Scarce Resources

Poetry / Geetha Iyer

:: Scarce Resources ::

Los indígenas precolombinos veneraban a la rana [dorada] y tallaron talismanes de arcilla y oro (huacas) semejantes a éstas. Esta práctica condujo al mito moderno de que las ranas doradas se transforman en huacas de oro al morir, y cualquier persona que ve o posee una rana dorada viva tendrá buena fortuna.

          I have been thinking about amphibians 
the way others think about fortunes. The cost of storing
 
          sperm in a vat of nitrogen. The cost of lighting, 
casing, ventilation. Labor—the woman who raises a swarm 

          of fruit flies, dusts them in nutritional supplements. 
The value of a toad in a tank that refuses 

          to lay. Maybe she wasn’t feeling it. Maybe, tomorrow,
as that woman who minds the amphibian tanks crunches

          the season’s dry leaves underfoot, she’ll sicken
of her commute. Low pay and stubborn animals. She doesn’t see 

          enough of her children, worries what they haven’t learned
in school. It is for her that guyacán trees burst 

          into bloom. Their amarillo brillante punctures
months of drought like the silk-strung suns

          of orb-weaver webs. Wealthy men, artists, harvested
the labor of Madagascans, made them milk

          gold from such spiders, spin threads and weave a mantle
they draped over the shoulders of a woman

          pale as baby’s breath. My grandmother’s saris were shot 
with gold threads, my mother’s silver, plated, mine

          plastic treated to shine, so scarce are the veins
under earth. I think of the coats some toads wear, signaling 

          fitness, the coming of storms, sex, biohazard 
toxins, prospectors’ fortunes. They’re extinct

          in the wild, those ranas doradas. After the harvest, 
we shall need new myths. A woman returns to her children 

          in the dark, kisses the brown of their foreheads, whispers 
that they must study hard, become economists. 

          But stop, she adds, to praise the brief sunbursts 
of guayacanes before their flowers fall, lest the rains 

          do not follow, lest your hearts compress 
to mere nuggets beneath your lungs.

This poem takes its epigraph from Zippel, K. C. et al. Implicaciones en la conservación de las ranas doradas de Panamá, asociadas con su revisión taxonómica. Herpetotropicos 3:1 (2006), 29–39.

From the writer

:: Account ::

We are living through a bottleneck period—the Anthropocene era of mass extinction; the ever-widening gap between wealth and poverty; the brink of nuclear warfare between megalomaniacs; the institutional exploitation of people most marginalized by power structures; and the collapse of critical ecosystems under the impacts of climate change, population growth, and unchecked resource extraction. Those of us who will make through the other end of this bleak and narrowing tunnel will be poorer for all that we have left behind in the wreckage. We will only have stories of those who died, images and videos of megafauna and microbiota that have gone extinct. We will speak less than a couple hundred languages. We will have forgotten the names of everyone who didn’t have the wealth to erect monuments in their memory. I am haunted by this inevitability. When I write, about people or about other organisms, it is to commit something of what is wonderful about this world into the abstract realm of memory. It’s all I can carry with me, citations included.

“Scarce Resources” concerns itself with extinction on the one hand and economics on the other. I live in Panama, where the golden frog, Atelopus zeteki, is an icon for native biodiversity and conservation. I wrote the first draft of this poem in mid-April, just before the first rains of the season, when Tabebuia guayacan trees bloom en masse. Words cannot express their yellow in full sunlight—their magnificence stops cars short along the road-side so people can get out to take photos of them. Yellow-gold is the heart of this poem, given form in animal, mineral, and plant form. A Panamanian told me a version of the story that appears in the poem’s epigraph, and since my Spanish is not as good as it should be, I misunderstood its meaning. I thought the modern myth of the Panamanian golden frog (scientifically speaking, a toad) went like this: that if a man were lucky enough to find and capture one in the wild, upon death, he would turn to gold. In fact, in the story I was told, it was the frog that would turn to gold. In reality, A. zeteki is extinct in the wild, which makes me wonder, if we dug up the earth, would we find their little bodies transmogrified into gold nuggets? And if we found nothing, what stories would we tell then? What would we do without yellow so yellow it glowed?

Geetha Iyer received an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in journals including Orion, Gulf Coast, the Mid-American Review, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. Recognition for her work includes the O. Henry Award, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Calvino Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. She was a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon and a 2017 writer-in-residence at Estudio Nuboso’s Lab de Arte y Ciencia in Panama. She was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, and presently lives in Panama.

Baby Blues

Poetry / Katherine Anderson Howell

:: Baby Blues ::

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Baby Blues” is part of a series of poems that mark the grief, fear, and change of identity associated with motherhood and marriage. In these poems, images of the sea, certain flowers, and the night sky repeat. I use images of stars, whether jasmine or novas, as reminders that our lives are part of vast, only partly knowable, systems. My work embraces this mystery as a key element, not only through exploring such imagery but also through a process called “textual poaching,” to borrow a term from fandom scholar Henry Jenkins. Poaching is evident in “Baby Blues,” which began as a found poem, as the story of Miriam Carey connected with my own struggles. However, as I began to research brain science and medical journalism, as well as have personal conversations with more mothers about their experiences with postpartum depression, I discovered obscurity around postpartum depression and obtuse suggestions for treating it. I paired the digital media history of twenty-first-century postpartum depression to pair with the story of my own darkness. Women from all races and social classes have had their stories silenced by this media cacophony. The multi-voiced poem was born.

Katherine Anderson Howell writes and parents in Washington, D.C. She is the editor of Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, from the University of Iowa Press. Her poems can be found in Gargoyle Magazine, Sweet Tree Review, Juke Joint Mag, and Stillwater Review, among others.

Two Poems

Poetry / M. K. Foster

:: Aubade with Dolly Parton on Vinyl ::

—if I build a house of you in spring, if I want to watch you 
flood with light wood ash smoke, if we’ve been in bed long enough 
to open, if I open, if I let you open me, if I open myself opening 
you, if I break a part of you open, if I nail my bones to yours, if 
I should stay, if I kiss knee elbow wrist, if your head against my ribs, 
if my arms collapsed around you, if it costs me to keep you (what 
costs a body), if you are my last prayer, my favorite prayer, my only 
prayer, my one phone call with the worst words in the worst order, 
if you are the beautiful cracks in the windshield only I can see (even 
if you aren’t), if we’ve been in bed too long, my dearest, if you are 
my darling, if I’m your deer, if you hit me with your car, if I’m caught 
in your windshield, if it’s all my fault, if it’s Tuesday and you love 
Tuesdays, if I should stay, if I want you in the worst way, if I am weighed 
and found wanting, if I’m full of shit (so are you), if I burn for this, 
if I am burning, if my heart could burn a house down, if I’m always 
burning down the wrong house (you), if your face like glass apples, 
if your skin like a rosy room packed with sleeping pickled animals, 
if your eyes like fire-poker holes, like small idiot stars blistering 
the black-out curtains this morning, if freckles of light like toxic petals 
of ivory mold speckling the sagging ceiling, if we’ve been in bed too 
long (how long is too long), if we fucked, if we’re fucked, if we fucked up, 
if we couldn’t help ourselves, if we’re helpless, if I suck (so do you), 
if you’re useless as a glass axe or wet matches (even if you aren’t), 
if I’m a goner without you, O my darling (and I am), sweetheart, 
if I’m the punchline of every country western song, if I should stay, 
if I would only be in your way, if I Will Always Love You is always 
playing somehow, somewhere always crooning the same tune 
on-loop, if this is hell (this feels like hell), if I’d follow you to hell, 
if you holding on to me for dear life, my dear, is hell, if I feel like hell 
for what’s happened, if this is hell (this bed), if hell is a bed (this bed), 
if we’ve been in bed too long (too long is too long), if it kills us dead 
in the end (what costs a body in the end), if I pay in light wood ash smoke 
like this is the last time, if this is the last time, even if we know what 
comes next (we know what comes next), if the cherry tree like a chest 
x-ray breaking up the window white with dark bones, if your face like 
a grubby water glass waiting for rain, if your eyes like dug-up graves, 
if your eyes in this light eaten out by light, sockets hollow as moon craters 
hollow as us (if us), if us, if heavy husks of marbled dust

:: Poem in Which We’re Finally Cowboys ::

—or, how when we climbed to the top of the extinct volcano, 

	then over the guard rail, walking to where rock dropped 
off to city and water below, waiting for the storm we could feel 

traveling towards us to challenge our bodies, I wanted to be 
	the bird that could take you close enough to become 
the point where blue crushed blue, to become horizon: 

	we knew we could die at that moment, so we knew 
we could never die. This is what I always want to say, 
	but never can when we telephone, and every time, 

		I hear your heart in your mouth like a bird 
	in the mouth of a volcano. All I want is for you 

to know that a way out is just a matter of falling towards 
	wherever the light is coming from, or going. 

Darling friend, for the year we lived together, I wanted 

enough sunflowers to flood your days, enough moondust 
	to cover your nights. These are all the things 
we sing to lovers, but never say enough, or at all, 

for friend like brother, broken smoke wreath my father’s mouth 
	makes when he speaks of a man who, he tells himself 
again, is long-gone away from this life. You’re so lucky, 

he said to me when my body left yours behind in our city. 
	You don’t know how lucky you are. I didn’t then, and I still 
don’t now. I thought I would shatter when I thought I would 

lose you the spring they removed part of your body. You are 
	the bluest part of the sky, the most electric part of the sun 

	cracking clouds like egg shells after rain, you are the greenest 
vein of field when everyone is looking and the glittering river 
		from which no one can look away.

	 If you were made of wood, you would be a cello,

	if you were made of light, you would be, not the star,
 but its reflection in the sea, at once, the brightest point 
	in heaven and on earth, and always moving, carving

your way out of dark: prayer I say for you when I remember 
	how my father holds the one photo that never leaves
 his wallet for a frame, two cowboys with their arms 

around each other, the kind of holding-on they teach you 
		for someday saving someone from drowning. 

Dying is a young man’s game, I’ll tell you one day, 

	when we’re old the way beach glass is old— every bit 
the same color-bite, only softer at the edges. And I’ll tell you 

my best dream about you again: once before we were 
	ever born, our bodies not then our bodies rode west 
in cars like caballos over crests of hills like waves in darkness 

like deep ocean, wearing woven Stetson hats and grinning 
	under black mustaches, the sky like campfire light 
bleeding through the windshield: we’re traveling 

like lightning, like bricks through our own reflections 
	in windows, galloping hard, heavy as waterfalls, 

	you and I— riding how anything that knows it can fly 
and does because it never looked down, lives.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Aubade with Dolly Parton on Vinyl” began as a minimalist experiment to explore love as hell, but didn’t remain so for obvious reasons. Instead, it blossomed and caught fire as a massive elegy loosely based on the story of Paolo & Francesca from Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno. Dante encounters the lovers in the circle of hell for condemned adulterers, but when he hears Francesca tell her story, it breaks his heart. They fell in love, as Francesca tells it. They resisted their feelings until they couldn’t, and then, their passion kills them when Paolo’s cruel brother/ Francesca’s husband discovers and murders them. On the one hand, these lovers die for and with one another, and they live together eternally—which is the dream of love, isn’t it? But on the other hand, these lovers are bound together for all time in a horrifying vortex of pain in the afterlife. It is a poem obsessed with its own narrative of longing, but the conditional language of the ifs bite back against the romance. It’s also important to note here that in this version of hell, Paolo & Francesca wake up every morning to the exact same Tuesday morning in the same dirty bed of the same grimy room of a cheap love motel, and in this hellscape of a cheap love motel, a scratchy, skipping vinyl recording of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is always playing softly, painfully, and faithfully on-loop in the distance.

“Poem in Which We’re Finally Cowboys” is a love poem for my best friend, Sarah. She is infinitely dear to me, and in the spirit of 17^th century poet Katherine Phillips and her best-friend love poem “To My Excellent Lucasia, On our Friendship,” I wanted to write a poem to honor my beloved friend who is “all that I can prize, / My joy, my life, my rest.” This poem is also inspired by my father’s loss of his best friend, Jeff, who passed very suddenly just before I was born. I grew up hearing stories about them (“Gary & Jeff knocking open car doors off their hinges in a truck with a railroad tie for a bumper;” “Gary & Jeff get a car airborne over the crests of the hills of San Francisco,” “Gary & Jeff….”), and I always see the softness that fills in at the corners of my father’s eyes when I talk about Sarah. In this sense, I wanted to write the love poem for my best friend that my father never could for his. This is my celebration of the beauty of platonic love between friends who came from the same innocent design and immortal soul.

M. K. Foster’s poetry appeared or is forthcoming in The Boston Review, Crazyhorse, The Columbia Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, B O D Y, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere; and her work has been recognized with a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and most recently, inclusion in Best New Poets 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and currently pursues a PhD in Renaissance Literature at the University of Alabama. Additional notes and links can be found through her website: www.marykatherinefoster.com.

Two Poems

Poetry / Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

:: My Mother as a Failed Sonnet, or Maybe Just a Forest ::

I’ve written you as rivers, as frost, as everything 
hidden underneath it, as a children’s picture 
book in a foreign language, as language, that one and all 
others, as your hands and those of your mother and 
hers, most often hers, as what she held in them, as 
the empty tea kettle, as everything she’d lost, the dead
and their sea and its unsinking, as salt, as what abandon 
must mean and what it must taste like, war
and famine, immigration and tea,
Ceylon, Lady Gray, Darjeeling, as the fortune 
it leaves at the bottom of spent cups, and as 
those cups, carried across ocean and name, as water,
generations and generations of it, mothers’ 
open hands, as bare Russian birch branches 
grasping for clouds, as what a child sees 
looking up in a forest.

:: While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about death ::

when he rips a dandelion head off its stem 
and wonders why the body shrivels  
or the pregnant stray gives birth
to her calico litter and you find two of them 
wedged underneath your car tires that winter
when the drunk woman across the street falls
leaving parts of herself down every row-house stair
last night’s howling in her lungs and on your windows
and the neighbors drape her body well
before the ambulance arrives 
he will ask where they’ve all gone and why
look up instinctively and wonder 
and you’ll confess you do not know
hold him and say nothing 
about elsewhere being better or everything
happening for a reason 
you’ll hold him as though your hands
could weigh him down 
could keep his bones from growing
as the clouds move slow
he’ll notice for the first time
they are white “Not blue?”
he’ll ask surprised and you will nod
say something about the shapes of animals 
then he’ll remember the flower and kittens
the dead woman
                                             “Will they come back?”
and you’ll again stay silent 
because the lawn is full
of broken glass and water bottles
full of piss and dog shit full             
of yesterday and you will shake
your head and think you’re doing right by him 
it’s better he know now you tell yourself
and watch him look away and up
search for the dead inside the clouds

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems are part of my collection The Many Names for Mother, which explores how the weight of my Jewish-refugee experience has influenced growing up to raise a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child. Its poems obsessively tell, retell, and hover around trauma and absence—ranging from ancestral histories to my personal experience of immigration to my travels to Eastern European death sites as a descendent of a USSR Holocaust survivor.

My Mother as a Failed Sonnet, or Maybe Just a Forest:

I’ve been trying to define, to name motherhood. I’ve been trying to understand who I am as a mother by delving into who my mother is as a mother. I feel like I’ve spent my life trying to write her to get closer to understanding. The attempt of this poem at definition was failed from the start, just like the formal constraint that cannot contain what it means to be a mother. I’ve been thinking a lot about motherhood not only as the content of a poem, but motherhood as an element of craft, motherhood as not only poetry but poetics. Behind the failings of definition and form within this poem is an attempt to see how motherhood becomes a form and name all its own, just as it rejects both.

While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about death:

On election day, November 8, 2016, my son turned one. We began his birthday with an exciting trip to the polls, but by the following morning, excitement turned to dread, and unfortunately, we all know what has followed since. Trying to grapple with raising a toddler in the midst of what is going on in our country, I began writing a series of poems, “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son [ ].” In them, I struggle with how to respond to the animosity espoused by the current administration, how to teach my son compassion in the midst of such hate, and how to remind him where he comes from—urging him to remember our named and un-named pasts.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. Julia’s poetry collection, The Many Names for Mother, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the Fall of 2019. She is also the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014), and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and Nashville Review, among others. Julia is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine, and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood, Other Women Don’t Tell You.

Two Poems

Poetry / Reilly D. Cox

:: Robert the Gardener ::

My father, always the artist, loses employment
and begins digging holes for a hilly college.

Each morning, he wakes from the same dream:
he’s back in his youth and gliding down the lane 

of an endless pool, his long, hairless limbs 
moving through the water silently towards a Cracker Jack 

salvation, and he wakes. Each morning, he finds 
he has sunk into the covers a little deeper, his limbs 

a little more tired. He rises as his children are still
in their troubled sleep, brews a pot of coffee,

and pours a river through his magnificent mustache.
He eats three raw eggs, chewing the shells

until they are a fine powder to protect his poor teeth—
holey and golden—and wipes the loose strands of yolk

with a slice of rye bread sporting only a few dark blossoms
of mold. He wraps himself in the emerald-green uniform

with his name embroidered over his heart like a target
and heads into the sun-shy morning. With little fires

burning in his pockets to keep himself warm, he plumes
beautifully—smoke signals trailing behind on his walk

to the Great Garden. He’s given up on disciplining the smoke,
ignores the incessant beacon of O-S-O drifting past his shoulders.

He makes sure to arrive before the other creatures, gathers
hundreds of flowers in his battered cart, rides up

and down the many hills, and only opens his eyes when he senses
a good spot. The college wants to draw in new blood

and my father knows how to arrange color to attract
anything. Sometimes, he grows bored, creates a trompe

l’oeil by a hall, a nature morte by a campus gate, but
he is mostly good, cares for the little blooms,

remembers the lessons his father taught him: sees
that their roots are good and watered, that the sun

won’t hurt them or grow estranged. His coworkers—
younger, cut from nylon—keep themselves entertained

by eating little animals whole. One man claims to have
a family of chipmunks nesting in his belly; another,

a whole pond of goldfish. Each lunch, he tilts
his head back and drops little flakes down the length

of his throat, smiles, says it always tickles
when the fish are feeding. My father sits alone.

He worries that he’s mixed up his eggs, that
he has a brood of chicks begging in his belly,

hatched and angry, so he won’t eat today.
He keeps himself warm with clear liquids,

doesn’t dare to light a match. He imagines
how much warmer it would be, to fall in,

a whole ocean to pickle him into summer.
He knows he’s a good swimmer; he won’t drown.

:: Robert the Gardener (Tent Caterpillars) ::

My father is setting fire to the trees again. 
He drags us from our play this way.

My brother and I, split body, jerk awake
at the coughing of a chainsaw in our wood.

