. Adjust­ing the phone, I watch my son run his Bee­tle over and around my lap. I run my fin­gers through his hair, mak­ing fur­row after fur­row. His sweet baby scent, giv­ing way to the fra­grance of earth and sweat—the wind dis­till­ing. “I’m fine,” I say.

I pause from weed­ing gar­den beds and look up into the tree line. The tips of pines hiss and crack­le under a sheen of static—the gar­bled voic­es almost com­pre­hen­si­ble. I plunge the trow­el deep­er, earth­worms and pill bugs squirm­ing up from crest­ing soil. Under my hand, the dark­ness puls­es. Beside me, my son scoops earth into his tin pail, trac­ing the flower beds his hands. He pets the inky shoots, say­ing, “Listen—can you hear them sing?”

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Before I wrote cre­ative non­fic­tion, I was a poet. I decid­ed to approach my expe­ri­ences with ill­ness through the lyric essay because the form allows me to cre­ate a sus­tained nar­ra­tive. I use my train­ing as a poet to hone tone, rhythm, and con­cise­ness of lan­guage. Writ­ing poet­ry has also helped me incor­po­rate strong imagery in my cre­ative non­fic­tion pieces like “Surge.”

“Surge” is part of a four-part series that explores my expe­ri­ences in moth­er­hood, men­tal ill­ness, and elec­tro­con­vul­sive ther­a­py. After giv­ing birth to my son, I fell into a deep post­par­tum depres­sion, which was com­pound­ed by my exist­ing men­tal health issues. This essay describes a peri­od of reprieve, when my depres­sion improved. At the same time, “Surge” fore­shad­ows my hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and ECT treat­ments a few short months later.

In “Surge,” the mon­sters and earth play a vital role in describ­ing the moth­er-child rela­tion­ship. I rely on mag­i­cal real­ism to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where myth becomes truth, pow­er, and heal­ing. Read­ers are encour­aged to take leaps in imag­i­na­tion, to fill those gaps with their own voices.

 

A Kundi­man Fel­low and Soar­ing Gar­dens Res­i­dent, Sayuri Ayers is a native of Colum­bus, Ohio. Her prose and poet­ry have appeared in Entropy, SWWIM, Hobart, The Pinch, and oth­er lit­er­ary jour­nals. She is the author of two chap­books: Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bot­tle Press, 2016) and Mother/Wound (forth­com­ing from Full/Crescent Press). Her lyric essay man­u­script, Beast-Moth­er, was a final­ist in the Paper Nau­tilus’ 2019 Vel­la Chap­book Com­pe­ti­tion. She has also received grants from the Ohio Arts Coun­cil, Greater Colum­bus Arts Coun­cil, and VSA Ohio. Please vis­it her at sayuriayers.com. 

Nonfiction / Kascha Semonovitch

:: Descartes and Doulas ::

When I went into labor, my doula asked me think of a mantra—something I could repeat—for the ear­ly part of the process. For this phase, my doula said, I need­ed some­thing that took a lit­tle con­cen­tra­tion, took a lit­tle of my mind because I would not yet be all body. Some peo­ple liked to look at pic­tures or sing or dance. Or repeat­ed a poem or a prayer. Just repeat­ing om om or hum­ming would work for when, hon­est­ly, it just doesn’t mat­ter what you’re think­ing because you’ll prob­a­bly just be mak­ing nail marks in your partner’s shoul­ders or shit­ting your­self. But for this part I need­ed a lit­tle phrase to say and say again to keep the mind busy.

She thought maybe I could recite a piece of poet­ry I had mem­o­rized. This hor­ri­fied me. Instead, I choice to recite the struc­ture of Descartes’s Med­i­ta­tions as laid out in the syn­op­sis. In ret­ro­spect, I can see how I sound like an arro­gant aca­d­e­m­ic. But it was hon­est­ly the best thing I could think of at the time: it was some­thing I had mem­o­rized while teach­ing to the point of entire­ly inter­nal­iz­ing it so that I could think it even while dis­tressed. “Dis­tressed” in ref­er­ence to active labor is one of those awe­some euphemisms only child­birth edu­ca­tors would use. If you’re “dis­tressed” in labor it is in the way that dis­tressed fab­ric has been beat­en or dyed until it changes struc­ture. It will nev­er look the same.

My doula and I, it turns out, didn’t get along. I nev­er spoke to her again after she “suc­cess­ful­ly” guid­ed me through an un-med­icat­ed labor. At the end of the labor, my pelvis broke in two, and I couldn’t walk for months. She didn’t vis­it me in the hospital.

But in the begin­ning, I trust­ed her, and I picked the syn­op­sis of Descartes’s book. It is one of the most com­mon required texts in intro­duc­to­ry phi­los­o­phy class­es, and also one of my favorites. This is the struc­ture of the text:

1. Doubt all things.
2. Prove the exis­tence of the mind.
3. Prove the exis­tence of God.
4. Deter­mine cri­te­ria for truth.
5. Prove God again.
6. Prove the exis­tence of the exter­nal world and the divi­sion of the mind and body.

In ear­ly labor—which for me last­ed about fif­teen min­utes because I had a baby in three hours—I repeat­ed, One doubt all, two prove the mind, three prove God, fourth truths, five prove God again, six the world, one doubt all, two prove the—

Then, I would get inter­rupt­ed by pain and start again. It’s a lit­tle like the habit of count­ing steps while you’re run­ning; not all run­ners do it, but I know many who will sim­ply count steps when the body has pleas­ant­ly tak­en over the mind so that count­ing is about all that’s left.

Repeat­ing the struc­ture of The Med­i­ta­tions made sense as mantra. The con­tent of The Med­i­ta­tions made absolute­ly no sense at all.

The Med­i­ta­tions are all about struc­ture. For­mal, log­i­cal struc­ture. For teach­ing pur­pos­es, the point of read­ing The Med­i­ta­tions is not at all to show they are cor­rect. The lessons include learn­ing how to make dis­tinc­tions, how to devel­op ter­mi­nol­o­gy, how to trace the ori­gin of ter­mi­nol­o­gy through history.

But the big rea­son we teach the text is that it demon­strates how a log­i­cal struc­ture must be con­sis­tent and that that struc­ture can be an effect per­sua­sive tech­nique. And that start­ing from the wrong premis­es can lead you to the wrong con­clu­sions. The text’s log­ic is hard to refute if you can’t dis­pute the premis­es. If you real­ly let your­self go in a read­ing of The Med­i­ta­tions, you are per­suad­ed by it.

When the book opens, Descartes is alone. He is in his bed­room with some free, pri­vate time: “I have today suit­ably freed my mind of all cares, secured for myself a peri­od of leisure­ly tran­quil­i­ty, and am with­draw­ing into solitude.”

The labor­ing body does not have this priv­i­lege. As a par­ent one abdi­cates the right to pri­va­cy for many years; labor­ing takes away that priv­i­lege entire­ly. Prac­ti­cal­ly, espe­cial­ly in the U.S., you sim­ply are not allowed to be alone when labor­ing. I chose to have my hus­band and doula with me for com­fort; at the hos­pi­tal, the nurs­es had to stay with­in earshot and at least with those part­ners. I shat myself over and over in front of at least three peo­ple. It could have been a city; I don’t know. Pri­va­cy was not an option.

