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TWO POEMS by Sally Wen Mao
MUTANT ODALISQUE
This is not an ode. February’s ice razor scalps
the gingko trees, their hair pulled skyward
like the ombre roots
of young women. March harrows
us mottled girls. Vernal equinox:
a hare harries the chicks, hurries
behind wet haystacks. Livestock.
Gnats. The glue-traps are gone.
March, ladies. March for your dignity.
March for your happiness. March, a muss
of lidless eyes. In the forest, a handsome man pisses,
puissant, luminary’s ink leaking on trees.
Penury I furl into the craven lens, in its mirror, a pulse:
webcam where I kiss my witnesses.
They watch and watch and watch the butcher
cut, the surgeon mend, they watch the glade
of crushed femora, they watch my dorsal fin,
they watch my scales dart across the cutting
board. They watch the way I open, flinch, bent
against the wind that beheads the nimbuses.
Or April’s turning toward ecstatic sob—departure.
Networks freeze, all sloe, all ice. Transmitters
falter. The cicatrix soaped, cilia & pus
rubbed raw. No machine. I dare
my witnesses to stick their pencils on me.
Do they marvel at a conquest—
blue flesh & gills. Do they think of me as soiled
or new soil. Do they take notes in their medical
journals. Am I their inspiration O Vesalius god
of anatomy is that why they ask so softly for my name.
OCULUS
This morning I peruse the dead girl’s live
photo feed. Two days ago, she uploaded
her confessions: I can’t bear the sorrow
captions her black eyes, gaps across a face
luminescent as scum. I can’t bear Ithaca snow—
how it falls, swells over the bridges,
under my clothes, yet I can’t be held
or beheld here, in this barren warren,
this din of ruined objects, peepholes into boring
scandals. Stockings roll high past hems
as I watch the videos of her boyfriend, cooing:
behave, darling, so I can make you my wife.
How the dead girl fell, awaiting a hand to hold,
eyes to behold her as the lights clicked on
and she posed for her picture, long eyelashes
all wet, legs tapered, bright as thorns.
Her windows overlook Shanghai, curtains drawn
to cast a shadow over the Huangpu river,
frozen this year into a dry, bloodless
stalk. Why does the light in the night
promise so much? She wiped her lens
before she died. The smudge still lives.
I saw it singe the edge of her bed.
THE LUNGFISH by Michelle Gillett
grew legs and arms, sucked in air and named ourselves,
is who we are— bone and gut, God’s face before we invented it:
stone-like, wide mouth feeding on every element.
~Erin Gillett
FOUR POEMS by Tommye Blount
BAREBACK AUBADE WITH THE DOG
Thicker than its master’s thigh,
I saw that dog gnawing its leash—
and didn’t I know better? Knowing my fear
of dogs, I thought, “If I walk faster
and stay calm, then—”
That leash, thin as Yes, snapped. Of course
the dog snapped too and I
wasn’t fast enough—only two legs then
instead of four. I was afraid, yes,
but I didn’t run. With my eyes shut,
I braced for what comes to those afraid
of what they refuse to see. But
that time, the dog headed for the lake.
It passed me by and I watched
the water gulp it down—its paws and then
its legs and then its flanks and then gone
was the scruffy heart
of its head. Wasn’t I sure it would not resurface
when it did? What sunlight there was
caught in its mouth a small body—its
slim head bucked twice more
against the water’s vermillion ripple.
AND THE DOG COMES BACK
from the lake with nothing
but the bark
it left with—an unintelligible
agony. Isn’t that, me
being the two-legged kind,
assumption and projection? A bark
sounds like a bark. A call of danger is a call
of ecstasy. It sloughs
the lake off its flanks,
sniffs the spittle of its chewed leash—
dangling from a hand
which too doesn’t know any better.
Control yourself, the dog
is told. The impossible leash
stings its back. So this is restraint
—I think as the dog
feigns satisfaction
in the dull salt
of a featherless palm. No,
you’ve caught me. I’m not there. I’m the animal
still fucking in a stranger’s bed.
His tongue licks my mouth. I whistle,
but I do not listen.
THE RUNTS
It’s my hand—so close
it could be bitten
clean off. Tonight
he is the dog—this bedded stranger
not using his words,
not responding to any name.
He lets me keep my hand—
returning it back cleaner
than it left. I haven’t learned my lesson
so I give him the other one.
No, not could be bitten. He bites my hand
and I howl like something
that should not howl
down his throat. We are both dogs
now, mouthing the dark until
we are not mouthing the dark.
We are sinking in the hold
of whatever is willing to hold us.
LYCANTHROPY
As if I can’t understand
my body is more than surreptitious pact
between nerve
and the crime it loves,
they’ve cornered me. And in this light
my frame is haphazard and threatening,
but I can’t speak—their leather collar still cinched
around my neck, a silver
leash hook for each pair of eyes daring me
to attack. Each man armed
with a hot muzzle, a mouth
full of scripture and no to aim
onto my back—now bent
over a prayer they mistake
for a growl. In this place,
there is no common tongue,
I can’t understand them,
so I can’t follow the order
that follows each leash,
so they beat me
until skin becomes wound
then scab then hide.
TWO POEMS by Patrick Rosal
TEN YEARS AFTER MY MOM DIES I DANCE
The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.
When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose. If you’re lucky,
time grants you a second chance,
as I was lucky
when I got to hold
the hand of my mother,
how I got to kiss that hand
before I sprawled out
on the tiles of the hallway
in the North Ward
so that the nurses
had to step over me
while I wept. Then again,
I have lived long enough
to turn on all the lights
in someone else’s kitchen
and move my hips in lovers’ time
to the same shameless
Amen sung throughout
the church our bodies
build in sway. And then
there were times all I could do
was point to the facts:
for one, we move
through the universe
at six hundred seventy
million miles per hour
even when we are lying
absolutely still.
Oh magic, I’ve got a broken
guitar and I’m a sucker
for ruin and every night
there’s a barback
who wants to go home
early to bachata
with his favorite girl.
I can’t blame him or the children
who use spoons for drums.
And by the way, that was me
at the Metropolitan stop
on the G. I was the one
who let loose half my anguish
with an old school toprock
despite the fifty-some
strangers all around me
on the platform
waiting for the train
about to trudge again
through the city’s winter
muck. Sure, I set it off
in my zipped up three-quarter
coat when that big girl
opened the thunder in her lungs
and let out her badass
banjo version of the Jackson Five,
all of which is to say, thank you
for making me the saddest man
on a planet teeming with sadness.
The night, for example,
I twirled a mostly deaf woman
in a late-night lounge
on the Lower East Side
and listened to her whisper
a melody she was making up
to a rhythm she told me
she could feel through her chest,
how we held each other there
on a crowded floor
until the lights came up
as if we were never dancing
to the same sorrows
or even singing
a different song.
UPTOWN ODE THAT ENDS ON AN ODE TO THE MACHETE
What happens when me and Willie
run into each other on a Wednesday night
in Brooklyn? He asks, “Where we going?”
And that’s not really a question.
That’s an ancestral imperative: to hail
any yellow or gypsy that’ll stop on Franklin
and Lincoln to fly us over the bridge then
zip up the East Side where the walls
are knocking to Esther Williams or Lavoe.
And you know Willie daps up Orlando
and I say What’s good! and it don’t take
three minutes for me and Will to jump
on the dance floor or post up at the bar
sipping on Barrilito or to tap on my glass
a corny cáscara with a butterknife
like I’m Tito Puente but I have no clue
I really sound like a ’78 Gremlin
dragging its tailpipe the length of 119th,
which is to say, it don’t take long
for Willie and me to be all in. And that’s when
out of nowhere in the middle of the room’s boom-
braddah macumba candombe bámbula
this Puerto Rican leans over and says to me
real slow, “Everybody is trying to get
home.” And I’m like, “Aw fuck.” because
I’m on 1st Ave between 115th and 116th
not even invested in the full swerve yet.
It’s not even five past midnight and Will
is dropping science like that. Allow me
to translate: There are neighborhoods in America
where a man says one simple sentence
and out flow the first seventeen discrete meanings
of home. If you haven’t been broken by the ocean,
if your own weeping doesn’t split you down
into equal weathers: monsoon, say, and gossip,
if you can’t stand at the front door
of an ancestral house and see a black saint
staring down at you, no name, no judgment,
if you haven’t listened to the town drunks
laughing underneath a tree they planted
so they wouldn’t forget your pain, then your story
must have a whole other set of secrets.