We leave our shallow of mud, with so many good
sacrifices buried to the neck, and skulk 

towards it. In a clearing, our father has downed
a dozen trees bearded with tent caterpillars

and is lightly shaking a delirious tremens 
of gasoline over the many nests. He says,

If you leave anything too long, it grows.
He then takes a rag torch and lets sing

the good water. I had never heard such a choir
before, it was like the sound of marrow. 

My brother and I watch our father disappear
in the cracking smoke and barely see

the rag pointing across the crown of trees, 
with so many beards waving terribly.

Leaning over, it looks as if the smoke is born
from our father’s beard, and pours angrily 

from it. May one day I be so giving. May 
one day my beard grow so long 

that the holy spirit come flying out.

From the writer

:: Account ::

My grandfather passed away this past August, well over three years since my father passed away. At the time, I had been wanting to write about my grandfather, and the process of dying that was happening so rapidly yet slowly, and all the things that were slipping away as he did, but I was worried that to write about it would make it happen. Then he died, and, starting with a napkin at a restaurant counter, I started putting down everything that was then slipping away.

I imagined my grandfather as something mythic but dwindling—a storied figure who, while once meaningful and revered, had been reduced by time to hearsay and jokes. I started referring to his mythic counterpart as Sargon, after a Mesopotamian emperor who was the child of the royal gardener. I started the process of unmaking by incorrectly referring to him as Sargon the Gardener. In my imagining, Sargon tended to tomatoes in a dilapidated palace outside of Baltimore.

Other members of my family began finding mythic versions of themselves in the poems—the Witching Daughter, the Son’s Widow, the Bloodless Daughter, and the Son’s Ghost. The Son’s Ghost, my father, was always trapped in a process of dying or being dead; he, having died long before my grandfather, in his dying, became Sargon. He is one of the few members of the family to be named in the collection, in part because he was already gone, and in part because he shared a name with others who had passed away and could serve as a greater evocation.

My father was a gardener, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. He had difficulty maintaining jobs and worked, for a time, as a groundskeeper, knowing enough gardening to be qualified for that. While the focus of the Sargon poems were on Sargon, I was being reminded—more and more intensely—of memories of my father and gardening. So though I wrote the first “Robert the Gardener” as a one-off poem to turn the mythic towards the real and to play with un/making, I found myself fixated on more and more memories of my father and plants. Because I tend to be an iterative poet, I began an iterative sequence to find my father again, in all his burning glory.

Reilly D. Cox is a MFA candidate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. They had attended Washington College and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. They have work available by the Academy of American Poets and by Iron Horse Literary Review.

Two Poems

Poetry / Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

:: Husband Stories ::

[8]

I speak to no one from that past. ...My silence put to use
is the highest instrument. ...Now even the frost holds my
hand...I got rid of the life. ...It took all the ns to make a no.
...The distance is here. ...As for the chandelier... ...I
dig a well. ...Into the well I put many men.




[7]

There was a husband in the center of this story. ...Some
lunar waves were ringing....I got rid of the husband....
Even my ankle rejects you! ...I never told anyone, 
not really. ...The distance is here....Light in a circle 
could not save me.




[6]

Even the light has aged. ...The story does not compute.
...Some lunar waves were ringing. ...My silence put to use,
its highest instrument. ...Now even the frost holds my
hand. ...The things lost with many traces. ...I dig a well.
...Into the well I put many men. ...There are rows of
waiting others.




[5]

I speak to no one from that past. ...Some lunar waves were
ringing. ...What is left of leaves are stone. ...Now even
the frost holds my hand. ...I got rid of the life.
...If I could take it all back. ...It took all the ns to
make a no. ...Into the well I put many men. ...That husband
is gone. ...There are rows of waiting others.




[4]

The story does not compute. ...There is a husband in the
center of this story. ...What is left of leaves are stone.
...If I could take it all back. ...Even my ankle rejects
you! ...The distance is here. ...The ear up close.




[3]

The story does not compute. ...My silence put to use, its
highest instrument. ...If I could take it all back. ...Even
my ankle rejects you!. ...I never told anyone, not really.
...It took all the ns to make a no. ...The distance is
here. ...Light in a circle could not save me. ...I dig a
well. ...Into the well I put many men.




[2]

The story does not compute. ...There is a husband in the
center of this story. ...My silence put to use, its highest
instrument. ...I got rid of the husband. ...The distance is
here. ...The ear up close. ...Light in a circle could not
save me. ...I dig a well. ...That husband is gone. ...There
are rows of waiting others.




[1]

Even the light has aged. ...Some lunar waves were ringing.
...My silence put to use is its highest instrument. ...What is
left of leaves are stone. ...Real gaps spread in the tropic
of paradise. ...If I could take it all back. ...I never told
anyone, not really. ...The things lost without traces.
...It took all the ns to make a no. ...I dig a well.

:: Counternarratives ::

                              inspired by John Keene

                    [1]

                    ...God’s gonna trouble the water.


                    [2]

                    It was a gated community....The boy is a high school
                    student....There are rows and rows of others.


                    [3]

                    Forty-two miles from Disney....The frangipani swans 
                    in the streetlight. ...A patrol car’s siren sings several 
                    streets away.


                    [4]

                    Everything signs its name, leaves a trace. ...Real gaps
                    spread in the tropic of paradise. ...Forty-two miles 
                    from Disney....He never told anyone, but he always 
                    wanted to go to space camp.


                    [5]

                    Only the flowering catalpa trees are on watch and they
                    don’t have guns. ...The boy likes Skittles. ...Real gaps
                    spread in the tropic of paradise. ...He rides from station
                    to station until he can rest at home. ...People also ask 
                    what was he wearing....People also search for Emmett Till.


                    [6]

                    Sometimes he wakes feeling gone and doesn’t know why.
                    ...Only the flowering catalpa trees are on watch and they
                    don’t have guns. ...It was a gated community: cause of
                    death. ...He rides from station to station until he can
                    rest at a home. ...Gone with his father on a visit. ...God’s
                    gonna trouble the water. ...Bloodies the ground we stand on.


                    [7]

                    Forty-two miles from Disney....He rides from station to station
                    until he can rest at a home....Before he became someone’s
                    Halloween costume punchline, he had a name....No mention
                    made of his clothing...The warm air is a little brackish tonight.
                    ...The frangipani swims in the moonlight.... People also ask 
                    what he was wearing....He never told anyone, but he always
                    wanted to go to space camp....follow a star north.


                    [8]

                    He plays a game he knows he’s too old for: pinches the
                    moon between finger and thumb, pulls it to his lips.
                    ...Everything signs its name, leaves a trace....Real cancer
                    spreads in the tropics. ...Forty-two miles from Disney.
                    ...He rides from station to station until he can rest at
                    a home....He never told anyone, but he always wanted 
                    to go to space camp....Gone with his father on a visit 
                    and God’s gonna trouble the water.


                    [9]

                    Sometimes he wakes feeling gone and doesn’t know why.
                    ...Everything slings a trace, mouths its name....Only the
                    flowering catalpa trees are on watch and they don’t have
                    guns....It was a gated community....Cause of death.
                    ...Real gaps spread in the tropic of paradise.
                    ...Forty-two miles from disease....No mention made 
                    of his clothing. The warm air is a little brackish tonight. 
                    ...People also ask what was he wearing....He never told 
                    anyone, but he always wanted to follow a star north...


                    [10]

                    He plays a game he knows he’s too old for: pinches the
                    moon between finger and thumb, pulls it to his lips.
                    ...Sometimes he wakes feeling gone and doesn’t know why.
                    ...Only the flowering catalpa trees are on watch and they
                    don’t have guns. ...Real treasons spread in the gaps of
                    paradise....Before he became someone’s Halloween costume
                    punchline, he had a name. ...The frangipani swans in the
                    streetlight. ...Several weeks away, a patrol siren sings...
                    People also ask: what was he wearing?...If God’s 
                    gonna trouble the water.


                    [11]

                    Only the flowering catalpa trees are on watch and none
                    of them brought a gun....Causes of death:...The boy is a high
                    school student....The boy likes Skittles....Feel gaps
                    spread in the tropic of paradise. ...Forty-two miles from Disney.
                    ...Before he became someone’s Halloween costume punchline,
                    he had a name....No mention made of his clothing. Brackish air
                    tonight stings with a little sweetness....A patrol car’s siren
                    sings several streets away....People also ask: what really happened?
                    ...He never told anyone, but he always wanted to go to space
                    camp....But God’s gonna trouble the water, bloody the
                    lawn he stands on.


                    [12]

                    Sometimes he wakes feeling not really here, not knowing
                    why it was a gated community. ...The boy is a high school
                    student. ...The boy likes Skittles. ...Real gaps peel
                    apart the treads of paradise. ...He rides through all the houses
                    before he can rest at home...Before he became
                    someone’s Halloween costume punchline, he had a name.
                    ...The frangipani stitches up the streetlight. ...A patrol
                    car’s siren swats bugs and halos away. ...He never told
                    anyone, but he always wanted to go to space camp. ...Gone
                    with his father on a visit to follow a star north.
                    ...People also search for Emmett Till. ...Stand on
                    bloody laws....There are rows and rows of others.


                    [13]















                    [14]

                    He plays a game he knows he’s too old for: pinches 
                    the moon between finger and thumb, drinks it through his lips.
                    ...Sometimes he wakes feeling gone. He reaches 
                    for why everything sings its name, traces its leave...Gaps
                    split open the tropic of paradise...The sea air brackets
                    him tonight...People also ask: what really happened?
                    Before he became the punchline to a costume, swans
                    of frangipani backlit him in the night. A siren signs

                    several streets away. Cause of death: It was a gated
                    community.... Gone with his father on a visit.... 
                    People also ask: what was he wearing? He never told anyone,
                    but he always wanted to go to space camp. God
                    wasn’t near the water. 
	                         People also search for: Emmett Till.

From the writer

:: Account ::

//Husband Stories

The Python code is adapted from Nick Montfort’s “Through the Park” code (#!, Counterpath, 2014). This code generates stories by randomly omitting different sentences from a prepared list through each iteration. The output has been edited and arranged. Nick’s implementation and the code can be found in #! and on his website: http://nickm.com/poems/through_the_park.py

//Counternarratives

This poem is for Trayvon Martin, a black teenager shot and killed by a neighborhood resident. He died on February 26, 2012.

The title of this piece is from John Keene’s book of short stories Counternarratives (New Directions, 2017).

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of the forthcoming book Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), and previous books Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press, 2016), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012).

Descartes and Doulas

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.

21. I Forgot That Summer in Rome

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.

What We Pretend We Know About the Ocean

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.

If Only the Bombs

Fiction / Ilana Masad

:: If Only the Bombs ::

“Take a sweater with you, Glen! Glen? You hear me?” But he was gone. Patricia watched his car fumble out of the garage, back onto the lawn with one wheel, and begin to plod down the street. Bouncy, it was, had thump-thumped beneath them the night they met, Glen just back from the war, Patricia a college girl who didn’t mind the boys getting fresh. He had a reputation as a soldier. She had a reputation. Match made in heaven.

Of course he didn’t take the sweater. Wouldn’t want to wrinkle his perfectly ironed shirt. As if his own labor had brought about its state. And if he got sick because of the fans and the A/C units they had at his office? Well. There was only one person who would take care of him, and she wished to all the gods she didn’t believe in that it wouldn’t be her this time. That he’d found some twiggy mistress. Some other reputable girl. Elsewhere. Sweet dreams that never matched reality, Patricia knew, and went to check on the kid.

The kid lay in the dark room, dark as far as the kid was concerned. Deaf and dumb and blind to boot, the kid had escaped polio only because there was no pool in the state that would allow the kid to swim in it and no sandbox where the kid wouldn’t get shoved and made fun of by others. The special doctor came twice a week and worked with the kid while Patricia smoked in the kitchen until he called her in to help. The special doctor told her not to take so many pills. But her doctor, the regular one, gave her pills to get up and pills to keep going and pills to put her to sleep and they worked just fine.

It was feed time. Closest to life on a farm she’d ever get, this. When Glen had said he had land in New Jersey all those years ago, she’d pictured a single goat, a barnyard, some clean pink pigs, fresh cream. No, his parents, like him, had no skill for such things. Like her, they were city transplants playing at the suburbs. Patricia took Glen’s leftovers out of the fridge. Since the man didn’t have an appetite, she’d begun splitting the meals between him and the kid. The kid wasn’t particular, and throwing away food was a waste. She’d read articles about those poor Jews after the war, how they’d squirreled away food, scrimped and saved it. They had the right idea. Not everyone was rich like Glen’s parents. She’d gone to college on a scholarship and her parents were dirt-poor factory workers and dead by now. Probably hearing about the kid in her letter all those years ago had killed them. She didn’t know. Her sister had telephoned to say they were dead and already buried. No use asking why she wasn’t invited to the wake. After she’d gotten pregnant and married Glen without approval, they had all but disowned her, their eldest daughter, their pride and joy college girl. They were proud people that had no use for a college dropout with a bun in the oven, and her marrying a Protestant to boot. It all amounted to the same thing. They’d been dead to her when they were alive, and now they were just dead and she was alive. If this was living.

The kid’s room had the curtains drawn and the smell of its piss and shit swept through the air as she opened the door. The kid made signs and noises at her, its mouth smacking open, empty eyes staring in her direction. Sat up on the bed and reached for her. Somehow, the special doctor explained it but she didn’t understand it, the kid knew she was Mother. The kid knew her and hugged her and put its face against her belly and sighed. In any other kid, Patricia would take it as happiness. But not here. Here she knew what came next, and sure enough it did. Face turned up and mouth opened again and hand reached to her breasts, to catch and suckle from. She slapped its hands away. She didn’t let it do that anymore, not since its fifth birthday, when she had to reckon with the fact that it would never be a regular child. From the beginning the neighbor-women said it was dangerous, letting the kid drink her milk, and now they blamed her for what the kid had become. Patricia didn’t know what to believe. The special doctor said nothing was her fault. And then he would kiss her in the bathroom and lock the door and bend her legs up so her feet were near her head like a gymnast. Since Glen didn’t want to pay the special doctor, Patricia found another way to reimburse him for his time. And she needed him, the special doctor. He was the only one who made the kid calmer, less frightful.

She put some cold eggs on a fork and pushed it into the kid’s maw. The kid coughed and almost choked and some of the goo fell onto its shirt but the jaw chewed and throat swallowed and the mouth opened to take more, yellow crumbs left on the small sticky tongue. Patricia gagged. After she finished feeding the kid Glen’s uneaten bits of breakfast, she pushed and pulled it onto the changing table that was too small for a kid that age. Almost nine now. So many years of doing just this. She ripped the diaper off and wiped, breathing through her mouth and keeping her eyes almost shut. She put a new diaper on, took the empty plate and fork, and shut the door to the room.

The moans the kid made when it played with the toys in the corner of its room scratched at her back. But she stood there, listening to her scion, to what she’d made, what she’d done. After standing in front of the closed door for a quarter of an hour, she took a cigarette out of the pack in her apron pocket and went to stand by the kitchen window where she could blow the smoke out into the garden.

II.

Glen came home with a whistle to him. “Darling,” he said when she took his hat and his coat. “You know what day it is today?”

Patricia didn’t much care. It could be their anniversary, and she still wouldn’t let him do what he wanted. It could be the last day on earth before the Reds bombed them all straight to hell, and she still wouldn’t. It could be his dying day, and it wouldn’t matter.

It wasn’t their anniversary, and the bombs weren’t falling yet, and he wasn’t dying as far as she knew, but she expected him home every night with some excuse or other to make her let him in again. But she wouldn’t. She thought him cursed. Since they found out the kid would never be normal, she stopped letting him get anywhere near her when she was less than halfway dressed. And she didn’t let the special doctor finish inside her, not ever. She might be the cursed one, after all. Wouldn’t surprise her, really.

“What day, Glen,” she asked.

And he said, “Today’s the day the new plane is released!”

“That’s very exciting.”

“It sure is. That means more people flying, more people moving across the globe, in this big universe of ours. And I was there, I helped. It’s the beginning of the future, Patty.”

His hands rested on her hips, and he tried to pull her toward him from the coat-rack, but Patricia elbowed him in the chest and said, “At present, there’s supper ready in front of the TV for you.”

The Dash 80 was finished, with its Pratt & Whitney JT3C turbojet engine. A civilian airplane by Boeing. Patricia read the papers, including her husband’s papers in his briefcase when she couldn’t sleep at night. She read anything if it would put her to sleep eventually, and if it didn’t, she got some of that education she threw away when she left college and married Glen.

That the project was launching finally could mean one of two things. Either Glen would start coming home earlier or he wouldn’t. She hoped it was the latter. The kid was enough. She couldn’t imagine having Glen around again as early as five or six. She would end up taking herself to the Hudson and putting rocks in her pockets like the famous English author did. She could see it happening. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Then again, maybe a catalyst for that was just what she needed.

III.

The first Tuesday of every month was ladies’ night. Patricia and her girlfriends from high school, Donna and Milly, met at a diner on 42nd Street and talked, their insides spilling out of them in unmeasured tones. It was the only night of the month Patricia looked forward to. Donna usually brought some of her husband’s whiskey in a flask, and they would pour it into their milkshakes and get giggly. Whenever she was there with them, she remembered she was still two years shy of thirty. She wasn’t an old lady yet. Not quite.

Donna and Milly both lived in Manhattan, not in the New Jersey suburbs like Patricia and Glen, and she was glad for the excuse to come to the city. It meant she got to drive, and Patricia loved driving, even more so since Glen had bought her the car. It was all her own, even if his money had brought it about. The kid had never been in it, and Glen had only been inside that one time, driving it home from the dealership with a grin ear to ear and his pants just about falling off him in anticipation. Patricia had agreed to touch him a little and let him touch her after that, but only for a few weeks before she got tired and disgusted by him again.

When she walked into the diner, Milly was already in a booth, smoking, flipping through an old magazine. She was pregnant again, just starting to show now. She’d been flat as a ballerina last time Patricia had seen her. “Hello,” she said, sliding in across from her.

“Hello, Pat. How’s tricks?”

“All right,” she said, though it was only all right now, now that she was there with Milly, watching Donna walk through the door with her hips swaying widely in their pencil skirt. An office gal, she was still single, and she claimed to like it that way just fine.

“Sorry, girls, my boss’s ankle-biter was in today, and he’s a little demon. Tearing up the place, trying to look up my skirt.” Donna pressed herself into Patricia, and bumped her sideways to make room in the booth. “You’re looking bonier than usual, Pat.”

“It’s the kid. It’s stressful.”

“Doctor not helping?” Milly asked.

“He’s helping all right, but not in the ways I wish he would.” The girls laughed and Patricia smiled at the waitress approaching them. She thought they must look just like all the other regular city girls, out on the town for a good time. If it weren’t for her ring or Milly’s tummy, they could even be bachelorettes sitting and laughing there. But when she caught her reflection in the dark window beside her, digging in her pocketbook for her cigarettes while Donna ordered them the usual—one vanilla, one chocolate, one strawberry, which they would share and pass between them—she realized that no one could mistake her for a young woman anymore. The careworn wrinkles on her forehead and the lines around her mouth were too deep by far.