But exis­ten­tial­ly as well, I was not alone. I was not; the sin­gle let­ter “I,” stand­ing there alone, does not refer to the preg­nant body. The preg­nant body is not iso­lat­ed. It is not a con­tain­er for two minds or a stack of mind-body Russ­ian dolls. The preg­nant body is a vari­a­tion on all bod­ies; mind a flower on the stalk and seed of body. In labor, it isn’t pos­si­ble to won­der if you are alone: the immi­nences of a force that is not you rup­tures your sense of self along with your labia.

The uterus almost turns inside out in the final phas­es. In our birthing class, the mid­wife demon­strat­ed it by pulling a large, knit, wool sock over a baby doll and then push­ing the baby out, leav­ing an invert sock. The image stayed with me.

The baby would ini­ti­ate that. This was sup­posed to be a mirac­u­lous revelation—our babies were already com­mu­ni­cat­ing with us. I heard not beau­ty but a sci-fi movie voice inton­ing, We are not alone. I know I wasn’t alone in the class in think­ing that this was hor­ri­fy­ing; the aliens inside would decide when we got turned inside out.

By con­trast, Descartes, lone­ly male, decides he has to prove he is not alone: “If this objec­tive real­i­ty of any of my ideas is found to be so great that I am cer­tain that the same real­i­ty was not in me, either for­mal­ly or emi­nent­ly, and that there­fore I myself can­not be the cause of the idea, then it nec­es­sar­i­ly fol­lows that I am not alone in the world.”

The con­tent of The Med­i­ta­tions not only does not fit the state of labor­ing but it does not fit the state of liv­ing either. Even for a per­son priv­i­leged with soli­tude, this proof makes no sense if you look at the body. No mam­mal bod­ies lack proof. If, instead of only metaphor­i­cal­ly navel-gaz­ing, Descartes had lit­er­al­ly keeled over and peered into his navel, he would have seen evi­dence that, at least once, he had not been alone in the world. He too once dehisced.

In the log­ic of the text, Descartes would argue that he could not address his navel because he’s not sure it’s his. At the same time, he admits between med­i­ta­tions that this bod­i­ly dis­con­nect is hard to main­tain for the length of time it takes to read a sen­tence or an entire med­i­ta­tion. The body nev­er ceas­es exert­ing its grav­i­ty on the mind and a prop­er proof takes this into the equation.

But the fun­ny thing about the mind is that it can con­vince itself, if even for a lit­tle while, that it is not the body. You can feel, while tap­ping away at your com­put­er, while los­ing track of time, while check­ing out of a con­ver­sa­tion, while deceiv­ing your­self about pain or about per­cep­tu­al scale—the phan­tom limb, the per­spec­ti­val twist of a tall building—that you are not the same as your decep­tive senses.

That odd duplic­i­ty of the mind—to know it is not sep­a­rate and to try to be—is worth pay­ing atten­tion to. Even though it might not be cor­rect to say we are mind and body, we often feel it is.

But not when we’re hav­ing a baby.

~

When I pushed the baby out, the lig­a­ment that con­nects the two bones of the pelvis let go. With­out that sup­port, I couldn’t walk. So after work­ing so hard to have a VBAC—a vagi­nal birth after C‑section—I was more bed-bound than any C‑section patient. I couldn’t turn myself over in bed; I couldn’t pee or poop alone. When I final­ly went home, I was wheel­chair and walk­er-bound for a few months.

The worst part, how­ev­er, was that I was in the hos­pi­tal alone for five days with­out sleep­ing. A few hours after they put the baby on my chest, my hus­band went to the bath­room and puked. A stur­dy virus had him and my three-year-old vom­it­ing for days. As a result, they couldn’t come to the mater­ni­ty ward.

I called my doula. She said she had decid­ed to change careers. As in, she had decid­ed that very evening. She said that to me at two in the morn­ing. I don’t think it was entire­ly me and my failed Carte­sian meditation—I think she’d reached a point of exhaus­tion and age and she’d run out—but I was the imme­di­ate casualty.

So there I was, alone in the hos­pi­tal bed, not able to roll over and def­i­nite­ly not able to sleep. Since I’m bipo­lar, this was espe­cial­ly a prob­lem. My hus­band wasn’t there and my OB was out of town and my doula quit, so no one men­tioned the state of my mind. On the fourth night I saw the wall­pa­per move—there was no wall­pa­per in the hospital—and I heard voic­es wak­ing me up and I wasn’t asleep. I called for my hus­band even though he hadn’t slept much for a few days either, and he, beloved, got up and left the sick three-year-old with a friend.

But I still couldn’t sleep. The next day, after fig­ur­ing out how to get a wheel­chair into our old house, they got me home, and every­one hoped I’d sleep bet­ter. I didn’t, and it took some heavy anti-psy­chotics to bring me down.

~

The fun stuff comes at the begin­ning of The Med­i­ta­tions—Descartes con­sid­er­ing how often he’s been wrong when trust­ing his eyes, spec­u­lat­ing that all the peo­ple on the street out­side might be “automa­ta,” won­der­ing whether he might be mad, if his sens­es might be con­trolled by an evil demon. Could we mere­ly be brains in a vat, minds stim­u­lat­ed by some evil genius? Could the world be an illu­sion like The Matrix? Could, well, the wall­pa­per be mov­ing on its own? Fun ques­tions for intro phi­los­o­phy classes.

But in the end, Descartes is not a fun guy. He’s not an artist but an archi­tect, and the bor­ing kind, work­ing in CAD. He lays down an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal foun­da­tion one irrefutable fact after the oth­er: if I say I am think­ing, then I must be some­where think­ing; if I exis­tence some­thing bet­ter than me and more reli­able must have made me; all those things I have proved in the same way I would prove math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la­tions, so I will use that mod­el from now on for every­thing; look how well it works for God—God is as obvi­ous as a tri­an­gle; giv­en how per­fect God is, he wouldn’t be deceiv­ing me about my feel­ing that the world is real­ly there and that body and mind are separate.

By the end, the body and the world are back. The body is real, but the body is not the self—because the self can see this, can make this dis­tinc­tion. The reli­able mind has proved the world is also reli­able and ready for study by physics. Descartes, anx­ious to par­tic­i­pate in the new empir­i­cal sci­ence, want­ed to get out of the house of ontol­ogy and on to physics. Because the medi­a­tions claim to end think­ing on this top­ic defin­i­tive­ly, Descartes’s “med­i­ta­tion” prac­tice is, in a way, the oppo­site of philo­soph­i­cal think­ing. Philo­soph­i­cal think­ing, reflec­tion, is nev­er real­ly over; it always goes after the next dis­tinc­tion, the fin­er clarification.

Still, still, Descartes is worth read­ing. Descartes is fas­ci­nat­ing because even in his fail­ure, he draws your atten­tion to the edi­fice of self you’ve been stand­ing in. My good­ness, you say, but this thing is frag­ile, the cor­ner­stone is imma­te­r­i­al. This self is blown away with a lit­tle meta­phys­i­cal wind. We bet­ter build a bet­ter thing.