You must know what it’s like to expect
an invitation. You might not know what it’s like
to wonder if someone is even waiting
for you to return. Your idea of home
might not contain ways to call blood cousins
from another time zone or just shout
from the middle of the road. There are those of us
descended from peasants who never had to travel
too far to visit the smiths who craft knives
from hilt to tip, who cook blades
that split the wood or carve the rind
from flesh. I once went to visit the men
who make the machetes of the Philippines.
There was a time, I didn’t care where
those knives came from, how the men and women
stoked the embers and dropped their mallets
with a millimeter’s precision. When I was young,
I thought hard was the mad-dog you could send
across a crowded bar. I thought hard
was how deep you roll or how nasty the steel
you bring. In some neighborhoods of America,
hard is turning down the fire just enough,
so you could kiss the knife and make it ring.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Reprise by Kathleen Hellen
THE INTENDED by Rebecca Berg
From:
Wendy Kochman
27 Wayfarer Circle
Lafayette, CO 80540
To:
Professor Benjamin Schneider
Comparative Literature Department
New York University
13-19 University Place
New York, NY 10003
March 2014
Dear Ben,
I wonder how your life is. Are you happy sometimes? Are you well? Do you have a companion, and in your work do you still try to articulate the impossibility of articulating outside the Law of the Father? Really, I don’t know the first thing about you—I was going to say “anymore,” but I’ve been thinking lately that I never did. Me, I continue to tilt at the impossibilities, which is why, I suppose, I write memoir-inflected literary criticism that only rarely gets into print and why I have been thwarted in nearly every material ambition.
Do you remember once, riding home from school in the carpool—must have been eighth or ninth grade?—we were talking about the evils of car culture, and someone said, Well, when you’re adults you’ll want to have a car.
I’m going to have a horse, I said. (I didn’t even like horses.)
You were silent until someone prodded: What’s Ben going to have? And you said, uncomfortably, I’d like to have a small car.
But none of that is why I’m writing. You’ve been figuring in my dreams, Ben, bad dreams that at long intervals over these twenty years have erupted, like some dormant virus, in rashes. Sometimes David will sense my mood and ask what’s wrong, and I’ll say: I had a Ben Schneider dream. It’s a known phenomenon, a Ben Schneider dream, a shorthand between us. Oh no, he’ll say, what did he do this time? David teases when he’s at a loss, and he can neither understand nor alleviate the black restlessness that seizes me in the wake of a Ben Schneider dream. For days I go about sick at what my life has not been, suffering more dreams, until I tell myself this can’t go on and zip myself up.
My conscious mind is in fact perennially naïve and forgetful—I wonder if you remember that about me?—and for a long time I couldn’t fathom why my dreams should cast you, rather than, say, my mother as my persecutor. My clearest memories of you dated from the best years of friendship, from our late teens and early twenties, from long talks on early summer evenings, and yes, you did most of the talking and I did most of the listening, but the air was soft and I thought I had the worst of my life behind me and a flowering before me, and if you sometimes flaunted a financial magic carpet I would never share, and if you talked compulsively of jet-setting with celebrity intellectuals I would never meet—the heart of your life always elsewhere—still, I thought you knew my worth.
__________
I wonder if you know how far I have wandered. I’m speaking of my professional life and of this parched town where I’ve now lived longer than anywhere else, although there have been other traumas. But maybe you don’t know. It seems likely that you don’t know. It seems likely that, having dispensed with Wendy Kochman, having jumped the hurdle that in some way she once represented, you forgot that such a person ever was.
And rightly. Of course such a person never was.
Nevertheless, something happened—not a vague drifting apart, but some thing. You did something to Wendy Kochman, which I am only now remembering, because nothing happened to me, because I was not really Wendy Kochman. Another way of saying this: You killed Wendy Kochman, but at the time you did me no harm. In retrospect, though, it burns; it burns because it is of a piece with exile.
Maybe I’m fooling myself, but it seems to me that the exile would not have been so total if my oldest friend had continued to know my worth.
__________
Now, I do recognize that Wendy Kochman—and I—played a role in what happened. Wendy Kochman’s role, I believe, predated mine. You came to me. Perhaps I should say: “Ben Schneider” came to me, because surely the person who accosted me no longer exists. I imagine you dispatched him too, the eleven-year-old with his black Jewfro, his baby-Buddha build, and his precocious gastrointestinal tract—ulcers being seen at the time as proof of genius—who stood up from his assembly seat on the first day of junior high to ask the principal an uninvited question of unprovoked hostility. Who soon began to bring me gifts. Seriously, Ben, you startled me. I sat across the aisle and several rows behind you; at the time we were in different carpools. Why did you pursue me, how could you even see me? He likes you, people suggested. Even then I knew that could not be. I was an unmothered, self-loathing adolescent girl who wanted with a passion to disappear: just leave me alone and let me numb out. I did not like you. Was it that you needed an ear and a mirror?—and you sensed I could be picked off the back of the pack? Was it that our grandparents had immigrated from the same bloody corner of Eastern Europe? Or that your father had heard that my father played in the Buffalo Philharmonic? Assistant concertmaster, not bad. Was it rivalry? Or was it fellowship—one untouchable to another? But it seemed you never noticed your pariah status. The tanned offspring of the Buffalo business class had no power to make you feel ugly. In this, your self-certainty, you were decades ahead of me. I believe, though, that you were spared the context in which pariah status was most intimately enforced, namely, gym class. See ulcers, above.
Out of nowhere, you laid at the feet of Wendy Kochman your passion for Rachmaninoff, which she mocked, not kindly. Sometime later, you placed in her hands an LP of Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie, to which she said, not graciously, Yeah, it’s good music, but why are you giving me this? I barely know you. Next you gave her the Brahms double, and later, on returning from France, you brought her a poster of Impression, Sunrise that still hangs in my living room (silhouettes in a boat, orange light on blue-gray water). You evolved fast and on your own toward that quiet dawn. Your parents were not artists; you came from shrinks and MDs, a recipe, it seemed to me, for bombast. And yet you did not bring me Monet’s glittering lily pads. You brought me the subtle nostalgia of one random moment suspended, a phenomenon that I have often encountered since but at the time was new to me. I began to feel myself standing upon an unearned authority, which I nevertheless had no intention of relinquishing.
Outside of school and carpool, we never saw each other. So you startled me again by erupting when you learned I was going to graduate early. Your mother was driving the car that day, and you, sitting in the front seat, began to shout at her. I’m just as advanced as she is, you cried, more advanced. But Ben, I tried to say, you already skipped a grade. You were too stung to hear. I even tried to tell you that it was only because that old French teacher had told my parents: You need to get her out of here. He was trying to save me, Ben. I never even had a class with him. If he knew I was a good student, it was by reputation only. What he more likely had in mind was the epithets I’d been fielding in the hallways and the soccer fields for four years (dirty lezzie), the jocks shouldering me into walls, the head of student council—son of a state senator—accidentally on purpose grabbing my breasts. Maybe he suspected an unloving home, but that’s probably wishful thinking. I don’t know that he made the right call. If I’d had another year on the viola before venturing into Eastman, I might have stuck with the music. My life might look different now.
And so you hastened to get yourself early into Harvard. Mentally, I shrugged: rivalry after all. A little deeper down, I was flabbergasted: Really? You would rearrange your life because of me?
We did not stay in touch while we were away. My first semester, I had a peak experience playing late Beethoven in a hotshot quartet, and I fell in love with the cellist, a prodigy who was so at one with his instrument that it seemed to speak words and who slept with me once and told me I was “deep” and bowed out of the group. You were, frankly, the last thing on my mind. But again you startled me; you began calling me when we were home between semesters: Do you want to go for a walk? Do you want to come over? The first time, my family was finishing dinner, and they all looked at me: Why is he calling you? I joined you—warily, later willingly. It got me out of the house; I began, finally, to think of you as a friend. You were majoring in philosophy, and American philosophy departments, you told me, were disgustingly dominated by the Anglo-American school, which was an exercise in superficiality, complacently erecting syllogisms with no notion that language was an arbitrary system of signs; that one could appeal neither to personal experience nor to empirical evidence without committing a basic ontological error; that certainly one could not talk about negative capability, as I was wont to do, because that presupposed an opposition between interior and exterior that was always already collapsed; that, in fact, one could never say anything, because the notion that there was anywhere outside of language to speak from was retrograde romantic individualism. It was a series of infuriating can’ts, and we argued, and it was as if we were pushing a piece of clay back and forth. You never told me I was “deep.” In truth you came close to naming the way it felt to be me, which was that the world attenuated upon approach, always—that I was myself a soap bubble, aleatory and hollow, across whose surface the five senses chased in iridescent colors. I loved our play. (I still miss that heady play.) Even your self-absorption became attractive, because it was not my parents’ self-absorption and was therefore something of mine. The logic was not impeccable.