Milly caught the waitress by the arm before she left and asked for a slice of pie, whatever was freshest. The waitress rolled her eyes and nodded. “Pregnant women,” they heard her mutter as she walked away, and that got them started again. Milly did have a tendency to get handsy with everyone when she was hungry, and she was hungry especially when she was pregnant.

“Look at that one,” Donna said a while later, the rum she’d brought swimming through her veins, making her bold. “Sitting at the bar. The one reading the paper.”

Milly squinted. She never wore her glasses. Said she thought they made her look too smart. She didn’t need people knowing she was until she was good and ready to make sure they knew it. “Too skinny,” she said, shaking her head. “Honestly, Donna, I’ll never understand your taste.”

“I see it,” Patricia said. “The cheekbones, right?”

“And I do like them clean-shaven, not all scruffy. All that hair makes them look dirty,” Donna said, swigging straight from the flask. “I’m going to go talk to him.” Patricia and Milly protested, but it was no use. When Donna wanted to be taken out for a drink, nothing would stop her. They watched her lean on the counter next to the man, pretending to look at the desserts in the glass cases. Pretending to look at the menu. Pretending not to look at the man. But when he didn’t look back, she pulled out a cigarette and asked for a light. He turned, said something, and Donna balked, her hand trying to clutch at her skirt fabric which was too tight to take hold of. She hurried back to the booth, found the matches and lit one, but it sputtered out before she could bring it to the tip of the cigarette.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong? What did he say?” Patricia took the matches and lit another for Donna, whose hands were shaking. Milly reached out, her breasts lying on the table as her protuberant eyes bugged, concerned.

“He’s not a he,” Donna spat, and took a long drag. “She’s a woman, can you believe it? And she asked me whether I was trying to pick her up! Said something really nasty about my…” She gestured to her amply filled blouse.

“Indecent,” Milly said, touching her stomach and taking Donna’s hand. “Don’t worry about it, hon.”

“Disgusting,” Patricia added, staring. The man—the woman—was watching their booth now. She raised the glass of Coca-Cola she was drinking and saluted them with it, and tipped her hat, which she wore inside, at them. At her. At Patricia. The woman winked, and grinned, and she had big teeth that were only a little yellow, and thin lips, and her cheekbones were still high and beautiful, and if only she weren’t wearing the suit and the hat, she could be pretty, maybe.

“Stop looking,” Donna hissed. “You’ll only encourage her.”

“So what? She’s the freak,” Patricia said. How could a person do that? Wear a suit out in public, right in a busy diner, with no shame. “You know what? I’m going to go give her a piece of my mind.”

It wasn’t until she was at the counter that she realized she’d taken her pocketbook with her. As if she were leaving. And when the woman leaned towards her and said that her friend had been mean, called her a hussy and then left, Patricia nodded, saying, “She can be like that. Contrary.” The woman looked at her for a long moment before asking if she wanted to go get a drink next door, and Patricia nodded. The rum, the daring of it. The escape. Nothing could be more unpleasant than Glen or the kid, and if someone wanted to be nice to her this way, with a hand at the small of her back as they walked out of the diner and a comment on how beautiful she looked, nothing vulgar like what Donna had implied, someone who looked like a handsome and well-dressed man—well. It was more than Patricia had bargained for and just enough that she knew what to do with it.

IV.

The papers and the radio kept telling everyone the same thing all through the first week of June. At ten in the morning, people in New York City and over fifty other cities around the country were to be ready to go to shelter. It was a test to see if the United States of America was ready for the bomb. Any bomb, really. Just in case the Ruskis ended up dropping one sometime soon. Patricia had thought there was more of a chance that the kid would start speaking than any of that happening, but she reasoned that she was probably all wrong and why not be prepared.

But on the morning of the test, she was nothing like ready. She woke up in the bed she’d fallen asleep in, where things she had never thought could happen happened. The muscle aches were proof that it wasn’t an alcohol fueled dream. The booze still ran through her, though, her head pounding. She could have stayed in bed, feeling sheets on her naked skin for the first time ever, reveling in the silky smooth touch for hours. But she had to pee, and she’d have to get up eventually, even if it meant facing the night in person.

But her own mass was the only human thing in the bed. On the pillow where the hair she’d played with after midnight had splayed, there was a note, a tidy little dispatch folded into quarters with the word Dearest written out in neat cursive. Patricia made herself leave it be. She didn’t want to know what was in it, her body flushing already with the shame of it as the depths of what she’d done sank in, the impossibility of it all. As the stream of urine trickled and then sprang forth between her legs, and her head dangled downwards, she saw the way she yellowed the water in the toilet and wondered what else she was tainting. Only herself, or Glen and the kid too? Or the note-leaver?

She cleaned herself up and found her pocketbook on the floor near the hotel room door. She clawed inside it, trying to find her pillbox, but of course it wasn’t there. She’d left the damned thing at home. She hadn’t bargained on being away this morning. Glen must be worried sick. He wouldn’t know what to do with the kid. And there was a satisfaction in that, a cold heat blooming in her chest from it. Patricia felt a thread of passion jump from her groin to her belly and up, and a straining want surged over her. Not for Glen. Not for the kid. For the shameful night.

Gathering the bits and pieces of her clothing and putting them on, she glanced at the folded paper on the pillow again and again, until, dressed, she approached it. The clothes felt like armor, guarding her against its contents. But her mind wasn’t so iron-clad, and as she read the words she sank to the bed, her head spinning and panging with the hangover.

June 14, 1954

Thank you for trusting me when you knew you shouldn’t. I had to leave early to get to work, but I watched you sleep and you seemed so sad that I wanted to wake you up and make you cry with happiness again. But I let you sleep. I sense, from what you told me last night (yes, I remember, despite your accusations that I wouldn’t!), that you don’t sleep enough.

Please, let me hold you again. I’ll take you out and show you the grandest time. Meet me during the safety test today, and we’ll make a date. I’ll be outside my office building on the corner Broadway and 54th Street. Everyone else will be running to shelter. We will be alone to talk for a few minutes. Please?

Patricia traced the words, which had been written into the page with such force that they left dips on the front and dents on the other side. She couldn’t fathom how someone with such soft hands, with such a butterfly wing touch, could be so ruthless with a pen. It only proved that the first line was true: she shouldn’t trust this person.

But the test. She’d forgotten all about it. Had no reason to remember, since she was supposed to be home twelve hours before it started and it wouldn’t affect the sleepy suburb. Stuffing the note in the pocket of her skirt, she grabbed her pocketbook from the floor and hurried out of the room. The hall was empty, but she kept her head down and rushed to the stairs. The lobby of the hotel was quiet, too—it was late, she realized, glancing at the big clock in the foyer, past the breakfast hour and more. People would be at work now, or at home, doing what people do. Preparing to run to shelter. What women do. She couldn’t recall, in that moment, what she did at this hour every day.

Her car was parked two streets over. She remembered the walk from it last night, hushed with suppressed and drunken laughter, and wondered how her companion had gotten to work. The subway, she supposed, though she would never have guessed that someone like that would frequent the dirty transit system. Stupid, she berated herself. Stupid. The kid was probably yawping and howling and out of control, and she only hoped that Glen had remembered to lock its door or there would be havoc wreaked all over the house. The room itself was likely filled with shit and piss and vomit already. She would be on her knees cleaning all day. For once, the thought struck her as good and true. Elbow grease had been the way her mother had made her atone for her sins every Sunday. A proper punishment.

Coffee or food was out of the question. She had to get back to New Jersey as quickly as possible or she’d be stuck in the city for the test. She might be anyway, and she had no idea where to go. She pulled the car out of the space and into the road, greeted by honking behind her—she’d forgotten to check her mirror, but her head pounded too badly to care much about the man gesticulating behind her—and began to drive.

Not toward New Jersey. She found her way to Broadway and began climbing the city street by street.

When the alarms began to wail, she knew the protocol. She was supposed to pull to the side and leave the road clear for emergency vehicles and find shelter. But the howling bells were like the cries of the kid before she knew it wasn’t normal. They were like her screams last night. Like the woman’s moans. Patricia braked hard, the car behind her honking, and the one behind that, and the next one. She was in the middle lane and traffic was getting tangled up around her. People were running outside. She jumped out and followed the runners, checking the street corner when she reached it. 50th. She peeled away from the crowd going to wherever it knew it was supposed to go and headed up, one block and another and another. People were yelling behind, around, their noise as deafening as the alarms. Could she really leave her car there in the middle of the road, her beloved car? Could she disappear forever? She kept running. The wailing didn’t stop. She could picture the land around her exploding to pieces every time her heels hit the sidewalk.

At 54th, she saw her. She ran to her. She was under a fire escape, looking entirely different than the night before. Blouse and skirt, a little like Donna’s. Lipstick. Her hair swept up elegantly. Cheekbones high, eyes sparkling with worry until she saw Patricia and she smiled with relief, unexpected after the swagger she’d had last night. She was all confidence then. But this—this too was beautiful, Patricia thought. She wondered if she was still drunk. “Come here,” the woman said.

If only the bombs came now, Patricia knew, everything would end perfectly.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I first sent this story to a reader, they told me it reminded them of Carol, the film based off of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt. I hadn’t read the book nor seen the movie at the time, though the movie was in the zeitgeist and so may have seeped into my consciousness—must have, really, since the protagonist’s name is Patricia. I swear, I didn’t put that together until writing this account.

The idea for this story actually came from an odd factoid I discovered while I was looking at one of those sites that list important events in history that happened on a particular day. There, I read about this nuclear alarm test that happened in some fifty cities around the U.S. in 1954. I found an article that described one woman in New York City who ran when the alarm sounded, leaving her car and a terrible traffic jam behind her. I wondered—what is her story? I wrote this piece to find out.

The thing that scared me most about this story, and that I didn’t foresee going into it, was the kid. I think the kid’s existence—and the kid’s lack of gender, lack of humanity in the eyes of the protagonist—came partly from my need to portray monsters as human. The monster is not the kid, of course. The monster is Patricia. Goodness, morality, these things are so relative—they depend on context, on the information shared, on the social consensus at the time. In the 1950s, there was an even deeper stigma regarding disability than there is today. Helen Keller was still alive then, but she was the anomaly, the model of perfect disability that functioned in a socially acceptable (and very American) way. Patricia wouldn’t have known about her, I imagine—or, if she knew, she would have been disappointed that her child was not similarly “miraculous.”

I hate how Patricia treats the kid. I hate how she refuses to see the kid as human, calling the kid “it” rather than whatever gender the kid was likely assigned at birth. But I also think that for Patricia, the kid is somehow the sum of her life’s disappointments—she sees the kid as a symbol of everything she’s failed at, her own disappointment and self-hatred. She can’t understand the kid, and that the kid loves her hurts her even more because she’s not capable of loving the kid back. Is it fair? No. Is it right? No. Is Patricia a good person? Not really, no. But she’s human, just like the kid is human, and capable of love, of happiness, of pleasure. Monstrous humanity fascinates me, especially when it intersects with complex identities and trauma—I’m not talking about how “lovely” the Nazi next door is, à la New York Times features—what I mean is specifically when people who have been oppressed, whose bodies have been taken from them, whose minds have been shuttered by a system that doesn’t see them as important, react by passing on that hurt.

Ilana Masad is a queer Israeli-American book critic and fiction writer. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories, a podcast featuring new, struggling, and established fiction writers. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, StoryQuarterly, Joyland Magazine, and more. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The Spell

Fiction / Vishwas R. Gaitonde

:: The Spell ::

Ricky chuckled when the lawnmower’s drone smothered his sister’s yells. She stood on the porch of their house shouting and thrashing her arms at him, but the mower easily stifled her raised voice. Ricky rubbed his hands on his shorts and continued to mow, his bare torso shining in the late afternoon sun, flicking his head now and then to toss back the damp clumps of hair that fell over his eyes. A grim smile lingered on his face. Let Kayla shout with all her might, as though being a couple of years older gave her that right. Now if he only could ratchet up the noise on the mower.…

He abruptly turned off the machine and turned to stare hard at his sister. Two magic words had filtered through the racket.

“What did you say?” He cupped his hand behind his right ear, brushing his hair aside. His eardrums still vibrated with the ghostly remains of the mower’s sounds.

“Harry Potter!” She yelled the magic words again. “Want the latest Harry Potter novel, don’t cha? I have it.”

“You do not.”

Ricky, ruddy and sweaty after his brisk exertion on this sultry day, reddened one more shade. Kayla had no regard, no respect whatsoever, treating a revered name as though it was some cheap moniker like the names of the mayor of the town or their senator.

She had got hold of the latest Harry Potter novel? His sister Kayla, who could effortlessly out-muggle the stodgiest of muggles? Gross! The injustice made his heart burn, smolder, burn, smolder with each alternate heartbeat. He was the sole Potter devotee in the house, the zealous Pottermaniac who wanted every new novel the day it was released (or earlier if any magic spell could help). He read each one at least six times and then lost count of further readings. Even since the new novel had been released last week, he’d been half out of his mind and in danger of losing it completely unless the book was in his hands within the next few hours. His parents had promised him as much if he did his chores.

His parents were going into town that evening, and he hoped they would stop at a bookstore. He mowed the backyard—a chore he had been putting off—before his parents started out, making sure they saw him hard at work. But some of the grass had grown so high a cat could get lost in it. The mower got choked, so Ricky slunk into the kitchen to “borrow” his mother’s scissors and snip off the blades of grass.

The extra work soon made him hot and clammy, and he peeled off his shirt before starting on the front yard. Summer had crawled toward its end, but the days were still not perceptibly shortened, neither had the heat abated. The dark clouds barreling over the horizon heralded the approach of one of those swift summer thundershowers, forked lightning and all. Ricky raced up and down, anxious to shave the front yard before the clouds moved overhead and disgorged their water. How like Kayla to choose this exact time to taunt him.

“Liar!” Ricky yelled back. “Dad and Mom have gone to town to get the book.”

“They have not.” Kayla shook with amusement. “They’ve gone to have a good time. Drive on the waterfront, a candlelight dinner without you and me, mostly without you. Dad asked me to hold on to the book. You’re not to get it till you do your chores.”

“Well, I’ve finished.” Ricky glanced at the small patch of lawn left. “I will be, in ten seconds, anyway.”

“Well, we’ll talk when you’ve really finished.” Kayla swung around and disappeared into the house, ignoring Ricky’s “That sucks.” Ricky tore his way through the rest of the lawn. He dashed into the house, feverish. Kayla lay curled on the couch in the living room, her face chiseled with anticipation.

“Where’s the book? Gimme the book!”

She uncrossed her legs and lazily hauled herself up.

“In a hurry, are we?” She wore a crooked smile. “Not so fast. Let’s check how you’ve done.”

She inspected the backyard with the sour face of a critic and then scanned the front yard.

“Hmmm.… Not a bad job. But that patch looks tacky.” She pointed to the area Ricky had rushed through. “Trim that spot a little more.”

“Yeah, right. You’re not Dad or Mom, Kayla.”

“No, I’m not. You can wait for them to return, and if they think it’s okay, I’m sure Dad will give you the book.”

She walked back into the house, smiling at her brother’s sullen shout: “All right, all right, I’ll do it.”

He slouched in slowly after a few minutes, more subdued, but before he got a word in, Kayla said, “Go to your room, Ricky. You’re in for a treat. This is the day you’ll never forget. Ever. Your life’s gonna change.”

She ignored Ricky’s look and pointed him to the stairs, and then gave him a little shove to propel him onwards and upwards. She followed him up to his room.

“Lie down on the bed.”

He turned and gave her a furious look. “What—”

“On the bed, Ricky. On your back. Do as you’re told. I’ll let you on to something, but you’re not to tell a soul. I’m a wizard. Shocked, huh? Surprised? Those who think they know it all are the ones who know so little. I have to cast a spell on you before I give you the book.”

“You’re wacko. You—”

She gave him another shove, and he fell onto his bed, grimacing. “Now what?” he was about to ask, but she bounded out of the room. A few minutes passed, long minutes, when he felt as limp and helpless as a beached whale. He would not play along anymore, book. The book was likely on the desk in his father’s study. He would go right in and take it.

As he was about to rise from his bed, the door flew open and banged against the wall. Kayla was back, flushed and breathless. And brimming with an eerie inner fury, too, thought Ricky, the way she slammed the door shut. The shutters of the window were drawn and the slats at an angle so the sunlight that streamed into the room made odd yellow patterns on the floor but was otherwise diffuse. Kayla had cloaked herself with a large black sheet and wore a loose black hood. She held a brown cardboard box, a box that was noisy, alive, and agitated from within.

“See and believe,” cried Kayla, her voice high-pitched, screechy. “You are about to be transformed forever, forever, forever. The journey begins!”

She overturned the box above his body and something strong and hard and wriggly plopped atop him. He raised himself on his elbows. A large grey rat nestled on his crotch. Ricky sucked in his breath, lying perfectly still, feeling his flesh curdle into goose bumps, even feeling a wave passing over his body stiffening each individual filament of hair.

He eyed the rat. The rat eyed him. They saw the shock in each others’ eyes. Neither of them moved a muscle. The smell of rain seeped into the room, and from the way the light brightened and dimmed, Ricky knew the clouds were struggling to blot out the setting sun while it fought back. In the patchy half-light, the fur of the rat was half grey, half gold.

Then Kayla, standing at the foot of the cot, swaying in her black robe, started an incantation in a singsong voice, fluctuating between harsh and musical, between fortissimo and sotto voce:

Rattus rattus, res nullius,
Unus multorum, ultra vires
Absolutum dominium.

Ricky was aghast. Where had his sister learnt these ancient spells? His heart bounded and his spirits sank. She may not have been kidding when she taunted him. How had he overlooked the signs pointing to her true nature? She grew her fingernails until they were as long as a witch’s. She used weird words. She never caught a cold. She was always mean. A single look at her face, and babies burst into tears. There must have been other red flags he’d overlooked. His sister, so plain and so commonplace, and now.… But then, didn’t Harry Potter grow up in an ordinary way among ordinary people? For a good many years, nobody (including all the people in his neighborhood) had suspected Harry of being anything but a poor little orphan brought up by his uncle and aunt.

His sister was no Harry Potter. She clearly belonged to the Dark Arts. The shadows in her eyes infiltrated the room even as her malice marinated every syllable that she flamed out, slowly, passionately, deliberately:

Servus servorum Diabolus
Vaticinium ex eventu
Venisti remanebis donec denuo completus sis!

What was she saying? Whatever the words meant, the rat responded by moving forward onto his belly and crouching there, its claws digging into his skin. He felt the coarse trail of its tail leaving the mark of Satan on his body. He thought of rolling over in one swift motion and dislodging the rodent, but what if the motion made the rat dig in deeper? Weren’t rat claws poisonous? He tried not to move. The effort left him trembling.