My expe­ri­ence of those who love to phi­los­o­phize is that they love the ques­tions Descartes posed no mat­ter what he con­clud­ed. They love to stand at the door­way of the house of meta­physics and won­der if it will fall down on their heads. They won­der about going mad, even if it’s the poets who most often do. Even for Daniel Den­nett, who dis­miss­es the homuncu­lus as laugh­able, The Med­i­ta­tions serves as what he calls an intu­ition pump. The medi­a­tions stir up desire. The text is a get­ting-our-hearts-minds-going tool. In oth­er words, it needs the body and its desires to com­pel us to read it.

~

I was hor­ri­fied at my doula’s sug­ges­tion that I recite poet­ry because I knew it would make me feel too much; it wouldn’t help me be a mind, it would get me going, adding emo­tion­al fuel to the fire.

But in fact, The Med­i­ta­tions also get my heart going. They fill me with hope for think­ing. They remind me of the plea­sure of the mind, of the click­ety-clack of the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ham­mer and the fun of look­ing at the struc­ture together.

The Med­i­ta­tions is a post-par­tum text. When we are not in labor, we feel the lit­tle fire of fear that we are alone. The post-par­tum body now holds the oth­er lit­tle body  out­side and can’t be sure of it any­more. The wall­pa­per moves beneath sleep worn perception.

~

In a sto­ry in Chang­ing Planes, Ursu­la K. Le Guin imag­ines an ontol­ogy where peo­ple are like birds; in youth, every­one says fierce­ly, Let’s go to the city, every­one leaves the dis­tant nests and flies togeth­er and works away, and then after a bit, the wind changes, and they look at each oth­er and say, Isn’t it time to go home? and they wing to the coun­try, have babies, and die only when the babies are ready to fly away. No labor­er would need a doula to stand in for the com­fort of others.

But we are not birds who migrate togeth­er at the twitch of the light. Sea­sons of the mind do not coin­cide. Even when bod­ies com­mu­ni­cate, the baby ini­ti­at­ing its way out­side, the mind resists, con­vinces itself it can stay. Flock­less, we let our young depart like the dead.

The navel is, after all, a scar.

~

I wasn’t very good at being in labor; I cried, I begged for the epidur­al, I hat­ed the doula, I hat­ed all of it, I want­ed to get back to my mind. In ret­ro­spect, I would choose med­ica­tion, peace, less fuel, less fire. There’s enough to be when hav­ing a baby.

I haven’t taught The Med­i­ta­tions or any­thing else since I had my sec­ond child. I have a great deal of self­less life, and a child named Lucian, from luce, the light—all that end­less light, the light of the mind, that light that kept me up think­ing until there was no more think­ing left.

I may not teach, but I still read, and I read The Med­i­ta­tions for me, for the plea­sure of notic­ing that lit­tle sense of self that keeps deceiv­ing itself into exis­tence. And for the plea­sure of fear that fol­lows. A doula offers com­fort. There is no com­fort for suf­fer­ing of life, for the suf­fer­ing that results from mere­ly hav­ing a mind. Labor­ing toward a baby leads to no more safe con­clu­sions about the self than The Med­i­ta­tions. All I can say after is that it’s all right to let a lit­tle decep­tion con­tin­ue; it’s all right to think you are your sin­gu­lar self, to enjoy the decep­tion of men­tal life.

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

This piece recounts a labor. I wrote it because that event keeps ram­i­fy­ing through my life. Birth doesn’t end with the end of labor. Women are encour­aged to go back to the work­place, to lean in, as if a sin­gu­lar mind-body had not exis­ten­tial­ly irrupt­ed into two. As a philoso­pher, I can’t think through birth in the terms of the texts I have been trained on. These texts were pri­mar­i­ly writ­ten by male authors, priv­i­leged with a pri­va­cy I have nev­er had since giv­ing birth.

 

Kascha Semonovitch’s poems and essays have appeared in jour­nals includ­ing Quar­ter­ly West, The Belling­ham Review, Zyzzy­va, the Keny­on Review, and oth­ers, and in the chap­book Gen­e­sis by Danc­ing Girl Press. She has received a PhD in phi­los­o­phy from Boston Col­lege, an MFA in poet­ry from War­ren Wil­son Col­lege, and fel­low­ships at the Mac­Dow­ell Colony and the Ucross Foun­da­tion. The edi­tor of two col­lec­tions of philo­soph­i­cal essays, she has taught phi­los­o­phy at Boston Col­lege, Seat­tle Uni­ver­si­ty, and the Hugo House in Seat­tle. She runs an art gallery in Seattle.

Nonfiction / Anne Gorrick

:: 21. I Forgot That Summer in Rome ::

Most graf­fi­ti fol­low a for­mu­la, a booty shak­ing cur­sive print­out log­ic. The float­ing fig­ures will include Perseus and Androm­e­da. The first symp­tom is amne­sia. The best way to take this bath is to immerse your­self. In the first week, the seed will either con­geal or fall out. In the lost lands, Lucius was the first to notice a cloud of dust on the hori­zon. Poet­ry always knows. We slaugh­ter ves­tiges of a lost city. A Left Bank hill­side car­ries the name Sainte-Geneviève. Not a bad sell­ing point. Part of the less-than-per­fect to down-right-bad ety­mol­o­gy out there, full of chaff, is the knowl­edge of disease.

 

 

To the south and west, we could see Nepal. It was clear­ly well used. Then I made trip after trip to used book­stores, track­ing down issues of the Sur­vival­ist that I did not have. We were designed to be con­ceal­able and fitwell in the palm of the hand. Women’s boots some­times reached their thighs. Their groans are lost. In sep­sis, the body’s immune sys­tem goes into overdrive.

Edit: Oh, I had some­thing explain­ing it, though it’s lost in my files.

 

 

For 25 days, they fol­lowed our Bal­let Boot Camp Chal­lenge. He looked her up and down, focus­ing on the cloud-print paja­mas tucked into her black stilet­to boots. His stum­ble into the scene looked authen­tic. She ran ahead of him to the goat pen. He reached into his mouth and felt his own tongue. He was wear­ing Nike Zoom Hyper­fuse, a pair of sneak­ers he still owns. His pas­sage left damp spots on the sur­face of the road. There is a sto­ry every nitrous user tells about the first time she ran into gas. Every­one can for­give and for­get once. He pow­er­slides a grind­ing U‑turn in front of the truck. These are not her words.

 

 

All you might need to do to soft­en it up is wash it. He gazed down at the dio­ra­ma of her body. Hunt­ing could be a form of chess. Wow, that hip­ster cou­ple in the pho­to made my body itch wild­ly and spoiled my appetite. You seem to be imply­ing that the musi­cal intel­li­gence of the past week amounts to noth­ing. Alec Bald­win debuted his spot-on Don­ald Trump impres­sion on SNL. This is the acces­so­ry every­one for­gets about until they need it. The blue­white death col­or was ris­ing. Rooms are actu­al­ly quite pleas­ant when lit like this. The ripest ones usu­al­ly lay­for­got­ten at the bot­tom. Dante liked to over­see the load­ing of the lug­gage. You don’t want him next to your skin. The itch has spread. It’s wool, so peo­ple expect it to be the ene­my. The pil­lows were soft, the blan­ket plush and thic­knoth­ing. He balled his hand into a fist as if to hit her. There were bright­ly col­ored rem­nants of lost holes. Some­times it was but­tons. Now that I am dead I have for­got­ten. Spray paint me lumi­nes­cent orange so I remem­ber. Sheep can rec­og­nize indi­vid­ual human and ovine faces. Anoth­er favorite gar­ment was a yel­low leather shirt jack­et I wore until it shredded.