Did you notice that I never called you? You must have noticed. Here is what I vaguely noticed: During all those hours of walks and talks, you never tried to touch me, though something about me seemed to feed you. Maybe you liked my mind. I wanted to think that. Simultaneously, I told myself you just needed someone to occupy you when you were stuck in Buffalo. A witness, a Penelope.
Or was it something darker? I have been forming a queasy theory about your father, which I cannot (or will not) articulate outside of narrative.
__________
So let’s cling for now to the easy insights. In graduate school, our away-from-Buffalo worlds began to overlap. You had migrated to Comp Lit at Yale; I had abandoned the viola and got myself into the English Department at Cornell, which I chose not because it was a battlefield in the theory wars, but because it provided every graduate student a full scholarship plus stipend. So. Was the problem that I was no longer a musician? Was it that we now shared a circle of acquaintance?—and Wendy Kochman was no star: at best of no use, at worst a liability. You see that I am getting stuck in a rather tedious pedestal story: You put Wendy Kochman on a pedestal, later you knocked her down. Seeing her roll at your feet, how could you not kick her?—though maybe I fell of my own accord. By the time I visited you in New Haven, the site of the kicking, I was impatient with the field of English. The price of admission seemed to be immersion in—surrender to—the not-interesting, the not-significant. Almost certainly, I dissented from too many things. What I could not see, though maybe you could, was that as a result academia was going to shed me and that I did not take myself seriously, I did not consider my life and future livelihood cause enough to fight for. Les non-dupes errent, indeed. I was having dreams then, too, dreams that I now consider premonitory, of shrouds, of flat black clouds, of stingrays settling over my face.
Your apartment in New Haven made me wistful. It had hardwood floors and white walls. I, to stay within my stipend, had settled in Ithaca for acoustic ceiling, wood paneling, and wine-stained carpet at the battered end of Farm Street. From the moment I set foot in your territory, I felt tentative, wrong-footed. You had asked me to come, and now, every time I opened my mouth you were impatient and contemptuous, as if I were an aspect of yourself, or a family member, that you were ashamed of. For my part, I was not equipped to defend myself. When I am attacked, guilt is my first reaction: I must have done something wrong to make Mommy so mad. That fogs, to say the least, my perception of the stimulus. The spears went in, and before I knew what they were, I had forgotten what they were. So I cannot enumerate the errors you charged me with. I only know that you seemed to be convincing yourself I was stupid. One occasion has stuck with me. Sitting on your futon in that bright apartment, I asked you what you thought of something you were reading, and instead of answering, you accused me of needing “pure voice.” It’s infantile, you said. Emotionally immature and politically retrograde. You had Wendy Kochman, of all people, longing to hitch herself to the authority of univocal truth.
My question frightened you, perhaps, because you had nothing to say?
Finally I did rouse to anger. I wasn’t going to stick around for this, I said, and I started whacking through the onionskin pages of the phone book, looking for the Greyhound number. That, I believe, is when you tried to hand me a pill: Here, take this.
What is it? I said.
Instead of answering, you told me I had a problem with oral receptivity. A reaction-formation, you said.
I felt bad for your roommate, who was witnessing this squabble. I felt bad—guilty, even—about the phone book in my lap: melodrama. But mostly I was squatting very still inside myself, watching myself lose, yet again, a love object. I had learned, belatedly, to love you, and post hoc ergo propter hoc, here you were, un-becoming. The person who would shove that pill on me was not a person I trusted. It was an ancient loss; I knew how to take care of it. I just needed to go away and tend to myself.
Greyhound never got called, because the phone rang first: your father. He asked you how the visit was going. I know this, because I heard you say, We’ve been fighting, but we’re working it out. Then he asked you to put me on the phone. What? What did he want to talk to me for?—as if I too were a child of his, when in truth I barely knew him. He asked me how I thought the visit was going, and I don’t know if you remember this about me either, but when I’m bewildered, words drain from me; I have to chase them down, and in the struggle I sometimes get them by a leg or foot—upside down or inside out. This time I grabbed hold of bang-up, which I meant literally but which he chose to take figuratively: Good, good, a tiff can bring people closer.
When I got off the phone, you pleaded, Don’t go, Wendy. Things will be better. Your voice was different—beaten. So I stayed.
Come to think of it, your father had startled me once before. We’d been in your kitchen talking, and he appeared with a camera and wanted us to go outside for a picture. What? Well okay. We stood on the grass. Stood like manikins, side by side. Hold hands or something, he said. I remember thinking, Oh, he’s got the wrong end of the stick. As I write this, I wonder: what else didn’t come from you? Was calling me all those times even your idea? Once—this is coming back to me, now; I’d forgotten this episode—you invited me to spend the night with you. I was surprised: Really? With your parents in the house? They were cool with that? Well, okay, but I couldn’t stay all night; that wouldn’t be okay with my parents. Ugh, you said. Wendy, you’re so afraid of your parents. We went up to your room—the only time I saw it—and lay down and held each other. When you got an erection, I reached under your clothes and wrapped my hand around it, and you said: I can’t. We talked instead; I was nothing if not flexible. Pretty soon you said, Wendy, I’m fading, and then truly I did not want to be there anymore.
How could I not see? Well, naïveté. But honestly, I can count on one hand the times I saw your father, and those sometimes years apart. You of course said nothing—until finally, having come out to yourself and then to your family, you told me your father had accused your mother of failing to consummate their marriage since she had not given him a real son. I was appalled for you, Ben. If I remember correctly, that happened before I came to New Haven. How terrible that your father was still hoping to make a match between us.
These days I also feel for my younger self. The it in the middle.
__________
For all intents and purposes, our friendship ended during that weekend in New Haven. We had a couple of encounters in Ithaca. I don’t remember why you came. It wasn’t to see me, I don’t think, but you stopped by. Once you spent an hour or so on the window seat of my new apartment, a studio in a rambling Queen Anne on the corner of Titus and Albany. My boyfriend from Farm Street had broken up with me, and I had found this beautiful, tiny place for myself, hardwood floors and twelve-foot ceilings, oak woodwork and bay windows, and then my new boyfriend had moved in with me, not altogether in accordance with my preferences. You and I were almost strangers by now. So you sat politely while Keith and I discussed the enneagram. In a spirit of mischief and inclusion—I knew you didn’t know the enneagram, too middle brow—I pointed out the personality type I thought fit you and handed you the book. You said, But this is mostly positive. Your surprise betrayed your underlying contempt, as did your silence about the retrograde politics of typing people, as did your reference to a potpourri burner as “that thing in the bathroom” and your attempt to make conversation with Keith, who was black: “Are you religious?” Oh, Ben, if you had not been my friend, I would not have believed you were real.
I remember another incident from that visit. We were at an English Department function. You were my guest, but of course you were a Yale theory guy who knew Derrida personally, which meant that after all the room was more your room than mine, and you and I were standing together, and Julie Somebody—I seem to have permanently suppressed her last name, but she was one of those acolytes who had imbibed enough Lacan and Foucault to convince herself she could acquire an aura by committing ostentatious social cruelties and not enough to understand that her dutiful Peter Pan collars were always going to make people feel sorry for her—that person invited you and noticeably did not invite me to “a little party” at her place.
You hesitated. You wanted to go. You so wanted to go.
I said: Ben, if you go to that party, I will never speak to you again.
Well. You didn’t go. For a long time, I felt cynical about that. He might as well have gone since we never did speak again, not really. Now I’m less sure. I could have dismissed you outright, if you had gone. And then you never could have returned, you never could have haunted my dreams.
__________
I saw you once more, at the MLA. It was the last morning of the conference, my last year on the market, in every way an epilogue. I had finished my dissertation and had failed for more than a year to get any piece of it published, and I just had finished the one interview I’d landed, and I knew I was not going to get the job, and I was sitting on a couch in a hotel lobby with Keith, and you passed by. You didn’t so much speak to me as vaguely address yourself to two distant acquaintances: I’m not going to get anything, you said, and I had two reactions, the first of which I was ashamed of: schadenfreude. Next came skepticism. Really, Ben Schneider will get nothing? You did not think to ask about my situation.
Sometimes, in my dreams, you walk by me and fail to see me, and if I call out you fail to recognize me and then, looking guilty, you pretend to know who I am.