Scabbers! Ricky suddenly remembered Ron Weasley’s pet rat, who was really the evil wizard Peter Pettigrew disguised as a rodent. Pettigrew, who had betrayed Harry Potter and his parents to the evil Lord Voldemort! Was some evil accomplice of Kayla’s hiding in the form of this rat? It certainly seemed so, for the rat had fluffed up its fur and appeared to double in size, each thread of gold and grey prickling like the quills of a porcupine. Or had it actually grown? Were his eyes playing tricks? New sweat broke out on Ricky’s brow, and he was sure Kayla glimpsed his naked fear, just as he saw the mocking glitter in hers, a glitter now perfectly mirrored in the golden eyes of the rat.

Tu fui ego eris!
Victoria aut mors!
Acta est fabula plaudite!

Kayla’s intonations rose like banshee wails, shrieks that rent themselves from within, and they nudged the rat forward, inch by inch. The beast stepped over Ricky’s belly button and its snout reached out for his chest. Ricky went limp as he spied the rat’s wet lips drawn back, its two front teeth gleaming like miniature machetes, its eyes boring into his, its whiskers ominously stiff. He lowered his gaze immediately.

Kayla hoisted herself up on her toes as her voice notched up the decibels, mounting higher than Ricky thought the human voice ever could:

Rattus rattus! Rattus rattus! Rattus rattus!

Then she crashed back to earth on her heels, out of breath and elated, eager to appraise what she had wrought. But Ricky no longer saw her clearly, and the rat’s face also swam before him, distorted, disproportionate and dangerous. The sweat from his brow had streamed into his eyes, and he dared not raise a hand to wipe it. He blinked rapidly, but this only brought more trickles of sweat. He screwed his eyes shut.

Tap-a-tap-a-tappitty-tap. The steady patter of rain intensified and the wind rattled the shutters, but far from producing a cooling effect, the air became more humid, oppressive. Ricky felt something like a slender tape, abrasive as sandpaper, repeatedly scraping his chest. His chest muscles stiffened like cardboard, his nipples turned rigid. The spell was working. The rat had injected something into him, something noxious, something creepy. He cautiously opened an eye, hoping he could see through the film of sweat, and then realized what was happening.

The rat was thirsty. It was lapping up the sweat pooled in the slight hollow in the center of his chest. As he relaxed a little, the rat gave a bound and landed on his face, its soft belly squashing his nose, smothering him. At the same time the rat’s slim, prehensile tail stroked his lips, its sharp tip poking around, trying to get into his mouth.

Loud gurgles and chokes broke out—Kayla’s laughter. For the first time, rage overcame Ricky’s fear. Undercurrents of dread still lurked, fear that the rat would gouge his eyes with its two front teeth. Then he remembered his hero, Harry Potter, who was always brave; he seized the rat and yanked it off his face. The rat slipped from his grasp and leaped over his head. He heard it thwack on the floor and scurry away.

In a flash Ricky was on his feet, but his knees were wobbly and it took him a few seconds to steady himself, enough for Kayla to drop her cloak, zip out of the room and down the stairs. Ricky caught up with her as she flattened herself on the door of their father’s study. He was panting, and he yelled out at his sister: “Gimme that book! Where’ve you hidden it?”

Kayla gave him a sweet smile. “Oh, the book? So sorry, no book for you. Dad’s not gonna go to the bookstore either, so don’t hold your breath. He ordered your book online and it’ll come in the mail, so keep an eye open for the postman every day.”

Ricky gulped. He didn’t know what to say. But his sister did not grope for words.

“Go take a shower, Ricky.” She wrinkled her nose, and her nostrils curled up as she looked him up and down with scorn. “Take a shower. You stink.”

Ricky lowered his head, but instead of slinking away he charged and head-butted his sister in the midriff. Kayla gasped in astonishment and pain and staggered aside, and Ricky sailed through the door into the study. As he had suspected, there was a fat book on his father’s desk. The room was dark but he didn’t need light to know that it was the book. He reached out, then paused. His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on his shorts and then picked up the book with reverence.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This story looks at two types of power described by the Conflict Research Consortium at the University of Colorado: “Power Over” and “Power To.”

“Power Over” is the ability to dominate another person or group: “I can make him (or her or them) do what I want him to do.” “Power Over” usually involves force and threat. If the subordinate fails to do what he or she is asked, force of some kind can be exerted to make the person comply. “Power To” is the ability to do something on one’s own, using intellect, stamina, and other resources. These resources give some people the boost to accomplish things.

While considering “Power Over,” one must take into account the submission of those who are subjected to the power. A rich tycoon is powerful because his wealth gives him power; he can use it to seriously hurt or damage those who do not do what he wants them to do. But his only son despises him. The son doesn’t mind living like a hippie or a hermit and doesn’t care about his inheritance. The father’s coffers are powerless to help him in this case because not only is his son not submissive but the son is also exerting his “Power To” live his life as he pleases and not according to his father’s dictates.

Kayla uses Ricky’s overwhelming love for Harry Potter and his fanatical desire for the new novel to exert “Power Over” him. So subsumed is he within J. K. Rowling’s world that he is even ready to believe his sister might have secretly been a wizard all along, and one that practiced the Dark Arts at that. It is only when he is goaded beyond endurance that Ricky exerts his “Power To” and breaks free of his sister’s control.

Vishwas R. Gaitonde’s writings have appeared in publications such as Mid-American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Santa Monica Review, The Iowa Review, and The Millions. One of his short stories was cited as a “Distinguished Story” in Best American Short Stories 2016. His awards include residency fellowships in fiction at The Anderson Center, MN, and Hawthornden, Scotland, scholarships to the Sewanee and Tin House writers’ conferences, and a fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminar (Montreal, Canada).

Sudden as a Massacre

Art / Kate Gilmore

:: Sudden as a Massacre ::

Kate Gilmore; “Sudden as a Massacre”; PICA Time Based Art Festival; Portland, Oregon; 2011

From the artist

:: Account ::

“Sudden as a Massacre” is a video made in 2011 for PICA Time Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon. Originally, a version of this piece had been performed at Pace Gallery in 2011. In the original performance (“Through the Claw”), a group of women tear apart a 7,500 pound cube of wet clay and throw it at the walls, floors, ceiling, and occasionally at the audience. This turned out to be one of my favorite performances, so I decided to redo a version of it for the video in Oregon—the result is “Sudden as a Massacre.” “Sudden as a Massacre” had a similar configuration of clay and women, but the walls were a vibrant yellow and it was performed for the camera. The video played alongside the resulting installation. The performers in both of these works were amazing—the New York version consisted of former students or individuals I had worked with before. The Oregon piece was more complicated as I am not from there, so I relied on the staff and curator to organize the performers. In both of these pieces the force and energy of these women to destroy this historical and political object appears as a deep and intense necessity.

Kate Gilmore was born in Washington, D.C., in 1975 and lives and works in New York, NY. Gilmore received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (2002) and her Bachelors degree from Bates College, Lewiston, ME (1997). She has participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, The Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Russia (2011), PS1 Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, New York, NY (2005 and 2010), in addition to solo exhibitions at The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2014), MoCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH (2013), Public Art Fund, Bryant Park, New York, NY (2010), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2008), Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH (2006). She has been the recipient of several international awards and honors such as the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), Art Prize/Art Juried Award, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2015), Rauschenberg Residency Award, Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL (2014), Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2007/2008), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York, NY (2009/2010), Art Matters Grant, New York, NY (2012), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, New York, NY (2010), the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, New York, NY (2006), “In the Public Realm,” Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2010), The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York, NY (2005), New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, New York, NY (2012 and 2005), and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency, Brooklyn, NY (2010). Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Indianapolis; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. Gilmore is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY.

Mindy and Me: On Diversity and Other Middlebrow Desires

Criticism / Douglas S. Ishii

:: Mindy and Me: On Diversity and Other Middlebrow Desires ::

In 2012, I made a New Year’s Resolution to balance dating with my doctoral studies: I would go on twelve dates in 2012—a leap ahead of my one date from all of the previous year. I planned on having a tenure-track job and a husband by my hooding ceremony. (A life defined by benchmarks begets more benchmarks.) That summer, the man I nicknamed “Dreamboat” ghosted me after our third date: my first adult romantic disappointment. This made me cry involuntarily whenever I heard Adele’s “Someone Like You”—which, thanks to radio, was often. One August night, drunk on sadness and tequila, I watched the pilot episode of The Mindy Project, the single-camera sitcom by and starring Mindy Kaling as Dr. Mindy Lahiri, an OB-GYN Manhattanite on the hunt for love, when it was released online ahead of its broadcast premiere on FOX. A surprise cut in the pilot’s teaser reveals that our protagonist is narrating her opening voiceover from in an interrogation room. She explains to a police officer that she, drunk, rode a bicycle into a pool after ranting on stage at her ex-boyfriend’s wedding reception. She was exactly what I needed. It wasn’t just that she was minoritized—a term I use to name how “minorities” are not born but made through unequal power relations. She was also fast-talking, frantic, selfish, stylish, and loved to eat.

I watched the series finale at the end of Season 6 in the fall of 2017. By then, I had been on many more dates, but I had not found that husband. Illustrative of the conditions of the new academic normal, I had received a surprise visiting faculty contract at my alma mater, then became a postdoctoral fellow in Colorado, then visiting faculty again in Chicago, no tenure-track position but now a longer-term temporary lecturer for students I adore. Like Mindy Kaling, I had been perpetually on the bubble: continuing Kaling’s rise as a postfeminist icon, The Mindy Project moved from FOX after its Season 3 cancellation to Hulu, to inaugurate the streaming service’s ventures into original content. Like Dr. Mindy Lahiri, I had experienced starts and stops of career success: she had opened own fertility clinic, Later Baby, that swung between bankruptcy and prosperity. By the time the central love story between her then-former co-worker, eventual co-parent, and once-male lead Dr. Danny Castellano (played by Chris Messina, in his own career rise) had fallen apart in Season 4, I too had felt something like love. I nicknamed him “Logistics”: logistically, circumstance cut the fantasy of us short as I left town to follow my latest contingent faculty contract. Like Mindy, I told myself this is the life I love.

This story of Mindy and me was something I had to theorize. In the final moments of the finale, after she has run away from the ensemble’s wrap at two of her nurses’ wedding reception, Mindy and Danny meet in the recurring set of the hospital break room. She utters, “I don’t think I ever stopped loving you, and I don’t think I ever will.” They reconcile as the camera pans out. Something in my heart broke and was mended and was made messy even though she is coming back to a politically conservative low-key racist/high-key sexist to whom she has had to prove herself time and time again. (Academia.) Love, that most sacred discourse of emotional intensity and material belonging, facilitates complex contradictions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in The Mindy Project, as it does in my own experiences of precarity and privilege. Thus the show, which uses that love to navigate the public and private dimensions of everyday life, invites an analysis of some of the core logics of “diversity” today.

Mallika Rao’s November article in Vulture, “The Legacy of Both Mindys on The Mindy Project,” draws a parallel between the arc of the narrative and the creator’s uneven but gradually improving record of progressive representation; as she puts it: “[o]ur heroine stands at a wedding, thinking about a dude, same as six years ago. Only nothing’s the same.” [i] Against the backdrop of South Asian American tokenization, Rao tends with generosity to Kaling’s negotiations of being Other to the white masculinity that defines the comedy world. To further validate Kaling’s intervention, Rao quotes Desi women, who comment that they find joy in how The Mindy Project approximates their lived realities. This is part of the dictum that representation matters: to see your face and experiences reflected to a larger audience normalizes and affirms. However, Rao’s method reiterates what media scholar L. S. Kim identifies as one of the false consensuses between media industries and viewers: that viewer identification depends on racial similarity. [ii] Within this grid of “like” liking “like,” critics such as Rao can only make a moral appeal to an industry against profit creation; the argument is already overdetermined. Thus, I am not interested in The Mindy Project for its ethnographic realism—which, as a male-identified East Asian American writer, I recognize can be a problem.

So why do I like The Mindy Project? It is slapstick, but it is smart. The pilot episode opens on a retroactive shot of Mindy as a child in her suburban Boston home watching romantic comedies, which frames both her relationship to love and the show’s self-conscious play with that canon. The show quickly positions itself as highly self-aware and does not explain or justify that literacy to its audience. Thus, I understand The Mindy Project as a rather middlebrow cultural production. The phrenological language of the middlebrow refers to cultural texts, norms, and identities that inhabit the hierarchical space between so-called highbrow culture, characterized by its aesthetic “greatness” and inaccessibility, and lowbrow culture, known for its mass appeal and presumed lack of value. The academic study of middlebrow culture stems from two significant periods: its 1920s genesis, when the industrial growth of U.S. empire made goods associated with class privilege more available, and its post-World War II resurgence, which coincided with the violent backlash against desegregation and other Cold War reforms. [iii] Though the middlebrow is no longer named as such, contemporary middlebrow cultural dynamics speak to our own era’s class politics as new texts aspire to literacy and artfulness on one hand and consumer pleasure and widespread accessibility on the other. Given our bipartisan political culture obsessed with the righteousness of the middle, I need to say: the middlebrow does not deconstruct class hierarchy, but resolidifies it. The middlebrow does not produce a radical dissensus but a consensus between producer, text, and consumer.

Given its middlebrow self-referentiality, The Mindy Project would seem to take aim at the romantic comedy’s genre politics. However, in a January 2015 Al Jazeera America critique of The Mindy Project’s racial and class biases, cultural commentator E. Alex Jung bemoaned that “Lahiri’s project of finding Mr. Right, in other words, holds the ultimate promise of assimilation.” [iv] This aligns with other criticisms, such as Dodai Stewart’s May 14, 2013, article in Jezebel, “Mindy Kaling Only Makes Out With White Guys on The Mindy Project.” [v] But in a November 11, 2017, story in Vulture, Mindy Kaling foreshadows the series finale:

“The writers all pride ourselves on being feminist, and we roll our eyes at the character in a fun way,” Kaling said. “We love her because she feels she needs a man to be complete, and I think that reflects a lot of what women think. Certainly a lot of my friends—and even when I when I was younger—felt that way. But we don’t believe that, and we don’t want to give her what she wants, so we put her through that experience and showed her it’s not enough so hopefully she can be a little more woke in the process.” [vi]

One way of understanding Kaling’s comment is that, from 2013 to 2015 to 2017, Kaling and her team have grown politically and creatively. Instead, I understand The Mindy Project as part of a diversity discourse conveyed through middlebrow cultural dynamics—a joining of a liberal (as opposed to radical) diversity and a professional, sophisticate identity. I take up sociologist Jane Ward’s distinction between diversity as “a material fact of difference” and diversity as an ideological project that manages that difference through selective incorporation—we keep the diversity that we like. [vii] I use the term in the latter sense. Theater scholar David Savran critiques Rent (1994) for its middlebrow pretenses of inclusivity through its AIDS and LGBT storylines, its backdrop of anticapitalist bohemianism, its metropolitan topicality. [viii] His reading shows how middlebrow texts nominally represent social differences not to transform exclusivity but to assure producers and consumers of their own cultural cache: they already know better. Through such a consensus, diversity has come to have value: not as a social justice project of difference but as a set of digestible knowledges that translate to symbolic capital.

Let me state it differently, from the consumer side. In a very Mindy way, I find myself on OKCupid again, skimming profile after profile. For the uninitiated, OKCupid encourages you to fill out multiple prompts. One is “Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food.” (Sigh.) The question is a test. My litany must demonstrate that I enjoy the pop pleasures, but not too much; that I am cerebral, but not pretentious. I love harder post-grunge, but it gives the impression of unhealthy masculinity. So, I soften Rise Against with Fleetwood Mac—a group with the history to prove my inner sophistication. Maybe Lorde, with enough Pitchfork edginess to show that I am on-trend yet accessible. My catalogue of “Peak TV” shows is also key. Mindy is a driven but flawed but loveable heroine in the vein of Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon from 30 Rock (2006 – 2013) and Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation (2009 – 2015). These pop feminist icons are of the wave of NBC single-camera comedies for young, educated, urban sophisticates, like the show for which Kaling previously wrote and acted, the U.S. adaptation of The Office (2005 – 2013). While staking out important ground in the misogynist worlds of television and comedy, these shows all represent a white liberal feminism at which I can roll my eyes and prove my symbolic capital by knowing better. The Mindy Project is perfect to list.

II.

As Kaling’s explanation to Vulture suggests, part of the show’s middlebrow quality is how its writers understand themselves to be feminists. Yet, this language of political consciousness seems to contradict how they reiterate normative femininities, often through Mindy’s relationship to love. This central role of love draws me to think through theorist Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). [ix] Berlant frames the texts she studies through a side argument as middlebrow, in that they seek “the management of ambivalence, and not the destruction of pleasures or power” (5). Love for Berlant is “the gift that keeps on taking” since “the search for mirroring (desire) demands constant improvisation (anxiety) and taking of accounts (disappointment)” (15). Middlebrow love tries to be ironic about the norms it portrays, but also maintains a sincere investment in them, and performs intellection through its condescending reflexivity. As Berlant puts it, “she can have her sex and hate it too” (224).

I am less interested in criticizing The Mindy Project as a “bad” attempt at diversity than I am in how its participation in middlebrow love sustains our collective fantasy of diversity. The calls to diversity made by critics including Rao, Jung, and Stewart can be broken down into an affirmative diversity and reactive diversity: affirmative, in that we celebrate that it is there, and reactive, in which we respond to its lack. Reactive diversity is a complaint: things could be better if only we were heard, and thus we express our politics through our complaints while not upsetting our attachments to what causes us grief. [x] (Like television.) Both kinds of diversity can be described in Berlant’s language as juxtapositional (x): affirmative and reactive diversity function in proximity to realm of politics but do not engage power as such outside of calls for confirmation and emotional response. Affirmative and reactive diversity cause responses like the eyerolls that Kaling describes. Eyerolls, sighs, and cringes: Latinx feminist theorist Juana Rodríguez writes of such gestures as kinetic forms of communication with a future temporality. [xi] While Rodríguez mines the resistive potential of gestures for making a new future for queers of color, the middlebrow future is already present. As middlebrow sophisticates, our gestures move between each other to solidify our consensus that we just simply know better: we can have our diversity and hate it too.