 

 

I felt myself blush­ing, star­ing at my plate. I can’t even fig­ure out how to open the win­dows any­more. It took me a lit­tle bit to catch on. An ice cube will melt giv­en enough time if you set it out­side the fridge. I’m work­ing alone, lift­ing peach­es from a boil­ing pot into an ice bath. Mon­ey enters this con­test. I smelled mint and choco­late on his breath. Place half the straw­ber­ries, the sug­ar and Grand Marnier into a blender. This is prop­er for those who leap from any height into water. Abortive attempts were made by the Dutch to reclaim their lost pos­ses­sion. Tear the top cor­ner off the map and just fuck­ing shove it into my mouth.

 

 

Many of his patients had lost fin­gers. The weight of water and kayak forced him against the sea bot­tom. He forced him­self not to wrig­gle. We decant our­selves. They scream/stare/whisper into her, this inar­tic­u­late con­test. He was so illeg­i­ble that he couldn’t remem­ber what soda was called.

 

 

Insep­a­ra­ble from def­i­n­i­tion, writ­ing is lost. Note­books filled with almonds. Writ­ers ren­o­vate, reoc­cu­py. A com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor after dark, elab­o­rat­ed, mithri­dat­ed, extract­ed from con­text, not real­ly fir­ing at the tar­get. Our ele­gances, our errors sac­ri­ficed to grav­i­ty and solem­ni­ty. I remem­ber being pret­ty hor­ri­fied at first. When genre = capitalism.

 

 

Sure enough, the vis­it is about to turn ugly. Click on “for­got pass­word.” With mink, a promised win­ter of work and pay, but you for­got to bring your for­mal wear. We’ve lost touch with our Win­ter Pianist. Seat­ed at a theme-dec­o­rat­ed table, I had to wear that red dress because I lost a bet. The remain­ing four­teen quick­ly became lost and ran out of food. He refus­es to accept that she is a mole or a dou­ble agent, but her actions begin to raise doubts. Out west for coal, 50 man­nequins in lav­ish ball gowns. Also, the guests were seat­ed at small tables.

 

 

A sto­ry of smoke­jumpers and a woman in a rust­ing satin gown under a pale sun. The affair resem­bled noth­ing so much as a cat­tle dri­ve. So many acres of ball­room floors that year around the city. Car­toons to helped me to remem­ber these sto­ries. Dur­ing the win­ter, hump­backs fast and live off their fat reserves.

 

 

Tux bind­ing annoy but­ton­hole flat­ter­ers how­itzer ter­mite chum­mi­er nails 
shakes… Ball­room blog­ger thresh­old cyn­i­cal­ly fas­ci­na­tion largest monolog
batiks… Hearti­ly Slocum com­pro­mis­es abscond­ed­for­got were diag­noses Ganymede real­is­ti­cal­ly… Marauds recy­cle macaws win­ter char­ter­ing screen­writ­ers win­ter­green… Wheeled aero­nau­tic Callaghan wall rel­e­vant tuxe­do compeaty

 

 

The view from this win­dow was writ­ten by a woman. Ama­to­ry ele­gies. These love frag­ments, these vocab­u­lary words, these Flash­cards for Roman Civ­i­liza­tion. “Bankers sign” in Latin means “wax tablet.” See my “Licensed Feet in Latin Verse,” a rhetor­i­cal exer­cise. Many fem­i­nine poems have been lost for lack of copy­ing by male read­ers. His moth­er changed them all into Latin char­ac­ters, 15 in num­ber. The read­er-fig­ure is gen­dered as female in order to under­score her gener­ic “you.”

What author presents her thoughts on her lover going on a boar hunt? Sulpicia

What poet addressed a lady who has almost lost her hair through bleach? Ovid

 

 

Lit­tle Ice Dev­ils con­tin­ued from page two. She is liv­ing with com­plex region­al pain. “Not even wild grass grows here,” she said. She tow­ers in Lucite. Bones break fre­quent­ly. You must nev­er for­get that Alas­ka doesn’t love you back with its fat hal­ibuts. Despite the thorns that caught on her hands and arms, a dozen fra­grant beeswax can­dles and a rude lit­tle jar of pig fat. Form dis­solves into care­less­ness. They for­get their med­i­cine togeth­er, get­lost, con­fused, dri­ve off the road. Motion­less­ness as ice. They are pieces of drift­wood that dot the beach­es. It’s easy to get lost inside tall cans of Red Bull. Despite the ecsta­sy the hors­es inspire, Pim­li­co is, at bot­tom, noth­ing more than a chill and shud­der. If you had looked at her in detail, she smiled back and found her way into your poem.

 

 

Plu­ral­i­ty and the great civic flo­ra uncov­er oth­er bits of lost mat­ter. The fear asso­ci­at­ed with bur­ial has been replaced with awe. Con­cil­iar fic­tions, in par­tic­u­lar the replace­ment of lengthy and detailed end­notes with more suc­cinct foot­notes. He acts like a king long enough that he becomes one. He pro­duced him­self as a tran­scrip­tion, the nar­ra­tive mov­ing through the busy and var­ied events of Rome. Using the syn­crom­e­ter, you may iden­ti­fy and ana­lyze a par­tic­u­lar skin­site of now-lost tragedy. Alpha­bets began to replace pic­ture-based writ­ing. The boy climbs the rope and is lost to view. There will be charis­mat­ic renew­al, syn­tac­tic move­ment, the appear­ance of move­ment from sequen­tial draw­ings. A world of cities had become (again) the world ruled by a sin­gle city.

 

 

Food, vict­uals; means of sub­sis­tence, liveli­hood. Or lotus; the moon; a conch; the tree Bar­ring­to­nia. Rise from your sick bed. Recov­er from trou­ble. Don’t for­get to take your umbrel­la. I did not have a rule. This both­ers me because it means that I will have to delete 23 brain-improve­ment work­outs. Do not for­get to share your favorite name with us, an assem­blage in any of the hun­dreds of dic­tio­nar­ies, major and minor. Who invent­ed this rather nice but most­ly for­got­ten lit­tle lan­guage? Pair, dozen, score, gross, hun­dred, thou­sand (when used after numer­als). So I entered into the hol­low tubu­lar stalk. A word that sounds rude, but isn’t. The Eng­lish word “sen­ti­ment” does not con­vey the exact con­no­ta­tion. The petals were vivid blue. The word anemone comes from the Greek “anemos” or “wind.” I also remem­ber feel­ing a bit con­cerned that the names were going to stick for life, so I want­ed good ones. The fear of not being dom­i­nat­ed by a god. Many Indi­an hol­i­days end with fire or water. Hun­dreds gath­er to watch.

 

 

Lan­guage cheats. Most­ly, it boils down. Describe your pos­ses­sions, their visu­al echolalia, their slow reduc­tion in vocab­u­lary and syn­tax. I’m pret­ty sure I’m going to embrace these games once we get home. By the time he died, almost every­one clung to their splin­ter tongue, their hypoth­e­sized absolute uni­ver­sals. We’re just a set of vocab­u­lary exten­sions. We pro­vide the nega­tion. I have a cochlear implant, but it’s of lim­it­ed help. Words you’re unfa­mil­iar with become lit­tle holes. Words tend to point in a greater num­ber of dif­fer­ent direc­tions, an opus which pro­pos­es to fix the mean­ing of terms. Inter­est to avoid being for­got­te­namidst the tumult and con­fu­sion in count­less trans­lat­a­bles: to col­or melody, con­ser­va­to­ry. “Crooked head” is the tribe’s term for any lan­guage that is not Pirahã. Pitch changes in utter­ance can sig­nal emo­tion. Pri­or to this, we were con­sid­ered broken.

