My Plea

Nonfiction / James Davis May

:: My Plea ::

The poem below was written sometime before January 26^th, 1938. I have a copy of it on delicate—nearly tissue-thin—manila paper. There are two holes punched into the left-hand margin, and the poem itself was written on a typewriter. The poem’s flaws will be obvious to any seasoned poetry reader; I hope, though, that you’ll take the time to read it, as its author was very dear to me. I think, too, that the poem can tell us a little about persistence and poetry’s importance to the young. What I’m asking, I suppose, is for you to be less concerned with evaluating the poem’s merit than you are with acknowledging the human voice that lives inside its lines. Here it is:

MY PLEA

I do not want to know about hell and strife
The pitfalls, the agonies endured in life
No, do not press them upon me
I shut my eyes that I might not see—
The ugliness and bareness of it all
See men live, rise, love, and fall.
Instead show me love and happiness
Quiet streams and peacefulness,
Hear stirring music and voice full of song
Show to me the right and not the wrong.
I want to live in beauty and be free
Travel to moons and across seas
I am Youth!
Hear my plea!

NMB

The poem arrived by mail last week. It was in an envelope within an envelope, the first of which was modern and the second of which was not. That second envelope, which was the same aged color as the paper, had my late grandmother’s maiden name on it—Miss Nora Brown—and her address (123 Morgan St., Brackenridge, PA), along with a postmark: January 26^th, 1938. 7:30 p.m. Philadelphia. My grandmother passed away last December, and my aunt found the poem in my grandmother’s drawers. My grandmother was not a hoarder; she kept a very neat and clean house, so if she kept something, it meant something.

Until very recently, every poet who’s ever tried to publish a poem could remember the dread inherent in finding his or her own handwriting on an envelope in the mail. It meant you had been rejected by the magazine you sent your poetry to for consideration. In my grandmother’s case, it was the Ladies’ Home Journal that sent her the bad news. Reading the rejection slip enclosed in the envelope along with the poem, I was surprised by how little has changed over eight decades:

We regret that the accompanying manuscript, which had the most careful reading, is not in every way adapted to the special requirements of Ladies’ Home Journal.

Please accept our thanks for your courtesy in permitting us to examine it, and feel assured that we are always glad to give manuscripts our careful consideration and to report promptly as to their availability for our needs.

Yours very truly,

THE EDITORS

Compare that to my latest from Poetry magazine, which came via email:

Unfortunately, your submission isn’t quite right for us. Thank you very much, though, for sending work our way—and thank you for your interest in POETRY magazine.

Sincerely,

THE EDITORS

Both my grandmother and I were “blanked”—in other words, the editors (or more likely someone working for the editors) signed their title instead of their names. A passive-aggressive way of saying “Please stop sending”? Anonymity dictated by volume? We’ll never know. Though blank rejections appear to have gotten shorter—yet another symptom of cultural ADHD in the digital age—the coolness and false contrition remains: LHJ wrote that they “regret” that her poem “is not in every way adapted to the special requirements” of their magazine; Poetry, meanwhile, begins its dismissal with “Unfortunately,” before telling me my “submission isn’t quite right” for them—the editorial equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me.”

Anyway, I have advantages my grandmother did not, namely a healthy ego. I’ve been published, after all, and teach creative writing for a living. I’ve been seasoned by hundreds of rejections just like these. I even used to keep all of my rejections in a bloated large envelope until someone pointed out that it was tacky to do so. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a recent high school graduate, was not yet nineteen, and worked at a drugstore. She would not, as I did, go to college, let alone eight years of graduate school. For every hardship she endured—the Great Depression, World War II, Richard Nixon (she’d like that joke)—I’m certain I can cite ten ways in which I was privileged, and she is one of the people, along with her husband and my parents, who made my easier life possible, a life that allowed me to pursue such an impractical vocation as writing poetry. Prior to receiving her poem in the mail, I knew only that my grandmother was a tremendous reader. My father and aunt have since told me that she wanted to be a writer, a poet in particular.

It’s likely that she borrowed the typewriter and, I’ve invented this detail, the copies of LHJ that she read prior to sending the magazine her work. It was her first and, I believe, only rejection. Which makes the note on the back of the envelope—“My first attempt and a rejection!! ‘If first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’”—somewhat ironic, if not sad. The “again” in that note is underlined twice. In less than a year, she’d marry my grandfather, whom, the family legend goes, she fell in love with when she saw him marching as part of the fire station’s drum and bugle corps. In fact, the Brackenridge fire station was and still is right across the street from the address on the SASE. On Google Street View, I see a yellow-brick building composed of roughly ten row houses. My grandmother’s former residence, where she lived with my great-grandparents and likely wrote this poem, is the second from the corner and less than two blocks from the Allegheny River. If I zoom in, I can make out a tiny mailbox to the left of the front door. I doubt this is the same mailbox that briefly housed my grandmother’s rejection, but it certainly looks old enough.

About that poem. It was written in 1937 or ’38, as I’ve said, a decade and a half after the publication of The Waste Land, so it seems antiquated, yes. Antiquated and at times clichéd. But it has virtues, and were I to find it in a stack of submissions exclusively from high school students, I think it might have caught my eye, especially the sentiment behind the first couplet: “I do not want to know about hell and strife / The pitfalls, the agonies endured in life.” There’s a delightful irony to these first two lines. The poet says she does not want to know about these things (that is, “hell and strife”), but in naming them we’re led to believe that she does know about them. My grandmother was Irish Catholic, so she would have been well acquainted with hell; and I imagine growing up on the shore of the Allegheny during the heyday of steel and coal provided good models for what eternal damnation might look like. Billowing smokestacks, sunless days, etc. Her father, meanwhile, worked in the mills and by all accounts drank more than even the most hyperbolic Irish stereotypes. All of this to say that this teenager likely experienced real, not imagined, strife.

The poem operates by negation—it’s a protest against those images of strife: “No, do not press them upon me / I shut my eyes that I might not see.” Now the poem has taken up its title; it has become a plea. We wonder to whom it’s addressed. A deity? Culture (i.e., media and literature)? Cynicism itself? We don’t know, but the force behind this plea strikes me because, unlike a lot of poems by teenagers, it opts for something more forceful than melancholy. It protests, and the word “press,” along with the speaker’s shutting her eyes, suggests violation, a violation against which the poem pushes back.

The next couplet—“The ugliness and bareness of it all / See men live, rise, love, and fall.”—veers too much toward abstraction, we’d probably say in workshop, and yet viewing this poem through a historical lens, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that its concerns, its prophesies, were valid. World War II would begin in a few years, and as we all know, this war was one that had a long windup. It’s reasonable to think war had been on this young poet’s mind. How many of the men that worked in that fire station across the street were headed to war in three or four years? How many would end up dying in the next decade? That Brackenridge was a steel town, making many of those men vital to the war effort, probably kept the percentages down but not by much. So many in my grandmother’s senior class were about to “live, rise, love, and fall.”

The poem has sonnet DNA. If we’re generous—and let’s be since this is my grandmother!—it has fourteen lines. It also has a turn, albeit a nontraditional turn. The volta comes at line seven instead of line nine: “Instead show me love and happiness / Quiet streams and peacefulness.” Here, of course, any creative writing professor would object. We’ve got two glaring abstractions, and those abstractions are, as abstractions tend to be, clichés. Not unusual lines to find in a teenager’s poem. The next couplet is more specific than its predecessor: “Hear stirring music and voice full of song / Show to me the right and not the wrong.” The first line of this couplet is curious. Is the speaker imploring the addressed to hear the music, or is she asking to hear that music herself? Grammatically, it’s the former, which makes the poem more interesting to me. For one thing, it gives the speaker more authority: we’ve already said that she knows about “hell and strife,” and now we know she knows about this music, a music that by implication is unknown to or discounted by the person or power she addresses. That person or power doesn’t hear or doesn’t choose to hear the music. It follows, then, that the addressed also has a tendency to show “the wrong” instead of “the right.”

I’ve said this poem has sonnet DNA, and that’s true, but it’s primarily an elegy, the strand of that form identified by Edward Hirsch as containing “poems of great personal deprivation shading off into meditations on mutability and petitions for divine guidance and consolation.” Considering this definition makes me all the more certain that my grandmother’s poem addresses God. If so, what a brave poem for an eighteen-year-old Catholic to write! That a poem would be the proper form to issue imperatives to God is also intriguing because it points to the fundamental reason we write poetry: we want meaning and order.

Tonally, this poem reminds me, oddly enough, of “In Warsaw” by Czesław Miłosz, which was written some seven years later, under very different circumstances. In that poem, Miłosz stands in front of the ruins of St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, which had just endured the carnage that resulted from the Nazis quashing the Warsaw Uprising. Miłosz asks himself why he is there meditating on the ruins and remembers that he “swore never to be / A ritual mourner.” The poet has no choice, though, as the hands of the dead grab hold of his pen and “order [him] to write / The story of their lives and deaths.” This obligation to the dead is not one Miłosz embraces, not at first anyway. In the poem he confesses that he desired to be a poet of odes, not elegies:

I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

The last full lines of my grandmother’s poem read, “I want to live in beauty and be free / Travel to moons and across seas.” Both poems express unrealistic wants. Time and History, which live beyond the borders of all poems and occasionally invade them, occasionally sack and level them, had different plans, plans that were in place for both poets by the time Miłosz finished his own poem. Miłosz, at thirty-four, had the subject of human suffering, one that he would write about for six more decades. My grandmother, at that same moment, had her family, my grandfather, father, and a little later, my aunt, and then much later her six grandchildren, subjects that would obsess her the way poetry obsesses poets. I read those last two lines—“I am Youth! / Hear my plea!”—eighty years after they were written and feel sad. Sad because she wanted to be a poet and couldn’t be. The war years, I imagine, put poetry on hold. As did this rejection. If I could write to her, I’d tell her, as I tell my students and as my professors told me, that rejection is part of the game, that she went big—LHJ was the first American magazine to hit over a million subscribers—too big for a first poem, and that the rejection she received and opened on the cold porch in Brackenridge in January of 1938 was not a comment on her talent. Listen to what you wrote on the back of the envelope, I would tell her. Keep trying, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

And what to say about that life? What to say without sounding sentimental? She never learned to drive, loved champagne, hated parsley, lived until she was ninety-seven, seven years longer than my grandfather, and mourned his death in the ways of the old epics. It wasn’t right that he was taken from her. I think of that second line, “The pitfalls, the agonies endured in life.” If you asked her how she was doing during those last years, she’d say “lousy,” and add that she was terribly sad and lonely. No pretense whatsoever. You knew where you stood with her and, it appears, so did God.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When my father called to say that he and my aunt found a poem my grandmother wrote, I asked him to send it to me. In the days between that phone call and the poem arriving by mail, I entertained absurd dreams of becoming my grandmother’s literary executer. “I will find a way to publish this poem,” I kept telling myself. My grandmother loved Elizabeth Barrett Browning and read as widely and as diligently as any of my academic friends. So I had high hopes even though I hadn’t read the actual poem. When I did, I got really sad. My grandmother’s posthumous literary career rests on this poem, a poem that is good, I think, for a teenager writing in the first half of the twentieth century, but its virtues are in the potential it suggests, not in its actual lines. That makes the blank rejection slip she received all the more heartbreaking. My grandmother experienced literary rejection, something I experience so often that it hardly fazes me, and it looks as though that rejection ended her literary aspirations—what to do with that information? My grandmother died at ninety-seven and was lucid for all but the last few years, so in the months after her death, I didn’t feel as though I had missed opportunities to know her. I didn’t feel as though there was anything unsaid between us. This poem changed all of that. Suddenly, I want to talk to her, her teenage self, the girl who wasn’t that much younger than my students are now. I want to protect her ego, but I can’t. All I can do is make a case for the poem.

James Davis May is the author of Unquiet Things, which was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The New Republic, New England Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. The winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, he lives in the Georgia mountains with his wife, the poet Chelsea Rathburn.

Two Poems

Poetry / Meg Wade

:: Aubade in Mid-December ::

My lover searches the forest
of my hair to find the good

ear he can whisper into.
My other a can of tin bees.

I heard music when you spoke just
now—I swear it, he whispers. 

But I hear nothing. 

No trembling timpani, no 
boots puncturing the bone-white   

snow. I listen hard for some sudden 
interruption of solitude. He switches 

the radio on & Appalachian Spring
breaks through the speakers. 

It’s thirty degrees. Unseasonably warm
and wet. Our messy bed now nothing 

more than a contract between 
landmark and surrender.

:: Failed Spell ::

You must swarm the dark. 
You must strike fast & shatter

its branches. Do exactly as I say 
or you will lose this child.
 
Walk out into your mother’s 
woods & do not speak to anyone
 
for three days. Gather the bark 
that will soothe the little furnace 

of your body, mullein leaves
once the flower finishes 

dying; meadowsweet, we call
Save. Crush the leaves. 

Cover them with vodka and drink.
Your body will become a light 

show. May mercy’s lace thread
what happens next.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Aubade in Mid-December”

I became incredibly and inexplicably sick in the spring of 2017. I battled most of the year with my health, which of course affected my relationship with the world. I permanently lost a significant amount of hearing in my right ear. I couldn’t chew solid foods. When I was finally in somewhat better health again, I took on a new lover. This poem is based on a true story of a night we had early on in knowing one another. I wanted to write a poem that explored my newfound relationship with hearing loss and sex, but also the complicated nature of intimate relationships in general. How so often we are alone—even if we are not alone. How even though we are together, we still experience the same moments differently.

“Failed Spell”

Lately, my work is heavily inspired by the spiritual practice of Appalachian Granny Witches. My mother, her mother, and her mother before her were all practitioners of this sacred healing art. These poems rise to engage with this practice and the place it resides in, as I try to navigate my own lineage and responsibility within it.

Meg Wade is a 2017 National Poetry Series finalist. She is a former Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Creative Writing Institute, and her manuscript Slick Like Dark won the 2017 Snowbound Chapbook Award from Tupelo Press (2019). She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and her poems have appeared in Nashville Review, Horsethief, Pinwheel, and WILDNESS, among other journals and anthologies. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.

Six Sonnets

Poetry / Diane Seuss

:: Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates ::

Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates behind Whitman
beards, legless homeless talking to themselves on red dirt corners, laughing 
at the nothing there is to laugh at, holding up blank cardboard signs, 
the want so great they can’t put words to it, and I belong nowhere, have 
never belonged anywhere, not where I was raised, not where I was not raised, 
not in any classroom or strip motel or restaurant of any false or real ethnicity, 
not chic, not invisible, not urban but no farm where my apron can flap 
in the wind, not in any workplace, my god, workplaces, I know this is 
the wail of a teenager and yet I’m not really wailing, am I, am I wailing, 
I’m saying this body has never been a home, my shack a shackle, dog 
is a good boy but he bites, poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped 
into so I could skip town, even the hospital where I was born was borrowed 
from the Catholics, nuns thought I was odd and tried to foist me off 
on the Buddhists but they reached through the fog and handed me back

:: It’s a real Garden of Eden story ::

It’s a real Garden of Eden story, the mother of the little 
compound, founder, embracer, died of cancer, then some 
goof from Arkansas moved in thinking he could plant corn 
after they told him you can’t plant corn in the mountains, 
there will be a freeze on one end or the other, planted corn, 
it froze, and now he’s out there most nights burning husks 
for God knows what purpose, and he’s got keep out signs 
all over the range so Shawn can’t walk his dogs out there 
and the half-coyote Rico sits smack in front of Shawn and stares 
into his eyes like hypnotism, but you know how coyotes are, 
that high laugh-cry that throws salt into your wound at the time 
of night you’re already bedded down in your loneliness, 
and Arkansas out there setting fires and the dry trees rattling 
their leaves like some golden currency no one uses anymore

:: For twenty-six days I lived in an apartment with a dishwasher ::

For twenty-six days I lived in an apartment with a dishwasher, 
and I’ll tell you, it changed me, it changed my hands not to have 
them daily in hot, soapy water, and the change wormed its way 
up my arms all the way to my brain, so that I became incredulous 
at the notion of ever having worked through a sinkful of dishes, 
I was also in a strange time zone, and at a high elevation, so that 
in bed, flat on my back, I felt short of breath like an invalid, I was 
like Keats, and cried a little upon waking, as he did, opening 
his eyes once again to unbearable suffering, and people in the town 
treated me with an unaccustomed degree of respect, when they 
shook my hand I could tell they were thinking that it was soft, 
and it was soft, so was my other hand, the softness snaked 
through me into all the corners of my life and my whole interior, 
I had no origin story, no soul, I was, practically speaking, an appliance.

:: Either all of this is an apparition or I am ::

Either all of this is an apparition or I am, and where the apparition 
began I don’t rightly know, maybe I’m still coupled, maybe I have 
a towhead in tow, my singularity in every circumstance a mirage, 
reading The Dubliners at Orlando’s eating a relleno while the whole 
world sips its margaritas in tandem, watching a meteor shower
from a blue picnic table in the dark near a tributary of the Rio 
Grande, wild dogs rambling through the pueblo beneath the Blood 
of Christ mountains where I have never/will never belong nor
should I, and magpies with the indigo feathers down their backs 
who can recognize their own faces in looking glasses, or Intro 
to Buddhism, peyote-tripping through class, the prof spinning 
a prayer wheel like a party favor, maybe all the way back to being 
trapped with my dad in a House of Mirrors, reaching for a father 
and banging into glass, self, self, impairment, hallucination

:: It is abominable, unquenchable by touch ::

It is abominable, unquenchable by touch, closer 
to the sublime than sentimental, more animal 
than hominid, I’ve seen it in the eyes of birds 
weaving on a stem of ragweed, voracious,
singular, there is no one like me, Dickinson in
her narrow bed, her cold clenched hands, her 
penmanship elegant, unreadable, even following 
a recipe for black cake her black cake came out 
strange, lusher than the template, and every freak 
I ever met had that same look in their eyes, armless, 
rolling a cigarette with their lips and teeth, legless, 
rounding a corner on their handmade cart,
monarchic, imperious, wild, sad, and like every 
queen the need for love revolting and grand

:: And then landscape was all there was ::

And then landscape was all there was. Curves of rock blocking 
the sky like drive-in movie screens showing repeatedly films about 
ribbons. Breast-shaped blood-colored towers. Beautiful, my mind 
called it. I languaged it so I wouldn’t have to hear the wind. Two 
weeks in a hotel off the interstate. So lonely I start getting mawkish 
about other people’s fingerprints on the headboard, hawkish about
hawks. Do hawks eat roadkill. What eats hawks. I turn encyclopedia
into a verb. Eat every meal at Dick’s. Who’s Dick, I ask the waitress. 
Nobody remembers the original Dick. They’ve been looking to hire 
a Dick but so far no applicants. I need my loneliness, I was quoted 
as saying. Someone writing the narrative called me a ribbon-snipper.
I don’t have a zip code, a house, a dog, mailman, milkman, president, 
dad. It’s a classic Western tableau: man wearing a hat under a derelict 
sky. Not a cloud in the. In this case, a bitch wearing a fedora.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I am working on a book-length sequence of sonnets that, taken together, will constitute a kind of memoir, though not exclusively a memoir of life experiences, but one also of the nature of memory itself—a memoir of the act of remembering. The sonnet is an endlessly fluid, re-imaginable form. It has been hushed, lushed, fragmented, fogged, elated, flipped, and freaked by everyone from Donne to Rossetti to Hopkins to Millay to cummings to Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, A. Van Jordan, Evie Shockley, and countless others. To participate in it, for me, is to feel held up, though delicately, by the experimentations and solitudes of poets known and unknown.

My sonnets are all fourteen lines—I’m not abandoning that holy integer—but are often unrhymed, or use rhyme only intermittently, and are unmetered, though now and then I drop in a metered line or two to remind me (and the reader) where we come from. Most of my sonnets do contain a turn, however subtle, and a couplet, though not necessarily rhymed. The diction is at times on the edge of formal, at other times, idiomatic. They frame, at times, increments of lived experience. At other times, their focus is an idea, a reading experience, a theory, an absurdity, a dream, or a vision. They teach me, among other things, that, as Oscar Wilde writes, “Your days are your sonnets,” that every moment is potentially divisible by fourteen lines.