The Mindy Project moved to Hulu as part of a wave of diversity programming and thus adds to our fantasies of online streaming services as being free from the institutional constraints of networks. Like Mallika Rao’s article on The Mindy Project, we can easily narrate the handful of episodes in which Mindy Lahiri directly addresses her race through the language of affirmative diversity: as social progress via creative freedom. In the Season 5 episode “Concord,” Mindy, frustrated by her ex-partner Danny’s wedding, hops in her car and ends up at her parents’ house. She is greeted with a frying pan to the head by her mother, Sonu (portrayed by Sakina Jaffrey). Mindy and her slacker brother Rishi (played by recurring guest star of Pitch Perfect fame Utkarsh Ambudkar) stumble upon what they think is their mother’s affair, but she confesses that she has been flirting with a director to try to get ahead in the local theater scene despite the gendered, ageist, and racist biases of acting. In the episode’s final moments, Mindy encourages Sonu to write her own story, a metacritical comment on reactive diversity’s demand not just for more actors but more creative voices. The tag ends as the camera drifts out of the front room, where Mindy and Rishi curl up on the couch to listen to Sonu read from an entry in her journal, one detailing her first encounter with snow during her first days in the U.S., in which she asks: “Will this cold, unforgiving place ever be my home? But as time went on, India became a distant memory and all of it changed for me. My adoptive home became, simply, my home.” (I cringe.) It is a telling of her ethnic story as the ethnic story: disorientation, alienation, adaptation. Only her ethnic story is kind of … bad. While the scene seems to mock the sacred status of writing from the ethnic self, the scene offers it with such sincerity, as an invitation into the family and her intimate life. This encapsulates the middlebrow relation of love: an eyeroll that tries to hide a heartfelt sentiment and a heartfelt moment that evinces an eyeroll.

In this way, we can understand the diegetic inclusion of brownness in the Season 5 episode, “Bernardo & Anita,” through affirmative diversity and the middlebrow impasse of love. Named after the lovers of West Side Story (1957) to signal its Brown, ethnic drama, the episode opens with Mindy on a dinner date with Neel, in which she says, “You’re the first Indian guy I’ve ever gone on a date with.” Neel shares that he identifies “culturally as Indian,” and Mindy banters with cluelessness about the content of her Indian American identity. After dinner, Neel walks her home; she closes her eyes and leans in—only to fall forward into nothing. Neel has not reciprocated her gesture and says, “I just don’t really see this going anywhere.” Why? “Being Indian is a really important part of my life,” and he refers to her as a coconut: “because you’re brown on the outside and white on the inside.” Her mouth drops open as we cut to the intro credits. As a fourth-generation Japanese American who has been called the homologous “banana,” and whose similar performance of American identity has been shaped by his family’s World War II incarceration, I freak out. Sure, Neel is freaking hot and has remedied the white uniformity of Mindy’s lovers. But those are fighting words.

The episode proceeds with a formulaic theorizing of ethnic identity. She asks her younger brother Rishi for his thoughts: “you think you’re white, and I think I’m Black.” There is something about the correlation of Mindy’s class and femininity to whiteness that hits somewhere between unfair conflation and systemic truth. He goes on to say: “We represent a new kind of Indian American: ones with literally zero roots to our past.” (I roll my eyes even as I feel so seen.) Further into Act I, Mindy calls Neel again and asks to hang out. He reluctantly agrees, and they meet at (corporate sponsor) Bed Bath & Beyond. After commenting on how a white employee assumes they are married, they lay out the terms of Indian American identity: Neel says, “It’s not really your fault your parents assimilated so completely they completed abandoned their heritage”; Mindy retorts: “Hey, pal, immigrants are supposed to assimilate.” The terms of debate are narrowed to clean and simple binaries: heritage integrity or willful assimilation. As middlebrow, there is no complexity or contradiction: there is merely labeling and anxiety management. But we affirm that diversity is now present. Cultural critic Helen Heran Jun argues that there is a methodological tendency to conflate the media representation of a subject position with an ideological disposition. [xii] In other words, we ask for affirmative diversity over a deconstruction that tracks what that diversity actually does and for whom.

III.

Since much of the show’s criticism focuses on Mindy’s majority-white pool of lovers as envisioned by a majority-white writers’ room, what ideological disposition do we expect from a change in subject position? [xiii] As I think through my frustrations with The Mindy Project and the fantasies it represents, I refuse to use the expected terms: two-dimensional, fake, stereotype. (Am I complaining?) These terms come from an important activist history: the activist writings of the Asian American Movement (1968 – 1977), which became the intellectual basis of the academic field, analyzed how stereotyped representations of Asians and Asian Americans expressed anti-Asian bias and discrimination as shaped by U.S. politics with Asian nations. Clearly, this still deserves repeating over and over again. However, the mainstreaming of stereotype critique has turned the language of the stereotype into a stereotype itself: a figure without a history, a heuristic to (over)simplify the political world, an easily repeatable meaning. Thus, any deviation from the most racist caricature seems like the remedy: three-dimensional, real, complex. This moralistic framework leaves no space for cringes and eyerolls, as we must affirm it for its political goodness or react to it for not being good enough. This keeps us locked in essentialisms and “burdens of representation” arguments that stymie group creativity.

Apprehending agency beyond models of individual choice can help us understand Mindy’s creative responses to reactive diversity. After their Bed Bath & Beyond hangout, Neel invites Mindy to dinner with his Indian friends. She brings her coworker, the white doctor Jody Kimball-Kinney, with her, as she wears a kortha. She enters a space filled with Brown people but is surprised: “oh, you’re dressed regular.” At dinner, they reference Soulcycle, butter coffee, hipster tastes, and their parents’ surprise over unmarried couples living together at age 32. Their normalcy, performed through a class-specific cultural citizenship that suggests whiteness, creates a sense of community—one that is itself middlebrow. Everyone pulls out their phone and reads texts from their parents in accents: the in-group humor of affirmative diversity. Jody tries to join in with his own Indian accent, but Mindy educates him as her foil—she quickly tells him, “it’s not the same.” We laugh because we know; The Mindy Project has affirmed us as the “diverse” viewers we are, for we recognize the stereotype Mindy has confronted.

Yet, “Bernardo & Anita” shows that affirmative diversity’s focus on stereotype critique is not enough as these interactions lead to the dramatic climax of the episode. Mindy quickly puts together a mundan—a Hindu ceremony for a baby’s first haircut. In front of an audience of Mindy’s new community, her parents, her coworkers, and a “priest she found on Yelp,” her son Leo has a meltdown. Leo’s cries escalate against the steady chants of the priest, but Mindy tries to push through in a diegetic inclusion that lasts over a minute. The camera cuts to shots of Jody, who reacts with increasing trepidation, and her other two white male coworkers, who plead for the ceremony to stop. (I cringe.) Meanwhile, Mindy’s parents look on adoringly as part of the backdrop of Brown people, with her mother Sonu becoming visibly excited. The source of our affirmative diversity has become unwieldy.

The mismatch between the responses is not only racialized: it becomes one about citizenship. The unperturbed Brown people do not respond to the American child’s complaint and the panicking white men must intervene. (I cringe.) Having many dear friends and cousins with babies prone to meltdowns, I respond to Leo’s cries. The camera’s pedagogy turns against us, encouraging us not to identify with Mindy and her seemingly trivial pursuit of heritage transmission; we identify with the out-of-place white men, the sensible ones who respect the diversity that ethnicity represents but do not encourage what in the moment feels like abuse. (I cringe.) Mindy calls the ceremony off and, in the next scene that kicks off Act III, Mindy, Leo, and her parents sit on her bed as Mindy frets, “I tried to do this Indian thing that I didn’t understand and everyone knew.” Her parents reassure her that they love the U.S. and thus did not encourage their U.S.-born children to maintain ethnic ties. Her mother insists: “You make us so proud every day. If that isn’t Indian I don’t know what is!” Validating the Act I understanding of assimilation as an individual choice but dismissing its consequences through the power of love, their permission resolves Mindy’s conflict. (I roll my eyes.)

This identity conflict is love, the gift that keeps taking. Berlant reminds that middlebrow love is not just about a desire for wholeness but the anxiety that attends that search, as well as its resulting disappointments. As I have argued, The Mindy Project and its criticisms occasion a consideration of how diversity contributes to the quotidian ways in which difference becomes so unbearable. Sure, I have criticized how the portrayal of race, ethnicity, and representation in “Concord” and “Bernardo & Anita” aren’t good enough. But I have done so to dwell in this ironic mode of middlebrow diversity, in which the gestures of eyerolls and cringes alone seem analysis enough. When I ask them about their responsibility to bridge the world of texts and the world of politics, my students generally agree, “It is important to have the conversation.” Some days, I snap: “Then what?” The general response is a shrug, a giggle at my impatience, a look down deep into their notebooks, sometimes a truism about needing more people of color behind the camera. Our tools for doing otherwise feel so few because paranoid reading, once a critical praxis, has taken on the role of diversity value creation: all we need is a good complaint and a good eyeroll to no one in particular to show how smart we are.

As I sit in meetings about campus diversity, which seem insistent on erasing power, equalizing differences, and promoting “civility” as our spaces of inquiry are besieged by hate groups and surveillance using the language of “freedom of speech,” it feels like we are so backed into a corner that diversity feels like love—one that we have and hate that we do. Despite my theorizing and advocacy, I am not fully sure what is beyond diversity. But what if we took that not-knowing not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to confront the oppressions we know until we do? Being educated, “diverse” sophisticates, we have a relationship to power, and beyond complaining to each other, we can use that power. Instead of rolling your eyes, have you called your representatives? Instead of cringing, have you donated to Black Lives Matter and other social justice struggles? It’s time for action beyond our disappointments. We must break the political fantasy that underpins diversity: that things would be fine if only we were heard.

This essay has traveled through discussions of class, the sheer fact of race, and the problems of our language of diversity and media accountability. In calling us to organized, political action, I have insisted on breaking the lovely fantasies that insulate us from the precarities all around us. But since I started us out with my relationship to Mindy: what about love? Returning to her Vulture quotation, Kaling has said about the final season: “I think she gets what she needs, but not what she wants, which to me is a happy ending because what she wants is insufferable.” Kaling poses Mindy’s insufferability against the possibility of her being “a little more woke.” Mindy Kaling goes on to describe how her character’s Real Housewives aspirations and brief marriage to Ben, the suburban Jersey nurse of Season 5’s romantic arc, enable her to locate her desires beyond matrimony. As someone who has fantasized having a big, gay wedding reception (I cringe at the thought of “fabulous”), I pause. I mean, Mindy ends up with Danny—which hardly feels like a happy ending, even as I have the tools to critique that very notion. Is the construction of love, and all we attach to it, itself insufferable? As I yet again thumb through the Tinder haze of indistinguishable beards and vacation photos and gym selfies, I wonder: Is unloving love learning our vexed relationship to that which we cannot not want—is there is no outside to ideology, no way to be “woke” with love? This is not to deny the manifold forms of love that exist beyond the romance narrative, as I find consolation after every shitty date from all those who can laugh and roll their eyes at how men are the worst. I guess that’s Mindy and me: we can have our love and hate it too.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the audience of the Northwestern University Asian American Studies Program’s February 2018 Brown Bag for their generous comments on this essay, especially Michelle Nancy Huang, Jonathan Gen Magat, J. Ryan Marks, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and the aforementioned adored students; my timezone-crossing Mindy simul-watch party, Amanda Dykema and Susanna Compton Underland; Lynda Mazzalai Nguyen and Betsy Yuen, who survived the insufferable autobiographical narrative; and the undefeatable Sarah J. Sillin, for soliciting this essay and the shared adventure that underwrote it.

[i]Mallika Rao, “The Legacy of Both Mindys on The Mindy Project,” Vulture: Devouring Culture (19 November 2017).

[ii]L. S. Kim, “Asian America on Demand: Asian Americans, Media Networks, and a Matrix Stage,” in The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, eds. Lori Kido Lopez and Vincent Pham (Routledge, 2017), 170–1.

[iii]These two periods were when the middlebrow was named as such and when critics like Dwight Macdonald lambasted the cultural field as a “bastardized” cooptation of high culture. See Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” (1960), republished in Against the American Grain (Da Capo Press, 1983).

[iv]E. Alex Jung, “Mindy Kaling is Not Your Pioneer,” Al Jazeera America (11 January 2015).

[v]Dodai Stewart, “Mindy Kaling Only Makes Out With White Guys on The Mindy Project,” Jezebel (14 May 2013).

[vi]Maria Elena Fernandez, “The Mindy Project Cast on the Series Finale: ‘Mindy Gets What She Needs, But Not What She Wants,” Vulture: Devouring Culture (13 November 2017).

[vii]Jane Ward, Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 48.

[viii]David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2003).

[ix]Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2008).

[x]I want to be careful here: L. S. Kim criticizes how the figuration of media advocacy as complaint frames racial misrepresentation as an issue of political correctness and not creative possibility, and, if you do not inhabit a minoritized identity, you perhaps should not comment on this issue further.

[xi]Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York University Press, 2014), 2–7.

[xii]Helen Heran Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York University Press, 2011), 246–7.

[xiii]The question brings to mind Black feminist Hortense Spillers’s theorizing of the American grammar of racialization within white supremacy in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Spillers highlights the ongoing legacies of the Middle Passage to critique the “dubiousness” of the language of sexuality—freedom, desire, reproduction, kinship—and its presumptions of human freedom for those who have been systematically denied their humanity on the basis of their race. The Mindy Project’s affirmative diversity participates in the American Grammar of Asian American sexuality, in which Asian Americans are seen as particularly amenable not to disturbing pre-existing racial arrangements. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2008.

Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002.

Davé, Shilpa, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha Oren, eds. Global Asian American Popular Cultures. New York University Press, 2016.

Doty, Alexander. “Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism.” Flow, 24 September 2010, www.flowjournal.org/2010/09/modern-family-glee-and-limits-of-tv-liberalism/.

Fernandez, Maria Elena. “The Mindy Project Cast on the Series Finale: ‘Mindy Gets What She Needs, But Not What She Wants.” Vulture: Devouring Culture, 13 November 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/mindy-project-cast-on-saying-goodbye-to-the-show.html.

Jun, Helen Heran. Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America. New York University Press, 2011.

Jung, E. Alex. “Mindy Kaling Is Not Your Pioneer.” Al Jazeera America, 11 January 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/1/mindy-project-racetv.html.

Kim, L. S. “Asian America on Demand: Asian Americans, Media Networks, and a Matrix Stage.” The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, edited by Lori Kido Lopez and Vincent Pham. Routledge, 2017, pp. 170–180.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1997.

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Rao, Mallika. “The Legacy of Both Mindys on The Mindy Project.” Vulture: Devouring Culture, 19 November 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/the-mindy-project-legacy-of-both-mindys.html.

Rodríguez, Juana María. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York University Press, 2014.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Savran, David. A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Stewart, Dodai. “Mindy Kaling Only Makes Out With White Guys on The Mindy Project.” Jezebel, 14 May 2013, https://jezebel.com/mindy-kaling-only-makes-out-with-white-guys-on-the-mind-504732390.

Tachiki, Amy, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong, eds. Roots: An Asian American Reader. University of California Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center Press, 1971.

Wanzo, Rebecca. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling. State University of New York Press, 2009.

Ward, Jane. Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations. Vanderbilt University Press, 2008.

Douglas S. Ishii is a visiting assistant professor of the Asian American Humanities at Northwestern University. He holds faculty affiliations with the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the American Studies Program. His academic work has appeared in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies; Global Asian American Popular Cultures (NYU Press, 2016), edited by Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha Oren; and Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015), edited by Betsy Huang, David Roh, and Greta Niu. Douglas also has work forthcoming in American Quarterly and The Oxford Online Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture.

The Man and the Old Woman

Fiction / Ntombi K

:: The Man and the Old Woman ::

Once upon a time, an old woman stopped a man. The old woman asked the man to remove a green sticky thing from her eye. The man snubbed her, and from that day onwards, every time the man went to the bush to relieve himself, his faeces followed him relentlessly. That was the end of the story of an old woman and a man, but the beginning of tale of that man, as Tshomo and his shit:

Tshomo and His Faeces

There once lived Tshomo, his wife, and his mother. Tshomo was a glutton. His wife served and served him, and when he was full, he went to the toilet and released the looooooooonnnngest shit. When he made to flush the toilet, it didn’t go away. Then, he left and went to a Stokvel. His shit followed him and said:

Tshomo we Tshomo
Ong se elang, Tshomo?
Ha o ya lebeng, Tshomo
Keya le wena Tshomo

(Tshomo oh Tshomo
Why do you leave me, Tshomo?
When you go to a drinking hole, Tshomo
I’ll follow you, Tshomo)

Tshomo stopped and squashed and squashed it. When he was done, he continued to walk to the Stokvel. His shit, spreading out, trailed behind him.

Tshomo we Tshomo
Ong se elang, Tshomo?
Ha o ya lebeng, Tshomo
Keya le wena Tshomo

Tshomo ran, ran, ran, and then fell. When he was flat on the ground, his shit laughed aloud. Then he waited for it, tucked it inside his pocket, and carried it down to the Stokvel. When he got there, he bought himself beer and drank it. His shit peered and said, “Tshomo, Tshomo, feed me. If you don’t, I’ll embarrass you in front of everyone.” Tshomo fed it. Then he bought himself Coke and drank it. His shit peered out again, “Tshomo, Tshomo, feed me. If you don’t, I’ll embarrass you in front of people.”

Tshomo fed it, and when he had fed it, the members of the Stokvel said, “Mmmmmh, we smell shit here.” Tshomo took his shit from his pocket and hid it under a bowl. Tshomo’s shit pushed at the bowl and ran away. The Stokvel members chased Tshomo out of the Stokvel.

Then, on their way home, Tshomo and his shit met an old man who held a bag containing a lot of money. Tshomo instructed his shit to jump inside the old man’s bag and steal some money. His shit did as instructed and that was the end of this story, but the beginning of another Tshomo tale:

Tshomo and His Shit

There once lived, and surely still does, a hoggish man called Tshomo. One day, after having dinner with friends, he excused himself and went to the restroom. He sat on the toilet seat for a very long time, such that the person who had been queuing after him went to a restroom in another building and came back to find him still there, moaning out a thick, long, long shit.

He wiped his cleft, flushed, and the shit would not go away. He waited for the water to fill up the cistern—to flush again—and it still would not go away. Then he decided to leave it laying there like that, but when he reached for the door handle, it sang:

Tshomo we Tshomo
Ong se elang, Tshomo?
Mo o yang, Tshomo
Keya le wena Tshomo

(Tshomo oh Tshomo
Why do you leave me, Tshomo?
Wherever you go, Tshomo
I’ll follow you, Tshomo)

Tshomo kicked and squashed it, and then proceeded to walk—a lot faster this time. But it tripped him, and when he fell, landing on his back, it sang again:

Tshomo we Tshomo
Ong se elang, Tshomo?
Mo o yang, Tshomo
Keya le wena Tshomo

Tshomo pleaded with it, promising to wear it proudly the next time. And, nose turned, it continued to sing until he decided to tuck it in his side pocket. He washed his hands and applied huge gobs of cologne before going back in.

A few minutes later, a beautiful young woman walked across to where Tshomo and his friends were seated. Tshomo made to approach her, but when he stood up, his shit made a slight movement. Holding on to his side pocket, he went to the restroom again. “I thought we agreed that you will stay inside my pocket until we get home,” said Tshomo. His shit asked how it would have felt if it had been Tshomo in the side pocket. “Ok, fine. I won’t be long,” said Tshomo, spreading a few drops of cologne to silence his shit.