 

 

One expla­na­tion is that some of the names have been lost over the years. There is a ghost in the rope. No one has a sec­re­tary, and no one can remem­ber a damn thing. I doubt sci­en­tists will ever be able to talk to us. It’s the clos­est thing we’ve got: water and your fan­cy-schman­cy oppos­able thumbs, and oth­er gleam­ing, shrimp-like objects. Paper Girls To Force Giant Days. It’s best not to nib­ble. Our goal is to cre­ate the largest & best list of oxy­morons on the inter­net. The con­stant buzzing was unbear­able. Rocko and Fil­burt ran into the front open­ing of the giant tele­vi­sion. It’s less of a coher­ent movie and more like a bunch of vague­ly relat­ed scenes stitched togeth­er. See more about Sea Mon­keys. Seri­ous­ly, we taste like the sea + pis­ta­chio and lychee. Giant, list­less, con­nect­ed using mor­tise-and-tenon joints that hang togeth­er like huge Lego sets, we use tools. Can be taught to speak (like par­rots); have huge brains for birds; springs from a deep­er basic source than think­ing. Rhyming. Why the man­tis shrimp is my new favorite ani­mal. Even­tu­al­ly we will be able to read only huge batch plateaus in the land­scape. The obvi­ous give­away is that the scars are stu­pid­ly shiny. Then I thought about shadows.

 

 

Hol­i­days are con­struct­ed out of spe­cif­ic meals. He thought of crabs, and their val­ue sud­den­ly dwin­dled. We made Bacon n’ Whiskey jam. You know the word. You’ve prob­a­bly made the same mis­take. The plea­sures of this movie are like those of a beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed, hap­haz­ard­ly plot­ted pic­ture book. Curled up on her side, only a thin sheet thrown­hap­haz­ard­ly over her body. As the pho­tos indi­cate, we for­got about the but­tons on his coat (fur­ry dice, old post­cards but every­thing very hap­haz­ard and rat­ty). She lost her orig­i­nal form, a series of strat­i­fied hor­i­zon­tal lay­ers, a hap­haz­ard bent cop­per. Sev­er­al whitish strands fell hap­haz­ardlyabout her pale face. Grab what­ev­er you can. This made the blinds hang hap­haz­ard­ly, thus the room looked messier. Peo­ple tend to for­get that Ice­land is about 25% desert. A Vir­gin Mary lunch­box and hap­haz­ard licorice and yum­my mum­mies. The first vow­el is often­lost in speech, as auto­mat­ic and insignif­i­cant. Women, sea­hors­es, and riv­er gods are bap­tized in Rubens. High wood­en fences installed along the bay made it dif­fi­cult to see ships. Thou­sands in dress­es once on a brisk moss of lawns.

 

 

The self has made an effort. All built explic­it­ly upon mod­el scenes, a vehi­cle for vir­tu­oso imitation.

 

 

Stretch all you want. It’s just a kind of inter­plan­e­tary col­o­niza­tion. His green eyes glit­tered. It’s an awe­some draw­ing of my first fan drag­on with the tox­ic trench stinger. She lost her hold, slid out of the poem. My shoul­ders cleared a road. These lit­tle scenes played out among the green stalks. A lizard scram­bled up her arm, toward her face. “Which reminds me,” he said, “we’ve got to recov­er your films.” The same is true of fos­sil beds in the Gobi desert or the Amer­i­can west. That’s an odd sort of cloth for a leader to wear. It has been many years since I last tast­ed this, its ser­pen­tine length across the hills, the noise of mon­ey. Dur­ing the Pol­ish-Mon­go­lian pale­on­to­log­i­cal expe­di­tion to the Gobi Desert of Mon­go­lia in 1971, every­one was going toward noon, every­one who’s ever stuck their arm out of the win­dow of a mov­ing car.

 

 

Next to the boom-box he’s laid out his clothes. It felt like a pho­ny arm made out of sty­ro­foam or some­thing. He lost all his skin and his nails. Dou­ble dahlias in the gar­den. The threads? Stripped. The pipes? Worn and bare, and they thought, fuck ’em. By now I have pried them apart. Not well you see. So. Let’s divide labor with tact and sort out him from his lit­ter. We were sel­dom out of sight of mud-walled huts or tiny Chi­nese villages.

 

 

I mur­mured. I undrew. You have for­got­ten the words. Four­teen heavy let­ters. Click here to tell us which words you think I should have includ­ed. I watched who the crowd part­ed for. He tast­ed like vod­ka. “There’s not a let­ter there from New York,” I asked, “with my name writ­ten on it?” We have a name picked out: you. I was gripped with pan­ic. You will please note that we have increased your roy­al­ties to 20 per cent. The space of exile goes on for­ev­er like a sen­tence. You dressed with great cau­tion. After the event, the smile surgery focus­es exclu­sive­ly on lift­ing the cor­ners, the drift. Every zoo needs a keep­er. If you’re not sure if a word is an exple­tive, look it up. Avoid the inser­tion of hard returns at the end of every line. Are you sure you want to hear the results?

 

 

Matthew’s west­ern eye­wall and my father’s death relate to his­tor­i­cal times, benign par­ties, and fun, irrepara­ble wounds lurk. The kids on his bus were scream­ing, snort­ing their father’s ash­es, his last biop­sies. The war left prison in the veins. Image stud­ies, cir­cum­stance, small and fierce­ly felt. I think what you’re expe­ri­enc­ing is “absence seizures.” Often, puls­es in the groin and legs are very weak. Nerve con­duc­tion. In Benign Rolandic Epilep­sy, the EEG will pick up epilep­tic activ­i­ty in the rolandic area of the brain. The cre­mas­teric reflex is absent. Only ink would think up pat­terns like this, like a dirty plas­tic pre­tend ivory thing. Every­one is a genius at least once a year. Moths flutter.

 

 

In their be-penised bona fides, for­get sweaty neigh­bors and their fan­cy work­out equip­ment. Some­times the best jokes are made by a dou­ble act, even if the per­son play­ing the “straight” role doesn’t know they’re play­ing it. I’m sit­ting in a very pub­lic area and for­got my head­phones. Turkeys Have Got­ten Huge Since the 1940s. Read­ing Par­adise Lost I was struck by how male char­ac­ters (God, Jesus, and the Angels) are yakking all the time and Eve stays qui­et. He’s run­ning on the “Big Tits and I Can­not Lie” Plat­form. He osten­si­bly sets out to com­bine the Creepy House and Creepy Doll sub­gen­res. A cacoph­o­ny of red lines. His­to­ry of the Tam­pon | Mansplain­er Series.