I am divorced and now intentionally unpartnered. My son lives several hundred miles north. I am alone much of the time. I am more aware of that aloneness when I travel, when I’m divorced even from my little house and my landscape. At times I feel I’m teetering on the edge of non-existence, of being swallowed by strange altitudes and sublime, overwhelming vistas. The sonnet has become my constant companion, my Camerado and camera, my vessel, Louise to my Thelma as we take flight over the Grand Canyon. When I’m not writing them, I’m talking sonnets in my headspace. Lines surge through me as if I am a sieve. Sometimes they end up in poems; at other times they stream behind me like hair ribbons let loose into the wind.

Diane Seuss’s fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming in May 2018 from Graywolf Press. Four-Legged Girl, which was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open received the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her first book was It Blows You Hollow from New Issues Poetry and Prose. Poems and brief essays have appeared in a range of literary magazines, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and New England Review. Seuss was Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College for many years and was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colorado College in 2012 and 2017. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Two Poems

Poetry / Ciona Rouse

:: The Situation in Our City ::

I could write about rain.
I could write about rain and how it fell
for 24 hours straight in Alvin, Texas, on July 25, 1979.

This is not about rain.
This is not about weather or a storm and
especially not Alvin, Texas, where I’ve never been before.

I’ve been to Atlanta,
Georgia. I was there first. I learned
of light and breath in Atlanta. On July 25, 1979

I was born
while children died. Murdered.
A black child left his house five miles away

as I came to be.
But he never came home.
He never again dragged flakes of caked up mud 

from the sole
of his shoes into his apartment. 
Never again ordered a handful of Big Bols gum

at the mart
on the corner, never again
wore the 9pm scent of 12-year-old boy.

Truth is this
is about a storm. It’s about a thunder
that dropped black mamas to their knees

a lightning
that cracked necks
left bodies floating, dragged from rivers.

How the rain
fell for 24 whole months 
and nobody could see through sheets of sorrow

and fear.
I came here when the situation in the city
meant my daddy looked everyone in the eyes and shot daggers.

My mama
showed me the world 
while squeezing my body too tight. Everywhere we’d go

my body 
close to hers. So close to feel 
my breath wet her skin. So close to keep me breathing.

:: Click ::

on a good day
the brown thrasher sings
tee      teeryoo be doo be doo
but on a day when gray catbirds
and red-shouldered hawks hunger
the brown bird stops 
thrashing for food & hides
in the thick deep briar & bristle
pulling don’t	   don’t you dare 
from its chest      a warning which slams
against the air like click clack 
smack click clack 
smack

like the girl who said smile
on a wind-whipped South African day
she said smile real thick and bring
the click from the back of my tongue
out the apex of my lips
she taught me how to click in the Xhosa language
click clack tock click clack tock
all the dipthongs necessary 
for excuse me sir or help
me please ma’am 
but uniting click & vowel
on my tongue did not come
naturally

like the boy, skin as rich
as soil & bark who sprouted 
adrenaline wings
but still could not fly
fast enough      mouthed a scream
but no sound thick enough
the boy who needed
thistle though it pricks & bleeds
to nestle inside & smile real wide & go click 
clack click clack click clack
which is to say
I’m hiding      I’m ok
now turn around boys
don’t fall
prey

From the writer

:: Account ::

On July 28, 1979, police discovered two bodies. Young bodies. 13- and 14-year-old bodies. Black boy bodies. One of them, Alfred Evans, was last seen on the day I was born within miles of the hospital where I came to be. His name is one of the two names that started a list of Atlanta’s missing and murdered children—a list of nearly 30 young people who went missing and were found murdered over the span of two years.

My parents spoke of these children for most of my life. They reminded me that I was born into a terrifying time when black children were murdered mysteriously. In early 2017, I finally began learning more about these children, their stories and the fears of black parents and black children in Atlanta during this time. I’m exploring the unsolved theories, unfortunately finding too familiar the neglect of media attention and police action, listening to the music of these young people, watching the films that delighted these young men and women in the making. I’m experiencing the first two years of my life in a way I could never recall from my infant memory.

I’ve thought a lot about how these children were hunted like prey by the murderer (or murderers, as many still suspect), so I’ve written several poems regarding hunters and prey, specifically thinking about animals native to the area. The brown thrasher found in “Click” is the Georgia state bird. There’s something about turning to the natural world to unpack these very unnatural deaths. I’m drawn to animal instincts, to animal hunting and hiding patterns, to human interaction with animals. I’m wishing these children weren’t hunted and tracked and trapped and killed. They are not animals. They are boys and girls with thought and laughter and dreams and family waiting for them to return home. They are humans, slaughtered.

In writing these poems, I say the names of these children over and over and over. Their breaths erased, but their names still on my breath. I hope these poems might place their names on others’ breaths as well.

Ciona Rouse is the author of the chapbook Vantablack (Third Man Books, 2017) and poetry editor of WORDPEACE online journal. Her work can be found in Native Magazine, Gabby Journal, Matter: a journal of political poetry and commentary, and Talking River. She lives in Nashville, Tenn., where she co-hosts Re/Verb, a podcast where music, literature, and pop culture collide, with the poet Kendra DeColo, and also curates many local poetry experiences and reading series.

Two Poems

Poetry / Xandria Phillips

:: Sativa Song ::

          for Brannon Rockwell-Charland

                    it’s me, bitch

bud not being
          and loud as hell
                                             when I move 

                    you move

like a whale 
          and the fire 
                                             savaging its belly

                    the spark lifting 

the locust off 
          its haunches 
                                             that’s what I be

                    dark as detritus  

covered in rainbow
          street toxin 
                                             and oil slick 

                    I’m so woke 

I ain’t never sleep 
          and I don’t need
                                             a hook

                    for this shit

I’ve got too many
          thoughts to share
                                             on the continuity

                    of this sitcom 

played in most cases 
          for its high-fructose 
                                             background jeers

                    I’ve got thoughts

on Congress   
          wood grains
                                             and quicksand 

                    that I want to plant

in your kneecaps 
          I’m digging a well
                                             with a shovel made

                    from your hunger

to house the swell 
          where blood inflates 
                                             with pulse 

                    crosses 

in grids of pleasure 
          I snap the reigns 
                                             on your temples 

                    it’s time to go

I have this boat 
          it’s so lovely 
                                             and mystic and 

                    just everything 

you’d want 
          in a vessel

                                             and blessed as

                    the elevated 

the boat always 
          leaks and sinks  
                                             and strands us 

                    somewhere 

too blue to re-access 
          with memory 

                                             once we’ve left

:: Two-Headed Slake ::

You take the tongue I speak      and make me beg it back 
                                                         into my head. Without language, 
          I’m a man stranded and walking 
                                                     barefoot. No nuance. A goat 
bleating its way home 	         in the dark. I labor sound, 
                                                       a braying siren sans time 
          signature. You lather your 
                                                       hands post-theft, and I
translate beasted litany: 	        They’re building a podium 
                                                       to disclose my animalia 
          from. Wooing valleys 
                                                      where my names lived, 
waxed, and fermented 	        their sigil into the sunken 
                                                      earth. In me they built you 
          a home with a porch swing 
                                                      out back. You colonist, 
carry me over my threshold. 	Run up the stairs and run 
                                                      back down. Be thorough.
          Before the windows distill
                                                      to fog-licked pelt, turn on 
every single light in this 	       good damned house.

From the writer

:: Account ::

These forms speak to the parts of myself that need to nest and arrange in order to make sense of environments. Tedious expeditions, more beleaguered than loved by craft, these poems are small, formerly uncharted artifacts about myself. I am someone who wrote from within academic institutions for many formative years. Living outside academia, I now see the ways I was pressured by internal and external variables to be contrary or at constant odds with subjects in my work. At its marrow my poetry existed to disavow because my relevance was constantly questioned. These poems speak to a recentering of value: the risk that I court every time I open the door. I am curious about my stakes in love and pleasure, and how the outside world can so swiftly intrude upon intimacy. I have much to learn from being perceptive about what thrives uninvited at my interior.

Xandria Phillips is a poet based in Chicago. She is the author of Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Find her work online at The Offing, The Journal, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, Scalawag, and The Shallow Ends. For more, visit xandriaphillips.com.

Elegy for the Slain Ship

Poetry / Kyle McCord

:: Elegy for the Slain Ship ::

          after The Sea of Ice, 1823

In a better world things might have been different
          a fairer wind a trimmer sail but no such luck

the wind did its work and the captain too
          you’re cut to the heart and stilted: 

all that’s left of you gored worse still: help is unlikely
          rescue is foreign to this place 

every hour tender Christ who we love is bloodied 
          by stigmata stygian worms inch his wrist 

(what color one mother whispers) 
          deeper into the Kunsthalle before the Moderns

Marc’s elephant begs time’s stubborn arrow to move 
          while one tired child cries into his father’s flannel

not for you he is a clock like thirst or lymphoma 
          the father sings to him in a low voice 

the boy will spend his life trying not to forget 
          but name a thing time defers

one way or another so confined you become
          a figure for the lost but always accessible

like Mao’s body my father would add 
          if he weren’t feathered with tubes to grant him breath 

I am learning to live with the patina of panic 
          that graces you at all hours 

you as hashtag on the tour maps 
          daily a hundred hands and none to mend

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve been writing about and through art for over a decade now, so it’s about time I offered some account. I began writing in museums in the brutal winter of 2009. I had lost my job and moved back home to live with my parents. My girlfriend at the time traveled to Italy and fell for an archeologist working with her on a dig site.

What I loved about the museum was its strict form of solitude. The way the aesthetic demanded a kind of obedience to the rules. If anyone violated the quiet of the gallery, a docent would quickly intercede. The only relationship that seemed appropriate was that between viewer and art. I felt a kind of equality here. I spent long hours with Tanner, Hopper, and Bacon.

I met my wife in August of 2014, and we began a long conversation about the objectification of women and the violence done them by the visual world. She is a visual artist and creates feminine landscapes that attempt to reframe the image of the woman in the context of the natural world. Especially in 2018, this conversation seems to carry more Kairos than ever. I wrote these poems through the eyes of a father dying of cancer, but they are very much a part of that conversation that began with a very wise woman and the negative capability she experiences in her own medium.

Kyle McCord is the author of five books of poetry, including National Poetry Series finalist Recklessness and Light (Trio House, 2016). He has work featured in AGNI, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. His book Sympathy from the Devil was selected as one of the top five books of the year by the Poetry Foundation Blog. He has received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. He teaches at Drake University in Des Moines.

Two Poems

Poetry / Matthew Lippman

:: Partway ::

Partway through the airplane I saw Kansas. 
It was cut up into squares and circles of earth 
that made no sense. 
There were a lot of worms down there. 
Partway through the cutting of the worm into two 
I saw Kansas. 
I was between Kansas City and Missouri. 
The vapor trails reminded me of worms 
and my sister was on a red couch in England. 
Partway between the Atlantic Ocean and New York she was a mermaid. 
Then she was the loneliest woman on the planet between planets. 
When my wife said I am not afraid of death anymore 
her mother had died partway between January and June. 
You could see her eyes in the Santa Rosa fires 
that burned half of Marin County partway between home and the parkway. 
Everyone travels to get somewhere soft 
even if there is a missile in the wallet 
or a mallet in the parking lot. 
Partway between destruction and devastation 
there is a marigold or a bowl of lentil soup 
that took five hours to simmer. 
It’s a happiness of 
I need to get to you 
and 
you are already here. 
Every time I walk in the front door 
I am partway a party boy and partway 
a junkyard dog. 
I have my days.
Some days they are other days 
and most days they are not.

:: Some Other Part ::

You can have the other part of the dream. 
The part where the wolves eat the fawn. 
The part where the dead lady in 4c 
gets her eyes eaten by the cat.
She’s been dead for days 
and no one wants to go near that part. 
I’ll take the part
where a warrior-spirit goes to help his brother or his sister 
or the fallen child in the lava pit 
who certainly won’t make it.
You can have the other part, 
the piece where the dream is mangled by the kid on his skateboard 
who has spitballs of acid in his throat. 
That part where he throws them against the wall to get through 
to something worthy pretty 
or to just make trouble for the rest of us. 
You can have the other part of love,
the part that everyone wants to call hate 
but we know goddamn well does not even come close. 
It’s the part of other that has a bird in it or a wombat. 
Some creature that knows how to kill to live 
and couldn’t, in your wildest dreams, play the saxophone. 
That saxophone part. 
Not the keys or the copper 
but the part where it gets shoved up in the air and meets the warrior God—
that membrane of purple and orange 
that sounds vaguely like dying 
but does not even come close.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Thinking about halves these days. How nothing is whole. Or, nothing feels whole. Not the self, or maybe the self, but more, the world. Things feel in parts. Either, broken and splintered into parts, busted in half, cracked and demolished or, out there in pieces, waiting to be put back together. Someone out there—us, you, me, them—waiting to gather the chunks and put them back, hopefully, in some beautiful shape or form. I’m talking about the country, the culture, the neighborhood, the vibe, the groove, the collective state of being, these men who have done horrible things to women, to people. So, these poems started happening with the word “part” in them. Five came in one night, one exhausted hour after midnight, me thinking about all these men rambling on—apologies, non-apologies, fucked up histories that led them to asshole-ness, to crimes, to injustices, indecencies against women and other living things. I wanted to scream at the TV and radio, “You have fucking daughters.” I just wanted to stop listening and then I realized—kinda, sorta, all the way—that I am a man, part of that tribe but not all the way, just part of the way, but a man, still. So, I asked myself, “What can you do, buckaroo?” and it just seemed to me that I could listen better. Especially to my daughters. Just listen better and shut the fuck up, which the poems are, a shutting up, a silencing of self, a self-reflective turning inward to investigate. A listening with wordfulness. A prayer. A part of the puzzle, of putting things back together if, in fact, they have that kind of power or resonance, poems. I am interested in this—in parts, parts coming together to make other parts, not necessarily to make things whole, come to think of it, but just to make them better. And I do mean, better, because there is a better out there and it comes from being together, working together, communing—youmeweus—and it is a little naïve and perhaps there is a boatload of wishful thinking in the thinking that poems can help to facilitate that process. But I believe it, partly, part way, in part because there is hope in my heart and I have daughters.

Matthew Lippman is the author of four poetry collections—The New Year of Yellow, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande Books, 2007), Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010), Salami Jew (Racing Form Press, 2014), and American Chew, winner of the Burnside Review of Books Poetry Prize (Burnside Review Press, 2013). He is the editor and founder of the web-based project Love’s Executive Order (www.lovesexecutiveorder.com).

Two Poems

Poetry / Keunhae Lee

:: Fire and Silence ::

In Gyeongju, father tucked his feet beneath
him, kneeling low, his bombast stilled for once.
His cousins crouched around a silver spray
from a metal spigot thrust from a concrete pad
behind the house to wash a bloodied skull.

In the main room, low-slung trays bulged
burdened dishes laden with spiced pickles.
My sister, curled on mother’s lap, wept 
in ugly waves. A cousin grinned and warned 
us not to eat the meat and jerked his head
towards a partly empty pen. The dogs
there in watchful repose, ready sprung. 
An aunt shushed him before he spoke, but still
I grasped already what my sister witnessed.

Steaming pans of stew, garlicky and hot, 
thick with strands of brown meat which hung 
tangled like slender noodle clumps,
roused dinner and the soft click 
of metal chopsticks against steel bowls 
and breath blowing across hot food.

Walking alone through the woods 
the next day, my fingers 
brushed against a poison 
caterpillar hidden 
on the underside of a leaf. 
The pain was immediate, 
intense fire arcing
its way up my hand.

What blaze was stayed as I braced my wrist amid the forest calm?

:: How Debt Travels ::

I punched my fist through ice formed
owing to the prolonged decline in mercury 
over a five-gallon bucket.

The ice dipped and bobbed as if it, 
the bucket, wanted to be the ocean
deep in the arctic, 

owing to the sustained upsurge of water
owing to my hand and arm’s descent
that barely scraped the bottom
of the white bucket 

owing to my short stature
owing to my brief life of five years 
owing to time’s sustained progression.

I washed my tongue with water
owing to injury caused by grownups
in the way that children often are.
I spit and did not swallow

owing to what I knew about poison
and kept my mouth shut
owing to the fragility of grownups

owing to their fear of death
who yawns wide like a lion 
who pinned the tail of a mouse
with its knife point claw

owing to death’s inevitable arrival
owing to real mortality
owing to a failing body
that really is only made of mud

or God’s spit and ash
owing to uncertainty of biblical accounts
owing to unreliability of the human tongue

owing to the porousness of memory
owing to fantastical feats of mind
owing to fallibility of electric pulse
of synaptic leaps from terminal to terminal.

I kept my mouth shut
owing to self-preservation or moxie
and now those grownups are gone or faraway
and now I am taller owing to time’s persistent crawl
and now I am fragile and their debt is mine.

I have carried it with me and towed it forward,
cradled it until the still hours of dawn, 
and now I wonder who could come collect
if I should leave this debt behind.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Generally, I have noticed that the past asks to be revisited and made relevant, if not entirely understood. In these poems, I write about moments in my life that will not be quiet. It has been a challenge to pare these moments down to what I think are essential to the integrity of each poem.

For example, “Fire and Silence” began as a long narrative poem about the events of two days in Geyongju, South Korea. As I began the process of editing, I noticed a sense of things being constrained and released, like a closed fist opening to outspread fingers. I chose to keep images that I hope convey that sense. The people in this poem are constrained in some way, described as being “crouched” or “curled up.” Even the dogs hold back “in watchful repose,” whereas descriptions of food tend to meander a little more, open up and spread out. I hoped to mimic that sense of a closed fist opening in the form as well, using lines with 5 stresses, to 4, to 3, and then relaxing that constraint in the last line, where I used 7 stresses.

For “How Debt Travels,” I really wanted to use a chant of some kind and looked all over the place for an established closed form. There is most likely something out there that would have worked, but I wasn’t able to find one I felt would fit. In the end, I decided there was nothing wrong with just straight repetition inspired by religious chants since the poem deals with religious themes of sin, legacy and death. I really wanted to emphasize the interdependence of things and actions by suggesting a causal relationship between each set of lines. In this poem, I focused not on the number of stresses to determine line breaks, but discrete images or ideas instead. I used my own breath as a significant factor for determining stanza breaks. It was really fun to write and to read aloud!

Keunhae Lee received her MFA from NC State University and currently lives in Bonney Lake, WA.

Two Poems

Poetry / Virginia Konchan

:: Cinéma Vérité ::

Should nature be my profile photo
or my cover photo? Should I adopt
a mantra or tantra? Must I again face 

a heckling crowd or bad steward
of the earth whipping the one animal
entrusted to him? If so, kill me now.

Actually, I think I am already dead.
My brain is floating in formaldehyde;
my preferred pastime is staring at the wall.

But I am godlike at the typewriter, and I am
also a skilled movie critic; when the subtitles
or voice-overs are off, I know instantly.  

If brevity is the soul of wit, I am clearly soulless,
as I take forever to say anything, or get anywhere,
despite the ministrations of multiple seraphim:

it takes an army to keep me alive. I no longer fear 
mirrors, because I know who I am looking at; I am, 
surprise surprise, looking at me. Jesus Christ,

Superstar, are you just going to stand there and
watch me burn? I pegged you as one who preferred
a story to an anecdote, but clearly I was mistaken.

My sails are set for Death Valley, despite the flat
foreground and financial exigencies of today.
See above. See below. Move the decimal,

I mean decibel, two places to the left: then
you’ll know my worth, my value, my market share.
Love is a pocket full of kryptonite, extemporaneous

words spoken in the heat of passion, off the cuff. 
You knew me; I knew you. Let that be enough.