He fiddled with his wristwatch before telling his friends that he needed to go somewhere urgently. His friends begged him to stay for one more beer, but when he had finished it, and had forgotten about what lay hidden inside his pocket, he asked for a refill. His shit started to jump up and down, down and up, inside his pocket and Tshomo’s friend asked, “What’s that smell?”

“I thought I was the only one picking it up,” said another, and Tshomo, directing their attention to something else, spoke about the beautiful young girl who had walked past them. Even as they asked the waiter to shift them to another table, the smell lingered. It hung about as they looked at each other and under their shoes, resolving that it couldn’t have been from one of them.

They left the place at last. Most proceeded to another drinking place while Tshomo went far away, to where he was going to desert his long, long shit for good. He managed to, but only for a short while. For when he went home, he found it coiled outside the door, singing:

Tshomo we Tshomo
Ong se elang, Tshomo?
Mo o yang, Tshomo
Keya le wena Tshomo

Things had changed. Tshomo’s shit was no longer trailing behind, but leading him. What else could he do to get rid of it? The disgruntled Tshomo held his head, out of options. Then, the following day, the same girl who had passed their table—on the night of the dinner with his friends—walked past him and could not smell his shit, but instead a balm of roses.

At first, the girl refused his lift and to give him her number.

Weeks later, when they saw each other again, she turned him down all the same, but at least this time took his number.

Three weeks later, they had already gone out on many dates.

A month later: inseparable!

Tshomo’s shit was silent then. For, months later, the girl’s rosy balm clung to Tshomo’s collar and Tshomo’s shit to the girl’s diadem.

A year later, the girl washed up several times, with scented baths oils and salts, to enshroud that noisomeness, which wafted grimly the moment she got to it.

A year and some months later, the man started going out late at night with other rosy-balmed girls, leaving the girl behind.

A year and some more months later, the girl stopped going home. Stopped seeing anyone.

Two years later, Tshomo told the girl how no man in the entire universe could put up with a stinky for a girlfriend.

Two years and some months later, the girl left Tshomo and went back home.

Two years and some more months later, Tshomo moved in with another girl, with a doubly rosy smell.

Three years later, when the girl had heard that Tshomo was with another girl, it broke her to know that she had lost the essence of her scent to a man who had a lot to take and nothing to give in return.

Three years later, Tshomo was still living with the doubly rosy girl but on the side, seeing a triply rosy-smelling girl.

Three years and some months later, the first rosy-smelling girl to take Tshomo’s shit met an old woman, a fairy, who upon seeing her in a busy market said, “That shit wearing you down will soon return to its owner! Learn better, next time, what you are after, and what or who is after what from you, and also for what reasons.” Pressing a small bottle into the palm of her hand, the fairy disappeared among the winding market avenues. Doing as instructed by the bottle, what Tshomo had left her with soon became nothing but a frowsy memory. Even as it infiltrated her mind, it could no longer be hers.

That night it rained, and when the bolt of lightning struck, it hit Tshomo’s stomach and he rose, in the middle of the night, and ran to the toilet, to let out his longest shit yet, and it sang Tshomo we Tshomo, Tshomo we Tshomo until it stopped raining. But even as the rain stopped, whenever Tshomo would leave it behind, it continued to sing.

Three years and some months later, the balm of the doubly rosy girl would become single and that of the triply rosy girl, double.

Three years and some more months later, when Tshomo could be seen spending more time with the doubly rosy girl and less time with the singly rosy girl, the singly rosy girl would meet another Tshomo and leave him.

Four years later, the doubly rosy girl was only left with half of what was once a resilient balm.

Four years and some months later, when she awoke in the middle of the night, she followed the trail of shit, in every drawer, under every shoe, behind doors, in the wardrobe, inside a side pocket of a hanged coat, to where Tshomo had hidden his shit. When the girl confronted him about it, he denied it.

Four years and some more months later, she confronted Tshomo about it and he denied it.

Five years later, she left because nothing changed.

Five years and some months later, Tshomo was back to his same old shit, still unwilling to deal with it himself, still looking for someone to pass it on to or a place to ditch it, forever.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009) and the fairy tale collection, My Mother She Killed me, My Father He Ate Me (2010), which features Lily Hoang and Carol Oats, truly left an impression on me. In Petrushevskaya’s collection, I particularly liked her requiems, fairy tales, and a little bit of her allegory treasure trove, although it is only her fairy tale collection I drew a lot from. In the same way, I delighted greatly in Hoang’s “The Story of the Mosquito” and Oats’s “Blue-Bearded Lover.” Exposure to literatures by the these female writers and the privilege of having being taught prose writing by Prof. Lily Hoang inspired me to revisit the fairy tales I grew up hearing. In the process of remembering these fairy tales and contacting my cousins (young and old) and friends to remind me about the parts I had forgotten, I found myself filling in a lot of missing gaps in the parts they too had forgotten.

The gap-filling process became also a process of reimagining/reinventing new fairy tales. From memory, I used the Tshomo fairy tale as a template to create a new fairy tale that speaks to a contemporary setting. I also used this fairy tale as an opportunity to query its supposed “original structure” and its subject matter with the hope of creating or recreating a past, present, and future Tshomo.

This is how the story of “The Man and the Old Woman” was generated. The version of the Tshomo fairy tale I grew up hearing emerged during a time when many homes in the old township of Evaton/Small Farms (where most of my childhood years were spent) had no flushing toilets. People either went to the bush or used pit latrines to help themselves. In many ways, this influenced the manner in which this fairy tale was specifically told. It reflected the living conditions, culture, and language of the Evaton/Small Farms community at that time. I took these factors into account during the process of remembering and reinventing the fairy tale. I experimented with the language shifts from the old version which was plainly, “The Man and the Old Woman” to “Tshomo & His Faeces” and “Tshomo & His Shit” in order to suggest the passing of time. I have also delighted in discovering who Tshomo is in the present day.

Note, significantly, that the Tshomo tale was (and still is) mostly narrated by girl children.

Ntombi K is a 2017 Andrew Mellon Fellow. She holds an MA in Creative Writing (Rhodes University) where she authored her first short story collection titled, I Won’t be Long. She also makes Theatre and TV/Film in the Vaal area of Evaton (South Africa).

Wash My Letter in the River

Nonfiction / Naomi Washer

:: Wash My Letter in the River ::

Dear Angelo,

There is a term in Japanese literature called shasei. In English, it translates to ‘descriptive realism.’ At least that is the first definition I found when I read it in a book. When I researched it myself, I found that the concept had undergone an evolution over time, by different poets, but centered primarily on the following phrases and descriptions:

Shasei:

paint from nature / sketch from nature / depicting life / depicting life by empathizing with real objects / not a technique, process, or means, but a totality

The word shasei resides mainly in the world of haiku. Haiku are meant to be descriptions of scenes, rather than abstract thoughts or reflections. The goal is to be true to the scene. Haiku are to be written from actual experiences rather than imagined ones. Haiku should be written while observing the chosen scene, not later from memory. One cannot write a summer haiku in the winter, as summer could not have been experienced at the moment of writing.

Takahama Kyoshi (1874 – 1959) insisted on the pure-objective shasei. The objective shasei must contain no human emotion, even while it must depend on the subjective, personal, emotional response of the reader. The haiku itself must not include any “emotional” words; however, readers must take away an emotional resonance from their encounter with the haiku, regarding the perspective of the haikuist. This speaks to the theory of transactional haiku poetics, a theory which emphasizes the social nature of haiku—the sort of “call and response” the form conjures between writer and reader. This theory views the haiku as a moment of cohesion, of union, of two figures who share the felt significance of a poem.

The internal shasei follows many of the same principles as the objective. The internal shasei is a written phrase that corresponds to an inner feeling of the moment. It is inspired by an external scene around you (“poems hung on a clothesline from the porch to the forest/river: how do the poems dry?”). Shasei is a copy of a subject. But it is also an emphasis on the most essential elements (“the red door, the cast iron pan, the limestone walk, the rusted mailbox”).

The haiku is the genre, the shasei the concept.

The poet Shiki (1867–1902), who originally coined the term shasei, evolved its definition over time to include the term makoto—a continuation of the meaning of shasei.

Makoto:

sincerity / truth / significance / faithfulness / genuineness / poetic truthfulness

In haiku, the embodiment of makoto is shasei directed toward inner reality. In this case, the subject rendered is the self of the poet. The self is experienced objectively, like that of any thing experienced in nature.

One more I want to call your attention to:

Keijo:

scenery / landscape / expressing the concrete image of a thing just as it is / expression in which landscape is depicted, charged with emotional resonance / not merely a copy—environmental expressions that take on their own significance

In our letters, I gave you words, brief descriptions of a place you’ve never been. A place I used to live. I showed you the house in a photograph. That was all. In the fields, you found a poem. The poem was my house. You called it The Red Door.

Shasei

There once was a fiction writer. He mailed me a box of autumn leaves from Vermont because I lived in Chicago and I missed Vermont, and he gathered the leaves on his hands and knees in the dark so that he could not even see their color (he could not even see if they had color), and all this sounds selfless I know, until I think how poetic he must have felt out there in the leaves.

I sat on a bench all afternoon in the public square in my neighborhood. I sat there till the golden hour, till the lamppost turned on. I’d been watching some children play together in a large pile of leaves. They kept running to the leaves, grabbing as many as they could hold, running back to their parents (who were ignoring them) and throwing the leaves above their heads. Every time, the wind whipped the leaves into a circle around the children’s bodies as they fell to the ground, and every time, the children squealed with delight. Golden light was all around the square when they began calling out each other’s names. “Felix! Felix! Come on, Felix!” And suddenly it hit me that a few months before, I saw these same children playing underneath a willow tree in the nearby park—my favorite willow tree. They’d been constructing a home, protecting each other. Suddenly I’m simultaneously on that bench in the square and sitting in the grass in the park two months before, watching these kids, scribbling down on yellow legal paper everything they say.

Makoto

I worked at a soup and sandwich shop in the city. It was a booth in a larger indoor market with many other stands: coffee, crepes, donuts. I’d never worked with food before; it took a long time to adjust. At the start, I found it oddly satisfying. I liked being semi-anonymous—a first name, no curiosity to know anything more. And I liked the repetition. I liked the routine. I liked tapping my card to the reader, being admitted through the doors labeled Employee Access. I liked the shunk and whirr of the sanitizer. I liked wrapping sandwiches up tight and handing them off to customers. But what I liked even more than this was being able to write you of all of it.

Cooking soup one morning at the shop, someone nearby spoke words that reminded me of you, of a conversation we had had about windows, about my window tattoo, what it was made of (“bones or skin?”), and how it helped me see. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned it on to write you, but when I turned it on I found that you had already written me, had already sent me a poem, a poem for me, which is different than a poem about me, though it seemed to be.

Keijo

I went to North Carolina like I always do in summer for a week. Before I left, you knew I was feeling low. But I hadn’t even said. You told me maybe I needed a break from poetry. From talking about it. Listen: poetry wearies me. You exhaust me with all the effort I must give to correspondence. So I went to North Carolina. I sat on a porch and drank coffee and walked along the river at the town’s edge. I saw many beautiful things. I saw things as you might see them: rocks piled on the riverbank / a black rocking chair on a porch / signs missing letters / my grandmother’s quilt. You found my poem(s). I wrote to you on yellow legal paper at midnight on the bank of the river. It began to rain lightly, and an old drunk man stumbled past singing I was born by the river… he sat by me as I finished writing your letter, and we spoke of writing and love and war. He told me of the girl he’d known in Jamaica who made everyone else dissolve away. And we wrote a poem together, there on the yellow legal paper:

Rain fell like some hint of things to come / and the river kept on with or without us / ebb and flow / tomorrow where will we be / what we are or what we should be.

Back home in Chicago, I wander into the kitchen to find the fridge magnet poetry a friend composed the other night during my party:

perhaps we hand our poetry a sky

A text message I won’t send you: I like your picture too much to “like” it on Facebook.

You said: I want a girl who is a heliotrope—in the day, she’ll turn to her interests and passions; in the night, she’ll turn to me. I can only deal with those who are heliotropes too, who understand that I am heliotrope.

A video message you sent: in bed shouting the poem is the body the poem is the body the poem is in the body the poem is in the body

You said: nothing is final until physical correspondence.

Sketching from life; a genuine totality; an expression of a thing just as it is

A letter I wrote and never sent you:

Confession:

I have been afraid to tell you this.

I have done this before. This correspondence between poets. It is troubling to me because the first time, it failed supremely. In college I fell into an affair with a poet. We wrote to each other, of each other, about each other. We confused love/romance and poems. We confused poets and poems. It destroyed me, but also made me into who I am now. Made me obsessed. Made me walk the line between poems and context, reality and fantasy, idealism and disillusionment.

I have been wary of our co / respon / dance from the beginning because of this, because I don’t want what happened to me to happen again, even while I crave and need what we have cultivated because I do feel I am my whole self when writing to you because you understand this struggle, this need to not give ourselves up to another person.

But whether or not we meant to, we have given ourselves to each other.
we are connected
to each other’s words

     there should be a word

for what we are
          for what we’ve done


                    wordseachother
                     eachwordother
                     eachotherword

                              active, a moving forward,
                                we move
                                        eachotherward

Listen: this yellow piece of paper full of rain.

Yours,

Naomi

From the writer

:: Account ::

In Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, in the section titled “Envois”—messages from “a destroyed correspondence” between Derrida and his wife, Marguerite Aucouturier—Derrida writes, while theorizing about the meaning and significance of letters: “Mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself.” This is the idea behind so much of my writing, the way I teach writing, the aesthetic of the journal I run, Ghost Proposal. In the case of this essay, “Wash My Letter in the River,” this letter and the letters it refers to throughout are all intertwined in a larger correspondence that did, in fact, happen and exist with a poet friend of mine, along with a larger project of my own on the nature of letter-writing and correspondence between writers. I go to letter-writing whenever I cannot deal with Literature—when Literature and I aren’t making anything happen together on the page. As soon as I go to letter-writing, everything happens all at once. And it makes more sense to me than any other genre. I began writing letters in earnest in college, and I did not always do very well in college. Sometimes I almost failed classes, which was a mystery to everyone involved, but when I was not doing my homework, I was writing letters, and this was my self-education. I was not writing, or not writing well, the summer of the correspondence referenced in this essay. But I exhausted myself with the commitment I brought to this correspondence. And finally, near the end of the correspondence, alone on the river in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I had gone to work on essays for my master’s thesis, writing letters helped the writing come. I wrote essays for my thesis on Fernando Pessoa, Bruno Schulz, and Unica Zurn, and when I was done and went walking by the river, I felt myself pulled back into the letter, to the movement inherent in correspondence, to the ways in which a letter goes on existing beyond the moment of writing, in the act of sending, envoyer, off to the recipient, sending oneself to the recipient, s’envoyer, and back again. The correspondence referenced here was one that focused chiefly on poetics for a designated period of time (the summer between our semesters) and evolved into questions we are still discussing today regarding epistolary poetics. What is a letter? What does a letter mean, what does a letter do, what does a letter say, what does it accomplish? What does it keep one from doing or saying? How does it keep one from living, but ensure that one goes on writing? In our correspondence, the questions took on a life of their own, the topics sped up and I sped up to keep up with them, but I had other questions I needed to slow down to identify. I read books about letters to try to understand what I was doing, and it was in one of those books (Japanese Poetic Diaries, Earl Miner) that I found the topics discussed at the beginning of this essay, drew parallels between those concepts and my writing life, then circled back around to correspondence. When my yellow legal pad began to catch the rain that night in Wilmington, I sent a message to my friend to say I was writing him a Real Physical Letter, that it had begun to rain over the paper. “Wash my letter in the river,” he said.

Naomi Washer’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Homonym, Essay Daily, Crab Fat Magazine, The Boiler, Split Lip Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia College Chicago, where she earned her MFA in nonfiction. She is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Ghost Proposal.

A Brief History of Tears

Fiction / Dawn Tefft

:: A Brief History of Tears ::

In 1964, I began crying.

I can give you the setting of the day it happened, but I can’t tell you why. It was the day of my quinceañera. I remember I was wearing a pale pink dress made of satin, slowly unfolding my napkin, feeling aware that I was sitting at a folding table in front of all the guests. And then, as I wrote later in my journal, “Long, deep heaves. Every breath burning the nose and the throat. Reverberations in the abdomen.” I tried to hide it with my half-unfolded napkin.

Localized Crying
(from an interview with Peter Scatori)

I didn’t know what was going on at first; I would just start crying as soon as I sat down at the computer. If I even looked at the monitor, it would go zig-zag on me. My boss and all my co-workers made me see a therapist until the company’s insurance wouldn’t cover it anymore. I started having to do all my work on paper, figuring out sums by hand. Luckily, I’m good with numbers, so I could do the smallish numbers in my head. Eventually, the whiteness of paper would blind me when I looked at it, and I’d have to turn away. So I started writing on brown paper napkins, the kind with the fibers you can actually see. I used those until they made my eyes red and weepy. My eyes felt like sores in my face. Finally, I went to the doctor, and he tested me for all kinds of allergies. I wasn’t allergic to anything, not even goats. I got really scared at that point because I thought if I couldn’t use paper, I’d have to rely on my head for everything. So I decided to go to a psychiatrist. It was then I was diagnosed with Localized Crying, the kind brought on by stress. It really helped me a lot to know I wasn’t crazy, that there were actually other people out there experiencing the same triggers and symptoms as me. Since then, I’ve lost my job, but at least I know it’s not like it’s because I’m a bad person.

Eventually the napkin disintegrated, leaving only my hands. Maybe paper desires to absorb something. Maybe it needs to make a map of a story, the kind without words. Like when I was seven and my parents gave away our Collie. Because they didn’t even seem upset, I cried over a piece a paper and circled where each tear landed.

The Jesuits were fond of tears. Every three years, they chose one person who was especially burdened and undertook to cry for him for one full year. In 1663, in the village of Monparte, an anonymous monk left a note for Pelier Pele, saying that he would be crying for Pele during the coming year in order to help alleviate the recent widower’s suffering. Pele was a farmer, and after his wife’s death by consumption, word got around that he was having trouble taking care of his seven children. Court documents show that Pele remarried by the end of 1663. According to village legend, the new marriage was facilitated by the slow disappearance of a very large mole on the end of Pele’s nose. Villagers believed it to have been the result of the monk’s astonishing powers of concentrated sympathy. Monparte still holds its annual Festival of Tears, during which people are blindfolded by officials, paired up, and sent into dark rooms made of peat. The pairs sit cross-legged on the ground, inhaling deeply. With each inhalation, the pair take in each other’s scent along with the moist, earthy scent of the walls surrounding them, and by nightfall they begin crying. The tears fall into bowls placed in the lap. Later, the tears are bottled and aged. When one of the pair feels life is going especially well, he brews a tea from the tears which allows him to feel the sorrows of the other.

My mother came over to my chair and put both her hands on my face, just holding it and talking to me in this really low voice. I don’t remember anything she said, except for eventually she called my best friend over to sit with me because she thought Susana might get what was happening. That maybe it was a teenage thing.

I couldn’t stop. Susana didn’t know what to do with me.

According to Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears, “tears usually signal a desire, a wish, or a plea.” Clinically depressed people have “lost the impetus to cry, because without desire, there are no tears”; infants who are neglected long enough never cry again: “It is the infant who believes it will be picked up that wails, energized by its fear that it will be left alone.” Though many readers might find Samuel Beckett’s writing bereft of hope, in psychoanalytic terms, his writing is pointing at the loss of the ability for tears. It is, like a depressive working with a therapist, seeking to explore the sources and effects of the tearless condition. And all explorations are undertaken with hope. If, as Beckett once stated, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” perhaps, then, Beckett’s words are his tears. Though in “Endgame” some of his characters live in trash cans, it is not as if to say, “Yes, let us all, now and forever, live in trash cans.”

I remember sitting there trying to figure out what was happening to me. Running through the day’s events, hoping to find whatever it was that was bothering me. I remembered going to the bathroom and taking a bath after my mother woke me up. Carefully doing my makeup and hair for two whole hours. Spraying myself with some rose water, putting on the gold cross necklace and little gold post earrings, pulling on pantyhose. Catching my pantyhose on a fingernail, having to take them off, putting on another pair. Slowly. My mother zipping up my shiny, full-skirted dress. Looking at myself in the mirror from different angles, and then standing and staring, trying to decide what I looked like: good, bad, okay, sexy, innocent, innocently sexy, young, old. Eating oatmeal for breakfast. Riding with my parents in the sedan to church. Listening to them talk about Father Hernandez, the price of fruit, whether or not Tía Theresa would move out of the neighborhood. Arriving at the church and walking in. Listening to the Father. Sitting at the metal folding table for everyone to see. Crying.

Noxious
—a short story by Felipe Fitzcarraldo

In the town of Carancas, high in Peru’s Andes, Mayor Nestor Quispe is perplexed by a meteor. The meteor fell in the night. The next morning a farmer came into town, reporting a huge, stinking rock in one of his outlying fields. He asked the mayor to put together a party of men to remove the rock, which he claimed poisoned all of his animals. When the mayor arrived, he saw so many dead sheep on the ground, it looked like the clouds had come down to rest. He knew the sheep were dead because he kicked a few.

The farmer was right. The fields stank. They smelled like rotten eggs, tons of them. The mayor decided it would be best to dynamite the thing. He made plans with the farmer to come back with the explosives the next morning. That was before the outbreak.

Slowly, over the course of the day, all the townspeople had fallen ill with crying. When the mayor returned home, his wife, Maria, was sitting on the porch, knitting and crying. When he asked her why she was crying, she just shook her head. She didn’t even look up, just kept working the needles, looping and looping. He never understood how those loops held.

He shrugged and walked into the kitchen to get some water. He opened the cupboard and reached for a glass. When his hand returned empty, he wondered what had happened. He tried to look for the glass, but everything was blurry. Then the first tear fell, thick like mucus. When the next one fell a couple minutes later, he rubbed one hand into an eye, but it didn’t help; his eyes were already clouding up again. He kept rubbing and trying to clear a path for his vision, but it was like looking through a windshield in a heavy rain. He could only see clearly for a few seconds, and only every couple of minutes at that.

When Maria walked inside, she asked why he was just standing in front of the cupboard.

“I can’t see. I keep crying these thick tears.”

“Well, sit down, then,” Maria said, pulling a chair over to him.

“I’d rather sit by the phone.”

So Maria walked him into the next room and settled him in the chair next to the phone table. When she walked out, he was rubbing fists in his eyes and staring at the dial.

The mayor called the town’s doctor, Jorge.

“I can’t stop crying, Jorge. What’s wrong with me?”

Jorge told him people had been coming into his home all day, complaining of eye afflictions. One old woman who came in with her whole family thought they all had devils in their eyes. Jorge recounted the old woman’s memory of a similar incident when she was a child. She said that a man with money had come to the town and offered to pay for a bride. None of the families would give their daughters to him, no matter how much he offered. Before the man left, he stopped in the street in front of one particularly pretty girl and stared at her until she started crying. The girl cried for a week straight. At the end of the week she died, her skin like a corn husk, drained of all her girlish fluids.

Jorge told the mayor about other people, too. People who came in saying they were being visited by saints, laborers who thought they’d gotten particles of wood, dirt, or rock caught in their eyes, and lots and lots of children. The children cried harder than the adults. Jorge thought it was because they were so worked up about their incessant crying, they were crying in addition to crying.

When the mayor hung up the receiver, he couldn’t think. He sat and cried without having any thoughts at all. After a while, his thoughts returned, bearing his mother. He remembered when he was twelve, his mother giving him a package wrapped in brown paper. He remembered untying the string, carefully, letting the rough strands of it scrape against his fingers. Running his hands over the scratchy surface of the paper. Finally, unfolding the paper like little girls practicing at unwrapping babies.

Some people have told me it’s because I’m a woman, or that I’m just weak. But that’s not it. It makes me strong in ways most people aren’t. For example, I can stay all day at a funeral, whether I know the person or not. As a professional mourner, I earn a lot of money to share people’s sadness while following funeral etiquette. The thing is, I don’t have to fake it. I just have to remember not to mention I didn’t know the deceased. I study the deceased’s life, share some of it in conversations, hand around my own personal supply of heavy-duty tissue. People like to talk to me; they feel comfortable collaborating.


 
          Allow me to cry.
          I am not          the neglected infant.
          Fear me if I am silly 
          or silent,
          if I refuse to take         lessons,
          though I am a novice.
          It is also bad 
          when I make         no argument.
          The Generalissimo will have won
          and flies will soon swarm
          the village.

The Dictionary of Tears tells us that both men and women cry. Historically, men have cried at heroic deeds or because they lost someone close to them. In the former case, men cried to express their emotional reaction to a stirring event. In the latter case, men cried not to express, but because there was no other reaction available.

During the reign of the Vikings, tears were thought to be becoming to warriors. If a warrior went into battle without wetting his beard, he wasn’t fully aware of the consequence of battle. Warriors traveled with a bard, who wailed battle epics while the warriors slept. It was thought that if he wailed in just the right key, and if he paid each moment in battle its due honor, the songs would infiltrate the plans warriors make while sleeping. When burying the dead, the bard would cry for the entire community, channeling the force of the emotions of all in attendance. The Kjula Runestone states that when a ship was sent to sea empty, without a body for a missing warrior, cries were so loud that enemy camps thought the dead were trying to enter the bodies of animals.

The Mongols were, perhaps, the most fearsome criers. When they charged into battle atop their steeds, it was with tears scouring their cheeks. Russian legend has it that one Mongol warrior cried terribly while gutting a young girl and then rubbed her viscera on his wet face. To the Russians attempting to keep the Mongols at bay, it looked like the warrior was actually crying pieces of the girl. Eventually, Mongols turned to crying silently, the sight of which was said to be hard to discern, but harder to forget.

Of all the ways of going through the world, crying isn’t the most untenable. Can you imagine going through life acting happy no matter what’s happening around you? Like even when the window worker at the Burger King hands you soggy fries with that look that says her bills are piling up but she really doesn’t want to have to move back in with her abusive ex-boyfriend. And then you realize she forgot to include packets of ketchup. Now that would be weird.

The Dictionary of Tears says that tears were perfected by Madame Curie in 1773, the year she infused them with lavender. Having distilled lavender buds, robbing them of their essences, she added this fragile water to the sturdier salt water she milked from the ducts of volunteers. Madame’s Salts became so popular that she eventually produced a series of ready-to-wear tears, some of the more popular of which were Rose, Chamomile, and Jasmine. Today, a vintage Rose is reputed to cost in the millions, not only for its age, but for the chance to partake of a quaint French villager’s tristesse, circa late 1700s.

The ready-to-wear line was often used to add a seductive sadness to one’s hair or clothing, but the original lavender tears remained by far the favorite of Curie’s inventions. Imbibed and left to fall from the eyes as they may, court goers were especially fond of them and considered them an essential accessory for attending plays, concerts, dances, and other artistic and social events. The potentially unexpected oncoming of tears was one of the attractions, but usually the tears made their appearance at particularly dramatic emotional moments. Known for its calming properties, lavender was prescribed to soothe the nerves of many an overwrought funeral goer.

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was said to incite so many tears from the audience that the concert hall would become humid. More than one audience member was reported to have become delirious, imagining themselves in the highlands of France, chasing a younger sibling through the fields. In 1779, Maria Tina Binoche, a patron of the arts and an asthmatic, choked on the lavender-heavy air in a Paris concert hall and died in the middle of Mozart’s “Requiem.” Following a string of similar deaths, Madame’s Salts were outlawed in 1822. Nearly two hundred years later, Jonas Salk would read about Madame Curie and attempt to inoculate excessively emotional patients with tears, only to find that the vaccine didn’t work. Devastated by the failure of his idea, he became deeply depressed and died of alcohol poisoning.

I started crying once, and I just haven’t stopped since.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Pop psychology often conveys that any one issue has a single or at least primary cause, but we’re all the products of history, unique biochemistry, material circumstances, and all the stimuli we’ve ever encountered over the course of our lives. The frame for the story is a short first-person narrative intended to explain something inexplicable: the sudden onset of crying that never stops. The story contains no dialogue, and the first-person narrative is interspersed with fictional encyclopedia-like entries about historical events, cultures, or phenomena related to crying. The entries tend to further complicate the narrative rather than provide clarity. But I like to think that further complicating something truly complex is a form of clarity.

I enjoy less traditional forms of storytelling, and I thought it would be interesting to explore something as universal as crying from both a personal and a (completely fictional) historical perspective. I was particularly drawn to crying because some cultures label it as weakness even though it serves many necessary functions, likely makes us stronger in the sense that it helps us keep going in the face of hardship, and is a permanent feature of our lives.

Poems of Dawn Tefft are published in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Witness, and Sentence, among other journals. Her chapbooks include Fist (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), The Walking Dead: A Lyric (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark, 2005). Her first fiction piece was published recently in Pioneertown. Her nonfiction has been published in cream city review, PopMatters, Truthout, Jacobin, and Woodland Pattern’s blog. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works as a higher-ed labor organizer and representative.

From the Foothills of Oblivion

Fiction / Christopher Higgs

:: From the Foothills of Oblivion ::

I want to say I love you in the most unpredictable way, a way no one has ever said it before. When I do “triangle orange redux,” you know how and why. It’s our secret. I shouldn’t have brought it up in mixed company. Couldn’t help it. Could not help it. Sorry. Anyway, listen, my son loves saying “recycling bin.” For a while he said, “psycho bean,” which sounds like recycling bin as spoken by a two year old if you say it out loud very carefully. Anyway, listen, I wish we made our world of watermelon sugar. I really do. I really wish it. But we’ve never had tigers here who spoke our language. No iDeath. No Forgotten Works.

I want to say I love you but I am alone and no deeds have been done here as they were done in watermelon sugar. Let me let go of this, can I? Can we do that for me, please? For us. Okay? Okay. Thanks. I need to clear my throat and get some air and regroup and remember that time I busted that ring of soviet cocktail hustler video game adjacent belligerent fidgeting surrender of every person to the equal opportunity center nearest the culprit who turned out to be none other than the mysterious injunction against the inferior posterior amphibian barometer in the alpine recreation locations of every single architect on this side of the Rockies? Jesus Christ Carter get a fucking clue, get a fucking goddamn clue you blue faced quarter shaped apple with a rotten core. Center break neck speed toward the alphabet we least want spoken in these parts; trust me, you do not want to switch alphabets at this moment because the part of this story where presently we reside affords little but a not good place to switch; the bandits around here are more likely someone trying to kill us or rob us or tell us a lie and catch us with our pants down than anything else; we could wind up back in prison if the lights snap on at the wrong injunction if you know what I mean. Of course you know what I mean, you wrote the book on dubious injunctions.

I want to say I love you but we work at the university which translates to: we could get shot at any moment. Let’s not think about it. If we think about it, we may get paranoid. No need to get paranoid. Paranoia results from the effect of too much of something in your brain. To counteract it you need to balance it with something akin to its opposite, or you need to wait it out because whatever transgression you have made can resolve itself in time. Time equalizes. I’m probably the first person to ever say that phrase, so let me go ahead and make sure to copyright it. Time equalizes©. Now I own it, right? So if anybody wants to use that phrase they have to pay me. God I love this country. America! Fuck yeah!

I want to say I love you before the sun sets over the Pacific. Before the sun and moon and stars snapped into existence, presuming they snapped into existence at some point, at some point when life began we began, but we began before as star particles but before the star particles what? Our ancestry will never get discovered. Likely we will never know from whence we came. Even now with our robot bodies and our immortality, however could we hope to discover the origin of the origin of the universe? But even if we could, then what? Say we somehow accomplished it. What then? Do we go searching for the origin of the origin of the origin of the universe? And then on to the next iteration to infinity? Perhaps a certain line of work involves crevices or whole holes into parallel universes where aerobic, or should I say acerbic, or should I say fellow patrons of this sentence let me set the record straight, or disco, or blight, or foggy up the windows I’m preparing to, we’re preparing to, we want to forgo or forage or forfeit or forget. Miette said, “Go to The Forgotten Works.” I know he said it, we know he said it. They all know who said the flames last touched by the least partisan woman in the history of police states and quantum mechanics deserves the medal most given for honor, but honestly why ask questions? Why ever ask questions about anything?

I want to say I love you despite the private investigator’s findings. The least acceptable mode of transportation these days seems better than never leaving your couch. We get endorsements, you’d never know it. You play the fiddle in a brass band and wonder why no one wants to hang out with you. Play by the rules, fine. Play your gut-string harp or parent a pigeon or jerk off a jack o’ lantern or find a Frisbee or give up more room while all gallivanting around. Make excuses. Make a loud sound. Buy beer. Drink beer. Buy more beer. Drink all the beer. Pass out. Wake up in jail covered in vomit. Chunks of vomit in your beard. We can see it. We didn’t want to tell you about the subject of the documentary. Didn’t want to spoil it. Wait and see for yourself. Love makes mountains out of however many nails combined equals a quarter. Imagine a fourteen-hundred-year-old ghost slathering herself on my sister. Our sister. We have a sister. We see our sister in pictures. We left gate yawn trigger figure, seven, figure eight, figure a different, or should I say alternative route. Take the side streets. Van Nuys suffers a bad reputation but in this new world all the gangsters line up on the side of the road to show off their hotrods. One tricked out wheelie all pumped full of hydraulics. Flashback to Boyz n the Hood. We watched Boyz n the Hood constantly, enough to memorize the whole thing. Same as Goonies. Memorized it. Star Wars Ewok Adventure? Memorized it. Savage Steve Holland’s ’80s classic One Crazy Summer? Memorized it. Never you mind how many movies I memorized as a kid because I watched them over and over. Also music. We’ve memorized a good deal of music. Late ’80s to late ’90s jams compose a good deal of our knowledge, my knowledge, we have shared knowledge, you know. Love means never having to never ever again. Did you know Erich Segal, the guy who wrote the book turned into the movie Love Story, “was denied tenure at Yale and Love Story was ignominiously bounced from the nomination slate of the National Book Awards after the fiction jury threatened to resign. ‘It is a banal book which simply doesn’t qualify as literature,’ said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and fiction jurist William Styron. The National Book Award for fiction that year went to Saul Bellow for Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” according to the LA Times? Why care about anything anymore? Why listen to anyone? Why allow anything inside? Why not build up a wall, learn how to write code and become a hermit working from home writing code for some mega code company overseas? Almost everything we have rests on the coast of Switzerland. What coast? you might ask. Perhaps. Perhaps you’d ask. And we would say, “The coast of never ending suicide.” We want to dispel the rumors of ecstasy or beyond. When you take your last gasp, you never breathe again. Never. You can’t imagine it so don’t even try. To understand death one must experience death. We don’t believe anyone can imagine death. The undead believe in death. We believe in ceasing. Losing cohesion. Becoming something else. Dissolving. Disintegrating. Becoming gaseous. Feeding bugs. Feeding plants. Feeding every level from the subatomic on up through the humans eating carrots from the Hollywood Farmers’ Market. We see celebrities and fawn. We get autographs in a little powder blue notebook carried around always. We always carry around the autograph book. Who knows what might could happen? Who knows when we’ll ever get that close to them again? Don’t tell about the time at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival when we approached indie princess Parker Posey but instead of introducing ourselves like normal humans we approached her from the side, toward her back, and when we neared her enough to take in a whiff of her hair we took it. We stood a foot away and leaned in and smelled her hair deeply, deeply smelled her scent, inhaled her scent deeply, her hair. We told this anecdote once in front of a crowd of people and recorded it on a cassette tape, the leading method at the time, and then after transcribing the tape and listening to the tape, what it produced startled me, startled us, startled everybody presumably. Most glaringly we repeated the issues facing mother nature later today after the masseuse and Paul and Gerbin and Joyste found private lives to assume and the Conrad attention bolstered all sorts of aggression, then and only then could we even consider elaborating on the ancient alphabet for Oren or Thatch or Chrimen. None of those fuckers get the gift if any one of them fails to transport delectable treats affordably. Parachute and foil. Draw a farewell scepter or grant a fugitive a parent for a day and ask the lord for forgiveness. We cannot excuse the handful of wrongdoings posted before the elevated conference of paper towels and dolls made of paper towels. All along we tell secrets. Do you catch secrets? How could you? Grandma needs to talk about a pony. Poetry? No, a pony. Ask another day.

I want to say I love you, don’t you remember? Can’t you recall? Must I continue to say it over and over? What power do we harness from repetition?

I want to say I love you but I’ve already said it twice today. Who am I now, Gertrude Stein? Are we Gertrude Stein? How many times can one say the phrase “I love you” and still hope to conjure the same level of significance?

I love the love of loving you while in love with you I love you more than loving you can be said to love. After everything everyone extolled. After all the purple. After all the inchworms. The poisoning incident. The flock of angry geese. Killer bees. The serial killer slash hitman. We cannot tell a lie. We cannot tell a truth. We cannot tell anything without exhibiting both liar face and truth teller face. Go figure. And ask yourself, what else is love but a knife without a torso to slip into? We forget. I forget. We hide. I hide.

We frequent and drive and parachute without forgiveness. And I do, too. And like Frank Stanford said, “I am watching you from the foothills of oblivion.”