 

 

Still extant, is attrib­uted, there­fore capa­ble of extrac­tion, con­demned by intrigue: the canon­i­cal Latin love elegists. Browse alpha­bet­i­cal­ly through more than 9,000 words. I nev­er real­ly stud­ied the deep end of time. When will the dig­i­tal­ly tattooed/engraved mark/chip be manda­to­ry? Deep down, they knew that they want­ed to face the real world togeth­er. I knew I dis­agreed, but it took me a while to artic­u­late my rea­son. A sketchy draw­ing of the Vat­i­can gold-glass as the sim­plest and old­est pat­terns of prayer. Like Allen Gins­berg zip­ping, the accu­mu­la­tion from inmates shov­el­ing, etched with favor. Obvi­ous­ly won­der­pain called to me from some­where: “Throw straight, cold and fast.” There’s a reflect­ed absence. He showed me his badge once, the destroyed elec­tron­ic doc­u­men­ta­tion of lost art. Vic­tor mouthed the words “thank you.” The bridge’s exact ori­en­ta­tion is unknown.

 

 

She used to drink some­times more than was nec­es­sary, but she nev­er for­got. We are sud­den­ly vul­ner­a­ble and need more time. You may feel relieved that the worst is over. Grad­u­al­ly divest your­self of your orna­ments. Put them in a draw­er and for­get about them. You can help vic­tims and do your shop­ping all at the same time. There is no recov­ery from this per­sis­tent veg­e­ta­tive state, from a street­wise four-move hand­shake, from a thing you nev­er blame deeply. What’s the most obscene dis­play of pri­vate wealth you’ve ever wit­nessed? Liv­ing with binge. My mind was blurred, and I per­ma­nent­ly lost pieces of the last eight months. My bro­ken para­graphs have stum­bled between a clean water dis­as­ter and your mom. With some fucks, I remem­ber wak­ing up. Mood con­ta­gion. Sud­den­ly the per­son would look up. “I just got bit by a shark.” In the days and months sub­se­quent to fire, there was a mirac­u­lous heal­ing through the inter­ces­sion. If you’re with­in 10 feet of some­one expe­ri­enc­ing this, make eye contact.

 

 

But if you stop and pay atten­tion, per­spi­ra­tion can actu­al­ly teach you. An inves­ti­ga­tor will shake your hand to deter­mine if it is cold or sweaty. I won­der if I have wan­dered into a cult. I sleep in my bathrobe. If he held his fin­ger straight up along a screwdriver’s spine, he could fling it. I did not sign up. I did not take detailed notes. The body burned entire­ly. When we broke up, I lostin­ter­est in wak­ing up. I won­der if you felt the weight. But it points to a fun­da­men­tald­is­hon­esty. Bring us anoth­er night­mare. Two A‑list clas­si­cal artists rev­el in their ten­der. Don’t for­get to touch and kiss each oth­er often, as if you were only here to mar­ket a prod­uct. If only I could unlearn all these things I’d believe. You spent most of the musi­cal try­ing to shake off what you crave.

 

 

It’s full-on trans­paren­cy, not a blur. Its shift­ing appear­ance res­onat­ed toward a new mate­ri­al­ism. It may help to imag­ine how flat sheets repeat the same col­or. Dou­ble-walled façades have repeat­ed­ly been invent­ed. Elim­i­nate the tint left behind. It seems ran­dom, these peo­ple walk­ing in the street, but it’s not. Mate­ri­als (peo­ple) which do not trans­mit light are called opaque. They were swept out into a vague and dusty char­i­ty. Blame­less pink corsets, lus­trous sur­faces. Sci­en­tists made see-through wood using epoxy that is cool­er than glass. A tool for mea­sur­ing the index of refrac­tion of an irreg­u­lar­ly shaped, trans­par­ent sol­id resets the player’s spawn point. But my ques­tion is, why don’t we see these excit­ed elec­trons return to their orig­i­nal ener­gy? We see every­thing slow­ly. This is often lost by the scal­ing off the out­er sur­face. Ignore the gray box so when look­ing through the win­dows we see sky. It’s only that some objects disappear.

 

 

Alpha trans­paren­cy tex­ture def­i­nite­ly works. The vis­i­ble and leg­i­ble I. A look at the floor plan’s secret infra­struc­ture. Who has glass pock­ets? No geom­e­try or attrib­ut­es, just light points and their spills, watery look­ing ground tex­tures. Turn off the lights. Your ren­der doesn’t look very realistic.

 

 

Evac­u­ate an emp­ty cylin­der into her some­what vig­or­ous grasp. Dump out the tea leaves you’ve been using all week. Rus­sians believe that you must not put emp­ty bot­tles, keys, or change on the table. This amounts to almost 13 of the emp­ty weight of the air­plane. It’s hard­wired to suck. Com­pet­i­tive ath­letes need more sug­ar to attract their hum­ming­birds. Their names are already for­got­ten in Great Moments in Cin­e­mat­ic Drink­ing. The way they twin­kle as he para­sails. The endurance exer­cise out­come is to post­pone fatigue, not replace it. It’s green when it’s on/good and red when it’s off/bad/empty. I brought myself to an instinc­tive halt. Hold the Trulic­i­ty pen like an emp­ty laun­dry deter­gent bot­tle or cof­fee can. On tele­vi­sion. One day ago. Sup­pose you tape two bot­tle rock­ets togeth­er and light them. Emp­ty­ing a city on short notice means inter­nal com­bus­tion. We gave the rat a prop­er bur­ial in an emp­ty can.

 

 

I’ve been prac­tic­ing this for years: Plath’s fold­ed cloth. It won’t bring lost laun­dry back. Describe the expe­ri­ence: the cold car. Stop cry­ing for the sake of aes­thet­ics. Scot­tish Fold Cats Are Hon­est­ly The Cutest Fuck­ing Things Ever. Improve the sharp­ness and qual­i­ty of my prints ten­fold, of flame, enfold­ed. There is some­thing so bro­ken and I fall, a frac­tion in com­par­i­son. Sil­ver and how ashy the mat­tress. New para­medics: I don’t know how you plan to save any­one if you’re not crushed and minia­ture. The vis­i­tor will feel delight­ed. They sat for eight, nine, 10 hours gaz­ing. It was just fold­ing laun­dry at 2am, except with a sheet of gal­va­nized mesh wire. Lay­ers, veined and bunched togeth­er, as soft as coils. She did not need to fold these into herself.

 

 

Child sol­diers =

amnesty, brain­wash­ing, char­i­ty, drugged, Eritrea, for­eign pol­i­cy, girls, human rights vio­la­tions, in Ugan­da, Japan, kid­nap­ping, met­al gear, non-prof­it, of Isis, Pow­er­Point, Qui­zlet, res­cue, sur­vivors, should be pun­ished, TV tropes, used as spies, vice, with PTSD, TEDx talk, YouTube, Gen­er­a­tion Z

 

 

Decod­ing real­i­ty? That’s like des­e­crat­ing a church. It’s like the Lost Ghost Ship Turned Its Guests Into Can­ni­bals. The French Rev­o­lu­tion broke out with the fall of the Bastille | Are­ta­lo­gies of Isis | We’ve also built a new Guilt Fin­ger fea­ture into the game. Ring of frost, con­se­cra­tion, des­e­cra­tion, wild mush­room, flare, ice trap. Snow was now falling heav­i­ly, geo­graph­i­cal fac­tors shaped this space. The rules of plur­al lux­u­ry, a sim­u­lacrum of Night­town. The vast throng could not hear him. A jas­mine bluegray night scene. Art broke into frag­ments. He is face­down. We dig into the meat of charm­ing alley­ways. Sum­mer and snow­dark, my face a mask going into the wild­woods. Space is not hori­zon. There is no ver­ti­cal per­spec­tive. This work was made to fall into your hands.