:: Rapture ::

Lordy Lordy, check out this amphitheater:
there’s so much oxygen, I can’t even breathe.
And yet I noticed the performance has been 
divvied up into ever-shorter time intervals.
What’s with that? Do you not trust the span
of our attention, or is this a question of form?
Let’s get rid of the mannequins in the mall,
with their cold plastic nudity, and immobile, 
neutered sex. Better to be an other-directed 
idiot, like the misshapen moon, or a brutish
prick, mirror reflecting you back to me at 
twice your natural size. I used to be ardent,
used to break any window in sight if what
I desired was visible from the other side.
Now, I take melatonin to treat malnutrition,
but there is no pill for this sinking sensation.
Embalmed by the memory of your touch,
I wreak havoc with the trajectory of stars.
My modus operandi is auto-renewing,
yet I’ve grown rusty without god, child 
prodigy at the art of wasting, killing time.
Can’t you recognize an appreciating stock?
I put a spell on you, because you’re mine.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem series is from a manuscript-in-progress entitled Any God Will Do, begun last year in response to a sense of political exigency and a desire to write both into and against that. In it, I explore a revival of the contemporary love poem, in the legacy of such poets as Richard Siken, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Jack Gilbert, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, and others. I invoke extreme states, such as rapture and passion, in the context of time, interested in the continuity between intense psychological states and lyric temporality, and also in questioning the historical association of the lyric moment with heightened emotion and a kind of temps suspendu. Fascinated by the traditions of different kinds of love poems, from courtly to erotic, I am most curious in exploring where the volta happens in a love poem, so-called love poems that turn on or contradict themselves (e.g., Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130), the impossibility of fusion with the beloved, and the figure of the beloved across time.

Author of a poetry collection, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2018), Virginia Konchan’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and elsewhere.

Reconciliation

Poetry / Vandana Khanna

:: Reconciliation ::

I.

He doesn’t want her when 
she’s just a goddess practicing—
all fake and pious and pink. 

Likes her better as a single girl 
swearing in the old language of 
dust and mud and stars. 

He wants to feel like a god 	
again utter prayers that make	
his skin glow the cool blue 		
of neon like the sagging sign 
proclaiming Karma above the sad-sap 
door of the bar—like all the doors 		
slammed shut at the end of the world.		 

He can feel the glare 		
of the evil eye black on 
the back of his neck every time 
she speaks, forgets how to protect 
against it: was it salt or chilies 
or mustard seeds? 

But really, how to prevent
that bitter bud of guilt 		
from blooming? 

Another thing he lost in this incarnation. 

II.

He didn’t believe her 
that nothing happened 
with that other guy, the one 
whose name means crying, 
the one with the ten heads 

and not a pretty one in 
the bunch. That monster 
who tried to touch the black 

gasp of her hair, sniffing 
the air behind her ear looking 
for that bit of her caught on 
the wind: saffron and cinnamon—
her smell its own particular sin. 

III.

He knows his doubt covers 
them like unforgiving ash,
how awful the dirty itch 
of it between their fingers. 

Nothing sacred about a fire 
catching quick and ugly.

All this because she thought him 
essential. Because she followed 
him into that jungle. Fourteen years: 

bored and bruised, how the animals
loved her less and less. She’d tried—

left clean sheets for him, 
someone who rubbed coconut 
oil into her scalp every morning.

Did he love her then? He can’t
recall. Only, when he pulled at 
the tight knots of her wrists, led
them into an ancient meadow 
made wild with onion, all their
sour history dulled. 

Their hands, plucked blooms, arms 
pricked by thorns. He felt the sharp ache
of the cosmos expanding with its chant 
and pulse, its stagger and stagger.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem is part of a manuscript I’ve been working on in the voices of Hindu goddesses where they re-imagine the iconic myths in which they appear and revise the ways in which we view them as wives, mothers, and women. This particular poem is a departure, of sorts, as it’s in the voice of the god Ram. He reveals his motivations and thought processes (perhaps) for acting deplorably towards his wife, Sita, who has returned to him after being kidnapped. Ram has a hard time believing in Sita’s purity and thus makes her pass a “test” of walking through fire. Here, he reflects upon what brought them together and what, ultimately, pulls them apart.

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India, and is the author of two full-length collections: Train to Agra (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2001) and Afternoon Masala (University of Arkansas Press, 2014), as well as the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues (Diode Editions, 2016). Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies such as the New England Review, The Missouri Review, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She serves as the co-poetry editor of the Los Angeles Review.

Boom Boom

Poetry / Michael Collier

:: Boom Boom ::

I leave my back yard and enter the alley in search of my poetry. I get lost a few houses down near the Eldridge’s because all the fences and trashcans are identical. I am alone, filling a shirt pocket with the bees David Hills eviscerates by pulling out their stingers and which he has lined up on a flap torn from a cardboard box that’s pinned to the ground with four small stones. In a tool box, I have a small hammer and screw drivers for taking things apart. Above me is the sky that is always blue. (This means at night the stars are what I see but can’t count.) The alley is dirt. My shoes scuff its uneven surface. Suddenly a door opens, a dog barks, it’s Boom Boom, a Chihuahua, not even a dog in my mind. It rushes its side of the fence, so much louder and fiercer than it needs to be. After a while it stops. Now it sounds like a tambourine because of its collar with tiny bells. Passion flowers grow in a thick vine over Boom Boom’s fence. I have been told the leaves of these flowers are the lances that pierced Jesus’s chest and broke his legs. Boom Boom is whimpering, lying down near a place in the fence through which I squeeze my hand to touch his nose. “Boom Boom,” I say, very quietly, “I love you. You are the only one who understands me.” Afterwards, I feel very small and very large, restrained and freed, and certain there is a purpose to life beyond the one I’ve been given.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Boom Boom,” which was originally titled “After Neruda,” began in response to a passage, translated by John Felstiner from Pablo Neruda’s essay, “Childhood and Poetry” (Infancia y Poesía). Felstiner writes, “I go out in the country in search of my poetry.” (Yo me voy por el campo en busca de mi poesía.) “I get lost around Ñielol hill.” (Me pierdo en el cerro Ñielol.) Reading these lines, I was transported back to the scruffy alley in Phoenix, Arizona, behind the house I grew up in, which was my country of discovery, a kind of wilderness in contrast to the postage stamp front yards—two mulberry trees apiece—that faced the street. The street welcomed, and even demanded, a social and external version of the self, while the alley invited and cultivated an interior and private version. But this explanation or schema of experience is less important to me than the door or window that opened when I read Felstiner’s translation and through which I returned to the earliest country of my poetry. It also reminded me that while we might be called to poetry as a vocation, we must keep looking for it. Poetry begins and continues in acts of discovery. (The fact that my own acts of discovery in my seventh decade are now often through poets I have been reading for many years is another topic. Those poets and poems comprise alleys of memory that are rich and complex.) As for “Boom Boom’s” form, I took my cue from Neruda’s prose, which even in translation is rich with imagery and music.

Michael Collier is the author of seven collections of poetry including An Individual History (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), a finalist for the Poet’s Prize, and The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent collection, My Bishop and Other Poems (University of Chicago Press), is forthcoming, fall 2018. He has published a translation of Euripides’s Medea, a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back, and with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, co-edited A William Maxwell Portrait. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is a former director of the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

Four Poems

Poetry / Wendy Chin-Tanner

:: Parent ::

Not pomegranate, but 
persimmon,

spotted, so easily 
bruised, a child’s finger-

nail could pierce you through.

:: And Not Look Away (Brooklyn, 1985) ::

The pale green of the trees that stood in front
of the crumbling brownstone that June. Later, 

their leaves would darken in the leaden heat 
and the asphalt would soften and return 

to tar under the sun’s sorrowful gaze.
Mornings, the sidewalk would begin the day 

gray, wet from the super’s hose. By noon it 
would be baked so that the cement glittered, 

gleaming like shattered glass. The world seemed to
die each afternoon and nothing ever

happened and nothing ever moved, not air,
not cigarette smoke, not the water 

that held the china girl afloat in my 
room, black hair, silk robe, and cut sleeves flowing

elegantly, drowning, entombed beneath
a dusty plastic globe. At the kitchen 

table, the women sat saying the same 
things over and over so that their words

began to rhyme and sound like song. In dreams,
I held my head under until the surface 

grew still, and all I could do was make 
my eyes see and not blink, and not look away.

:: Portrait ::

Maddy draws me—

a head, 
a pair of boobs,

and beneath, a womb
where the egg,

a speck of black pen, lays.

:: Mercury in Virgo ::

night devours
sleep the hours
surfeited

glut drenched time
sweat slick skin
sheet metal

rainwater
shine I walk
widdershins

warding off
terrors thought
crimes later

at the end
of a dream 
the stars in

a cloudless
sky form a
filigree

above a
skein of swans
honk and echo

fragments of
the past its
light can still

prick stinging
rapidly 
moving eyes

From the writer

:: Account ::

This cycle of poems, some of which are included in my forthcoming second poetry collection, Anyone Will Tell You, is preoccupied with an investigation of form and its subversion as an expression of the relationships between gender and identity, parent and child, self and other, the personal and the political, human beings and the environment, and the earthly and the cosmic. Within that investigation, I started out working mostly with blank verse couplets, but then, in conjunction with the birth of my second daughter, I began to write primarily on my iPhone’s Notes app and developed a new form consisting of three syllables per line and three lines per stanza, which I think of as trisyllabic triplets or 3x3s. Eschewing punctuation and most capitalizations, on a technical level, I discovered that 3x3s are highly fluid, as elisions work with and rely on the rhythm of the English language to expand the possibilities of meaning from line to line. I am also interested in how the exigencies of gender, parenting, the experience of the postpartum maternal body, and the interaction of technology with those conditions are borne out in the execution and expression of different formal traditions.

Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collections Turn (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, and Anyone Will Tell You, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal and poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown. Some of her poems can be found at RHINO Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Vinyl Poetry, The Collagist, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge. A former academic specializing in sociology and cultural studies, Wendy was born and raised in NYC and educated at Cambridge University, UK. She is the mother of two daughters and the proud daughter of immigrants.

Three Works

Art / Kenseth Armstead

:: Three Works ::

: Untitled # unknown (orange), (Yaddo experiment week 5 of 7); 2016; Acrylic on primed canvas; 12” x 12”

: Untitled # 6 of 25 (red), (Yaddo experiment week 6 of 7); 2016; Acrylic on primed canvas; 6” x 6”, 2016

: Untitled # unknown (blue), (Yaddo experiment week 5 of 7); 2016; Acrylic on primed canvas; 12” x 12”

From the artist

:: Account ::

The Yaddo 2016 residency mandate was to surprise myself. Most of the projects and bodies of work undertaken up until that point were monochrome, found, muted color mostly, site specific and/or history focused. The conceptual rigor of connecting to a site or historic body was always the key driver. This body of work would be different. It was strictly experimental and for FUN. This had never happened before. There were no rules, or for that matter, goals. Each day set up new puddles or twists of metal cut up in the studio and then embedded in the paint. Each twist led away from knowing. The Yaddo experiments are a complete body of work. In seven weeks, I completed some one hundred plus works (they still have not all been counted) that I do not know. They know me.

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative multimedia installation art for three decades. These works have been exhibited in several historic exhibitions which include Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art & Armand Hammer Museum in 1994; the Berlin VideoFest in 1994; Frames of Reference: Reflections on Media at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1999; Race in Digital Space at the MIT List Visual Arts Center & Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001; Veni Vidi Video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition) in 2003; Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum in 2004; “Edited at EAI”: Video Interference (celebrating 45 years of their award winning collection) at Electronic Arts Intermix in 2016; and most recently, the critically acclaimed Modern Heroics: 75 years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum. In each case, Armstead’s work has been included in pivotal explorations of American culture, emerging fields, gender politics, the New York art scene, ethnicity, artistic innovation, history, and institution-defining moments. Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures are included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, African American Museum in Dallas, Texas, The Newark Museum, and numerous other public and private collections.

Narrative in the Shadow of the Refugee Regime

Criticism / Mai-Linh K. Hong

:: Narrative in the Shadow of the Refugee Regime ::

Once, while my parents shopped in a drugstore and I wandered the aisles alone, a white woman approached me and said, “I want you to know I do not blame you for the war.” The woman mistook my silence for incomprehension, so she said more slowly and loudly, “I DO NOT BLAME YOU FOR THE WAR.”

I must have been about seven. Even then, I knew which war: Vietnam.

Exoneration, when unasked for, sounds more like accusation. I answered, “I know. I wasn’t born yet.” The woman studied me, then moved away.

Children are perceptive, economical creatures. They understand that some days you choose between justice and self-preservation. Years later, I wanted to return to that moment and say sarcastically to the woman, “I don’t blame you, either.” But such a response would have been unkind. Life is a series of imperfect responses, based in a kind of social arithmetic that rarely comes out right. I did not know what or whom she might have lost to war. I did not even know what I had lost.

* * *

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a scholar of race and ethnicity long before he became a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, wrote in the New York Times last year, “[I]t is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.” [i] Vietnamese refugees have been extensively measured, photographed, interviewed, psychoanalyzed, and documented; but before the relatively new field of critical refugee studies emerged, it seemed one could be a Vietnamese refugee or one could know about Vietnamese refugees, rarely both. Thus I open with personal narrative in keeping with a practice of self-identification—consciously placing oneself in relation to one’s work—that is common in critical refugee studies, as it is in ethnic studies more broadly. This practice speaks to work by Yến Lê Espiritu, who urges scholars to recognize “refugees as ‘intentionalized beings’ who possess and enact their own politics,” rather than as intellectual or practical problems for others to solve. [ii] Reflecting on the field for which she laid much of the intellectual groundwork, Espiritu writes, “Over the years, I have looked for ways to tell the story of the refugee—not as an object of study but as a source of knowledge.” [iii] Espiritu’s and Nguyen’s locutions assign fresh cultural and academic currency to “the refugee’s” capacity to illuminate the world—as a generative new paradigm or as a knowledge producer—while also validating the primacy of narrative in such production. Critical refugee studies decenter empirical, outsider ways of knowing that previously rendered the refugee invisible as soon as she lay claim to them.

A not-insignificant part of my project is this: decades after a harrowing passage, and from the relative security of a university office, I undertake to resignify my decades-gone, brown, child self who was once so visibly a remnant of the Vietnam War. That raced and gendered body, a “less than human” refugee body, was a screen on which (non-Vietnamese) Americans could project their otherwise formless grief, anger, blame, and forgiveness. [iv] As far back as I recall, I have been periodically hailed into some stranger’s narrative of a disastrous war, in which I played a role I recognized but did not choose. The woman in the drugstore, who believed her exoneration of me would have a particular meaning (“I want you to know,” she said), unintentionally taught me about the intertwining of knowledge and power (“I want you to know”) and the ways they are refracted through narrative (“I do not blame you for the war”). She is one of hundreds of Americans I have encountered who seek me out to complete their own, unresolved stories about “the war”—that is, about race, empire, militarism, innocence, or whatever else holds up the architecture of their Americanness. This awkward, exhausting, and weirdly soul-baring psychosocial dynamic is a condition of every Southeast Asian refugee’s “new beginning” in the United States.

Indeed, it is the refugee’s function in American society—and her job, for it keeps food on the table—to be hailed into others’ narratives. Since the 1970s, when the United States began formalizing its refugee admission procedures in response to post-Vietnam War refugee flows, this function has been laid out and reinforced by what some scholars refer to as the refugee regime: the complex of international and domestic laws, institutions, policies, and social practices that to a large extent set the parameters of survival for those who are fleeing persecution, violence, or catastrophe. [v] The refugee regime, while it ostensibly attends to the humanitarian needs of the world’s most vulnerable (and it does give some of them precious reprieve from danger), in the larger scheme arguably functions more as an elaborate gatekeeping and cost mitigation system for the wealthier nations of the world. [vi] Without the bureaucratic buffer provided by the refugee regime, such nations might have to reckon with an expensive moral imperative to protect millions of refugees. As Patricia Tuitt puts it, “the overriding aim of refugee law was at its inception and continues to be the reduction of the external costs of refugee-producing phenomena.… [I]f the concerns of the law are humanitarian this is only marginally and incidentally so.” [vii] Arguing for a more comprehensive, humane, ethical approach to refugees, Serena Parekh observes that the current international political consensus seems to be that “states have no legal obligation to resettle refugees or other forcibly displaced, they recognize no moral obligation to resettle refugees, and Western states are, for various political reasons, unlikely to resettle large numbers of refugees.” [viii] When refugee crises strike, as they regularly do, “most states feel entitled to exclude refugees, and this motivates many of their policies.” [ix]

Exclusion, the default posture of states toward refugees, is facilitated by the structure of international refugee law. This component of international human rights law is based on the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees and administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). International refugee law works in part by narrowing the legal definition of refugee so that most of the world’s 65.6 million de facto refugees—those who live in indefinite, forced displacement—would not qualify for protection under the Convention. [x] For the 22.5 million who do qualify, the law’s aim of a “durable solution,” a permanent path to safety and relative freedom, is elusive. [xi] Nearly all refugees remain “more or less outside the bounds of the nation-state system,” either warehoused indefinitely in refugee camps or living in other precarious conditions in a country of temporary asylum. [xii] Moreover, because most refugees who cross an international border do not make it farther than neighboring states, the burden of housing and providing for refugees in transit falls disproportionately on Global South states, which are commonly the countries of first asylum.

The deliverance of refugees to safety under international law, when it happens, tends to be understood by observers, policymakers, human rights and NGO workers, and even refugees themselves as an extension of charity—what one gives altruistically when one does not need to. In the United States, where the work of welcoming and integrating newly arrived refugees is done mainly by nonprofit resettlement agencies and private “co-sponsors,” such as churches and individuals, this tendency is amplified through narratives of private hospitality and “altruistic choice.” [xiii] Popular refugee narratives often fit the mold of “sentimental rescue-and-gratitude tales,” in which citizens of predominantly white bystander nations generously rescue racial and national Others from faraway calamities, and those refugee Others profess thanks for the favor, affirming the rescuers’ essential goodness and implicitly absolving them of past wrongs. [xiv] Decontextualized and dehistoricized, such narratives are ideological diversions: the centering of refugee rescue means that any role the host nation may have played in refugee production—for instance, by fueling or engaging in foreign conflicts or through economic policies that destabilize other nations—fades to obscurity. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues, the grateful refugee is a crucial figure for advancing contemporary American imperialism, for her thanksgiving validates liberal warfare’s promise: that violence and loss in the present are necessary to garner “the gift of freedom” in the future, a questionable gift proffered by the United States under auspices of global security, nation-building, and political and economic liberation. [xv] Critical refugee studies, as Espiritu elaborates, glean from the figure of the refugee an alternate account, not of war as such, but of widespread, ongoing “militarized violence,” which includes less visible forms of state violence that sometimes masquerade as humanitarian aid. Such a formulation reveals more fully “the raw, brutal, and destructive forces that Western imperial powers unleash on the lands and bodies of racialized peoples across time and space.” [xvi]

So it is that in the United States, a nation whose global militarism and economic and strategic policies have contributed to refugee crises in far-flung regions, including Southeast Asia, many confidently claim pride in the nation’s robust tradition of welcoming refugees. Americans commonly point out that the United States accepts more of the world’s refugees who resettle under the UNHCR’s auspices than any other nation, though in 2016 this was only 85,000 people. [xvii] The current U.S. president, who rode to power on a promise to exclude Syrian refugees, acted quickly after his inauguration to halt the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, whose future is now uncertain. [xviii] Trump’s presidency brings to the fore the seeming paradox of American headlines like this one from the New York Times in January 2017: “Warm Welcome for Syrians in a Country About to Ban Them,” announcing a story about some of the last refugees to arrive in the United States prior to the “Muslim ban.” [xix] Such a headline makes sense if we recognize that the refugee regime does not operate through law alone, or through force alone, but, like other vectors of capitalism and imperialism, calls upon narrative, myth, and affect to oil its gears and camouflage its workings. The refugee regime’s neoliberal underpinnings are shielded from view by stories that emphasize, on a good day, refugee rescue, hospitality, and friendship, and on a bad day, a parade of threats that emanate from an inassimilable racial and national Other. These seemingly disparate cultural narratives coexist and, especially in times of insecurity, can assert themselves simultaneously or flip with speed and ferocity.