From the writer

:: Account ::

Rereading Richard Brautigan, thinking about love. Thinking about thinking. Thinking about language’s inability to signify. Thinking on the page. Showing my work. Wanting desperately to say what cannot be said. Caught in the well, the void. Caught in space, a vacuum. Wanting what can never materialize. Wanting for the sake of wanting. Finding connections between cognition and imagination, identity and performance, story and report, private language and public discourse. Inhabiting the present. Inhabiting my body. Inhabiting the stress of waking and moving and begging without begging. This document presents my own associative thinking habits, a composition of my brain’s chemical neurological synaptic function, unencumbered by the dictates of the dominant discourse surrounding “good fiction” or “well-written fiction.” I’m interested in creating what only I can create, only I can compose, only I can assemble, in the radically personal way I create, compose, assemble. Communication doesn’t interest me in art. Instead I prefer provocation. This stands as an example.

Christopher Higgs lives in Los Angeles where he teaches narrative theory and technique at Cal State Northridge. His newest book, a constraint-based memoir entitled As I Stand Living, came out this past February from the #RECURRENT imprint at Civil Coping Mechanisms. Previously, he wrote The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney: a novel (Sator Press, 2010), and assembled the S.P.D. #1 Bestselling novel ONE, in collaboration with Blake Butler and Vanessa Place (Roof Books, 2012). In addition, he’s published two chapbooks and numerous shorter works for venues such as AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Global Queer Cinema, and The Paris Review Daily.

The Spider Mom

Fiction / Sionnain Buckley

:: The Spider Mom ::

a fairytale

Comma and Millicent had been trying for a baby for the past fourteen months. Every month they would take turns—odd months were Comma and even were Mill. And every month for fourteen months, they would both start bleeding on the first Monday, the moon and the close proximity keeping them synced. October had come again, and another Monday, and Comma and Mill sat in the kitchen feeling the bloods exit from between their legs in slow first-day fashion. They stared at their empty lunch plates, the crumbs of their chicken salad sandwiches, their crumpled napkins.

Just outside the window above the sink, a maple branch dangled, drops of water shining at the points of the leaves from the morning rain shower. They were feeling surprised and not surprised at the same time, and frustrated at both of these reactions. It was no matter how badly they wanted a child, no matter how many jars of semen they carried back to their bedroom, no matter how many hours they spent tipped upside down against the couch while the other read aloud from their favorite childhood books. They hadn’t done it, yet again.

So Comma and Mill sat there in the kitchen and bled together. And when they got tired of that, they stood up and rinsed their lunch plates in the sink. Mill wanted to close the curtains and take a nap, but Comma suggested they get out of the house. So they stoppered themselves up and went out into the wet world to ask for some help.

Their first stop was to their best friend, a nurse, because they knew that before giving any of her medically sound advice, she would hug them each gently and pull out the tray of teabags for their perusal. “Are you taking all those supplements I gave you?” she asked them. They were.

After they said goodbye to their best friend and thanked her for the tea, they walked down the block to their doctor, who looked at them straight-faced and said the same thing he always said: “Just come in, and I can do it for you. It’ll make your lives so much easier. I don’t see what the resistance is.” They thanked him and gave thin smiles to the receptionist on their way out.

Next they went to the midwife, who tucked her knees under her and leaned forward in her floral armchair as they relayed the news. “Maybe it’s time to try a different approach?” she said carefully. She offered up her suite of rooms and her own expertise, suggested the donor’s participation, or even more than one. Mill coughed quietly into her hand. Comma shook her head and said they’d touch base with her soon. “She may as well’ve just called it an orgy,” Comma whispered when they were outside again.

Another visit to another nurse friend warranted a repeated refrain: “You haven’t forgotten those supplements I gave you…?” Another cup of tea and it seemed their bladders were too full for this.

They went into the chapel on a whim—Comma’s idea—and slid into a pew beside the pastor, who lifted his head from his bowed prayer at their arrival. “God gives us all, in time,” he said, smiling at their frowns. “Have you prayed on your readiness?” Mill nodded sagely. “Try going to see Dr. Haylor,” the pastor suggested. “He does those procedures all the time.”

After stopping at the bakery for donuts (and the baker’s advice that they needed to plump up a bit, give it more to latch on to, here have a few more pastries, on the house), they went to talk to the innkeeper, who was a fount of everyone else’s secrets. As she bustled around the inn’s kitchen, she rattled off the names of everyone in the county who had artificially inseminated in the past fifteen years. Not that many, it turned out. “And who actually got a baby?” Comma asked. The innkeeper paused next to the sink with a frying pan in each hand. “Lola Peters, and the Trenches, but only after they went to Dr. Haylor. There was Jillian, too, you remember her, but I can’t really count that.” Comma and Mill were too tired at this point to ask the innkeeper why she didn’t count Jillian, and they didn’t bother to mention that neither of them knew a Jillian anyway.

Before returning home, they stopped at their neighbor’s house to see Artie, the seven-year-old they watched sometimes on weekends when his father was away. When he asked why they looked sad, Comma explained, and when he asked why it hadn’t worked, Comma explained that they didn’t know. “You know who’s really good at having babies?” Artie said. “Spider moms. Sometimes five hundred at once.” Artie had been on an animal kingdom kick lately, spouting off random wildlife facts at his fancy. “You should just ask a spider mom what to do!” He went back to separating his Legos into color-coded piles, and Comma and Mill crossed the street and went home.

Back in their small kitchen, Mill opened the cabinets and took down the bottles of vitamins and minerals and herbal tinctures that their nurse friends had given them. She lined them up on the counter in size order—the biggest jar with the bright yellow horse pills on one end, and the tiny brown stopper bottle of subtle energy formula on the other. She stared at the line of supplements, counted them dutifully, considered reordering them based on the likeliness of them helping in the slightest, then placed them all back in their spots in the cabinets.

Comma watched all of this from the kitchen table, and when Mill turned around, Comma pulled out the other chair and poked it invitingly with her foot. “Maybe we’re just on the wrong months,” Comma said as Mill sat down across from her. “Maybe we need to switch evens and odds.” Mill frowned in response. “Or each do a few months in a row,” Comma tried. “Or get a couple different donors.” Comma kept spouting off all the alternatives she could come up with, pausing between them to watch Mill’s face earnestly.

“Maybe we just need to ask a spider,” Mill whispered, staring down at her hands in her lap. Neither of them laughed, they just looked up at each other with the gravity that comes with helplessness.

“Okay,” Comma said. She stood up and pulled her chair to the center of the kitchen floor, then dragged the legs of Mill’s chair until it was directly facing hers. Comma sat back down, her knees just brushing Mill’s. “If we sit here long enough, one is bound to come along.”

Mill insisted on getting them each a glass of water, but after that they sat down and didn’t move again. By the time the sun had started setting they seemed to have agreed that they would stay that way. They watched the light fall across each other’s faces, across the tiled floor. The first hour they mostly stared at each other right in the eyes, but after that they took turns. They very well could’ve talked, but Mill seemed to need the silence, and Comma wasn’t going to push it. They only broke position to take sips from their water or to cross and uncross their legs. It made the most sense to keep them uncrossed, to more evenly bleed, but after a point they were soaked regardless.

It was the dead middle of the night, the windows black, the track lights above the stove casting the room half-lit, when Mill finally broke the silence. “Are you sleeping?” she whispered to Comma, who had closed her eyes for a bit to rest. She hadn’t slumped or jerked at all, so Mill wasn’t so sure. Comma nodded without opening her eyes, so Mill let her sleep.

When the sun rose the next morning, Comma woke up to Mill’s face staring straight at her. She knew without looking down that her pants were soaked completely through, saturated and drying a dark maroon down to the middle of her thighs. Mill was beating her—the blood had nearly reached her knees. Comma wondered if Mill would make a move to get some breakfast, but she just stayed put, stared at Comma for a few minutes, and then turned to the window to watch a bird hiccup across the sill.

It was past noon on that first day when Comma suggested that maybe they needed to at least take some iron pills. “It’s like fasting,” Mill said, closing her eyes and letting her head roll on her neck in a slow semi-circle from ear to ear. Comma could hear Mill’s stomach grumbling from here. Under her, and under Mill as well, soft clumps of congealed blood were slipping out and gathering in warm piles between their legs.

Comma and Mill wrapped their ankles around the legs of the kitchen chairs, knees open and bloody. They talked about names, an old subject of which they never seemed to tire. They wished sometimes that they could have three hundred babies, if only to use all the names they had come up with over the years. Eleanor. Selene. Kai. Tesla. Margot. Natalia. Cecil. Sylvia. Julian. Oliver. Lucy. Ronan. They recited the names back and forth to each other, like the instructions to a much-used recipe, or the words of a prayer. The sun set through the window, a magnificent red that they may have said reminded them of blood, under different circumstances.

Some days passed, enough for them to lose count, to lose feeling in their legs, to lose—it seemed—every pint of blood in their bodies. It had reached the hems of their pants and continued, dripping between their bare toes and running into the grooved edges between the tiles of the floor. Around them, from the empty rooms, came the creaks of the radiators cycling through their own fluids.

“I want you,” Mill whispered one evening. The kitchen was gray around them, losing light fast. Comma looked up at Mill. She had wrapped her calves tighter around the chair legs, and Comma could see streaks of red staining the wood. Her knees were angled open. Again she whispered, “I want you,” and tilted her hips just barely closer. Comma imagined standing, imagined lowering herself between Mill’s spread legs, blood on dried blood. Instead, she shifted until her knees brushed Mill’s, until she pressed against them. Mill shivered against the hard wooden back of the chair, and Comma’s heart dipped against her ribs. The light fell from the kitchen completely.

When the spider finally arrived, they had nearly forgotten they were waiting for her. Nearly. She made a subtle entrance, crawling haltingly over Comma’s thigh and stopping with her spindly legs poised, waiting. She faced Mill, or so Mill assumed, based on her limited knowledge of spider anatomy. Truthfully, Mill appreciated spiders from a figurative or symbolic standpoint but didn’t much care for their physical bodies near hers. “Comma,” she said, pointing. And Comma saw.

They sat there with the spider for a long time. A long enough time that Comma wondered if maybe they needed to get Artie in here as a mediator. The spider hadn’t moved an inch since stopping on Comma’s thigh and hadn’t turned away from staring at Mill. All the blood had dried by now on both of them, except for what stayed warm between their legs.

“Okay,” Mill finally whispered. “So what do we do?” She directed the question at the spider, but after a few minutes of silence, Comma couldn’t help but interject. “I can’t decide if this means she’s choosing me or you,” Comma said. “She came to me, right? But she hasn’t taken her eyes off you since she got here.” Mill ignored this and continued to stare at the spider instead, who, for what it’s worth, seemed to ignore this as well.

“Okay,” Mill said again, many hours later. Comma wasn’t sure what she was responding to, but it did sound like a response, like Mill had received a transmission that Comma wasn’t privy to. She fought the sudden urge to reach down and smash the spider with the palm of her hand. She sometimes had those urges, incredible ones, that she couldn’t bear to act on, but craved regardless—driving across the median, jumping from a high overlook, moving the blade of the kitchen knife just a little farther. The spider shimmied in place a little, perhaps nodded, then proceeded to turn back the way she came, down over the edge of the chair and across the bloody kitchen tiles.

Mill was the first to try to stand, although she nearly toppled her chair, and Comma’s as well, with Comma in it. “Bread,” she said, and Comma’s stomach immediately responded, groaning obscenely in the direction of Mill’s back. The two of them hobbled around the kitchen, gathering whatever they could find that hadn’t spoiled. A jar of peanut butter, a package of dried apples, the last three slices of multigrain bread. Comma figured they would talk about the spider once they had food in their bodies. Mill figured Comma could hear everything the spider had said and was quietly mulling it over. Neither of them said a word of this. They ate the bread and the apples in less than three minutes, then fed the peanut butter to each other from their fingers until the jar was wiped clean.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The image of two women sitting across from each other, legs wrapped around the legs of their chairs, bleeding themselves dry, originally showed up for me in a poem. I don’t write poetry often, but when I do it tends to be bloody. Menstrual-bloody in particular. Go figure. I wanted to do more with this image, so I lifted it and placed it somewhere that strange images are accepted without question and treated with sincerity: the fairytale. Inside this form, I knew that I wouldn’t have to change the image, or even explain it much. And maybe the story doesn’t end up being much of a fairytale, traditionally speaking, aside from the bloody mess (and the wise spider of course), but centering the excess of the blood was important to me for the purposes of the story. As a queer woman, I have had a widely varying relationship with my menstruation. As my opinion of and desire for motherhood has changed over time, my blood has felt alternatingly welcome and pointless and complicated and superfluous. For two queer and menstruating women who want nothing other than to have a child together but are consistently failing, the simple excess of blood in itself is a taunt from the body, an insult to every earnest effort. I wanted to honor the feeling of that excess and allow it a physical presence in the story.

Sionnain Buckley is a writer and visual artist originally from Long Island. She has worked as a muralist, a farmhand, a personal chef, and a facilitator for a queer book club for LGBTQ+ teenagers. When she isn’t writing strange stories, she is consuming queer media and popcorn in equal measure. Her fiction has appeared in New South and Crab Fat Magazine.

No Rain

Nonfiction / Michelle S. Reed

:: No Rain ::

Mom doesn’t remember the weather that day, but I like to think there was rain. I like to think the night was full of the sound of it. That thunder woke her up before the contractions did. That my grandmother cracked the back door to let the cat in from the storm and stood in the open frame for a moment, listening. Then her daughter called.

My sister was two when they brought me home. Mom says Jess picked up a baby blanket and slung it over her shoulders when she saw me. Said Jess wouldn’t put it down. She carried it through our childhoods, then lost it at an Ohio hotel when we went to Sea World. That was before we knew about documentaries or abused orca whales. We only knew the giant body of the black fish rising out of the water and diving back into it, our faces splashed from its fall even in our back-row seats. I remember being afraid of the whale but in awe of its power. Its tail swished so beautifully in the turquoise pool. Its teeth shone like embers.

Mom took a shower to make the contractions come faster and stronger. This is what you do on your second child, she says. No panic. Just stepping into the shower carefully, turning the hot water on, breathing deep and slow, waiting as long as you have to. At midnight, she woke dad up. “Are you sure?” he asked.

When Jess had her second child, my husband and I came to Michigan to visit. It was July, muggy and green. We sat on the back porch while my brother-in-law tossed a football to his two-year-old son in the yard to our left. Inside, a lasagna was baking. My parents were stationed at either side of my sister. All of them stared endlessly at my niece, cooing at her and touching her tiny fingers. She wanted to lift her head but wasn’t strong enough yet, so she jerked it back and forth and up and down, telling us yes no yes no yes. I was entranced by my sister. How lost she was in her daughter’s eyes. What am I missing, I wondered, that creates such a fire?

I was born quickly. So was Jess before me. So quickly, mom’s doctor ran into her room, yelling at the nurses, “You should have woken me up earlier! I told you she goes fast.” Three pushes and I was out. “You don’t understand what that means yet,” mom says. The women on her side are blessed with short deliveries. “When you do it, it will probably be the same,” she likes to tell me, and sometimes I let this pass without reminding her I don’t want children.

They thought I would be a boy. My name would have been Dave, like my father’s and his father’s. Dad would have taken me hunting when I got big enough to carry my own gun. He would have taught me to be quiet in the woods. To make a deer feel safe before I kill it. Maybe he would give me a bow too, teach me to use every weapon he uses. But I was a girl. They had to find something else to call me. Dad saved his weapons for my nephew. I took gymnastics and ballet. I was a cheerleader, an ice skater. Still, my baby book was blue.

Jess called me a week ago. She’s pregnant again. Her body is chaos; she vomits several times an hour, and her breasts and joints ache. Her son and daughter want her to play with them, take them outside, build a fort. So she sits in a chair while they zig-zag across the lawn and calls them back if they wander too far. I am amazed, again, at what her body can do, has done. What my mother’s body has done.

It might have been snowing, mom says, and dad agrees. Snow is not as good as rain, but frozen water is better than none. I want a connection between my fascination with oceans and rivers and tides to the conditions of my birth. I want a reason for my love of thunder and the comfort I feel at the sound of rain. For why I’d rather write about shades of blue in the Atlantic than raise children. I want my wedding on a cliff over Lake Michigan to mirror my beginning, somehow. I want water. But no one remembers.

They named me Michelle because dad liked the sound of it. Mom couldn’t think of anything else she liked, so she agreed to it. She says she sometimes accidentally called me Melissa in the first weeks of my life, so slippery was my identity.

Sometimes I imagine myself as the man they thought I would be. Another Dave. He’d be quiet and solemn, probably. Bad at sports and good at drawing trees. A tendency to daydream. He’d never be asked when he thinks he’ll have his first child. He might be a little wary of his body, disappointed in its lack of bulk and power. But freer in it, no doubt, than the one I have.

If there was no rain outside, there was still water in me and in my mother. She had to have it broken at the hospital both times she gave birth. For some women, it breaks naturally, mom says. Others, like her, hold on.

Jess wasn’t scared of orca whales or biking without training wheels or talking to strangers in restaurants when we were small. And later, she would make friends with boys easily while I kept to myself. She would have a baby and get married and not be afraid of losing herself inside of the life she made. She came first and knew everything I didn’t know. But I’ll never forget her in that Ohio hotel, heartbroken and clawing through bedsheets in search of her blanket: the thing that kept her safe.

What mom hated most about giving birth was standing up afterward. She says the nurses would take the baby away and then she would have to right herself, walk slowly back to the room, and wait for her daughter to appear again.

We played house when we were kids. Jess was the mom and I was the daughter. This was never questioned or explained. She liked babydolls, realistic ones who needed diaper changes and burpings. She fed them with little plastic spoons. She cradled them and gasped if anyone bumped her while she held them. “Careful! My baby!” She tucked them into miniature wooden beds. She sang lullabies. She gave the babies names. Invented imaginary husbands. Even then, I knew it was wrong that I didn’t do the same.

There was no snow and no rain. I know this in my heart. Metaphors don’t appear where I will them to. It was November in eastern Michigan. It was gray and ugly. The leaves would have been gone from the trees. There wouldn’t be snow yet, but everyone would have wished for it. People always want snow that time of year, in spite of how they’ll complain about it when it comes. They’d love anything to rain down and hide the black trees, brown grass. To give the children something to mold into castles, to throw at each other. To open the terrible sky.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This essay began as a poem about meeting my niece for the first time. Then I realized that what I really needed to investigate—my respect and deep love for the mothers I’ve known and my own lack of a need for that experience—wasn’t quite right for a poem. So I prodded and pushed and explored. I asked my mother what it was like to give birth to me and found myself searching for meaning in every detail, as if the color of the sky that night could explain (maybe even justify) who I am. Giving the essay a direct narrative structure didn’t feel right, so it became a series of lyric vignettes. I needed it to move in and out of time like memory does, to feel like any moment of it could be an ending or a beginning.

Michelle S. Reed’s first book of poems, I Don’t Need to Make a Pretty Thing, was a runner-up for the Hudson Prize and is available from Black Lawrence Press. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse Daily, Reservoir, Waxwing, Flyway, and Salt Hill, among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Independent Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. She writes nonfiction when she is feeling very brave.