They’d asked me in the interview what I’d been doing since I’d finished my dissertation. Working, I said, at the reference desk in the graduate library at Cornell. Even as I said it, I knew I was self-sabotaging; I tried to recoup by adding: I consider it an extension of my education. The room froze, they in embarrassment, I in fury at myself. And in disgust. Why should my answer have sounded flip? In any reasonable interview, it would have been an honorable answer. Only in our profession did needing to work disqualify you from working.
__________
I was going to sketch a narrative of the dark years that followed, but I find that I can’t. It was the end of dignity. There’s no place to tell it from. I just can’t.
I lived with a man who drank. I left him. For a time I temped in Washington, DC. Once they sent me to an international law firm, to proofread lists of chemical names in Danish. No matter that I didn’t know Danish; this was letter-by-letter comparison proofing. Mindless, mechanical work that nevertheless required your full attention. They put me at a little table facing a wall in the office of a smug German lawyer who spent the afternoon calling his friends in Frankfurt to brag about his salary. He had no idea—never did learn—that I understood every word. That he was distracting me. Can’t afford a McMansion, he kept saying, but I’m not complaining. Ich beklage mich nicht.
__________
“When you are up,” Barbara Stanwyck is said to have said, “you are accepted; when you are down, it is as though you do not exist.” She was talking, of course, about Hollywood.
And let’s be honest: If you had looked for me I would have hidden. David I met at the National Academy of Sciences, where he was researching mercury pollution and I’d been hired to do some photocopying. Three months later he got invited to rescue fragile ecosystems in this land of magpies and tumbleweed—a dream of his: to work outdoors. To live in the shadow of a mountain. He brought me a Cracker Jack ring and held out an orange gazania, which, when I laughed, he stuck in his buttonhole, and he said, Um, um, um, would you marry me? I was six months pregnant with twins, not by him—by Keith, who didn’t know. That’s the kind of man David is: nothing like you.
When the kids were little, I pulled the viola out. I had not touched it in twenty years. Do you know what desert air does to wood? My poor old Czech viola. When I opened the case, the strings lay on the belly of the instrument, flabby as twine. The sound post clinked, and the bridge slid between the bouts. It was in the shop for months; in the interim they sold me two quarter-sized violins for my babies. Benjy—named after David’s father, in case you were wondering—prefers mountain biking, but Emily took to music. I taught her myself until she played with a grace I’d never had and I could teach her nothing more. When she was ten, I took her to the violin professor at the university. For the next seven years, I listened from the living room, often in tears, silent ones, so as not to unnerve her.
Last year they started college. This year David got cut to halftime, and I found myself some adjunct work at community colleges and night schools, literature and composition. I even have library privileges. So, following your latest eruption in my dreams, I have been catching up on your publications, all those articles in the nineties, culminating in a book whose title stabbed me in the solar plexus—Eruptions in the Future Perfect: The Return of Theory. Apparently it was widely reviewed when it came out. In Diacritics I found this, from one of my Cornell classmates: “Nobody does the uncanny better than Schneider.”
Well. How entirely true. But that was nine years ago. And silence since. I wonder what is happening in your life. I wonder how that silence feels.
__________
Last night you glided past, conversing with a beaky, bespectacled woman in a broomstick skirt. She was inviting you to co-edit an anthology on shadow selves. Hey, I tried to shout, but I could only croak, and you looked at me blankly, bleakly, and the woman turned on me, impatiently reiterating the ground rules: You are nothing, Wendy Kochman. Stop making trouble.
__________
The “good years” of our friendship seem in retrospect to have been a crossroads. I allowed myself to be pulled out of my own terrain; I was always the one who didn’t know. Often I vanished myself, telling myself I didn’t need to prove anything to you, making myself in my mind bigger than you. “Ben Schneider” became my name for everything I forbade myself to be: snobbish and grandiose, massively defended. Possibly that disrespect seeped through my gentle leading questions and silent dissents, though perhaps you didn’t see; I counted on you not to see.
I remember the first time you fell for a man who wouldn’t have you. You swallowed twenty of those pills of yours and promptly called 911.
Later you called me. You proffered the story like a gift.
Oh, the drama, I snorted, not kindly, not graciously.
But “Ben Schneider” is a gift, isn’t he? All these years, it’s been the same damn gift. Belatedly, I accept.
Take this letter, ten weeks in the writing. Mischief. Drama. I am trying to decide whether to send it. I would need to be clear in my mind that I need nothing from you—not affirmation, not any response at all; I do not even need you not to respond. If you receive these pages, it just means that I have chosen not to disappear—or rather, given the decades that have passed: I choose not to have disappeared. How this eruption might strike you, I’ll refrain from speculating. Time folded while I was writing. It seemed we were in the carpool just the other day, side by side and bickering, with our lives before us, unknown and impossible. Now you are receding.
Farewell, my basherter—
Wendy
FWR Monthly: September 2015
Meditation frequently asks its practitioners to ground themselves in their bodies through a series of structured “noticings.” You are gently urged to press yourself into your chair, press your feet into the floor, press your fingertips together, press your lungs out into their little cage of ribs.
It is easiest, it turns out, to notice your body when it meets with a measure of resistance. The floor is a fact your feet cannot change. To live in a body, we are told and retold, is to forget about this all the time.
When I solicited poems for this issue, I asked for work that “enacts or inscribes the feminine in fresh, unusual, or surprising ways.” Noting that gender is both inscribed upon the body and enacted by the body, I wanted to see how gender could visit the text, or the site of inscription. It is, in fact, near-impossible for many of us to forget about our bodies. This is not a failure to live within them, but a ricochet from resistance to resistance, reminder to reminder – “You do not inhabit this body. To the world’s eyes you are this body. Here is what that means.”
I’m delighted by the poems in this issue, in no small way because they make the original phrasing of my solicitation seem deeply small and beside the point. They embrace the mystic and the vulgar. They are funny, heartbroken, and kind. They dig deep for inner voice and reassemble the voices around them in a gorgeous echolalia. With plums. And hoofprints. And Kim Kardashian. I hope you like them.
Kate DeBolt
Assistant Poetry Editor
DRAG NOTES – FROM A CONVERSATION WITH KINGA
by Justin Engles
TWO POEMS
by Danielle Mitchell
THREE POEMS
by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
PRAYER TO ST. MARTHA
by Leah Silvieus
Artwork by Lexi Braun
- Published in home, Monthly, Uncategorized
FWR Monthly: August 2015
The idea of voice has been hot on my mind lately. I think the ongoing work of folks like Amanda Johnston (one of the founders of Black Poets Speak Out), has made me think closely about how I move through the world, speak for myself, for and with others. Voice is subjective, relative. It’s also incredibly relational. Although I’m not a thousand percent behind Naomi Wolf’s talk of vocal fry, I know well the phenomenon of adapting one’s voice to suit one’s audience. The question is, then, from which conventions and collectives does one draw? And why? A writer performs on the page for a hypothetical audience, introducing herself to strangers again and again. Whatever voice that writer inhabits at any given time should be considered and relevant, and it should always feel true.
Since this is my first monthly curation of Four Way Review, the theme feels apt. As editors, we think about our own voices, our voices in conjunction with other editors’, and how the pieces we celebrate reflect upon us. Last month, Ken Chen, Executive Director of the phenomenal Asian American Writers Workshop, wrote an article excoriating certain white artists whose so-called transgressive work does little more than parrot the language of violence, racism, and patriarchy. Another recent editorial at Apogee raises the idea that it is as impossible – and unethical – to “read blind” as an editor as it is to be colorblind in the way we engage with each other in the flesh.
Here’s my secret: I was a little tempted to name this issue The Anti-Rachel Dolezal Life & Times, for the sake of those of us who have worked very hard to be ourselves, to own where we come from, and to make art from that space. The aforementioned – now-infamous – identity thief, who has worked with visual media in the past, was, unsurprisingly, once accused of plagiarizing a landscape by another painter. The appropriation of style, voice, and culture all converge so neatly in her story, it’s remarkable.
With all of this roiling in my head, I found myself, more than anything, wanting to read gorgeous, powerful voice. Just that. Inventive, not necessarily confessional, but representative of the artist in an elemental, charged way. When I started feeling tired of tired voices, avery r. young and Juliana Delgado Lopera came to my mind immediately, as the balm I wanted and needed most.
I bet you’re going to like reading these folks. Their styles are very different: young’s work boasts spareness and abbreviation, often using the architecture of parentheses to slow the reader, to encourage and reward re-reading. Lopera’s narrator, on the other hand, has fluidity and grace that’s enviable. Both are immediate. Neither backs down.