* * *

The law of refugees is as follows:

(1) A refugee is a person who has fled their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. [xx]
(2) Other countries may not return a refugee to their country of origin. This is the rule of non-refoulement, a central principle of refugee law. [xxi]
(3) The United Nations determines which refugees are eligible for permanent resettlement in another country. The United States accepts more refugees for permanent resettlement than any other host country. In 2016, this was only 85,000 people.
(4) Once a refugee arrives in the United States, a private, nonprofit agency takes over the work of integrating the refugee, having received a sum of money from the government. Private “co-sponsors” contribute time and resources to aid with integration. [xxii]
(5) After a period of time, a refugee may become a U.S. citizen.

The law of refugees is as follows:

(1) You do not speak. You may gesture for help in a way that makes for a good photograph. Pictures speak a thousand words. They will speak for you.
(2) When you are given the gift of a new beginning, you cannot refuse. You cannot say, “This is not the beginning.” Corollary: you may be haunted. And if so, the ghost is your responsibility, yours alone.
(3) Your labor will include gratitude.
(4) Your labor will include patriotism.
(5) You must not be ironic.

* * *

Resettled refugees learn all of this, the official and unofficial “laws” governing their presence in America, principally through survival. This perilous epistemology develops out of double consciousness, hypervigilance, and strategic performativity. Refugee lives are punctuated with social interactions that reflect how precarious and contingent is their “resettlement,” that optimistically named process through which they are putatively absorbed into a new community. Critical refugee studies have challenged the predominant, teleological understanding of resettlement that views a refugee’s displacement as a temporary disruption to be remedied by their integration into the host country and (re)socialization as a self-sufficient economic actor. Eric Tang, in a study of Cambodian refugees living in a Bronx “hyperghetto,” frames resettlement instead as a continuation of the colonial violence wrought by America in Southeast Asia, converged with the legacy of slavery that keeps impoverished African Americans in the hyperghetto. [xxiii] The subject of Tang’s most extensive interviews, a woman named Ra, experienced forced marriage, captivity, and near-starvation under the American-backed Khmer Rouge; once in America, she “engaged in forms of survival that disavowed the state’s insistence that she had been simultaneously saved and redeemed by its refugee resettlement program.” [xxiv] Steering her narrative of continued displacement in America, in part by setting the terms of her interviews, Ra materializes a theory of her own, which Tang terms “refugee temporality.” Rather than treating the time of atrocity as discrete and over, Ra’s narrative enables Tang to “name[] the refugee’s knowledge that, with each crossing, resettlement, and displacement, an old and familiar form of power is being reinscribed.” [xxv] While policymakers speak a technocratic language of annual caps, vetting, and sponsorship of refugees, refugees must meet their basic needs by working within the available narratives and discourses, generally ones that presume the gift of a new beginning. But many, like Ra, also claim social space and generate new language for their own understanding of their experience. This is a fraught, unsettling process that continues long after the legal condition of refugeeness is extinguished (for instance, through the bestowal of American citizenship). From this daily, indefinite negotiation between stark necessity and the refugee’s desire for (though sometimes skepticism of) a fuller existence, refugee-authored literary texts arise.

lê thi diem thúy’s impressionistic, semi-autobiographical novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) illustrates the painstaking and painful forging of refugee “forms of survival” out of the morass of cultural expectations and ideological narratives projected onto refugees in America. The novel’s five chapters are each divided into short scenes a few sentences to a few paragraphs long. Fragmentary and image-laden, the scenes read like prose poems, each capturing a moment from the young female narrator’s memory or imagination as if to form an album of verbal snapshots. One of the earliest scenes, which sets the novel in motion, describes an allegorical refugee sponsorship centering on a retired, white Navy veteran, Mr. Russell, who embodies a cultural phenomenon Cathy J. Schlund-Vials describes as “the alchemical recuperation of the American subject from military aggressor to militant humanitarian.” [xxvi] The elderly Mr. Russell, living in San Diego, watches television images of the Vietnamese Boat People, “nameless, faceless bodies lying in small boats, floating on the open water.” [xxvii] For Mr. Russell, these undifferentiated Asiatic bodies “merged with his memories of the Okinawans and the Samoans and even the Hawaiians” whom he saw in another war, decades earlier. [xxviii] One night, Mr. Russell dreams the refugee boats are seabirds flying “toward the point where in the dream he understood himself to be waiting, somewhere beyond the frame,” and with that revelatory image, he decides to sponsor a refugee family. [xxix] Through this collusion of sympathy and spectatorship, given form by the law, lê’s unnamed protagonist is plucked from a refugee camp to begin her rocky resettlement in America.

Mr. Russell exemplifies a distinctive convergence of sentimentalism, paternalism, racism, and military violence that characterizes America’s posture toward Southeast Asia and its refugees. lê quickly displaces that perspective as the dominant one: she embeds the man’s decision to sponsor inside her own narrative frame, a move that enables the reader to see, ironically, Mr. Russell regarding himself as an off-screen spectator, not the spectacle, as he watches the Boat People on television. Figuratively reversing the camera lens of American and European photojournalism, which iconized the Boat People’s suffering for a mostly white audience, lê’s novel critically highlights the white American veteran’s self-construction as observer-rescuer, including how “he understood himself” as “waiting, somewhere beyond the frame.” In his conflation of endangered, racialized bodies (the Vietnamese with the Okinawans, Samoans, and Hawaiians), Mr. Russell does not necessarily misrecognize the Boat People. Rather, he recognizes all too well historical continuities between the United States’ World War II Pacific victory (cinched by the atomic bombings and subsequent military occupation of Japan), annexation of Pacific islands, near-genocidal military exploits in Southeast Asia, and finally, the crisis experienced by the Boat People. But whatever redemptive potential exists in refugee sponsorship—and his epiphanic dream suggests there is some—Mr. Russell does not live to realize it; he is dead by page five, leaving the sponsorship of a young girl and five men as a final wish for his wife and son to carry out.

Thus, the sentimental rescue-and-gratitude narrative is derailed almost before it begins. The late Mr. Russell’s relatives are barely willing, much less warmly welcoming; the refugees are more frightened than grateful and keenly feel their dearth of options. Nevertheless, the narrator and her family must live and work with the prevailing expectations of gratitude, cognizant that to do otherwise would be to disrupt the mythologies underlying refugee admission, not to mention jeopardize their shelter and provisions in a sponsorship-based economy. Overhearing a tense discussion between the Russells, the refugees contemplate their dependence:

We each thought of those long nights floating on the ocean, rocking back and forth in the middle of nowhere with nothing in sight. We remembered the ships that kept their distance. We remembered the people leaning over the decks of ships to study us through their binoculars and not liking what they saw, turning away from the boat. If it was true that this man Mel could keep us from floating back there—to all those salt-filled nights—what could we do but thank him. And then thank him again. [xxx]

Anchored to the refugees’ anaphoric “we” is the recurring memory, and implicit threat, of being no more than a spectacle of bare life for others to “study,” then decide to aid or forsake. This memory directs the refugees’ responses to their sponsor: “what could we do but thank him”—a question without a question mark—and “thank him again,” rehearsing the role of the grateful refugee. Long Bui brings performance studies to bear in analyzing refugee life and identifies a “refugee repertoire” of familiar performances through which refugees negotiate complex social demands. Bui delineates “the refugee condition as a highly embodied staged process, anchored in the motion and movement of the diasporic subject’s navigation across different landscapes of belonging or exclusion.” [xxxi] The sponsorship economy is, among other things, an affective economy in which refugees perform certain states of mind (such as gratitude) in order to secure basic necessities. Thanking Mel is an act of survival, a staving off of “salt-filled nights” “in the middle of nowhere with nothing in sight,” for refugees who “float” precariously through their resettlement rather than actually settling.

Later, viewing a photograph of the fishing boat on which she escaped Vietnam, shot from the deck of the American naval ship that rescued them, the narrator imagines the Americans laughing at the Boat People:

Maybe that’s why it took them so long to lower the ladder. Maybe they laughed so hard at the sight of us so small, they started to roll around the deck like spilled marbles and they had to help one another to their feet and recall their own names—Emmett, Mike, Ron—and where they were from—Oakland, California; Youngstown, Ohio; Shinston, West Virginia—before they could let us climb up and say our names—Lan, Cuong, Hoang—and where we were from—Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan. [xxxii]

The narrator’s only visual document of the meeting at sea is a photograph taken literally from a white savior’s perspective, but her reading of the image rejects the salvation narrative that assumes sympathy or altruism. Instead, the girl imagines cartoonishly heartless sailors who “laughed so hard” that they fell about the deck, then “help[ed] one another” stand first before allowing the stranded Boat People to board. The two roll calls of names and cities of origin make clear the unequal footing on which the two groups, American sailors and Vietnamese refugees, encounter each other, with one list syntactically and symbolically subordinated to the other. In “recall[ing] their own names,” the Americans construct their self-identity in relation to the refugees, who must be “let” to “climb up and say our names.” At the same time, the “maybes” that begin each sentence, along with the sailors’ exaggerated antipathy, signal an act of counter-imagination: the girl’s construction of a narrative unlike any that might be harbored by, say, Mr. Russell, the sympathetic former Navy man who is also reading images of the Boat People.

Like Ra’s refugee temporality, the novel rejects resettlement’s promise of a new beginning; instead, it demonstrates how unsettledness endures into adulthood for the child narrator, a chronic runaway who ends up living on the opposite coast from her parents. The narrator, her father, and her “uncles” (her mother arrives later) are not so much resettled in California as they are forcibly transferred to California to continue an indefinite series of displacements. These include being asked to leave the home of Mr. Russell’s son Mel after the narrator accidentally destroys his collection of glass animal figurines, and later, eviction from a gentrifying neighborhood they can no longer afford. It seems at times they have not come that far: “We live in the country of California, the province of San Diego, the village of Linda Vista,” in 1940s Navy housing that since the 1980s has been taken over by Southeast Asian refugees, the narrator recounts, mapping California with a geopolitical vocabulary more suited to Vietnam. [xxxiii] Their ex-military housing reflects the fact that, as Espiritu explains, modern refuge is fundamentally an extension of militarized violence, a phenomenon she names “militarized refuge(es).” Refugee rescue, Espiritu points out, relies on the circum-Pacific U.S. military apparatus that grew dramatically from the 1940s to 1980s—the same bases, technology, weaponry, logistics, and pathways that were used in war to displace the refugees to begin with. [xxxiv] The refugees’ physical presence in the “village of Linda Vista” mirrors, and is the result of, the United States’ imperial expansion into Southeast Asia. The American war brings home its human remainders.

lê’s novel details many such ironies of resettlement, large and small. The refugees are not a good fit in Linda Vista. Their transplantation is marked by disjuncture, ambivalence, and distrust: about the Navy housing, the narrator wryly recalls, “When we moved in, we had to sign a form promising not to put fish bones in the garbage disposal.” [xxxv] After the narrator’s mother arrives from Vietnam, her husband buys her a used Cadillac as a “Welcome to America” gift, but she does not know how to drive and soon backs the lumbering vehicle into the wrought iron gate of the apartment complex. The landlord arrives to fix the gate and “silently cursed his tenants. He suspected each and every one of those living in the building’s sixteen units… They were people who broke things.” [xxxvi] With ironic humor, the scene literalizes the prevalent negative perception of refugees as “gatecrashers”—that is, as unwelcome guests in the neighborhood and the nation, and as people largely responsible for their own crises, “people who broke things.” Eventually, unable to pay the rising rent, the family is evicted and arrives home to find the building padlocked, all their possessions inside. They go “quietly” but not complacently: “At night we come back with three uncles. Ba cuts a hole in the fence and we step through. Quiet, we break into our own house through the back window. Quiet, we steal back everything that is ours… We tumble out the window like people tumbling across continents.” [xxxvii] The passage stakes out a collective claim (again, through a chorus of “we”) not only on the refugees’ property, but also on the narrative itself. “Quiet” the refugees may be, but their actions speak: burglarizing their home and stealing back their property, they confront a society that is not meant for them but in which they must nevertheless, like Ra, improvise “forms of survival.” Even in America lê’s refugees are still “tumbling across continents”; unsettled, they adopt (and adapt) strategic performances and reversals of meaning and narrative that carry them through a lifetime of displacement.

Acknowledgments
The Bucknell Institute of Public Policy supported this project with a summer research grant, and Bucknell University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender organized a faculty colloquium in which I developed some of these ideas. I am grateful to my colleagues Nikki Young, Margaret Cronin, Christopher Walker, Layla Vincent-Brown, and Monica Sok for helpful conversations and feedback, and to Steven Belskie for research assistance.

[i] Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry,” New York Times (September 2, 2016).
[ii] Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (University of California Press, 2014) 11, quoting Nicholas Mirzoeff.
[iii] Espiritu, Body Counts 171.
[iv] I am indebted to Marita Sturken’s development of Freud’s idea of screen memory and to Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s extension of Sturken’s work. See Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997) 44; Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, Justice: Cambodian-American Memory Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 77.
[v] International governance of states’ treatment of refugees is sometimes referred to as the “refugee regime” by scholars of international law and policy and international relations. See, e.g., Laura Barnett, “Global Governance and the Evolution of the International Refugee Regime,” International Journal of Refugee Law 14.2/3 (2002); Alexander Betts, “The Refugee Regime Complex,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 29.1 (2010); Guilia Scalettaris, “Refugee Studies and the International Refugee Regime: A Reflection on a Desirable Separation,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 26.3 (2007). My use of the term is broader and refers to not only legal and political formations, but also social practices and cultural productions that, I argue, influence the treatment of refugees in both daily life and policymaking.
[vi] Patricia Tuitt, False Images: The Law’s Construction of the Refugee (Pluto Press, 1996) 7.
[vii] Tuitt, False Images 7.
[viii] Serena Parekh, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge, 2017) 4.
[ix] Parekh, Refugees 4.
[x] Parekh, Refugees 3, 6; Tuitt, False Images 7, 67; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Figures at a Glance” (June 19, 2017).
[xi] UNHCR, “Figures”; Parekh, Refugees 4.
[xii] Parekh, Refugees 4.
[xiii] J. Eby et al., “The Faith Community’s Role in Refugee Resettlement in the United States,” Journal of Refugee Studies 24.3 (2011) 593; Helen Fein, Congregational Sponsors of Indochinese Refugees in the United States, 1979–1981: Helping beyond Borders (Cranbury: Associated UP, 1987) 17. The role of private sponsors in U.S. refugee resettlement was more prominent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is today. See Fein, 49.
[xiv] Building upon work by Mimi Thi Nguyen, Yến Lê Espiritu, and others, I have previously discussed the sentimental rescue-and-gratitude tale. See Mai-Linh K. Hong, “Reframing the Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives in the Post‑9/11 Period,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41.3 (2016).
[xv] Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012).
[xvi] Espiritu, Body Counts 26.
[xvii] Refugee Processing Center, “Refugee Admissions by Region: Fiscal Year 1975 through 31-Aug-2017,” U.S. Department of State.
[xviii] The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear merit arguments on challenges to Trump’s travel bans on October 10, 2017, but as of mid-September 2017, it is rumored that the President may soon issue a new order with a different set of restrictions. In the meantime, Trump’s order has been permitted to take effect with some limitations. See “Trump’s Travel Ban to Be Replaced by Restrictions Tailored to Certain Countries,” New York Times (September 22, 2017).
[xix] Jodi Kantor, “Warm Welcome for Syrians in a Country About to Ban Them,” New York Times (January 28, 2017).
[xx] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (2010) 14.
[xxi] UNHCR, Convention 30.
[xxii] Eby, “Faith” 591–593.
[xxiii] Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015) 14–15.
[xxiv] Tang, Unsettled 21.
[xxv] Tang, Unsettled 21.
[xxvi] Schlund-Vials, War 77.
[xxvii] lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Knopf, 2003) 4.
[xxviii] lê, Gangster 4.
[xxix] lê, Gangster 5.
[xxx] lê, Gangster 7–8.
[xxxi] Long Bui, “The Refugee Repertoire: Performing and Staging the Postmemories of Violence,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41.3 (2016) 113, 115.
[xxxii] lê, Gangster 29.
[xxxiii] lê, Gangster 88.
[xxxiv] Espiritu, Body Counts 30–32.
[xxxv] lê, Gangster 88.
[xxxvi] lê, Gangster 41.
[xxxvii] lê, Gangster 97.

Works Cited

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United States, Department of State. “Refugee Admissions by Region: Fiscal Year 1975 through 31-Aug-2017.” Refugee Processing Center, 2017.

Scalettaris, Guilia. “Refugee Studies and the International Refugee Regime: A Reflection on a Desirable Separation.” Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2007, pp. 36–50.

Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, Justice: Cambodian-American Memory Work. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Shear, Michael D. and Ron Nixon. “Trump’s Travel Ban to Be Replaced by Restrictions Tailored to Certain Countries.” New York Times, 22 September 2017.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. University of California Press, 1997.

Tang, Eric. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto. Temple University Press, 2015.

Tuitt, Patricia. False Images: The Law’s Construction of the Refugee. Pluto Press, 1996.

“Figures at a Glance.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 19 June 2017.

Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010, pp. 14.

Mai-Linh K. Hong is assistant professor of English at Bucknell University. She specializes in American studies, Asian American literature and culture, critical race and ethnic studies, and law and humanities. Her book project is titled Citizenship’s Shadow: Asian American Literature and the Contours of Statelessness, and her scholarly writing has appeared in several academic journals. A former attorney, she received her JD and PhD from the University of Virginia. She tweets from @FleursduMai.

Sarah Sillin, Guest Criticism Editor, received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is currently a visiting assistant professor of American literature at Gettysburg College. Her book project, entitled Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans’ Foreign Relations, explores how writers envisioned early Americans’ ties to the larger world through their depictions of friendship and kinship. Sillin’s essays have appeared in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and Literature of the Early American Republic.

I Don’t Know If This Is About Trans Stuff, or What

Critical Dialogue / KJ Cerankowski, curated by M. Milks

:: Introduction ::

A leading scholar in the field of asexuality studies, KJ Cerankowski has been writing on the intersections of asexuality and queerness for nearly a decade. Here, what begins as a critical engagement with Cris Mazza’s new hybrid film Anorgasmia unfolds into a complexly thought and deeply felt inquiry into Cerankowski’s own relationship to asexuality, desire, transgender identity, and writing as a tool for uncovering trauma. As KJ Cerankowski writes, “I read and tell in order to be upset, in order to live. I gather the fragments that will never fit together to make a whole. I want the trauma to be poetry, but I cannot find the right timing, the right words, the right image.… I ask how this constellation of events makes me—makes me desire or not desire, makes me desirable or undesirable, makes me like a man or a man.”

— M. Milks, Fiction Editor

:: I Don’t Know If This Is About Trans Stuff, or What ::

“I’m not talking about fucking; I’m talking about intimacy. One used to fade into the other, and sometimes I forget I’ve learned the difference.”
—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

“In many ways, healing from trauma is akin to creating a poem. Both require the right timing, the right words, and the right image.”
—Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You

I am watching Cris Mazza’s film Anorgasmia, the “fictional sequel to her real-time memoir Something Wrong With Her,” a book that lives out her reunion with a boy from her past while interrogating her past relationships and her current experiences with “sexual dysfunction.” The film, on the other hand, seems, to me, less about elusive orgasms and explorations in asexualities and more about gender. Of course, the worries over gender and the body circle back to sexuality, desirability, and desire. But gender—and its attendant dissection of body parts—is where we begin. Just about two minutes into the film, we see Cris on the floor of what looks like her basement, taking photos of herself in front of a mirror, when Mark walks down the stairs. Mark is the boy—now man—from her past, whom we first meet in Something Wrong With Her. He has recently moved to the Chicago suburbs to be with Cris after some thirty years estranged. Mark never stopped loving Cris; Cris, I think, is learning how to love Mark.