 

 

Veg­e­ta­tion grows sig­nif­i­cant­ly. A string snapped. Great and shim­mer­ing blues and greens. She gen­er­al­ly hid by drap­ing a dupat­ta to cast a shad­ow. I once watched him cut a trip­wire strung across a door­way. Yel­low marks imprint­ed on the road. We grim­ly wave fist­fuls of make-believe mon­ey. Sea salt mixed momen­tar­i­ly with Sun­day. It was the last thing I want­ed to deal with.

 

 

She start­ed run­ning. She was expressed as verse. For­mal. There was almost no descrip­tion of land­scape. The poem was high­ly wrought, slipped into news­pa­pers, so lost in kiss­es. There are hand­cuffs for everything.

 

 

Vis­it the post office in a minor key. He talked to her in Key West, accept­ed her as an appari­tion. Per­for­mance is every­thing, nights to cel­e­brate her Jan­u­arys, emer­gency num­bers lam­i­nat­ed for everyone’s safe­ty. It doesn’t even make sense, not even in Dolce & Gab­bana under­wear. Late­ly, he’s been hear­ing all the ani­mals talk­ing. It won’t work, even though the num­bers add up cor­rect­ly. I’m afraid I’m going to go to hell with 15 pounds of fur and claws. To date, there is very lit­tle expe­ri­ence they can­not trans­late, these smooth vol­canic stones. Him in a dry cave, wrapped in the bestra­b­bit fur blanket.

 

 

All you need is a hair­pin to unlock your hand­cuffs. Most people’s hands are larg­er than their wrists. A large mouth paint­ed dark with invest­ed pinks. She rubs alco­hol into a but­ter­cup. An image builds through the front door. Every­thing was “shit” and “for fuck’s sake.” I was struck by how nor­mal we all felt. In a dark-green par­ka with fur trim around the hood, she went to Texas with her geol­o­gist father. How­ev­er he was bun­ny­fur com­pared to her witch. Trees attached them­selves to light, glar­ing from their roots. Except Every­thing Looks the Same. I’d for­got­ten how much I hate space trav­el, necrobeas­t­ial­i­ty, this rab­bit-nude-4872-hid­den­stick­er-snow­man. A sound­less rush like an evening jack­et. Every­thing was gray and blocky, but some­how not oppres­sive. Noth­ing was miss­ing. Autonomy’s booz­ing head­winds, ATV nihilists. I ate rab­bit and cab­bage, which almost led to My Tea Shack vs. Fuck­ing on Turquoise Damask. With­in arts-based research, there are notable eth­i­cal gaps. Look, Rab­bit, I’m a woman: eye­lin­er, mas­cara. This page opens into a bright silence.

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Eileen Tabios pro­vid­ed me with one of her poems, “6. I For­got the Plas­tic­i­ty of Recog­ni­tion,” from her book Amne­sia: Some­body Else’s Mem­oir and invit­ed me to col­lab­o­rate with this text. First, I took each line and processed it var­i­ous­ly. I Googled it as it stood. I sub­sti­tut­ed the word “remem­ber” for “for­got” and con­tin­ued the Google search. I slow­ly typed in the phrase, or var­i­ous words from the phrase, to see where the drop­down box of sug­ges­tions led me. I picked and sort­ed and rearranged until I was sat­is­fied. Some lines came direct­ly from the brain­box, oth­ers were high­ly curat­ed from the elec­tron­ic mid­den. The first ver­sion of the col­lab­o­ra­tive piece includ­ed each line from Eileen’s poem, imme­di­ate­ly fol­lowed by my refer­ring text in ital­ics, to empha­size the back and forth. The sec­ond ver­sion sep­a­rat­ed my text out into a new work. I don’t think I ever quite felt this much free­dom (maybe per­mis­sion) to “write into” anoth­er piece of exis­tent work. Joy­ful. Instruc­tive. I kept going, writ­ing into sev­en of her poems total (so far).

Because this work is culled from the elec­tron­ic world, the sense of an “I” in the work shim­mers and appears to exist, but it’s at once an accu­mu­lat­ed and a dete­ri­o­rat­ed “self.” I am fas­ci­nat­ed by these cura­to­r­i­al constructions.

 

Anne Gor­rick is a writer and visu­al artist.

She is the author of sev­en books, includ­ing most recent­ly An Absence So Great and Spon­ta­neous It Is Evi­dence of Light (the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, 2018); My Beau­ty Is an Occu­pi­able Space, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with John Bloomberg-Riss­man (Palo­ma Press, 2018); and The Olfac­tions: Poems on Per­fume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). She also co-edit­ed (with poet Sam Tru­itt) In|Filtration: An Anthol­o­gy of Inno­v­a­tive Writ­ing from the Hud­son Riv­er Val­ley (Sta­tion Hill Press, 2016).

She serves on the Board of Trustees at Cen­tu­ry House His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, home of the Wid­ow Jane Mine, an all-vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tion (www.century house.org) devot­ed to the his­toric preser­va­tion and inves­ti­ga­tion through the arts of the now defunct cement indus­try in Rosendale, NY.

Anne Gor­rick lives in West Park, New York.

Nonfiction / Jenny Ferguson

:: What We Pretend We Know About the Ocean ::

One

At first we make believe this is age­ing, the gen­tle nor­mal­cy of what’s to come for all of us. She’s grumpi­er, a lit­tle mean. At times, though, mean­ness devolves into cru­el­ty. Most­ly this is snap­ping, this is accus­ing my father—her husband—of being unkind in the most gen­er­al of terms. You know what you did. Or, he knows why I say the things I do. Or, why do you always defend him? Like the bit­ing fence that dug into my bare leg when some­one else I was forced to trust let go too soon, we pre­tend we deserve her barbs, at least for a lit­tle while.

Two

When your mind tends toward nar­ra­tive, sto­ries, and their close cousins, untruths, what you find in the cloudy state­ments she makes are rocky shores, sea­side cliffs, thirst and tides too long, too far away to catch. You know, infi­deli­ty, some kind of sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­ease brought home to roost that can’t be for­giv­en, some rup­ture between what once were hap­pi­ly-unhap­py people.

Three

Delu­sion­al dis­or­ders are fas­ci­nat­ing and cru­el, anoth­er ocean entire­ly. When the mind sinks into a real­i­ty so seam­less­ly right, it becomes more than real, every new input into the sys­tem, no mat­ter how incon­gru­ous to the sto­ry being told, weaves its way in a flow­ing until all the plas­tic in the salt­ed body becomes like water too. It joins the tides, the under­wa­ter cur­rents, becomes entan­gled in wildlife-thoughts, becomes digestible even while those micro-plas­tics do their work. DDT and BPA invis­i­ble in water, still, killing us.

Four

Her cru­el­ty arrived after the Face­book Far­mville phase, where she tend­ed to a vir­tu­al gar­den with such sin­gle-mind­ed dri­ve, while out­side, not a minute’s walk from the desk­top com­put­er in our liv­ing room, toma­toes hung on the vine, ripen­ing past good­ness, rot­ting from too much sun, too much good rain. At least for a lit­tle while, we pre­tend­ed this joke was funny.