It wasn’t planned, but I don’t find it at all surprising that, in young’s suite of poems and Lopera’s excerpt, both use Christianity as a springboard for their characters’ voices. Owning one’s voice often comes from looking directly at structures of power, the stories we as a culture swear by. I think it’s important to reclaim power this way. And maybe it seems naïve, but I feel the connection between the art we make and support and the way we engage each other in the world is very real. These two artists are doing the good work.
~ Laura Swearingen-Steadwell
Poetry Editor
excerpt from FIEBRE TROPICAL
by Juliana Delgado Lopera
NEW TESTAMENT
by avery r. young
- Published in home, Monthly, Uncategorized
FWR Monthly: July 2015
For this installment of our new monthly “mini-issues,” I wanted to present a small folio on a genre which seems to gain more and more attention, particularly among poets — the “photo-essay.” Because so much of our daily life has gone digital, it becomes harder not to primarily encounter the world through our sense of sight. And “seeing” isn’t easy. For the photographer, when a photo essay is being built, he or she must whittle down, sometimes from hundreds of photos, until the image is found; then he or she must find other images that create tension with that original image. This month’s Monthly will present you with two poet/photographers, Chris Abani and Rachel Eliza Griffiths, both of whom I believe are doing fascinating and challenging work through photography. And please read the interview I conducted with Rachel! Such wonderful answers. That said, have a look-see (ha, see what I did there), and thank you for reading.
~ Nathan McClain
Poetry Editor
ON THE PHOTOGRAPH: AN INTERVIEW
with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
GHOSTING, INVISIBILITY AND THE ERASURE OF PARTICULAR BODIES: A SPELL
by Chris Abani
FAILURE by Glen Pourciau
I’d been holed up with a new project, and it seemed time to get out and breathe some fresh air and talk to people, an outcome that the solitary nature of my work sometimes led me to desire more than dread. I’d received an email about an opening reception at an art gallery, the owners of which were two of the friendliest people I’d ever met, and I was an acquaintance of a friend of a friend of the artist and had been to two openings for this same artist at this same gallery before and had seen this acquaintance at both of them. I planned on speaking with him at the opening about my project, and I liked the idea that I wouldn’t see him again for two or three years and could therefore minimize the effect of any adverse reactions to whatever I said.
I arrived about an hour after the opening began, hoping to reduce distractions by giving my acquaintance enough time to view the show. The artist was a specialist in geometric shapes, mainly triangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms, painted in a variety of bright colors and floating against an abstract background that suggested a brooding, subdued turbulence, an occasional gnarly, dissonant tree root bursting through the surface as if hurled by destiny. I scoped out the crowd, an impressive turnout, the usual buzz and nodding and handshaking and knowing laughter. I didn’t feel at ease, one side of the room already rising and spilling me toward the door, the floor on the verge of grabbing me by the leg and yanking me outside, you don’t belong here, leave and nobody will get hurt. The art did nothing at all for me, except for the tree roots, which appeared to have come from another dimension and aroused an almost painful urge to lift the frame or remove it from the wall and check the back to see if some design or pattern could be found there that would alter the context of the front side, and if the front side, seen in this new and broader context, would again reverse you to the back of the canvas, and so on, a type of narrative rotation that would intentionally undermine the geometry on its face. One of the gallery owners approached me, which she never failed to do, and she actually seemed glad that I’d come, though I’d never bought anything from the gallery and knew her gladness must have been limited to such an extent that it barely existed, and who could blame her, yet her face showed nothing but good will. Where does her good will come from? I wondered. I couldn’t imagine how she could think I was worthy of her welcome, worthy of her welcome, worthy of her welcome. As I was saying how good it was to see her, a well-dressed woman walked up from behind me and she greeted her as warmly as she had me and, not wanting to exhaust her kindness, I moved on, deeper into the front end of the L-shaped gallery, and continued to the elbow of the L, where you could inform a staff member if you wanted to buy a painting. Glasses of wine were also available in the elbow, but I turned away from the wine, fearing that even a small amount would trigger avalanches of verbosity.
Sure enough my acquaintance, whom I believed was still a friend of a friend of the artist, did happen to be in attendance and was standing just on the other side of the elbow, though I couldn’t be sure if this chain of personal connections remained unbroken because the artist and the friend of the artist were both rumored to be insane, at least intermittently, and prone to tirades against real and imagined enemies. Whatever the case, my acquaintance was laughing at or with a slender man who leaned in and blabbed a few words that had an edge, that caused my acquaintance to flinch and grimace as the man departed. I saw it as an opportunity to stroll up and greet him, possibly taking advantage of his relief at seeing someone other than the apparent wisecracker, but as soon as he saw me his eyes narrowed and without glancing back he took off for the end of the L, as if fleeing to a back door or a line of shrubs outside to hide behind. I resented his aversion to me. All I’d ever done when I’d spoken with him was share an assortment of views on subjects I could no longer recall. So after hesitating briefly I decided to rise above his snub and dare him to repeat it. Did he see himself as superior to me in some way, and if so on what basis? And who else was I going to talk to? Someone else might appear, but I wasn’t aware at the time of another potential listener. I caught up with him along the far wall, his head turned at an angle as he stared at a painting.
Hello, I said, and he replied with the same word but did not take his eyes off the canvas. How’s your work been going? I asked, struggling for rapport. I’ve been stuck lately, he said and at the word stuck he looked at me as if I embodied the word, or that’s how I took it and with good reason as far as I could tell by his rigid posture and sniffy look. I made a mental note to remember the word sniffy. I enjoyed the sound of it and could use it in my project, perhaps over and over and in this way raise the subconscious nostrils of the reader, a sense engager, engager, engager.
I’ve started a new project, I said, that I thought you might be interested in hearing about. He pursed his lips, his attention directed at the geometric subtleties of the work before him. If you’re stuck you may find something useful in my method. I write down everything at every reachable depth that passes through my mind, continuously, or as close to that as I can get. I have a spare ballpoint pen on my desk and a second spiral notebook in case I need extra materials and I let it fly, scenes and images, words from past dialogues and the imagined thoughts of others, their lies and aversions and judgments, and I want it all in handwriting, no word-processing software used at the outset. I want to engage my entire body and thus strive toward awareness of whatever flows through body and mind to form consciousness. And as the narrative progresses I attempt to work from what was written in previous pages, to dredge interpretations and meanings from that text, to develop a deeper narrative and then to proceed further with an interpretation of the interpretation, spiraling downward and outward at the same time. This method does not exclude the possibility of introducing new events and scenes, but they must grow out of all that has unfolded before them. But the underlying issue I hope to address in this project is the question of whether, on the whole, the source of difficulties in human contact–
At that point my acquaintance, whose name I could not quite remember, raised his hand directly in front of my face, a gesture unambiguously equivalent to a stop sign. Once again he fled, again not looking back, leaving me stunned that he, a fellow writer, could lack any curiosity about my project, and at such a crucial point in my elaboration, as if I’d been describing something utterly trivial or revolting. I stood frozen in my mental tracks.
Then I heard a voice and looked toward the sound of my name, the word calling me back. It was Alexandra, a young woman half my age or younger, shy but inclined to express her opinions. She’d blush as these opinions spilled from her, her eyes imbued with an admirable sincerity, and the redness of her face caused her freckles to disappear. Her head usually tilted forward as she spoke and back as she listened, her mouth hanging open to varying degrees depending on the extent of her credulity. I saw her occasionally at museums or movies and I’d made an appearance at her book club. Before meeting with the group I’d felt a horror of hearing their opinions and had imagined them riding through my mind on horses and lashing it with swords. Still, I’d been grateful to be invited and immediately found them all pleasant and receptive and I retained some regret that I’d disagreed with nearly everything they said about my stories. I’d admitted to them that most of it had nothing to do with what I was thinking when I wrote them, adding that this experience was not at all uncommon for me and that I often wondered as I listened to people’s opinions on any number of subjects whether I belonged to the same race as they did. What could I have expected them to say to that? Did I want to dissuade them from speaking?
I read your story in The Milky Way recently, she said, already blushing and tilting her head, her ponytail swaying a bit, and I wanted to talk to you about it. I read it twice actually, once in the waiting room at my dentist’s office and a second time while I sat in the chair before he came in. He runs late, and I like to read something on my tablet until he gets to me. This one appealed to me more than some of your others. I still don’t get the one we talked about in the book club about the guy who killed his eighty-five-year-old father while sleepwalking. I don’t know if we’re meant to imagine a history that would have provoked the murder or if we’re supposed to think we can be completely different people in our dreams, an idea that appeals to me, but the story doesn’t offer support for either of these interpretations so nothing holds it together for me, even though I’ve thought about it quite a bit and find the tumbling words in the story similar to the way my mind works, but don’t tell anybody.