In this scene, Cris tells Mark, “I’m gonna do a transgender makeover. I’m gonna go transgender and do self-portraits that way.” I watch and rewatch this clip: “I’m gonna do a transgender makeover. I’m gonna go transgender… I’m gonna go transgender… I’m gonna go transgender.…” The phrase echoes in my head. Mark looks perplexed if not a bit displeased. I am both perplexed and intrigued. I cannot help but think that Mazza imagines transgender as some kind of mask or costume to put on. “I’m gonna do a transgender makeover. I’m gonna go transgender.”

Throughout the film, Cris asserts that she doesn’t like the word “woman,” cannot apply it to herself, that she hates when Mark talks about her “femininity,” and that she feels “not female,” but maybe also not quite male. At the same time, she wants to know “what it feels like to be looked at as something that’s not female,” thinking that the experience might be somehow liberatory. So she embarks on what she calls a “transgender experiment,” or what her friend Dan calls a “temporary transition,” or what her colleague Chris calls a “costume switch.” She also says to Chris, “hopefully it won’t be performing; it will be being… being male.” At what point does Cris shift from performing to being? I think of Diane Torr, whose drag performances and “man for a day” workshops were designed to draw out the complex ways we embody gender norms, to help women realize how they are often “giving their power away” through the performance of gender. Torr also used drag to memorialize and hold close the men in her life that she had lost. Her performances as a man for a day or an evening were always called “drag” and “performances,” never “transgender.” One might do drag for a day, in a sense be a “man for a day”; one might go out in drag, but to “do a transgender makeover,” to “go transgender” for a day?

Cris cuts off her hair, buys men’s clothing, and, dressed as “Dave,” she goes to her friend Dan’s house to meet his family. The whole experiment goes “badly” by Cris’s account, and the evening was “rather awkward” according to Dan’s wife, Molly. Cris then overhears Molly speculating about whether or not “Dave” is transgender or asexual, seeming to not quite understand how vastly different the two identities are. So Cris returns home and decides to do some research, first on asexuality. She comes to understand asexuality as an absence of a physical need or desire to have sex. She wonders if she might be asexual. Throughout the film, she grapples with this question as she tries to understand the differences between sexuality and gender, and how to situate her potential asexual and nonbinary identities. What, we might ask, does one have to do with the other? But in this moment following her first transgender makeover, Cris also wonders how she could have been more “convincing” to Molly and her children. So she also finds a “transsexual” site on the Internet. She tells Mark, “I was trying to figure out what I could have done that was more, that would have helped more to be convincing. Now, nothing on there says anything about how to act, what to say.” I am not sure if Cris is looking for a guidebook on how to play a man or on how to play at trans.

Mark replies, “I think that’s because being a man isn’t really inside you.” Cris resents when Mark calls her “feminine” or a “woman,” but she does not directly object to Mark’s idea that being a man isn’t really inside her. Cris will later articulate herself somewhere in the space between female and male, nonbinary perhaps. With this shift to the in-between spaces of gender, I wonder then what it means to “be convincing”? What does it mean for “being a man” to be “inside you”? What does it mean to be a man? What is a man?

In Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, Thomas Page McBee writes of the panic, a “new PTSD,” that sets in when he encounters men who cannot see the man he is (or the man inside of him?), menacing men who instill fear and threaten his safety and bodily integrity—the fear of entering gas stations in unfamiliar areas, the moments when his body says, turn around, leave, run! He remembers how his first girlfriend compared him to other boys. “You’re like a boy… but better,” she said. I read and reread these words: you’re like a boy, but you’re not a boy. You’re like a boy, but you’re better than a boy because you’re not a boy. I am like a boy; I am not a boy. I am not like a girl, but am I a girl? I am not a girl. I am not a boy. I am like a boy. I am not like a girl. I am a boy. What am I? Is there a man inside of me?

***

R and I are hiking in Maine, and I am walking in front of her. “You’re like a guy,” she says. Just moments before, she told me there were times in her life when she questioned whether she really wanted to be queer. In response, I told her that sometimes I am afraid she is going to decide I am not the kind of man she wants, that I’m not really “man enough” for her. It is after I say this, following a short period of silence, that she tells me I am like a guy. I am caught off guard, pause in my tracks. I turn to look at her; I am not sure what to say, so I push out a “huh?” She repeats herself, “You’re like a guy. I mean… you even walk like a guy.” After a beat, I simply say, “Because I am a guy.” I am like a guy. I am not a guy. But I tell her I am a guy. Then I tell her I have stopped using she/her pronouns. She nods her head but continues to call me “she” right through the time we break up, and for all I know, I am still “she” to her, will always be her “ex-girlfriend.”

Almost a year later, I am driving through Oakland with TT as we head out to dinner. I have just come from a therapy session in which I talked about how I wasn’t sure if I should keep on the testosterone, maybe up my dose and become a (passable) man or stay somewhere in the middle space I currently occupy—like a guy, not a guy. It’s not that I want to be more convincing; I just want to be me, but I am unsure what that means. I tell TT how these questions are weighing on my mind, my body. I say I worry if I become a man then I won’t become the man I think I am. What kind of man is inside me? I joke: will I be too “faggy,” not the burly lumberjack of a man I imagine myself to be? But I also like the affects and sensibilities I embody, those that cause people to do a double-take, to tell me that I’m part gay boy, a little bit of a fag. At the same time, I carry a fantasy image of myself as another kind of man, a man whose wrist never goes limp. What does it mean to be a man? Can I embody all these masculinities in one? TT will later thoughtfully mark this conversation by giving me a card decorated with a lumberjack dressed in high heels. But in this moment, she turns to me and says, matter of factly, without missing a beat, “What do you mean ‘become’? You are a man.” My eyes pool. I nearly cry. Not “like a man.” “You are a man.”

How did I go from being like a man to being a man? Is being a man inside of me? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? Why is it that TT sees me as a man where R could only see me as being like a man? The day before R and I break up, we are talking on the phone late into the night. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days. During that time, I went to my doctor to inquire about testosterone. My doctor wrote me a prescription and scheduled me for a return visit at the end of the week to learn how to administer the shot. I am terrified and excited, anxious and nervous, and eager to tell R about this. On the phone, I tell R that I am making a life-changing decision, but before I can say more, she cuts me off. “Look,” she says, “I don’t know if this is about trans stuff or what, but I’m trying to be really patient with you. You haven’t given me compliments, like I love how you improvise or I love how you take care of your dog. Something. Anything.” We hang up the phone, both in tears, she because I won’t compliment her at that time, me because she never asks to hear about my life-changing decision. I feel utterly alone in the journey I am about to embark upon. Later, S will remind me it is not that I am doing this alone, but that I am doing it without intimacy. Togetherness and intimacy still fade into each other. I need to remember that I am learning the difference.

It will take me months to make sense of that phone conversation with R. But the next day, R and I break up. The day after that, I go for my first shot of testosterone. Three months later, I meet TT. Several months after that, TT tells me that she never saw me as anything other than a man. Is this about trans stuff, or what? Surely, it cannot be the testosterone in my body that allows TT to see me as a man where R couldn’t. My dose is low. I have only told a handful of people that I am taking testosterone, and most people, especially those who don’t know, cannot see or hear any change in me. Everything seems out of sequence: I meet ES before I even start testosterone, and he says, “I just don’t get it. I don’t see how anyone can see you as anything other than a man.” But then, ten months on testosterone, I am sitting in a dive of a gay bar in Omaha with TC. The bartender is curious about us: “What brings you ladies to Omaha? You ladies gonna sing some karaoke tonight? Can I get you ladies another drink?” TC turns to me and asks, “Why does he keep saying ‘ladies’? Can’t he see that you’re obviously a guy?” No. No, he can’t. Most people can’t—except the stranger at the bookstore who called me “sir” and “man” for the entirety of our interaction (on T), or the cashier at the grocery store who called me “man” and “bro” for that entire exchange (pre T), or the man in front of me in line at the Space Needle in Seattle who turned to his wife and, gesturing toward me, said “Ha, did you hear what he just said?” (on T) or the woman who walked into a crowded women’s restroom at the San Francisco Opera, saw me before she saw anyone else and in a panic shouted, “Is this the women’s room?!?” (pre T). Maybe the question is not how did I go from being like a man to being a man; rather, I might ask, when, where, and to whom am I like a man or simply a man? And does testosterone have anything to do with it?

I visit a psychic who tells me that the testosterone is like medicine for my body. I think she is right about this, but calling it “medicine” comes with its own set of complications. In Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado demarcates when the drug, testosterone, shifts from being medicine to being a substance to be abused. Such a differentiation also defines the psychosis of the user: “I must choose between two psychoses: in one (gender identity disorder), testosterone appears as a medicine, and in the other (addiction), testosterone becomes the substance on which I am dependent.” Am I a self-medicating addict, or am I being medicated for a psychiatric disorder? When my doctor writes my prescription, I watch her update my medical chart: the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” I received years ago when I sought approval for top surgery now becomes a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria.” Whichever we call it, I am still diagnosed and medicated. Preciado is on the other side, with no prescription for the Testo Gel; he writes, “I would have liked to have fallen into a dependence, have the security of permanently and chemically clinging to something. Deep down, I was hoping that testosterone would be that substance. To be attached, not to a subjectivity, but to the change produced by the ingestion into my organism of a substance without will.” After my first shot of testosterone, my thigh is sore for days at the site where I plunged the needle into the muscle. Pushing my palm against that spot on my thigh becomes addictive. I become attached to the soreness. I begin to fantasize about administering my next injection, feeling the soreness again. I become attached to the point of pain that serves as the somatic reminder that this is where I am putting a substance into my organism that will someday, somehow change my body in ways I cannot know. The testosterone is both medicine and addictive substance; I am both a medicated subject of the pharmacopornographic era and an addict. But what, exactly, am I addicted to?

I read and reread McBee’s Man Alive. I make my students read it; I buy copies for my friends. I cannot quit the book. I am addicted to the tears it always brings—the quiet pools in my eyes that never quite spill over, the silent heaving of my chest. I cry in my silent way because McBee’s anxieties—of stopping at restrooms in small towns, of fearing the man he may become or the man he already is, of running both from and toward the traumas of his past as he continues to become who he always was—are too familiar. They rattle around my chest, pick up crushing weight in my sternum. As I read, I feel the inevitability of needles in the thigh, cracking vocal chords and deepening voice, a 5 o’clock shadow, another puberty on the horizon. I am frightened, but I also want it so badly, enough to wonder if it is the only way I will continue to survive here. I always thought I would start the injections when I finally felt ready to run—to run away from my life, to start over somewhere alone as someone new. But I haven’t run away. Instead, I run toward the past even as I am ever hurtling toward some unforeseeable future. And now, in this moment, I push my hand to my thigh, which has become accustomed to the weekly injections, and I long for the tenderness that no longer lingers after a shot.

***

While reading Mazza’s memoir Something Wrong With Her, I get stuck on one scene. I read and reread it. Mazza narrates a moment when, as teenagers, Mark pushed her onto a bed and got on top of her. She fled. Mark scolded her, “Girl, you just don’t give me enough, you don’t put out.” Her brain has stopped chanting, “You’re supposed to like this.” Instead, this is the moment she decides she is frigid. She writes, “It was the scolding that had penetrated me. I was marked.”

I am seventeen years old. I spend the evening drinking with friends. We are at the apartment of a boy I am dating. He is nineteen years old and just moved out of his parents’ house. Late into the night after many beers and whiskeys, he turns to me and says, “Just sleep over here. We can share my bed.” We go down to his bedroom and as we fall into bed, we begin kissing. I am on my back. He is on top of me. His hands are all over me, his tongue in my mouth. I pull away. “Let’s just sleep,” I say. “You’re such a tease,” he says, just before he pins my hands above my head with one hand gripping my small wrists. With the other hand, he guides his cock into my mouth. “Keep it in your mouth,” he growls. “Use your tongue,” he pants, as he thrusts in my mouth. He comes quickly, in less than a minute. I am gagging on his come, spitting it out of my mouth. “Just swallow it,” he snarls as he lets go of my wrists and lets me up. I go to the bathroom to wash the come from my mouth and hair. The next morning I go home and rinse my mouth over and over. I stand in the shower until my mother tells me to hurry up and get the hell out of the bathroom. Later that day, he calls me and says, “I really like you. I had a great time last night. You didn’t have to do that, you know, unless you wanted to.” I quietly tell a lie back into the phone, “I wanted to.” The next time I see him, he goes down on me and sticks his finger inside me. I feel pain at insertion, but otherwise I am numb. “Tell me when you’re done,” he says. “I’m done,” I say. “My turn,” he says. A year later, I move across the country and try my best to forget any of that ever happened. Sarah Manguso writes in Ongoingness, “Nothing’s gone, not really. Everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.” He penetrated me. I am marked. I will remain numb, and I will choose to be celibate for years. And I will learn that wounds, even the little ones, can always be reopened.

In an interview in The New Inquiry, M. Milks asks Mazza about her resistance to a narrative of trauma and victimization in telling her story. Mazza responds that to “cry victim” would make Mark one of the victimizers. “We weren’t rapist and victim,” she asserts. “We were two kids.” I think back to that night. We were two kids. I never thought of my 19-year-old boyfriend as a rapist; I still cannot call what he did rape. I never thought he was responsible for my numbness or my celibacy. I cannot really know if I was already numb when he touched me or if his touch made me go numb. I cannot really know if I chose celibacy because of that experience with him or for some other unconscious reason. These are not the questions I am asking, nor the answers I seek. I think of Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I think of Hanya Yanagihara: “Don’t we read fiction exactly to be upset?” I read and tell in order to be upset, in order to live. I gather the fragments that will never fit together to make a whole. I want the trauma to be poetry, but I cannot find the right timing, the right words, the right image. Like Ann Cvetkovich, I want to explore how “traumatic events refract outward to produce all kinds of affective responses and not just clinical symptoms.” I want to know if it is possible “to name a connection while refusing determination or causality.” I ask how this constellation of events makes me—makes me desire or not desire, makes me desirable or undesirable, makes me like a man or a man. A question, a refrain in McBee’s text hits me in the gut every time: What are you running to? With every step forward, I find myself turning back for answers. In Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz writes of the pain in her body, of rape, of her body’s battle with fibromyalgia. So much of the advice doled out to the chronically ill, the chronically pained, the traumatized is to “look forward, not backward. Focus on what you need to do to get better, not what caused your illness.” Berkowitz cannot look forward; she needs to know the “tangled chain of events that got [her] here.” “Looking back,” she writes, “is what I need to do to get better.” I keep looking back in order to find myself here.

“You have to let people love you,” McBee’s therapist says. R says, “Let me love you.” “I see you,” she says. But to her, I was her girlfriend who is like a guy. I tell her that all I’ve been asking for is for her to love me, to see me. I tell her that I am a guy. I tell her that I am not “she.” I tell my therapist that every time I try to confront R with my “bad” feelings, I feel bulldozed. My throat closes up, my heart pounds, my brain goes foggy. All I can do is say that I am sorry for having feelings; I am sorry for having needs. I tell my therapist that I feel like that scared little girl again. (Was I ever a girl? Was I ever a boy? Am I a girl? Am I a boy or am I like a boy? Am I still that frightened child?) My therapist reminds me that what I am feeling is not what everyone feels when they remember being a child. She tells me I am experiencing complex PTSD symptoms that are likely activated by R. She suggests that I talk to R about this, that I ask her to form a strategy with me, in which I can tell her I am experiencing these symptoms and she can hold space for me to breathe and gather my thoughts and feelings. R says “Yes, of course, of course.” But, moving forward, when I cannot speak, she will tell me I am acting like a “petulant child”; when I finally find my voice, she will tell me that I need to learn to say something sooner; when I tell her I feel alone in this relationship, she will tell me I have abandonment issues; when I tell her I am hurt by something she said or did, she will say “that is just the story you are creating,” and she will tell me I need to “get over it already.”

“Empathy is not just a shared emotion,” Kristin Dombek writes, “but [it is] an experience of the place, the perspective, from which the other’s emotions and actions come.” During one of those moments with R, I ask her to try to put herself in my shoes, to imagine how she would feel if I treated her exactly how she treated me. “That’s not helpful to me,” she says. “Empathy,” Leslie Jamison writes, “means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.” When R refuses my request for empathy, to make herself porous, I seize; I bleed from all the old wounds.

I remember one night holding TT in my arms as we talked about how we might best love each other, make space for each other’s pain. She says, “Sometimes the question we should ask is not ‘what’s wrong with you?’ but ‘what happened to you?’” In tracing the multiple ways we inherit trauma, Mark Wolynn explains, “During a traumatic incident, our thought process can become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything even remotely reminiscent of the original experience. Once they are triggered, it is as if an invisible rewind button has been pressed, causing us to reenact aspects of the original trauma in our day-to-day lives. Unconsciously, we could find ourselves reacting to certain people, events, or situations in old, familiar ways that echo the past.” In Healing from Hidden Abuse, Shannon Thomas suggests that survivors of abuse and trauma develop a biochemical dependency on toxic relationships. They become addicted to the highs and lows, the pushing and pulling. Do I find myself, yet again, an addict? Am I addicted to trauma and abuse? Do I actually crave this odd familiarity and comfort brought on by the echoes of my past?

Before I start seeing my therapist, I tell R that my dynamic with her reminds me of the dynamic I have with my father. I am infinitely awaiting his apology; I spent two years waiting for an apology from R, and I am still waiting. R snarls at me: “I am nothing like your father. I resent that you would even say that.” I tell her that I didn’t say she was like my father; I said we share a similar dynamic. But in that moment, she is more like my father than she even realizes. The psychic tells me that R is actually like my mother. She tells me that my father was just mean and aggressively abusive. My mother, she tells me, is a narcissist and is emotionally abusive, but with subtlety. I remember the last conversation I had with my mother. I tell her I cannot stay at her house when I am in town because of what she and her husband said to me the last time I was there. “Like what?” she asks. I say, “that homophobic and transphobic stuff you said.” “Well I don’t remember that,” she says. And we leave it at that. I remember one of the last conversations I had with R. I tell her that, about a month prior, I was hurt and felt demeaned by something she said to me in front of her friends. “I don’t remember that,” she says. “What do you want me to do about it now? You can’t bring stuff up a month after the fact.” We leave it at that. My therapist says R and my mother are wrong—if I am still having feelings about something, then I can bring them up, and just because they don’t remember it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The psychic says, “Thank Jay-sus you didn’t shack up with her and have babies. It’d be like raising kids with your mother.” The psychic is a little rough around the edges and a straight shooter. I nod. “Yes,” I say, “yes.”

“I see you,” R says. In the end, I don’t think R ever did see me, and I cannot be sure she ever even loved me. I realize that during the year I was with R, I couldn’t really see her. But the people who cared about me did. N said R is a narcissist, and she worries that I am stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship. E said that R seems incapable of loving me, and that I seemed much happier before I started dating her. DM said R is verbally abusive toward me, that a loving partner would never say the things she says, at least not without apology. M handed me a book by Sandy Hotchkiss: Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism. The book will later shake me to the core. Everyone else could name what I could not. Recognizing the abuse as abuse is something I will come to months later, but I will remain haunted by the possibility that I did actually see R, and she did actually love me to the best of her capabilities. I am stirred by Bombek’s interrogation of narcissism: “It is something you’ll come to months or years later, if at all: the possibility that the way [she] was with you was real, and that it was love… You might understand this in the middle of the next time you fall in love with someone else, and find yourself, still, in love with [her]. You’ve just spread your love out in time, and [she] has spread it out in space.” Sometimes, I still want to believe in R, just like a part of me still wants to believe in my father.