Five

When a woman reach­es the cusp of six­ty, the odds of her devel­op­ing a delu­sion­al dis­or­der sprouts legs until there are eight, grows suc­tion cups capa­ble of elon­gat­ing to twice their length, this almost-six­ty form capa­ble of chang­ing at col­ors will, like grey hair tak­ing on hen­na, but this crea­ture whose blood is blue, this crea­ture climbs out of the water and walks in alien form among us. This fact is some­thing we should all know, should not find comes at us slant. We’ve learned to call it mother.

Six

Long after we’d stopped pre­tend­ing, and after that night, after I’d begged the RCMP offi­cer to arrest my moth­er so that she could final­ly, hope­ful­ly, be dragged to the hos­pi­tal, admit­ted, forced to get help, be med­icat­ed, an old­er man with a British-ish accent com­mon to Nova Sco­tia told me with delu­sion­al dis­or­ders it’s harm­ful to force this real­i­ty on their real­i­ty. It’s not help­ful to pre­tend. It’s not help­ful to deny. Where that leaves those of us on the out­side, liv­ing here, on a plan­et made of sil­i­con, iron, mag­ne­sium, alu­minum, oxy­gen, and maybe mag­ic, this plan­et, some­thing we can tend to agree is actu­al­ly here, is not flat, where we live in bod­ies com­posed of atoms, and maybe, yes, both we and our plan­et have gone through a process of evo­lu­tion, I’m not sure, I’m real­ly not, of where we are, of what we’re sup­posed to do when a schism opens in the earth’s crust. In 220 mil­lion years, there’s a chance the Atlantic will drain away like a bath­tub fun­nel sucks water from around a body, draw­ing Europe clos­er to Tur­tle Island, chang­ing our geo­gra­phies. Some schisms don’t under­stand time in the mil­lions, some schisms evade our detec­tion until we are sunk. Now, we make our lives in bat­tle­ship graveyards.

Sev­en

Of the vari­eties of delu­sion­al dis­or­ders we cur­rent­ly know by way of sci­ence, women are more like­ly to devel­op the type that tends toward invis­i­ble-but-deeply-felt amorous con­nec­tions, where­as men are more like­ly to find them­selves attacked, per­se­cut­ed from all sides, betrayed by those they love as often as the mail car­ri­er deliv­ers junk mail coat­ed in anthrax—yes, the mes­sen­ger is as guilty, as inter­twined as the some­times face­less threats. Yet always, with new input from our real­i­ty into theirs, this threat must change, devel­op, solid­i­fy as new mas­ter­minds emerge from the depths, their bod­ies suit­ed to impos­si­ble pres­sures. Where a sub­ma­rine can’t go, where humans can’t trav­el encased in skin, the giant and colos­sal squids live easy, free of swim blad­ders, free of our unshake­able need for air.

Eight

And who can say what real­i­ty this is, what real­i­ty we share above water and below, what oceans are the delu­sion, what land? And if the octo­pus is cos­mic, car­ried to this plan­et on mete­ors, seed­ed here in oceans when a virus infect­ed ear­ly squid already among us, can we deny our own mak­ing up what is real and what is real­i­ty, can we define her but refuse to define our own belief that we can breathe under­wa­ter if enough time pass­es, if the Atlantic one day emp­ties itself into the crust? Some­times these thoughts are as trou­bling as remov­ing salt from the human body to see what might be left, remov­ing salt from the ocean to clean it.

Nine

Psy­chosis breaks the bound­aries between pre­tend and real, fus­ing lava released in fis­sures into new ground we must claim. Her para­noid thoughts, of the army, and my father, and even­tu­al­ly me too, try­ing to kill her, have formed new ground. My rela­tion­ship to land has always been com­pli­cat­ed, about give and trust and nev­er own­er­ship, about the waters that feed me run­ning free, but yes, the treaties exist, and yes, they are bro­ken, and yes, each day, this is a betray­al. Now, we pre­tend in new ways: the med­ica­tion helps, the min­utes lin­ger­ing between ques­tion and answer do not exist, the haunt­ing lack of her laugh­ter is nor­mal because we are under­wa­ter, our ears flood­ed so that sound can­not reach us, nev­er­mind, yes, nev­er­mind that laugh­ter lives in the eyes. We know that the tide is far off, and that when we reach it here, the water is mud­dy, that tides are pre­dictable but always come in faster than expect­ed, that here on the mud flats you can get stuck, but also that this water is salty, this water holds life even as life changes.

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

The book-length CNF project I’m work­ing on now is a col­lec­tion of essays explor­ing my decol­o­niza­tion. That is, I’m try­ing to work out and chronicle—through non­fic­tion fragments—what it means to be a white-cod­ed Indige­nous woman reclaim­ing a cul­ture she was cut off from when her grand­moth­er, fear­ing the res­i­den­tial schools and the gov­ern­ment abduc­tion of Indige­nous chil­dren through adop­tions and fos­ter care, decid­ed to pass as white. It’s tak­en me a long time to under­stand why I didn’t have pride in being Métis as a child.

Of course, my mind was colonized.

And undo­ing that process is messy, reveals the ulti­mate pres­ence of frag­ments, dis­solves the untruth of whole­ness. That leads me to essays where I work in frag­ments, arrange frag­ments into frag­men­tary nar­ra­tives and frag­men­tary truths.

Three Lati­na writ­ers (Anna-Marie McLemore, Anna Meri­ano, and Tehlor Mejia), one white writer who is also a dis­abled writer (Cindy Bald­win), and myself will be pre­sent­ing a pan­el at AWP 2019 where we will dis­cuss “The Cul­tur­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty of Mag­ic Real­ism” and how many of us are turn­ing away from that label. For me, this means carv­ing out what a genre called Indige­nous Realism(s) can mean for art, build­ing off of the work peo­ple like Daniel Heath Jus­tice and oth­ers I have yet to meet or to read, oth­ers who have yet to be pub­lished, are doing to rework genre. I am not aim­ing for this cat­e­go­ry to fit per­fect­ly. That too is why Indige­nous Realism(s) exist in the plur­al, in the mul­ti­ple, in a space that wel­comes the hybrid, the strange­ly-fit­ting, and the frag­men­tary as the work this space can hold, with­out bor­ders, with instead a bound­ary more like skin, a semi-per­me­able mem­brane that has the abil­i­ty to change shape, take on ink, and to nav­i­gate the con­nec­tions between the worlds and the body of work in expan­sive ways.

This mod­u­lar flash essay begins—possibly? hope­ful­ly?— with ten­ta­tive, messy steps, to engage with Indige­nous Realism(s) in non­fic­tion by using the land as bridge between mag­ic and real­ism until nei­ther can be seen as inde­pen­dent of the oth­er. In par­tic­u­lar, this means read­ing in a way we were should not sim­ply mean to treat what may be read as metaphor, as only metaphorical.

 

Jen­ny Fer­gu­son is Métis, an activist, a fem­i­nist, an aun­tie, and an accom­plice with a PhD. She believes writ­ing and teach­ing are polit­i­cal acts. Bor­der Mark­ers, her col­lec­tion of linked flash fic­tion nar­ra­tives, is avail­able from NeWest Press. She teach­es at Mis­souri South­ern State Uni­ver­si­ty and in the Opt-Res MFA Pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Columbia.