Her face was extremely red at the end of her statement and I felt relieved to be listening to her, in no imminent danger of making a nuisance of myself.
So with this new story I had an idea that you might say was not what you were thinking when you wrote it and is irrelevant because of that, but I thought you could have the story as it stands and then write a parallel version with the same character and situations but this time the guy is taking Paxil. It would be obvious, I think, that you’re comparing how he experiences things in a different emotional state.
She leaned back then, head moving to her listening position, the redness draining from her face, receding from the center back toward her ears, which were still red and looked warm to the touch.
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of using parallel narratives, but in my mind the narrator is already taking Paxil so if I wrote a second version, as you suggested, it would be the Paxil-free narrative. No names are mentioned in the story, and that’s because a side effect of the drug is that he can’t remember people’s names.
Her mouth slowly opened as she assessed my reply and its possibly ironic content.
I like the story as it is, she went on. It’s one of my favorites of yours, along with the one about the baby who speaks German although his parents are both American and speak English. I get it that the child caregiver speaks German to the baby, but the question of what causes him to prefer the sound of German makes the story more interesting. Does it portend a deep-seated and maybe innate rebellion against his parents that will endure and develop throughout his life, or what? The questions raised by the German-baby story drew me further into it rather than throwing me into a funk, but I don’t think I could tell you why. I better get back to my husband, Homer. He’ll get jealous if I talk to you too long. I don’t mean that’s what this is about, but it’s how he’ll look at it. Are you enjoying the show?
Too many triangles for me, but I like the roots.
Me too. Where do they come from?
Exactly.
She left me, her hands twitching at her sides, a jittery sign language that I understood perfectly, understood perfectly, perfectly, just as I understood her impulsive urge to express her thoughts, plunging ahead despite the tension sometimes aroused in the speaker and the listener. It was conceivable that like me she struggled with the problem of whether you were intruding or indulging yourself in an unwelcome way and whether you were doing it intentionally or unintentionally or quite a bit of both. I’d never met Homer, whose wrath she may have risked in speaking to me, but I watched her go to the man I guessed must be him and was happy to see him absorbed in his own conversation.
It then occurred to me that I had no reason to stay a moment longer at the gallery. I was suddenly disgusted by the sight of people’s mouths moving and by the sizes and shapes of their teeth, and I imagined their empty stomachs roaring and them on their way to dinner after the show. I suddenly noticed the number of people avidly scanning their phones and poking whatever they poked on them. How could I have been so self-absorbed not to see it before? I imagined them walking into space with their phones, stepping forward onto down escalators, unaware of the drop as they tumbled forward, or striding obliviously off cliffs, eyes on nothing but their phones as they plummeted. Everything I saw in them filled my mind with noise and static, but what was the cause of my disgust? What did I care what they did with their phones? Did I fear that the mouth movers would angrily pounce on my body and eat me? What an absurd idea.
I got myself going and walked around the corner, not looking over my shoulder for a possible farewell glance from my closed-minded acquaintance, eyes directly on the front door, which a couple happened to be leaving through. They held it for me and I was out, drawing in a breath more free than any I’d taken inside, soothed by the air on my skin.
It was nice to see you, Alexandra said from behind, and the tone in her voice brought on a smile.
I looked back and saw her walking through the door, one of her hands tightening into a nervous grip.
I don’t know why I said that about the alternate storyline with the Paxil. I didn’t mean it. Maybe I wanted to provoke you, I don’t know why, just forget about it. I did think about the idea, seeing the story through a changed lens, and I guess I wanted your reaction.
I wouldn’t change the story, but it’s worth thinking about it in that light. I’ll do that. And I admit I hadn’t thought the narrator was taking Paxil.
I didn’t think you meant it, don’t worry.
She went back into the gallery, her final comment lingering as I pondered its implications. I’d preferred to see my comment about the narrator using Paxil as ironic, but why dress it up with a fancy label when I was simply lying to her and she knew it? How did she see me, I wondered, and how much had I unwittingly embarrassed myself when we’d spoken? So-called experts claimed that language should be used to connect people so why did I use it to distance others and thereby drive myself deeper into an isolated void? They claimed consistently that human contact made you happier, a subject that I questioned and explored in my handwritten pages. I felt strongly ambivalent on these subjects, but I couldn’t deny the simple pleasure at hearing Alexandra say, Nice to see you.
It disturbed me that she might see me as a liar, and though I saw no sign that she held it against me I held it against myself and knew she had a right to expect more from me. I’d been all set to get in my car and begin talking back to the unruly chatter inside my head and when I arrived at my desk to spill out as much of it as I could reach and try to make sense of it, the two warring sides of myself, the misnamed voice of reason and the wild animal that I rode around on without a saddle arguing with each other and trying and probably failing to come to an enduring resolution or peace. My throat clenched as I stepped toward the gallery and opened the door to look for her, into the arena with her potentially pugilistic husband. But why escalate the drama when I didn’t know what would happen? Two adults could have a conversation without anyone having to call emergency services.
Alexandra wasn’t far away, but she was standing next to the same man as before, presumably Homer, who appeared strikingly nondescript. If I closed my eyes virtually no image of him would have remained. I had second thoughts, but then she noticed I’d come back in, and she must have sensed that I wanted to speak to her because she was leaving Homer’s side. Words mounted, rising to meet her, and now here she was, eager to listen.
My latest project is to unburden myself, I told her, speaking far too fast, to heave onto the page the unending internal racket and to rewrite it again and again, each succeeding page and chapter originating from the buried content of the previous sections or chapters, until I reach a conclusion about whether I am the instigating source of the racket and its effects on my outlook or if it arises from the inherent conflict involved in human contact. Does it come from a partly submerged and untamed animal inside me, from networks of confused neurons, or is the noise an inevitable product of a collision between me and others with all parties sharing responsibility for the impact of the crash? I tend to think the source of the noise is me. What you said about Paxil suggests that. If a pill can change the outlook then that implies the problem’s source is within the mind. I wanted to resist the idea of putting Paxil in the story, out of fear that I alone am the cause of my anger and resentment and constant mental yakking, but on the other hand I haven’t been able to dismiss it.
So are you unburdening yourself or increasing your burden? she asked, her head tilting forward, the aptness of her question jolting me. All the words piling up, all the uncertainty in the process, and can you hope to explain the true nature of what you call the racket or to make what it may or may not want to tell you understandable enough to put it to rest? How much can you expect yourself to know or understand and how can you think there could be only one source, you, for what goes through your mind? And in the end, no matter what you do or think, maybe it’s just there and you could decide not to listen to it so much. It wouldn’t go away, but it might help.
Just when I thought we might be getting somewhere, Alexandra assuming the role I’d hoped my acquaintance might fill, Homer walked up, his face taking in mine.
I haven’t had the pleasure, he said and extended his hand, which I shook, though something in his choice of words made my flesh crawl.
Alexandra told him my name and explained how she knew me, her explanation doing nothing to reduce the intensity of his curiosity. He glanced at Alexandra to judge her degree of interest in me, vigilant for clues of a deeper attachment, but she revealed no concern he’d unmasked a secret and no hint that she wished we hadn’t spoken or that I should depart in order to defuse an impending uproar. Homer edged between us, obstructing our visual path, threatened by what he saw as my nearness to her.
His phone went off then, and he apologized to us as he snatched it off his belt. He turned his back to me but kept an eye on Alexandra, putting his hand on her arm.
He’s a doctor, she said.
I see he appreciates you, I said.
Her mouth tightened, stifling a pained smile. Homer gripped her arm tighter and I imagined his hand affecting the flow of her blood, her blood. Anyone could see she didn’t want his hand on her arm, but I cautioned myself that I couldn’t know what forces were at work between them, what words he might say about me on their way home or in their bedroom. I knew I shouldn’t assume the worst of him or make excessive inferences about her stifled smile. But were they excessive? So what did I have in mind, to disengage his hand and take her away from him? Was I the one to be feared, the one most in danger of being driven by haywire emotions?
Alexandra’s blush had reappeared, and as he spoke in a low tone to his phone she removed his clutching hand. I wanted a private word with her, but how could I do that without riling up Homer and therefore making the situation more difficult for Alexandra? Besides, Homer had returned his phone to its holster, and he was telling Alexandra they had to leave, a patient needed him. It was good to meet me, he said, his eyes now looking in the general direction of my face but not exactly at my face, preferring, as I saw it, not to fully acknowledge me. I said it was good to meet him, mirroring his words, I suppose, out of some sense of safe boundaries, though my resignation troubled me.