***

I go through a phase where I decide to write poetry in a more frantic voice. I only realize now that all the poems written in this voice happen to be the only poems I have written explicitly about abuse. (Is healing trauma like writing a poem?) I end up publishing those poems in a series. But I hold on to one:

How to Make Me Disappear

Step one: turn it
click doorknob jiggle jiggle.
He will yell—open
this door, missy, little lady, girl
you better now right this minute ’til
the count of ten
never never never
but you do

Step two: nails to the quick bite
if the screams try
to wriggle loose, inhale
lungsful throatchoke
tight tight tight

Step three: hold
it in. breath off. you do not
exist if he cannot hear you
whimper whisper wail wait
beltsnap lightsblack

Step four: rip
the beadeyes off all the dolls—
nobody sees a thing

In “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud writes of the phases of movement through the beating fantasy. In the third phase, the fantasy becomes, “My father is beating the child, he loves only me.” The child being beaten, Freud claims, is almost invariably a boy. I am being beaten. My father does not love me; he loves only me. The child being beaten is almost invariably a boy. I am the child being beaten. I am a boy. (Was I ever a boy? Was I ever a girl? When did I become a boy? Did I ever become a man? When did I become a man? Am I becoming a man? Am I a man?) Freud will say my ideas about being a boy are a product of my masculinity complex, that when girls turn away from their incestuous love of their father, they want only to be boys. I wanted my father to love me, but he only loved me as a girl. I am a boy, so my father beat me. My father beat me because I was a girl. My father beat me because I am a boy. Why did my father beat me?

Reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I return again and again to one scene. Jude, one of the main characters in the book, is just a young boy, living in a monastery where he experiences multiple types of abuse at the hands of the brothers and the Father. In this scene, Jude has just spilled some milk, and after cleaning it up, he has been commanded to go to his room. As he runs down the hall to his room, he notices that the door to his room is closed. It is usually left open unless one of the brothers or the Father is paying him a visit. He pauses in the hallway, unsure of what is waiting for him behind the door. But if he turns around, he will face the wrath of the brother who just sent him to his room for spilling the milk. Frozen in the hallway, young Jude must make a choice: return to certain punishment or take his chances opening the bedroom door. He finally works up the courage and opens the door with a slam, only to find nobody else in the room, just his furniture and a newly placed bouquet of daffodils. He falls to the floor, engulfed in sadness. As I read and reread this scene, the tension always builds. My breathing quickens. I feel the panic that fails to dissolve in the anticlimactic opening of the door.

I am nine years old. I am standing at the end of the hallway, and my father is coming toward me with his hand raised. I am paralyzed with fear until I make the snap decision to run into my bedroom. I jump into the bed and pull the covers over my head. My heart is pounding; I cannot breathe; all my muscles are tensed in anticipation of the crack of a palm on my backside. I wait and wait in my panicked state, but the beating never comes. I cautiously pull the covers from my head and sit in the quiet. My father has retreated to the living room where he is smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and watching television. I cannot know why he did not hit me that day. I have wondered if seeing my fear of him shook something deep inside him and he relented, or if he just didn’t feel it was worth the chase. I am haunted more by this silence and stillness than I am by the crack of a belt and the memories of red, stinging flesh.

I am standing in R’s hallway. I am collecting my things that she held onto after our breakup. She leaves them in a box outside her apartment door. Against my better judgment, I knock on her door. To my surprise, she opens the door. “What do you want?” she sneers. My heart is pounding, my throat is closing up. I am not sure what I want, really. Some short discussion follows, and by the end of it, I have backed away toward the building exit. She is coming at me down the hallway, her finger in the air, gesturing and shouting at me. I am growing small against the exit door. I am that shrinking, frozen little girl. (Am I a girl? To R, am I still “like a guy”? Am I a boy? Am I a man?) In a moment, I find the capacity to move my legs again, and I walk away, letting the door slam on her shrill words. This is the last time I see R. My last memory of her, of us, that I hold: her face twisted in anger, she is shouting and gesticulating, moving toward me as I shrink away like a frightened child. In this moment, she is more like my father than she even realizes. But, this time, instead of hunkering down in anticipation of the beating, I walk away from it.

Berkowitz writes, “I have a wolf in my story. But he will not interrupt my walk through the forest. Which is to say he’s already interrupted it: He’s the reason I’m here, sorting out the aftermath. Which is to say the wolf is eternally interrupting my walk through the forest: emerging from behind the same tree again and again to block my path. Imagine it repeating like a GIF.” Who is the wolf in my story? How did I get here? Which is the path I am walking? Is the wolf my father, the boy who pushed himself into my mouth, my mother, R, the diagnosis, the drug, the man I am like, the man I am, the PTSD symptoms themselves? They all repeat, like a GIF. They all either block my path or reroute me onto new paths. “But to solve this kind of mystery, it seems, you need to walk alone into a forest. You need to walk until you meet a wolf.”

If my therapist tells me my partner is activating my PTSD responses that come from the emotional abuse I experienced as a child, does that mean my partner is emotionally abusive? I cannot name it; I cannot say it because I imagine R’s teeth bared like a wolf; I hear R’s voice still echoing in my head: “Don’t you see that’s the story you created?!? Don’t you see that’s the story you choose to tell?!? Can’t you see that’s just your version; that’s not really what happened?!?” “Just get over it!!!” But her voice is not the only one that reverberates. The echoes of my past: “Come here right now, little missy”; “I don’t remember that”; “That didn’t happen”; “You’re such a tease.…” I cannot name it. I will remain in denial for months, for years, for what seems like a lifetime. Only now, as I write this, do I finally dare to name it: my relationship with R was emotionally abusive; I was sexually assaulted at the age of seventeen by my boyfriend; my parents are emotionally abusive; I developed a patterned response to abuse and became what Margalis Fjelstad calls a “pathological caretaker”; I have been numb, I have been celibate and asexual, but now I am not; I inject testosterone into my thigh every Friday, but I am not sure if I am a man or ever will be; I am unsure of how or if all these things connect. I am still walking through the forest; the wolves are still emerging from the trees.

***

I return to Cris, sitting on her basement floor, picking herself apart. After she tells Mark she is gonna go transgender, she dissects her body into pieces of meat and bone. “Every single part of me, there’s something wrong,” she says. She describes her thigh as a ham but not a very good one, her knee as a discolored, scabby circle. I know the drill. I have picked my body apart in so many ways: the breasts and the scars that mark where they used to be, the curves of my hips, the budding hairs on my chin, the muscles of my shoulders. Even the parts that are supposed to feel right still feel wrong. Maybe Cris and I aren’t really all that different. Maybe Cris is not actually trying to be convincing to anyone else. Maybe we are both trying to convince ourselves that we can be at home in our bodies, that we can heal our grief, that we can collect the fragments and let the little wounds scab over.

A piece of Bianca Stone’s “Elegy” from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows: “I realize grief wants me to stay a child, negotiating a stream of atoms, picking flowers. Grief wants me in good condition. Grief wants me to remember everything. Imperfect. Clear.” I am grieving for the child who never held the flowers; I am grieving for the child who was never in good condition; I am grieving for my inability to remember everything, imperfect and clear. Grief does not want me to stay a child. Grief wants me to learn how to be an adult, to mourn and heal the wounds. But how do I heal these little wounds, the ones I cannot simply “get over”? As Eli Clare writes, it is “harder to express how that break becomes healed, a bone once fractured, now whole, but different from the bone never broken. And harder still to follow the path between the two.” To reclaim the broken, stolen body is to walk the path between the wolves, between the wounding, the weapon, and the healing. Clare asks, “How do I mark this place where my body is no longer an empty house, desire whistling lonely through the cracks, but not yet a house fully lived in?” The timing still feels off, the words all wrong, but I am finding my desire; I am finding the language to fill the cracks: if I break myself open, will I be able to place the pieces anew, to rebuild the home of my body?

Bibliography

Anorgasmia: Faking It in a Sexualized World. Directed by Frank Vitale, performances by Cris Mazza and Mark Rasmussen, 2015.

Berkowitz, Amy. Tender Points. Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015.

Bottoms, Stephen. “Diane Torr Obituary.” The Guardian, 29 June 2017.

Cerankowski, K.J. “From go-go dancer to drag king: Living gender through performance.” Gender News, 6 Aug. 2012.

Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. South End Press, 1999.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2003.

Didion, Joan. The White Album. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Dombek, Kristin. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Fjelstad, Margalis. Stop Caretaking the Borderline of Narcissist: How to End the Drama and Get On with Life. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Freud, Sigmund. “A Child is Being Beaten.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, 1920, pp. 371–395.

Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Manguso, Sarah. 300 Arguments. Graywolf Press, 2017.

—. Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Graywolf Press, 2015.

Mazza, Cris. Something Wrong With Her: a real-time memoir. Jaded Ibis Press, 2013.

McBee, Thomas Page. Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man. City Lights Books, 2014.

Preciado, Paul Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press, 2013.

Stone, Bianca. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. Octopus Books/Tin House Books, 2014.

Thomas, Shannon. Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse. MAST Publishing House, 2016.

Wolynn, Mark. It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Penguin Books, 2016.

Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. Doubleday, 2015.

—. “Point of View: Don’t we read fiction exactly to be upset?” The Guardian, 4 March 2016.

KJ Cerankowski is an assistant professor of comparative American studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin College. KJ co-edited the book Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014) and has published poetry and criticism in Short, Fast, & Deadly; Feminist Studies; and WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly). KJ is currently completing a book that is most definitely about trans stuff in relation to trauma, pain, and pleasure.

M. Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (Emergency Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist; as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Feels (Black Warrior Review 42.2, 2016), an exploration of fan fiction and affect. They are editor of The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011–2013 and co-editor, with KJ Cerankowski, of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014).

Yet This Is Your Harmless Fairy, Monster: A Summer Seminar

Nonfiction / Lesley Jenike

:: Yet This Is Your Harmless Fairy, Monster: A Summer Seminar ::

“Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better.…” –Angela Carter

A student tells me she fell asleep last night reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. In her dream a bomb drops and leaves a room full of broken bodies.

It’s dark in the room and she can’t see, but by muscle memory she knows where to step to avoid the bodies, how to walk around them gingerly, as if stabbed by knives.

Or maybe I’m confusing “Blue Beard” with “The Little Mermaid,” she says.

In her essay “The Better to Eat You With,” Angela Carter counters Hans Christian Andersen (that “tortured dement,” as she calls him) against the reasonable intellect of Charles Perrault, a man of his age as much as Andersen was a man of his. For Carter, Perrault seems to neutralize his fairy tales’ sex and violence with an ironic shrug. She writes, “The primitive terror a young girl feels when she sees Bluebeard is soon soothed when he takes her out and shows her a good time, parties, trips to the country and so on. But marriage itself is no party. Better learn that right away.”

If Andersen’s hectic, Romantic version of Christianity leads to his heroines’ ecstatic suffering, then Perrault’s Enlightenment-era characters take a more practical tact toward worldly knowledge. His advice at the end of his stories (i.e., “Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret…”) is practical, even charming. There’s nothing practical about Andersen.

It’s summer and campus is quiet. There are only seven of us together for four hours, three times a week. The Fairy Tale Breakfast Club, one student calls us. I tell them, We’re learning together. It’s best, I find, to make reading and writing a collaborative effort; it draws them in.

So we sit together under fluorescence and read, in tandem, original tales—as original as they can be in light of time, edits, omissions, translations. I can feel our simultaneous shock and delight. It’s tangible—like revelation by experience, the revelator.

We’ve all known keys and apples and knives. Who hasn’t while cutting up an apple looked down at her knife in wonder? And the boy who mugged me in Franklin Park, he took my iPod—Fine, I said, but please give me back my key. It was a single white key I carried on a band around my bicep. If he had kept it, would he have tried every door in the universe? He gave me a look of disgust, ripped the key off the band, and threw it back at me before running off.

And what about mothers—all those missing mothers, dead mothers, stepmothers? At the very least, who hasn’t dialed his mother’s number and waited nervously for her to pick up?

One… two… three.

There’s a concentrated look on my student’s face as she recounts the dream in which she’s forced to walk back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the room to the other, past and around all those dead bodies. Who or what is commanding her to do so, she doesn’t know.

Outside the room is Aleppo or Boston or Manchester or the Arendale of Disney’s Frozen—shattered from the torque of explosives, from firefight and crucible. Every building is now a skull. Every skull has a crack where the brain’s been sucked out.

In her version of the tale, Bluebeard plots his wives’ deaths from a distance—maybe in a castle or cafe, mansion or split-level. Cities are his wives, and his wives are his wives, and children—not even his own—are his wives, and young soldiers, journalists, doctors are his wives. Guys who run falafel shops, who hock clams and mussels at fish markets, women who write poems on the backs of their hands are his wives. Bicyclists and passersby and girls out shopping or dancing to Ariana Grande, drinking tea or plotting the rise of girls are his wives. Stray dogs, old horses, drooling mules are his wives. Lovers of brooches and caterpillars and bougainvillea; haters of brooches and caterpillars and bougainvillea: his wives. So too a little boy with a lazy eye and a cat with three legs giving birth in a fishing boat. So too a baby in striped pajamas pulled dead from beneath a mound of concrete. The world is his wife and we are all his wives.

In high school I had a choker—a black ribbon tied tight around my neck with a filigreed key hanging from it. I wore every day. I couldn’t say what drew me to it. My boyfriend would joke that it was “the key to your heart and can I have it?,” which coagulated my distaste for clichés and the people who used them. I think what he really meant was—you refuse to have sex with me. I was just fifteen.

I liked fairy tales when I was fifteen.

When she turned fifteen, the Little Mermaid was allowed to rise to the surface.

Sometimes girls swerve near fairy tales, then—discovering how unserious they are, how unworthy—swerve away again. Feminist retellings are so second-wave. Better to leave them to the nursery and go after bigger fish. Yes, sex. Yes, violence. So what?

Yet, in Angela Carter’s “Bluebeard” retelling, “The Bloody Chamber,” Bluebeard’s final wife is gifted a red choker with inlaid rubies—meant to represent an historical connection to the French Revolution.

Little girls love to open boxes, to fit keys into locks, to watch unboxings on Youtube, to unwrap gifts, to slowly lift a lid and then—

When I asked my daughter what she wants for her third birthday, she said, “A pink present! A purple present!” “But,” I asked her, “What do you want inside the present?” She just looked at me, mystified.

Imagine a housewife finds her husband’s little gold key knocking around the clothes dryer like a hurt bird. She plucks it out and holds it up for close inspection, cocks her head as if to say, Hmm. What door, drawer, safe, box, head, heart, cunt, dick, hurt, mouth, fear does this key fit? What little toy truck, little wind-up cancer monkey, little liquor cabinet, little bureau of pain?

Louis the XVI was a collector of keys and fascinated by the mechanics of locks, but he didn’t understand—for the longest time—how the act of unlocking a door is somewhat like the act of love. As a result, his wife went childless for an excruciatingly long time. The result may or may not have been Antoinette’s longing for a baby, but was most certainly her political vulnerability. The former is irrelevant in light of the latter.

My husband likes to tell me about what he’s been reading. Lately he’s been working his way through a history of music in the twentieth century titled The Rest is Noise, and he’s gotten himself stuck on a description of a German opera based on the Biblical siren Salome. “In this one particular production,” he tells me, “Salome practically fucks John the Baptist’s decapitated head on-stage.”

The last image in that recent French film-version of “Bluebeard” is of the final bride—obviously no more than twelve or thirteen—posing as if in a Renaissance painting as she strokes—gently, gently—Bluebeard’s lopped-off head neatly placed on the center of a gold platter. She seems Madonna-like, looking a bit askance—just off-camera as if at something very sad—her head tilted a bit, ever so slightly, to the side.

The final scene is overly long, uncomfortably so. While we wait for the inevitable fade-to-black, our eyes roam over her little girl’s body, her odd face, her hand stroking, stroking Bluebeard’s bluish beard absently, as if it were cat’s fur. I can sense my students’ discomfort. Some laugh.

Afterward I ask them about Salome. Has anyone heard of Salome?

No.

There’s some significant connection here, I tell them, something about political/religious/artistic extremists and the women who love/hate them—but I can’t quite get my head around it.

In that recent film adaptation of Perrault’s “Blue Beard,” twinned narratives conflate at the moment the magic key enters the lock. Instead of the fairy tale wife, we watch a little girl from something like our own time enter the forbidden chamber. I will not be scared. I will not be scared, she whispers to herself.

She steps barefoot into a pool of blood and walks among the hanging bodies of Bluebeard’s dead wives, past and around all those hanging bodies, slipping here and there on that pool of blood as if it were an ice rink. My students laugh uncomfortably. After the film is over, I ask them,

“Why do you think the filmmaker chose to have the little girl telling the story in the present walk into the room and not the wife?”

Because:

1. A little girl, eight years old, is dead of a bomb in Manchester, England.
2. A fifteen-year-old who on Facebook is wreathed by illustrated flowers was also killed in Manchester, and her mother doesn’t know her password, so she continues, like Snow White in her glass coffin, an eternal sleep on the Internet.
3. We are always telling this story. We are constantly and in perpetuity telling this story.

That Bluebeard is God is an easy answer, I tell my students, but an apt one. In this scenario, the wife’s curiosity opens a door onto impermanence, a world in which Bluebeard is a landscape artist, in situ—a frowsy old man crouching in an English field, arranging in spirals his twigs and stones and water and frond.

The whole point is eventual obliteration, wind and weather, the drama of an English sky and, by extension, a breakable planet like a woman’s face at thirty, forty, fifty, the lines around her eyes intensifying until gulch, arroyo, well, worry, then—well—a whole city under the sea.

Maybe Bluebeard’s chamber of horrors is just an artist’s small-scale rendering, a kind of sketch before he stalks out into the field and begins the real thing.

Earlier in the film, Bluebeard smiles fondly at his child-bride. “You’re a strange little person,” he tells her. “Why?” she asks. “Because you have the innocence of a dove but the pride of a hawk,” he tells her.

This is suitable fairy tale dialogue—riddling and rife with easy symbology. The dove is innocent. The hawk is prideful. Many girls, including my daughter, manage the combination until experience and age catch up with them, at which point they make a choice—the dove or the hawk—and neither is without disadvantages.

My daughter just this morning, I tell my students, looked out her bedroom window onto the roof where a young mourning dove was hunched, waiting out the rain. “C’mon,” I said to her. “It’s time to get ready for school” (she calls daycare school). “Birds don’t go to school,” she said. “They go to bird school.” “Can I go?” she asked. “No,” I told her. “You’re not a bird.”

Who was the audience for Charles Perrault’s stories? And who was Hans Christian Andersen’s? One imagines Perrault among the glitterati of Parisian salons—many hosted by women. There was a naughtiness, you know, about the salon. It was a safe place for women to intellectualize, philosophize, socialize, flirt. In the salon’s milieu a fairy tale acquires layers of meaning—from tongue-in-cheek advice to young wives, to political commentary, and finally to children’s entertainment.

Now imagine Andersen in the confessional or on an analyst’s couch. “There’s this mermaid, you see. And she longs for an immortal soul…”

In “The Snow Queen,” a little robber girl threatens to kill the child heroine Gerda with a knife. She sleeps with her knife and keeps a cote of doves and even a reindeer prisoner. “These all belong to me,” she says.

She takes Gerda into her bed along with the knife, as if Gerda is a baby doll or a lover, and Gerda spends the night wondering if she’ll live or die.

Eventually the Little Robber Girl decides to help Gerda though her motives—like those of many fairy tale types—go unexplored. All we know is that her will is fierce and she’s in possession of it.

What kind of little girl is this?

For Gerda’s journey to the Snow Queen’s domain, the Little Robber Girl gifts her her reindeer, bread and ham, muff and mittens; then when Gerda slips the mittens on, the Little Robber Girl says, “There, now your hands look just like my mother’s.”

But the Little Robber Girl’s mother is a full-grown thief, bearded, and mean.

I tell my students, on the car ride to daycare, my daughter pointed to all the lilies she saw in their beds outside the grocery store and said, “Those flowers are mine! Everything is mine!” A little later, I say, I posted a recount of the episode to social media and the comments include something like, “What a beautiful little tyrant! ☺”

Is Bluebeard the baby or the birth?

More women make it out of childbirth alive than in Charles Perrault’s time, Hans Christian Anderson’s, or perhaps even Angela Carter’s, and more babies are surviving too. So why does our country rank highest in maternal and infant mortality rates among other wealthy, developed nations? This was the subject of an NPR story I stumbled across driving home from the art school where I ramble on at students about the meanings of fairy tales.

I manage to listen to the entire broadcast and still come away without any definitive answers. Something something health care. Something something education.

My mind wanders backward to my children’s births when I vaguely remember my mind wandering (during labor with my first, the knife with my second), back even further to an embryonic fear—perhaps carried in my genes—that I wouldn’t survive this. I was older after all, as all the paperwork and monitors and placards reminded me—Geriatric Maternity. Advanced Age. I’d been quietly relegated to “high-risk” outpatient clinics for many of my check-ups, ultrasounds, and, most worryingly, my genetic counseling, which felt like a job interview or, even worse, an explanation of why I did so poorly on my standardized test.

The counselor herself spoke slowly and softly as she gathered my information—who died and of what? Who is related to whom? How many live births? How many stillbirths? How many miscarriages? “Most people,” she said to me, “are a lot more nervous than you seem to be.” So of course I wondered if I should be more nervous. Maybe I wasn’t expressing the correct amount of nervousness.

I could die. The baby could die. Now or later, or later later. The baby could be malformed, underdeveloped, and maybe I’m evil for even thinking these thoughts, for thinking the words malformed, underdeveloped. My uterus could surrender its mission and just bail on the whole thing. My placenta could thin and snap. There might be unmitigated bleeding, preeclampsia, diabetes, postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis. My womb is a bloody chamber. The question is: who’s got the key?

Angela Carter, in her review of psychologist Eric Rhode’s book On Birth and Madness, writes, “Language crumbles under the weight of this pain. Mystification of this pain is a lie.” She seems intrigued by the writing but ultimately frustrated by his outsider’s expertise on something he’ll never experience. Should we hate Rhode for his lack of sensual knowledge?

Never mind the political ramifications of a word like madness, if I were to unpack Carter’s statement, my whole house—three little bedrooms, one full-bath and one-half, a semi-dry basement, two living rooms, a galley kitchen—would fill to capacity with underdeveloped notions about mystery and language and pain. I wouldn’t begin to know how to organize them, how to box and label them, then how to kneel before those boxes (were I to manage) at some small hour many years in the future and take those notions out—one by one—and, filled with nostalgia and longing, turn them over and over again in my hands. What I mean to say is this: I cannot say.

Still, death in childbirth may be the secret to so many fairy tales’ missing mothers, but, according to writer Marina Warner, there may be an even more insidious reason: a mother’s complete eradication by irrelevance. (She’s become so good at being silent, her silence consumes her. Her culture erases her. Her own son sets fire to her still-living body.)

And pain in childbirth may be the secret to so many transformations. I don’t mean simply the pain of labor itself, but the aftershocks—emotional, physical, what Rhode refers to in his titillating title as madness. Maybe our fate is simply to become sea foam. Pain drives the tides. Pain churns the foam.

A teacher I knew long ago who gave birth to her stillborn daughter soon thereafter became rain and ran away.

A musician who lost his teenage son over a cliff became the ocean and was sucked back into the clouds. He kept playing.

A mother’s absence may have to do with a teller’s desire to promote an image of motherhood that’s discreet and genteel to the point of obliteration—a sort of kindly shadow that would never dream of abandoning her children to the forest or tearing out and eating her daughter’s heart.

My own mother’s mother is just such a mother—I mean the absent kind, not the heart-eating kind. Or, she very well may have been a heart-eater, but time and forgetfulness has smoothed away any jagged peculiarities she may have had.

She hated my mother’s white Keds. I know that much. I know she wanted my mother to wear saddle shoes, so my mother would hide her Keds under a bush, and when she left for school in her saddle shoes, she’d duck behind the house and switch them out for her Keds.

I know my grandmother loved martinis and made clothes for my mother and sister. I know she made the little blue wool zip-up sweater in my baby son’s dresser.

I know she bleached her hair because in the one photo I’ve seen of her as girl her hair is dark. I know like so many fairy tale heroines, her own mother disappeared too—an absence inside an absence.

Eric Rhode: “Myths concerning some lost key to understanding are widespread.”

Changes in family dynamics too are the stuff of fairy tales.

When my grandmother came home one day to find her mother gone (by way of madness or literal absence), perhaps she, in that moment, became someone else’s daughter altogether.

“Consider Goldilocks,” says Rhode. “She breaks into a house belonging to a family of bears, or so she wishes to think. She is estranged from members of her family (because her mother has given birth to a little baby, the youngest bear; now she thinks her family belongs to a different species). She is a stranger in her own home.… Nothing fits. Much gets broken.”

When my own mother and father divorced, my father promptly moved out. But there was a brief interim when he was still around (sort of), when I tried to open the old brown leather briefcase he left laying around—locked by a combination of numbers unknown to me. I remember thinking all the secrets to my family’s failure were there if I could just open it up and see.

Then, after a time my mom invited her boyfriend to come live with us. I was a teenager. His blundering around the places and things I associated with my father enraged me. Like a demented Goldilocks, I rampaged my way through the house, hiding or destroying the boyfriend’s clothes, spraying his shaving cream all over his pillow, shoving ice cubes into the toes of his shoes, mocking him every chance I got—to his face and behind his back. The terror I inflicted on him was merciless, then one day I remember he just broke down and cried.

Eric Rhode says, “A loving family brings up a child who has no reason for complaint. And yet the child feels itself to be an orphan. Fairy tales reflect its predicament. A prince wakes up one morning and discovers he has become the son of a swineherd. A shepherd’s daughter awakes to learn she is a princess.”

“Nothing fits. Much gets broken.”

What did my grandmother die of? I still don’t know. I could find out and sometimes I believe I intend to, but I also believe I enjoy the mystery. In my mind I can imagine it was neglect. Childbirth. A murderous husband. Wolves. Cancer.

My great-grandmother was a Swede who’d settled in Boston. She was an alcoholic, my mom tells me. And—I don’t know. She was put in an insane asylum or just ran away one day—ran away from her kids and her husband. I’m not sure.

Did you know, I tell my students, a scientist named de Saussure in the eighteenth century thought he could measure the blueness of the sky?

What if we could assess precisely when night ends and when blue’s voice takes on the tremolo of twilight so that before we turn the key we might determine how blue calculates against joy?

I’m suspicious of the idea that color is eternal (the idea sounds too much like religion to me), but if the central argument re: color is whether or not color exists physically in the world, then how could I not equate color with faith?

In Perrault’s story, Bluebeard’s final wife, in trying to make the best of her situation, begins “to think that the man’s beard was not so very blue after all.”

Bluebeard could be the first person you slept with. He could be the death drive, a killing desire, the blue under an eye you want to kiss because it suggests mortality and invokes, therefore, tenderness.

Or Bluebeard could be a baby. Here’s why:

The manual on breastfeeding says you can’t really know how much milk your baby is getting except by weight gain and how many wet diapers and how many dirty. There are some latches—it’s worth noting—that just won’t work. Like a key in a lock.

There are bodies in this version too, of course. And they’re my old selves.

In this version of the story, once in that secret room I feel my way toward a window and, looking through it, can see all the way back to—

I ignore the bodies and look out the window

and from the window I see

a cloud like the spine of a book on a shelf in the sky :
What happens is this: the

I’m in a dark hallway feeling the walls
for a door, a way in. A beginning.

Ok. Good.

Just insert the key, turn, then

push the handle with both hands and—

Cloud like the spine
          of a book on
                    a shelf in
                              the sky

to run
          my hand along :
Blue is the color of his nursery.

Hans Christian Andersen stumbled under the weight of his neuroses—hash marks in his diary to keep track of his masturbatory sessions, obsessions with women he couldn’t possibly consummate, obsessions with men he couldn’t possibly consummate,a love of travel but a shattering fear of germs, an abiding loneliness he tried to squelch with public adoration, then a supreme distrust of public adoration. Who could love the son of a cobbler?

I had an Andersen collection as a girl—a handsomely illustrated, hardcover collection I managed to keep through my parents’ divorce, my mom’s two subsequent remarriages, so many moves, and even a long-term loan to my niece who is now nearly eighteen and headed to college.

But because I have children of my own, the book came back to me.

A live bomb, it ticks away on the shelf.

My name is written in the front cover. I put it there when I was maybe eight, maybe ten. The name seems to emerge from the blue endsheet and alone, without a middle name or a last name, it floats there, embryonic.

I read aloud to my daughter from “The Snow Queen” when she was an infant and was stunned all over again by the story’s eccentricity, how it seems to be a jumble of stories all with their own potentiality forced into subservience. The master narrative—a loving girl (Gerda) questing to free her friend (Kay) from the icy clutches of superficiality—subsumes along the way more interesting digressions, like the willful, violent Little Robber Girl or the flowers who have their own stories, all of which seem to refuse the larger story’s chief aim—that is, to return the world to normalcy. Take, for example, the tigerlily’s tale. It goes like this:

In her long red robe stands the Hindoo [sic] widow by the funeral pile. The flames rise around her as she places herself on the dead body of her husband; but the Hindoo [sic] woman is thinking of the living one in that circle; of him, her son, who lighted those flames. Those shining eyes trouble her heart more painfully than the flames which will soon consume her body to ashes. Can the fire of the heart be extinguished in the flames of the funeral pile?
“I don’t understand that at all,” said little Gerda.
“That is my story,” said the tiger-lily.

We’re back to Bluebeard as fanatic, I say.

Will our sons grow up to testify against us, as Audre Lord suggests, or do I “fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street?”

Is it an either/or proposition?

I always thought fairy tales were just for the despondent, privileged white woman.

Now I wonder, do we accuse the son who touches his torch to the pyre or the scheme that says the fire must be set in the first place?

These are questions, Friends, I can’t answer.

Instead, let me tell you about my mother’s house:

I go about my dreams there with new purpose.

Good night, Everybody, my daughter said before I put her down in her foldout crib.

It was the first night I spent with her in my mother’s guest room with its portrait of my long-dead grandmother above the bed.

(In the painting my grandmother wears an orange sheath dress, gold hoop earrings, and a modified beehive made of frosted hair. I’ve often tried to see myself in her, but I don’t.)

Deep in the blue gutter of night, my daughter woke up in my mother’s house and pointed to the portrait of my grandmother. I panicked a little, wondering if they’d been discussing in ur-language all the feelings words feel, tugged as they are out of abstraction as she surely was—from absence into presence. Go back to sleep, I told her.

Then morning came, sun first on the older part of the house where we sleep. She woke this time for good, stood up in her foldout crib, and pointed again at that portrait. She said to it, Night, Night, but she didn’t get it wrong exactly, not if you consider darkness is in all directions, simultaneous to now.

We’re watching Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, and after the final scene in which church bells—missing from Bess the heroine’s hometown steeple—peal out in Heaven for her sacrifice, I catch one of my students wiping away tears. I need a cigarette, she says. I’m sorry, I say. Did I break you?

When the Little Mermaid narrowly escapes her destiny as sea-foam, it’s thanks to a loophole in that fundamentalist dogma that says immortal souls are only for humans and there’s something wrong with becoming sea-foam in the first place.

Do girls killed for obscenity rise with the Daughters of the Air?

“I don’t see why Bluebeard has to be a person,” a student writes in her essay. “Maybe Bluebeard is an ideology.”

Yes!

What a cruel man Danish director Lars von Trier must be, how sadistic to make us watch a woman destroy herself in the name of something we can’t see.

But, to be fair, could we be friends with someone like Bess, a student asks. Could we actually put up with someone so ideologically pure, a believer so exasperating we watch her through our fingers and moan? And how can we love a little mermaid who would willingly give up her voice in exchange for eternal life—just when we’ve begun to believe we’re entitled to our voices in the first place? And just when we’ve started to think eternal life is a sham?

Sometimes I feel I’m forcing you into a philosophical bind I may never see my way clear of—not as long as I live.

The flowers in “The Snow Queen’s” Third Story refuse to (or simply can’t) tell Gerda where Kay is, but instead “dream only of [their] own little fairy tale of history.”

Dream. Fairy tale. History.

Name some similarities and then some differences between these three things:

(“All these are mine!” my daughter said, raking her hand across the garden.)

Story One. Little Death Eater

During the primary season, what kings themselves called the First Kingdom, loyal man-servants and the best whores were buried beside their czars. Shipwrights made twenty special. So many wives, hairdressers, droppers of petals, but lionesses strangest of all, their roiling throats and vertical pupils aping in shape a woman rising from her horizontal landscape. The king’s many wives ate away at his autonomy. Children ate at his thoughts. Chefs fed him ample food to eat his thinness. Lovers ate at his fat.

Why another kind of man-eater to eat at his spirit?

There once was a wife who so despised her king, to bang his name into the stone of her face, she took poison of her own accord just to spite him and like a lioness ever after belonged to no one but the ghosts of her kill.

Story Two. Little Sore Eyes

Many hundreds of years ago on the Sabbath of someone else’s week, a religion for little girls was born, first among brats and scullery maids who slept with their backs to the fire, whose altars were pig ossuaries, who wept in the smoke it takes to cure, then spread among ladies-in-waiting, whose eyes ached from scutwork, whose threads were licked thin enough to fit, whose rituals went: stare hard at a ceiling. Let the seams between planes expand, so what bore up your life’s establishment—cherry beams, cobwebs shred to the shape of a man sleeping—thunders to your bedroom floor.

The rubble will spell out your future. On your knees you grope for it. You feel the letters, the feeling a type of knowing, like a fist screwed deep in an eye-socket until you get stars and oh yes now the universe opens its door.

There’s a famous anecdote about Emily Dickinson that goes like this:

Aunt Emily reached into her housedress pocket and pulled out—an imaginary key! She opened her palm to show me, her niece. She said, “One quick turn—and it’s freedom, Matty!”

Story Three. Bluebeard as Composer

Wasn’t it Tolstoy who wrote something like, bourgeois love will be the last delusion? No. I say the piano is. It sits petulant and desirous of touch in the sitting room, stick and bone and pearl for a corpus, mother of pearl for fingers, metal pedal for a foot. It talks in puzzles should you know the score, built on glyphs and strikes on grids. Take the time to learn it and time bleeds. I don’t have it. But I like to think Rachmaninoff is thundering away at a keyboard somewhere in Hell. Think of me as God. I gather up the piano in my arms and rock it to sleep before shooting it. Any future instrument is just grist, hype, and hizzle for sirens whose music turns the ocean back on them. Sure, I can play the ordinary thing, but I do it under a nom de plume, the way you can dance by sitting very very still.

Story Four. Bluebeard’s Final Wife as Acolyte

I’m standing in your doorway. Your studio is white and clean but for postcard-sized drawings you’ve pasted to its walls, their abstracted facsimiles of artic scenes, and your to-do list in narrative imperative, hanging like a portrait above your computer screen:

1. the secret to this mode of critical
2. thinking isn’t the secret
3. which we’re also
4. haunted by, but by the
5.
6.

I’m sorry to have missed you. Your work is strange. Whether you’ve left any trace of yourself—a pen dripping blood on your pad’s glacial monolith—well, let’s just say I’d kiss you if you were here (and it would feel like sucking ice).

Story Five. Bluebeard’s First Wife as Miscarriage

Oh how did this all get started? I think it must be: blood on my bleached driftwood stoop, on a potted rosemary, in my orchard a grapefruit tree.

I rely on a tremulous class of growing things, and when they don’t grow, don’t worry; there are whole libraries dedicated to futility.

Story Six. Bluebeard’s Second Wife as Fairy Tale

Children, the sky’s rumpled sheets of stars shine tonight as they did years ago when clouds bullied the moon with their fists and high winds ruffled the scree, when weirder still a dove purred, a dove purred as night fell, its breast yielding.

In such wild times as these, my mind turns to poor Donkeyskin, her eye glittering. She lived in a trailer in a hollow at the head of a road that bursts the heart of the wood then ends where our county stops. She kept a bird in a glued-together cage, a single unmated dove as blue as that dress of hers the color the sky she had made to keep her own father from knowing her. And it’s years since anyone has. Woods seemed to wolf down her little life, keeping it like a light in its dark gut, a candle of sheep fat and old age, and there she sat. I hear tell her dove fell in love with a mouse that crept into its cage, and seemed to shelter it under its wing. God, we need to love something. (Moral One)

Among the many things in life to learn, be sure you learn how to play and sing
so when the time comes, you can play and you can sing. (Moral Two)

Story Seven. Bluebeard’s Second-to-last Wife, Dreaming a Dream

In the story I’ve only partly read, the setting is a calendar house with 365 rooms and twelve staircases. I’m in the azure room, number 243, and I impose a narrative onto a wren clattering onto the hearth. It drowns in its own blood. The end.

When he decided to detonate himself, did he count as one might count before a field day sack race, a dive off the block into a pool, as a way to get in sync with a grade school friend before the secret chant—you know—Miss Mary Mack this and that and hands clapping and strange eye contact? 1… 2… 3.

Or maybe it was at inhalation—this was just the right breath to end on.

Maybe he called his mother beforehand to ask for her forgiveness but couldn’t get through.

Fairy tales, I tell my students, are perpetual.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Most summers I teach an extra class at my college because it’s fun and I could use a little extra money. This year it was decided I would teach a section of Critical Readings in Fairy Tales. Because it’s a popular course, we (and I mean the administration and I) believed the class would get enough enrollment to run, and sure enough, it did. Though I’d never taught it before, I felt pretty good about having a month between spring semester’s end and the summer classes’ start to get myself up to speed on the reading and research I needed to do, but my college changed the dates on me suddenly and without notice, so I had to scramble to get my syllabus ready immediately after I turned in my spring semester grades. All of this is to say, I came to this class feeling weirdly unprepared.

As it turned out, I ended up with six students after a few dropped away, so in many ways it did feel an awful lot like study hall, or the Breakfast Club—only with odd, delightfully smart conversations.

I admitted to my students that I was coming to the material fresh and that I was hoping it would yield something to me, or for me—creatively. I also admitted that I’d been reluctant to venture into fairy tales since I was in my twenties. Retellings and adaptations felt stale—like some kind of static reminder of an old-fashioned, white-centric feminism I’m trying to wrestle my way away from.

But lately—thanks mostly to my toddler daughter—I’ve been forced to look at fairy tales again and in them I find new opportunities, new questions, new connections. In particular I’ve begun to read Angela Carter with fresh eyes and I see her as a brilliant intellect, a cultural critic of the highest order, and a writer who worked miracles with old material—breathing life back into them in unimaginable ways.

So this essay is a love letter to her and to my students who helped me see these old stories in new contexts—some of which are difficult and painful. One student in particular led me there with her dream of Bluebeard, and the rest seemed to fall into place.

Lesley Jenike’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Rattle, Verse, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, and many other journals. She has received awards from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her most recent collection is a chapbook titled Punctum:, winner of the 2016 Kent State Wick Chapbook Prize. She teaches literature and creative writing at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio.

Men in Pools

Nonfiction / Jo-Anne Berelowitz

:: Men in Pools ::

I was going to sneak the photo out of my mother’s album, but when I saw her watching me, I photographed it with my iPhone and replaced it under the clear plastic sheet. I tried to align it on the page, but the gluey bond had long ago worn off so it lay there, unmoored, cattywampus. When I returned home an hour later, I printed a black and white copy on my laser printer. I’m not sure why I keep looking at it, but I can’t put it down or turn my eyes away.

The photo shows my father alone at the shallow end of the pool at the house on Inness Road, the last house we occupied as a family before we shook the dust of South Africa off our feet and scattered. Only my father’s head and upper torso are visible. His arms below the elbows are submerged—probably crossed, judging by the waist-high ripple in front of his chest.

I’m guessing my then-fourteen-year-old brother, Roy, shot the image with his new wide-angle lens, a recent gift from my parents. Lying on his belly at the far (bougainvillea) side of the pool for a worm’s eye view, Roy filled the lower half of the frame with water, clicked, and froze the moment.