Alexandra’s blush had not left her, perhaps because he had her arm again, though not as firmly this time. But she didn’t seem afraid, which led me to reject the idea of following their car and pulling up alongside them if I witnessed a violent argument, Homer swerving from his lane, arms flailing. And as I imagined my pursuit I asked myself what got into me thinking like this. Why did I conjure up disparaging scenarios and attribute what originated in me to the motives and behavior of others?
I watched Alexandra and Homer exit the gallery, his hand moving to her back, nothing wrong in that, no gripping, no taking possession, only a touch. She turned at the door and gave me a suggestion of a wave, her freckles imperceptible beneath her face’s redness. Was I failing her? Why did I confront myself with this question? She wasn’t a prisoner and she could make her own decisions, and he had a patient to see.
I had a lot to recount, to weave thematically into my broader narrative, unrecognized elements and echoes to dredge up on my encounters at the gallery. I considered emailing my contact person at the book club to ask for Alexandra’s email. I could let some time pass and then write to her for an update, see if everything was going well for her. I saw it as fortunate that my memory couldn’t call up a clear image of Homer’s face. I told myself I wouldn’t be watching for him wherever I went, at some depth expecting to observe something that would cause me to develop further suspicions about his worthiness as Alexandra’s husband. But if I did happen to come across him at the grocery store, say, I might recognize him or, more likely, he might recognize me. We might stop and exchange a look of recognition. But what would the recognition consist of in each of us? For his part, would it have been limited to a passing awareness of a familiar face? I cautioned myself not to presume to know the obscure density and culture of Homer’s mind, but I suspected it would consist of more.
After giving it more thought I decided not to email Alexandra and resolved to stay out of their business, but as I worked the narrative constantly led me back to Alexandra and Homer. Did my brain crave obsession? If so, I couldn’t reasonably think I’d improve matters by involving them in my pathological patterns.
I continued with my routine, piling up the pages, and if I needed some space or missed the sight of other people, I went for long walks at the mall. I was forty minutes into one of them on a Saturday afternoon, my back hurting after hours hunched over spiral notebooks, when I saw Homer heading into the lower level of a department store, his phone hooked on his belt. I tried to ignore him, kept going, but found myself cursing his strutting gait, his obvious indifference to everything around him, headquarters of the world right inside his skull, how lucky for him to be such a person.
I decided to turn back and have a chat with Homer, realizing that without knowing it I’d been looking for him. I could start off with a phony apology for taking up Alexandra’s time at the gallery and for arousing his concern. I was sorry if I’d been inconsiderate of his feelings, I’d say, and regretted any difficulty I might have caused. It made me sick to think of this loathsome display of insincerity and I couldn’t begin to imagine how he might receive it, but if he didn’t accept my apology and became agitated I’d be under no obligation to be civil to him. If his voice got loud and he poked me with his finger or tried to tell me off, his eyeballs protruding with bulging anger yearning to find a way out, I couldn’t be blamed for taking up for myself, a time-honored principle of human interaction. Homer was considerably younger than I was and I had a sore knee and a hip that could benefit from surgery, but I still had enough juice left to step up if the little shit chose to disrespect me. In view of his line of work he should be healing people, not pushing his wife around or stirring up conflict and animosity. Did he think his profession gave him special rights, exclusions from the rules of behavior that applied to the rest of us?
I saw him at a sale table, as nondescript as ever, thumbing through stacks of trousers. He sensed me nearing and cocked his head.
Is that you, Homer?
He squinted at me with annoyance and then looked behind him. No one was there.
Who the hell is Homer? he asked. For that matter, who the hell are you?
My mistake, I said.
I made my escape as fast as I could. The unidentified shopper had no interest in hearing a superfluous explanation, and his breath was so bad that I wanted to don one of those plastic suits scientists wore when handling toxic materials. I couldn’t think of a more perfect person to make me feel like an idiot for mistaking him for someone else. All my raving about Homer and what would happen if he didn’t accept my ludicrous apology had been nothing but delusional drivel.
And though I fled the scene I couldn’t get away from the humiliating thought that I habitually devoted excessive time and effort to becoming a bigger and better fool. I resumed my walk at a reckless pace, the background mall music a blur, the shapes of others shifting in every direction. I needed to control my breath, control my breath, calm down the lurching, rumbling animal, all too aware that it would be with me wherever I went. I should leave the mall, get home and back to work, before I spotted another phantom Homer, subconsciously egging myself on with some melodramatic fantasy of rescuing Alexandra from a dark hidden room off a tortuous hallway, risking further episodes of mistaken identity, one of which would no doubt be my own. The unclouded truth was staring me down. I couldn’t look at people without injecting my self-generated racket into the picture, and the way I saw others had far more to do with me and my needs than anything to do with them. How could I have failed to halt my inner debate and fully accept this fact? I often didn’t even meet people halfway but invaded them, knocked down walls and painted the ones left standing. Had any of them invited me in? Did I care? Why did I persist in doing this? Was boundless stupidity or insufficient humanity enough to explain it? What less disparaging motive could I unravel? As the man fleetingly known as Homer had asked: Who the hell are you? Did I really want to know? Should I vow to control myself and permanently cease working on my project?
I changed direction, focused on walking out through the door that I’d entered, not far away, only minutes. I could get in my car and lock the doors and wait for my mental fog to subside, all those who happened to be nearby safe from me until I merged with traffic and drove with purpose toward my desk, where, I could already feel it, the relentless onslaught of verbalization would continue.
Issue 7 Contents NEXT: Stephanie Says by Alain Douglas Park
TWO POEMS by Corey Van Landingham
VIEW POINT, SAN ANDREAS FAULT
From here, I see the up-thrust of collision,
how the Indio Hills have changed
through time. In a year, the sign says,
we will be standing two inches to the left
of where we are now. I have wasted
the winter on a man who will never
love me. Five hundred miles from here,
my apartment stands on top of this same
fault, just hidden. Nights I can’t sleep,
imagining the forces beneath me
creating a world I’ll never see. In the one
I can, the park closes at sunset.
The light is handsome, but I can’t give it
to anyone. The flowers start shutting down.
Where the valley rises, I can believe
in a future that does not hold us close.
Intersecting, the plates broke through
the earth’s crust until time was visible.
I want us to matter like ephemera:
old stock certificates, the postcards we buy
in the gift store. Driving home, we pass
the air force base, which of course
we can’t see. It’s the army. It’s a secret.
From the overlook I could see
into Mexico. Everyone else leaving
each other in their different languages.
A BAD DATE
The pleasure boats cut across the lake we can see
from the hotel restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows.
“I’m a sucker for a view,” I say, which, he tells me,
dignifies imperialism. What with Rome, and all.
We’re meeting to see if I will let him, tonight,
tie me to not-his-bed, to, with the instruments
he will deem necessary, knock against me while
his wife watches. I’m trying to forget another
man, so I repeat what I have heard on the radio:
to assuage traffic jams, engineers are studying
ants. Sans egos, they get where they need to go.
No flash. No honking. No aggressive driving.
Outside is only an inch of glass away. I sip my wine.
The fog bank has been erasing the hills
for a week, and in the mornings I climb the stairs
to my apartment’s balcony, where what is visible
is mine, and I would kill for it, the right-out-there.
Issue 7 Contents NEXT: When I Died by Fire by Scott Beal
FWR Monthly: May 2015
Starting this spring, we’ll be sending our subscribers monthly “mini-issues,” each one edited by different members of our staff. We see these monthlies as a chance to showcase more great work, and explore more topics of interest, than we have room for in our regular biannual issues.
To kick things off, I’ve chosen work that blurs the sometimes arbitrary boundary between poetry and prose. As a reader, editor, and writer, I’m most interested in work that blends the finest elements of both — the kind of work in which one hears, as Robert Frost once called it, the “sound of sense.”
I hope you like these “poems” and “stories” just as much as I do, and will keep an eye out next month for a brand new feature, chosen by a different member of our team. Until then, thanks for reading.
~ Ryan Burden
Managing / Fiction Editor
TWO STORIES
by Kevin McIlvoy
THE LUTHIER’S MOTHER’S MOUTH’S OPENNESS
The Luthier’s mother’s mouth’s openness, her hands’ finger’s
tremblings, her red hair’s fires’ warnings. It’s what you saw if you
were making your last visit to her ever. You were the Luthier’s
mother’s Possession when you walked into her son’s guitars’
home, in which son and mother also lived together in one room.
Inside their home’s heart’s sounds: the tub’s faucet’s dripping’s
splashings and the refrigerator’s coils’ hymning humming…
TWO POEMS
by Sierra Golden
LIGHT BOAT
Jesse isn’t really a pirate, but the Coast Guard thinks so when he calls to say he found a body. It doesn’t matter that she’s still alive, so cold she stopped shivering, blue fat of her naked body waxy and blooming red patches where his hands grabbed and hauled her from the water. He stands over her with a filet knife, slowly honing the blade as he waits for Search and Rescue. The glassy eyes of a dead tuna stare up from the galley counter. At dusk, Jesse flicks on the squid lights…
TWO AMERICAS, TWO POETICS by Kate DeBolt
On November 24, 2014, my Facebook News Feed forked: all at once I was reading two wholly different kinds of perspective, like dispatches from parallel dimensions. I remember because I was laid up for days with a fever-dream flu, the kind where you pour broth down your throat while it’s still too hot because everything in your body aches for the fluid. I couldn’t sleep or work, but I could hold a laptop and click. That’s what I was doing when the grand jury announced its decision on the shooting death of Michael Brown some four months earlier.
Darren Wilson, the white police officer with some light facial bruising and a story that didn’t add up, was not indicted on murder charges. Michael Brown, the black teenager whose body lay in the street for hours, remained killed; we were just all officially meant to call it something else now.
The bifurcation of my social media stream was stark and immediate. On one side, outpourings of rage and grief, anguished and weary exchanges, posts and reposts of memes bearing Brown’s face, tagged with the gut-punching, ‘Is-this-real-life?’ hashtag #blacklivesmatter. For myself and my co-workers who teach young men of color, who have watched white cops put them in handcuffs for ‘disrespect’, very little felt larger at that moment than our terror for their safety, than the urgency of that terror. How much larger must that terror have been for their families? For the young men themselves? After all, a white cop shot a black child, and (the story goes) made enough money in donations to retire.
However, these heady emotional posts were also interspersed with ones that now seemed oddly inane. I saw photos of people’s dogs in funny hats, a recipe for Moroccan chicken, and a video tutorial for DIY (“professional quality!”) blowouts at home. I saw new haircuts and bikes and album after album of adorable children who would never need to fear for their safety from the police unless they were holding a weapon. It was almost like watching what Facebook should look like: in that parallel universe that was nearly the same as our own, but in which Ferguson was not on fire and Darren Wilson was being arraigned. “Yep, we’re all still good here, the world makes sense, check out these cats—they’re dressed like they run a Pizza Hut!”
The poetry world did something similar in the months that followed. For example, I have vivid memories of reading Danez Smith’s blazing, beautiful, sad poems: sharing them and emailing them and quoting them and being excited about them in general. For example, “Not An Elegy for Mike Brown,” which in its very first line communicates a heartsickness, a weariness:
I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name
his same old body. ordinary, black
dead thing. bring him & we will mourn
until we forget what we are mourning
It is the work of someone who does not want to have to do this work, who wishes that so many other kinds of poem were available in this moment, but who writes this one because it is necessary. It is born of the urgency of having to live in a skin you’ve been shown is a liability. It is not saying, “I will choose to confront this.” It is saying, “I must.”
One of the things that makes this poem such a difficult read is the naked hurt that travels with this imperative, the continuous acknowledgement of its subject’s general invisibility within our poetic tradition: “think: once, a white girl / was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan War. / later, up the block, Troy got shot / & that was Tuesday.” The language swings between verve and heartbreak, as when Smith demands a war to bring Michael Brown back from the dead but follows immediately with a demurral, with lowered expectations. “I at least demand a song. a song will do just fine.” To locate Brown’s killing within the epic universe of The Iliad is audacious, so much so that the impact is even stronger when the poem’s speaker de-escalates the negotiations.
Frederick Seidel also wrote a poem about Ferguson: “The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri.” More than mourning or disorientation, its oblique, meandering opening communicates a skittish reluctance to get political—anxiety over maybe being labeled pedantic runs through it like a tight-strung invisible thread. Rather than locate his concern too transparently in the political, he sidles up to the topic, approaching via the intellect. He writes:
A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack.
Then the zipper got stuck.
An angel flies in the window to unstick it.
A drone was monitoring all this
In real time
And it appears on a monitor on Mars,
Though of course with a relay delay.
One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station
Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output.
But not to worry. Forget about about about it.
The body of the man you were
Has disappeared inside the one you wear.
Ferguson, Missouri isn’t mentioned until the sixth stanza, and the reader arrives there by way of Mars, Madison Avenue, the Carlyle Bar, and Indianapolis. It’s worth saying that this isn’t a bad poem, just a puzzling one, and it does reward re-reading. The line “I wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County” works as a fulcrum, smack in the middle, subtly and (not so subtly) altering the repeated refrains that follow it. The elegant Mad. Ave. clothes-shopper from the third stanza is transformed, now a man on fire, trailing the flames after him into the Carlyle. The polite Algerian waiter collapses in strokes and prayers.
Seidel uses this technique to demonstrate the way that even the most pedestrian (if elite) concerns and activities are sullied by systemic injustice. The poem is heavily historical, grounded in Seidel’s memories of the Civil Rights Movement; Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Billie Holiday are all present. It also strives for topicality, concerning itself to the point of preoccupation with drones, monitors, terror, privacy—all humans, regardless of race, united under a surveilling eye.
So where’s the difference, and does it matter? The obvious answer would be that white poets can choose to engage this topic—the destruction of black and brown bodies at the hands of our police, cavalier, casual, largely unpunished, and seemingly ceaseless. This is one of the most insidious benefits of white privilege. When our racist great-uncles insist on ‘playing Devil’s advocate’ on Facebook, we are free to defriend. When the news is baffling and horrifying, we are free to turn our eyes elsewhere. We are free to choose whether we make this ‘our issue’; when we do make it our issue, we are free to approach it as serenely, as philosophically, as much Devil’s advocates as we like. We are free, in essence, to live on the dogs-in-hats side of the Facebook feed.
On November 25, 2014, Danez Smith wrote an “Open Letter to White Poets,” saying:
There are people I cannot reach because what I make is degraded (& why not glorified?) for its label of black art. I implore, I need you to make art, black, dark art that shines an honest light on the histories of your paler kin. I ask you to join those fighting, under the cry of “Black Lives Matter”, in whatever way you can. Research ways you can be involved in your local community, think critically about how you can use your privilege and influence, effect change; I challenge you to make art that demands the safety of me, of many of your writing siblings, of so many people walking the streets in fear of those who are charged to protect us, even of people who we hesitate at times to call our fellow Americans.
As my activist friends have been putting it, “white silence equals white consent.” I would argue for a poetics that complicates this notion, or at least one that holds white artists to a higher standard than simple acknowledgement of systemic racism. In certain instances, without forethought or empathy, white speech on these issues can be incredibly harmful. Witness Kenneth Goldsmith’s now-infamous performance piece, “The Body of Michael Brown,” a 30-minute long reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report. Goldsmith read this text (which he altered through cut-ups and remixing) beneath a massive projected image of Brown’s graduation photo. He chose to end the poem with a jarring line about Brown’s “unremarkable” genitalia. He played these choices straight, with a gravitas that could be called self-congratulatory if one were feeling uncharitable, and seemed honestly surprised at the outpouring of rage and pain that followed.
Many writers of color have deconstructed this poem, far more eloquently than I could here; I bring it up because it illustrates my point so well. White silence is unacceptable, but mere white speech is not enough. It is possible for white authors to enter the conversation in modes and styles that reify white supremacy rather than helping to dismantle it. Black and brown bodies—black and brown tragedy, misery—are not a canvas for our experimentation or philosophizing. At a certain point, Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s injuries can only look like appropriation. At a certain point, Seidel’s observation that he “wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County” only serves to remind that he is a white man in New York City.
This type of speech is easy, and it is not what we need. Rather, we need white poets to be accountable, to be honest about the power of our voices and their capacity to wound, to be aware of how far those voices carry. Claudia Rankine, quoting Judith Butler, wrote that “we suffer from the condition of being addressable.” Amiri Baraka wrote, “Let there be no love poems written / Until love can exist freely and / Cleanly.” The news continues to baffle and horrify. We need to keep our eyes peeled, our fever spiked, waiting for the poem that crashes our two different worlds—two different poetics—together until they are indistinguishable, down to the dental records. Who knows? Maybe one of us could even write it.