It was, (again, I’m guessing), an unremarkable moment for my father and brother, another ordinary sunny carefree day in my subtropical hometown, Durban, on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. Certainly Roy possessed only rudimentary skills with a camera, yet it seems to me that he captured something important, something there in the photo that I’m struggling to grasp but don’t yet have. Surely if I look deeply enough, I’ll understand?

What had made me want the image, want it so badly that I’d considered stealing it, was not the emotional charge I feel now at my desk in San Diego, peering through the image’s grey-scaled fuzziness, as though by intensifying my focus I might better penetrate the surface and enter a moment frozen forty years ago. No, something more cerebral, something less personal had gripped me. Or so it had seemed when, mildly bored, I had flipped through my mother’s album and come upon the photograph.

As an art historian who has taught Pop art more semesters than I care to count, I was struck by the photo’s compositional similarity to David Hockney’s 1966 Portrait of Nick Wilder. I’ve always felt a kinship with that painting—perhaps because, like Hockney, I came to California when I was twenty-seven and felt at once its chimerical allure, its differentness from everything I’d ever known.

Both photo and painting show a man within the curvilinear embrace of the far end of a pool, with only his head and upper torso visible, his house behind him. And in both the water flows our way.

I searched online for Hockney’s painting, printed a copy, and placed it beside the image of my father, their congruities more evident in black and white. The dimensions were as like to one another as I could get them: the photograph, 3” x 2,” the painting 2 ½” x 2 ½.” I glued them side by side on a sheet of paper and stared at them, willing them to speak to one another and to me, and to surrender the mystery of their doubleness. A long-forgotten snapshot by a boy beside a canonical monument of Modernism by an art-world genius.

Beneath their superficial similarities the moods are different. In Hockney’s painting, the mood is idyllic—we’re looking at the California Dreamin’ good life. Not just looking, but experiencing, for Hockney gives us enough of the pool’s oval arc that we feel compelled to fill in the rest: I imagine I’m in the pool with Wilder (a contemporary art dealer who was Hockney’s friend and neighbor), floating lazily on an inflatable mattress, the dry California sun warming my back in a moment of stilled perfection.

The images differ, too, in their depiction of space. The photograph obeys the rules of perspective, as photographs like this tend to do, but Hockney’s painting lacks depth: Wilder’s house is at one with the picture plane, a savvy acknowledgement of post-war guru Clement Greenberg’s insistence that painting honor its limitation as pigment on a flat canvas. Even Hockney’s choice of medium—acrylic—adds to the sense of surface impenetrability in its refusal of subtle tonal changes. And it’s a stretch to call this a “portrait” (though Hockney does), for Wilder’s face is blank, lacking the psychological depth that five hundred years of portraiture have led us to expect in something that bears the word “portrait” in its title. His mouth is closed, his eyes vacant—characteristics consonant with the carefully contrived, all-on-the-surface affectless affect of Pop.

In the photograph my father’s mouth is a dark hole—is he shouting? laughing? gasping? —and his eyes are wide, perhaps in surprise. He’s at dead center: lord of his manor, the patriarch in his pool. Is that what his look of surprise is about—a sudden realization, one balmy weekend in 1974, that he no longer fit his own self-mocking, self-descriptions: “I’m just a small town boy from the country,” and “I’m a simple man with simple tastes, simple pleasures”?

For him to be in the pool as I see him here, he would have come out of the house—probably with The Daily News tucked under his arm. I wonder what the headlines were that day. Was it: “Anneline Kriel, South African Model, Crowned Miss World in London”? or: “Japanese Government No Longer Grants Visas to South Africans”? or: “Government Passes Riotous Assemblies Act”? or, perhaps: “New Government Publications Act: More Stringent Censorship”?

He would have crossed the verandah, then the lawn, and walked down four steps into the shallow end, sucking in his breath at the sudden drop in temperature as his warm body entered the eighty-degree water, bracing relative to the sultry air. But that’s not how the image speaks to me. As I look and look, he seems, rather, to be emerging from the pool’s amniotic wateriness, gasping with surprise to find himself on such a fancy spread of property. His.

Behind my father and to the right, the sharp diagonal of the verandah’s roof defies the picture plane, punching back into deep space and drawing me in. I know those lines are not a pictorial device but a literal reality—a raking view of the roof—something verifiably there. And yet seeing it beside the Hockney I think of a key art-historical text: Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting of 1436, in which the great humanist writes that receding lines of linear perspective draw us, as though “through a transparent window,” into a scene (an “istoria”) that “will capture the eye of whatever learned or unlearned person is looking at it and will move his soul” to a higher, moral, or allegorical significance.

Why do I not find the mood in the photograph idyllic, this moment that I imagine as my father’s full-blown emergence into triumph? (Surely it should be?) Why do I not find the mood utopian and eternal, as I do Hockney’s?

What is here that moves my soul?

I’ll disavow nostalgia, at least that variant of nostalgia that yearns to restore the past.

What moves me, I think, is the future that spills out of the image and into my—our—present.

It was a happenstance shot that a fourteen-year-old boy, playing with his new wide-angle lens, took, one warm weekend in Durban, laying on his belly at the far side of a pool. And yet I can’t stop wanting to see—can’t stop seeing, with the prescience that hindsight affords—something deeper, something about the tide of events in South Africa that was about to burst through the constraining dam of apartheid and carry us all away—far away—into different lives.

From the writer

:: Account ::

My essay is, in many ways, an account of how I came to write it.

I love Judith Kitchen’s work, particularly Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate (Coffee House Press, 2012). Like Kitchen, I have a rich archive of images, letters, and cards. These all speak to me, though there are huge lacunae in what they say, and I try to fill in the gaps via my writing.

Other influences include Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Harvard, 1997) and Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001). I treasure, too, the work of Bernard Cooper, Teju Cole, and Jo Ann Beard.

Having taught art history for as long as I have (two and a half decades), I have a huge data bank of images in my mind. These surface as I write and seem inseparable from my own history. It’s likely that as I continue to work on my memoir, images from art history will continue to float into my consciousness, making my personal history resonant with art historical references—as here, in this essay in The Account.

I aspire to write nonfiction that is lyrical and charged not only with personal stories but with history, for knowledge, as Donna Haraway writes, is always “situated.”

Themes that unfold in my memoir are: home (my search for it) and betrayal (largely by the South African government of its citizenry).

Jo-Anne Berelowitz is an art historian by training and profession, now writing a memoir about growing up in South Africa during the apartheid regime. She lives with her husband and two Soft Coated Wheaten Terriers in San Diego, where she’s a faculty member at a large public university. Though she has published extensively as an academic art historian, this is her first publication in a literary journal. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program in creative writing at Rainier Writing Workshop.

The Message

Nonfiction / Lisa Marie Basile

:: The Message ::

I never meant to call you the night before you died. There, I’ll admit it right here.

I wouldn’t have called you on my own because I thought you were filthy. In you I saw cheap beer and diabetes. Chopped fingers and clots. In you I saw a heavy black tool box. Tackle. Maggots and pills and cigarettes smelling up my mother’s hair. In you I saw less than nothing. You who pulled my mother down into your suffering. You who loved her so much you had to destroy her. You whose T‑shirts were always dirty. Me whose life was pure and clean. You who called me a “famous writer.” You who abused my mother. You who put her out on the lawn. Me who lights a candle for you at night. Me who never said hello. Me who judged your god. Me who cursed you when you weren’t looking. Me who hoped you’d die. You who gave me $20 on Christmas when you had nothing else to give. Me who judged you, me who wore plainclothes to visit, me who stared through you with disgust. You who slept with a bedpan, you who my mother loved with her whole broken might, you who suffered silently into your last night. You who picked up the phone with such gratitude and ignorance. You who believed I’d call you to see if you were alright. You who spent a year in the hospital dying. You who got out and just wanted to pay the bills. Me calling from a city—my life so boundless, my body and skin free of disease, my insipid hatred—me calling from far away on my pedestal, you hacking blood late at night, me pretty, your lungs aspirating, me far from you calling my mother an angel, me far from your last grasp, me swimming in cool blue water as you died in a bright, empty room.

I wake filled with an engine of divine stuff; I am heaving it. It is an arm from the subterranean reaching up, up, up. It whispers: you will grieve today. I walk listlessly through the day, puppet-stringed to it. Chthonic, a black well, me pulsing through the water of vulgar, unwanted prophecies. I keep predicting death; my body knows it before I do.

Of course I called, I lie. Because how do you tell a sick man you weren’t actually thinking of him.

I move and move and move and register nothing. I touch the desk and the fabric and the window ledge, but I don’t feel any of it. I can’t regulate my consciousness. I’m latched to a holy funnel. I am sitting on a beat up black leather couch with a box containing your body. A person that existed last month is now inside of a box. That box is on a cigarette-holed square of sofa. The sofa in which he used to sit screaming loudly for candy or Natty Ice. My mother would bring it, her wavy golden hair too good, too angelic, for him. Sometimes he’d kiss her like a teenager kisses. He’d kiss her like he meant it. Sometimes she did too because she never loved herself. Now he’s sitting inside of a box and I’m all bile and shame. Why couldn’t I have called him on purpose? Why am I not a good enough person to call a sick man? Who are we to judge another man? Who am I to leave town like I deserve to leave town? Who am I to wish better for my mother? Who am I to make a sound while someone slowly dies? Who am I in this funeral dress? Why does it hurt so bad to have hated you? Come back, let me fill your pill box. Let me speak loudly over you choking. Let me clean up your blood this time.

I am being pumped up, bloated with your death. These days I wake with an emptiness that feels like the sea. It’s constant, and it moves in and in and over. It never stops. The shore is me, and the water is indelible.

I wake up with the reverb of you. Today you will die. I have never been close to god, and I have never known god. I don’t believe in god. I don’t believe in a semblance of god, but this may be just a resistance; this may be why I keep being bullied by the angels; maybe they want me to listen in. Listen in. I don’t want to listen in. Something wakes me; it’s sitting on the far end of my bed, press-pushing into the coverlet. It’s the feeling of someone on the edge of your bed, but there’s no one on the edge of the bed. It’s a fragment of a person or a person’s spirit detaching in parts. One part of you came over to me. Was it your leg, was it your arm? Were you trying to let me know you had to go?

There is a hole in my chest, and inside it is a part of you. I carry it with me, I peek in, peek in: hello; I check if it is still alive. I go swimming to clean myself out. I go swimming to move like ribbon, to hold my breath for a while. I think that this is a dying we can control. We can pull it back, we can wake it up. But when I come out from under the water I feel I can’t get enough of anything.

He couldn’t do anything but die in white sheets. The room, I know, it smells like iron. I can never not know it. Everyone in their sheets disappearing from the face of the earth. Everyone missing out on the agony down here. Everyone slipping through, making waves. His name was Marco, and Marco is gone. And before that, the others. The others are gone. And before that, some others. And those others are gone. I hold their gone-ness in me, hundreds of feet of gone-ness, but it’s all gone now. Even the gone-ness itself.

My mother calls to say she fell asleep on the sofa because you cannot sleep in a dead man’s bed. So she slept on the sofa, and when twilight sleep came over her and she could still hear the voices from the radio, she felt his body sit on the chair beside her and lean into her. His leaning was real; that lean of death—that lean from where? In that moment there is only horror. There is no comfort. The truth is as loud as light. That the body isn’t there. That everyday, average, normal body. That disruption.

When they were alive, you might cry out, “get off me!” or “I’m sleeping!” or maybe you move because “god damnit, you woke me up!”

That is not the case with a spirit. The spirit can take up space. The only problem is its residue; how do you ever get it off you? How do you learn to hold its message?

He was always leaning. He was always collapsing, and my mother was always catching. He’d gotten sick this past year, and the phone calls became tiring. He’d been in the hospital, in and out, in and out, all year. One night my mother woke up and he was vomiting blood, only it came from his lungs, and it was black and it was everywhere, all over the blue bathroom. I’ve pissed so many times in that blue bathroom. Now I can never piss in there again without all that black blood on me. Do you want me to send you some new curtains? I ask. A new bath mat? She says no, she prefers the blood stains. That she’d been awake in the yellow morning hours scrubbing up the blood. That he’d stand in the hallway murmuring, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, let me clean it.”

But of course she would clean it; she will clean it long after you’ve gone.

My mother calls to say she is washing his clothes: don’t bury me in a suit I want to buried in jeans and a T‑shirt—so she’s washing his shirts, but they have to be long-sleeved. They took his skin, she wails. They took all of his skin. He’s an organ donor but his organs were all rotten, although his skin was good and clean. My wound is filled with acid.

We find out about the bodies. They sit up when they’re being burned; they assume a fighting position, as if they know what is to come. It can take five hours. It can take five hours. Then he wants to be put out to sea, mostly; we will wear a small part of him as a necklace.

There is a vacancy in me that rings out from somewhere. Please, make a noise. They never make a noise. They just sleep where the marble is cold and always drenched in light. Full of forever—and me, and me, and me, standing there knocking, knocking, asking are you there? If you’re not, then from where am I getting all these messages?

I stand at the font and ribbon my hands back and forth in the water. I am catching my fingers around the water; it’s a hand. I am hoping there is something good left in me, that I haven’t been filled up with evil or emptiness or exhaustion. That I haven’t let my losses turn into something grotesque. I imagine waking up and walking down the stairs backwards; I imagine my skin on fire. I say a prayer, but even that feels selfish. We make death about ourselves. All this death makes a part of me evil. I place my head into the water, I open my eyes, I open my eyes and see.

There is only water; we are made of only water; we ripple, we flood, we toss up at the sand. We are broken up. We are continent. When I stop, I can feel the wave come in and pull back. That’s the message. That’s you. That’s the tide changing.

From the writer

:: Account ::

During the summer of 2017, my mother’s long-term partner passed away. He died incredibly young after suffering for a year. She, who’d worked in nursing her whole life, took care of him in his last year. We didn’t know he’d die, but we knew he kept getting sick. She put all of herself into him, into saving him, into literally resuscitating him. For her, the grief was and is endless. And it was complex. Do we only mourn those who leave us with golden memories? Can we mourn those who we, in part, hated? Do they become absolved once they’re dead, lifted into some untouchable layer of sky where sin is reduced to angel wings? I don’t know. As an atheist, I wanted to write something that explored my own grief and healing—while encountering the complexity of my sorrow. I felt there was no better way to eulogize him—his time in our life, his imprint, our hurt—without being unabashedly honest. Because I couldn’t lean on God for answers, I explored a lot of this through the lens of water. He was a fisherman, and he wanted to be put out to sea. I am a swimmer, and water is my holy ground; it’s the only place I feel spiritual. While I was swimming, he died, and while I was swimming, I felt him die. So another part of this is recognizing that there’s some elemental connection we all have—religious or not—that clues us in to the ticking of the universe, to the energy that comes and goes. It’s almost imperceptible, but I felt he would have wanted me to write about him in some way that dealt with water. Like waves, which come and go, I used vignettes to capture the memories, as a photograph would, that kept me up at night. That moved through me like an engine. While I’d like to say this is a good piece, it’s not. It’s shameful, dirty, and unresolved in some ways. But I tried.

Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks. Her book Nympholepsy (co-authored with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), is forthcoming with Inside the Castle. She is working on her first novella, to be released by Clash Books.

Two Poems

Poetry / Chet’la Sebree

:: Lady-in-Waiting, April 1789 ::

In front of looking glass, I admire my structure, my admixture 
of patterns, as I smooth down the gown that falls to my feet—

bolt of Irish linen stitched into frock for evening, 
where I’ll stand two steps behind Patsy, not behind closed doors,

make a lap around ballroom where candles dress walls, 
blue beads my neck, where my lips will be purple-puckered 

from a wine from a region often named.
Bordeaux, I try. Corset, I say, 

making my mouth French—admiring 
my bone-bound breasts nearly cresting top of dress.

In the mirror I practice, Dame de chambre, femme en attente—
though everyone here calls me Mademoiselle Sally—

esclave sounds better in this language,
maîtresse much the same.

:: Paris: A Retrospective ::

Your stagger sought to untether—hand sack of flour against frame, 
          heavy from body heavy with liquid lead.  

Was it me or Isabel you saw spread on the bed? 

~

This is as old as time, mom said.  First gran and her, then Mary and Bets.

~

Breathlessly: Sally.  

~

I could not mend my body to break—cedar berry, tansy, cotton seed minced to tea,
          trying to force a bleed.  

Belly swollen, sick as if still on ocean.

~

I am embarrassed by my opening—bare blush of blossom, floral flush of cheek. A flood staining 
          sheets in need of laundering.

~

Or maybe I didn’t open, but burst—a fracture that still aches in cold.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Lady-in-Waiting, April 1789”

This poem is in the voice of Sally Hemings—Thomas Jefferson’s slave with whom he had at least six children—when she’s a young woman in Paris. In 1787, at the age of fourteen, Hemings traveled to France with Jefferson’s youngest daughter, Maria (Polly), to meet Jefferson and his eldest daughter, Martha (Patsy). In this poem, Hemings is trying on a new dress as she prepares to attend an event with Patsy as her lady’s maid.

In April 1789, Hemings has been in Paris for nearly two years. It is documented that, during this time, Hemings started to learn French, received wages for her work, and received fine linens for occasions such as the one that unfolds in the poem. While in France, she became Jefferson’s concubine—according to her son Madison Hemings—and, sometime in 1789, was pregnant.

When it was time for her to return to the States with Jefferson later that year, she refused to return with him since she could petition the French government for her freedom. In Madison Hemings’s memoir, Hemings states that his mother returned to the States because Jefferson promised her “extraordinary privilege” and that their children would be freed.

In this poem, Hemings tries on language—the terminology, the French—much in the same way that she tries on the dress. In this poem, Hemings tries on what “extraordinary privilege” may look like.

Many of the details of this poem—and perhaps even the impetus for it—come from my experience of trying on a replica of an eighteenth-century corset in the Theatre Department’s costume shop at the University of Virginia.

“Paris: A Retrospective”

In this poem, Hemings looks back at her first sexual experience with Jefferson; this poem follows many failed attempts to write about this experience. Every time I tried to write the poem in the “present” tense of the late 1780s I failed, so I tried to come at this first experience from a number of different angles. The two that were the most successful were this one, in which Hemings is trying to reconcile her past and unpack what happened to her, and one where Jefferson dreams of his first sexual experience with her; the idea of breaking, unintentionally, is present in both.

As a writer, I felt conflicted about writing about this moment since I know there is a level of violence I know I already inflict by imposing my literary imagination on the life of this woman who is voiceless in history. Not being able to find my way organically into a poem about her first sexual experience with Jefferson almost felt like a sign that I wasn’t meant to write about it, so I gave up on the prospect—especially since I couldn’t reconcile what happened to her.

I often wrestle with the nature of Hemings and Jefferson’s relationship and the nature of their first sexual experience since she was at most sixteen and he forty-six when she became his concubine in Paris. It occurred to me, however, that perhaps Hemings also felt conflicted. From there, it also occurred to me that perhaps both my imagined Sally and I might benefit from the distance of retrospection.

In addition to Hemings wrestling with the nature of the experience, she is also wrestling with identity and motherhood in this poem. Hemings contemplates whether or not she’s “special,” wondering if Jefferson saw her or another slave named Isabel—whom he’d requested travel with his daughter Polly to Paris, though she couldn’t because she was pregnant—or if this experience was just her matrilineal legacy. Hemings was not the only woman in her family who was a concubine or had a sexual relationship with a white man. In this poem, she looks at the legacy of this through her grandmother, her mother, her sister Mary—who was in a common law marriage with a white man who informally freed her—and her niece Betsy. Hemings also wrestles with her first pregnancy in this poem—whether or not to have this child when she’s dealing with so much else, including being an ocean away from the majority of her family.

Ultimately, it felt fitting that Hemings needed the time, distance, and space from this moment to contemplate it. It also felt fitting that, ultimately, she also has no answers.

Chet’la Sebree was the 2014 – 2016 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She is a graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and the Richard H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse.