Category: Aquifer

Empty Suitcases

Inside Oma’s farmhouse it was as if panicked thieves had found everyday objects instead of treasure: closets, cupboards, the antique sideboard emptied into piles and strewn across the floors. “Kinkerlitzchen just gets broken, or stolen to fill up suitcases,” my grandmother always said about knick-knacks. But when questioned about the suitcases, Oma had refused to elaborate. “Enkelin, be glad that we are here and together,” she’d say to me, using her native tongue for granddaughter.

 

“Oma, what’s going on?” I asked.

 

She shook her head and urged me to the attic ladder, which she had managed to pull down, probably by standing on the stepladder she had used to clear off the top pantry shelves.

 

“You will look for my mutter’s trunk?” Oma said.

 

I’d never been in Oma’s attic. The dark entrance conjured up images of spiders, bats, and rotten floorboards with rusty nails. “What do you need so badly? Did you ask my dad if he could get it?”

 

“Your father is a good boy, but tender. You are different, like me but much smarter. We can take in these things and they do not destroy us.”

 

“Destroy us?”

 

“Please, Mäuschen, Oma will not always be here, and it sits like a big stone on my chest.” She crossed her hands over her heart.

 

I took a deep breath, climbed the ladder, flipped the light switch. In the attic: boxes, insulation, cobwebs, and a black steamer trunk. A plank served as a bridge to the trunk. When I lifted a yellowed wedding dress out of the trunk, tiny moths erupted in a flutter. A tin box contained old photographs, letters, and documents, written in German. I recognized Oma’s face in the sepia photo of a curly-blonde girl with her parents and a small boy. Did Oma have a brother?

 

I carried the box to the entrance and yelled down to see if this was it. Oma was sitting on the stepladder, talking to herself. “Oma!”

 

“Christina! You frightened me!”

 

“I found the box. With photos and papers. I’m coming down.”

 

“No, not the box. I mean, you keep the box. What else?”

 

“An old wedding dress.”

 

“We must find it. Go look harder,” she said.

 

“It would help if you told me what to look for.”

 

“Ja. That’s right.” Oma scrunched her face in scorn, spit out the words. “A fancy porcelain mantel clock.”

 

—

 

Oma hustled the clock into the kitchen like she held a blanket infected with smallpox.

 

I washed off my face in the sink, while my grandmother stared at the clock. I picked it up, checked for a maker’s mark. “A Limoges. It’s exquisite.”

 

Oma started crying, her shoulders rolling like turbulent ocean waves. “You know how my parents, a simple tailor and his wife, came by this clock?”

 

“No?”

 

“Sit, I will tell you.”

 

“The foolish Nazis thought things could be made right for the German people by compensating them for the losses they incurred during the war. One day, my papa and mutter went to an immense warehouse filled with furniture, dishes, candlesticks, rugs, Kinkerlitzchen. Papa wanted nothing— it would not bring little Frederick back—but Mutter wanted compensation. They’d lost everything—reduced to rubble. Why should they not take what the Jews left behind, Mutter said. The soldiers glared at Papa. He said, ‘Go then, Hedy, take what will make this better for you.’ The clock appeared on our mantel, without discussion, as if by elves. But, your Oma knew it was tainted. When my mutter passed, I packed it away.” Oma placed her hands upon mine. “The Jews did not willingly leave those things behind, Christina.”

 

“I know.” Oma had always claimed that her family left Germany before the war. Now I was afraid to hear that we were Nazis. Something else troubled me. “Did you go to the warehouse?”

 

She shook her head without conviction and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

 

“But if your parents never talked about it, how do you know all those details?”

 

“Is this an interrogation?” Oma abruptly rose. “What is it you want from me?”

 

She rushed to the sink then slammed dirty dishes around, muttering in German. Finally, she inhaled, and her shoulders fell.

 

“You were there,” I said.

 

She nodded but stared out the window. “Mutter stayed in bed, always crying. We could not refuse them.”

 

“The Nazis?”

 

“The soldiers were laughing, carrying on, undressing me with their eyes. Papa stood there, useless. He had slinked through the war while our neighbors disappeared. ‘Go on,’ he said to me. Past the bedroom sets, the pots and pans, the necklaces, the toys. I thought of little Frederick playing with his train and I became so … angry.” She faced me. “Then I saw it.”

 

“The clock?”

 

“Ja. So beautiful. Pink roses. Gold trim. A couple on a picnic, in love. I took a suitcase, from a pile that reached the ceiling, and put the clock inside.” Oma sighed. “I am a bad person.”

 

Yes. No, I thought. We weren’t who I’d thought we were.

 

She shuffled over, stroked my hair. “This is my big stone.”

 

It felt like my stone now, too. “We should sell it.”

 

“The clock does not belong to us.”

 

The clock was probably worth one year’s tuition.

 

Oma said, “We will return it to the family. This is your job, Mäuschen.”

 

The clock sat there, glinting in the warm light cast by the setting sun outside Oma’s kitchen window. Oma’s breaths were labored in a way I had not noticed before. A squirrel chattered upon the feeder my grandfather had built beneath an ancient maple tree. I wanted thunder and lightning to tear through the sky, a torrential rainfall to pound upon the steel roof, a tornado to whirl in the near-distance. Instead, a gentle wind simply rustled through the leaves of that tree as if the suitcases had never been emptied.

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Strawberries

Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.

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Griefs Spun to Gold

Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley

Burrow Press, 2019

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00

Cover of Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley.

In his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is “skittery,” that “would prefer to remain skeptical,” and that “prefers knowing to feeling.”

 

Susan Lilley’s collection Venus in Retrograde is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (“confessional”) poetry. Lilley’s poems also demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.

 

In “Champagne Road,” the second poem in the book, is this couplet: “There must be an easier way to quit a house / than to touch everything in it.” Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book—love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)—and the ways in which Lilley’s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the “kitchen laughter, / hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing” that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.

 

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley’s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in “Experienced: Jacksonville, 1967,” in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy “stood up and burped the alphabet;” when a “boy way too old” showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin “grabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,” and when he asked how old the speaker was, “I said, I don’t know.” And the result of these transgressions? “We had to write extra Ten Commandments / for not staying with the group.” Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.

 

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is “Song for a Lost Cousin,” which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls “powdering our faces / geisha white, love potions / in the blender with nectarines / and stolen Cointreau.” And later,

 

 Even the peacocks I love

 are shadows of my first, a bird

 now dead for decades, once

 opulent and princely on a dirt road,

 

 calling for love against black

 storybook trees and a moon cut

 from tracing paper.

 

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker’s memory.

 

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. “A Man in a Hurry” chronicles the sudden death of her father, how “On the Sunday we now know was his last” “he fell / into a long moment and stayed there, / stayed no matter how we called him back.”

 

“Palm Court,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker’s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother’s childhood home, the speaker wants “to ransack the air itself / for evidence of afternoon / piano lessons, dark braids / flying behind a rope swing, / hopscotch songs in the street.” But then comes the honest and moving truth:

 

 But our faces are not

 yet dreamed of,

 here at the very place

 her girl laughter might still

 be trapped in the trees.

 

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.

 

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the “burnt cake / perfume that citrus refineries blew,” the beach houses “at the end of two-track driveways / soft with sand and flanked by / crowds of hissing palmettos / and sea grape.” Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.

 

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley’s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde succeeds at both tasks.

 

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,” included in Venus in Retrograde and previously published here in Aquifer.

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Delivery

All year I avoided the square where Sam got knocked down. But that winter I found myself making pilgrimages to the shrine someone made up. The ghost bike was painted white and chained to a pole.

 

It was the winter I started to start early. I got pretty good at riding drunk. Pavement glittered and winked at me, sick with black ice. I ate sweet exhaust, crushed dinosaur bones. Nothing could touch me on these salt roads. Grit and ice clung to my face. I looked like any street I was rolling on.

 

One day under that carbon atmosphere I finished a delivery—five stars, no tip—and went to Sam’s bike. I was feeling good. Earlier I got IDed at Liquor Planet though it was my third time there today. It made me feel faceless.

 

There used to be a sign and there used to be flowers, but the world had a way of taking things away. These days, people were always leaving trash on Sam’s shrine. Sam would have found it funny—people littering on the shrine memorializing where he was run over by a garbage truck. He loved all the weird little circles of the world. But it made me sick.

 

There was no litter on his ghost bike that day. But there was a young man in the saddle. He looked familiar. Sam, I thought, but of course it wasn’t. The young man wore a vintage army jacket and pretended to peddle while someone filmed.

 

I rolled the red light. A cab stopped short, horn blaring.

 

“Look, I’m Lance Armstrong,” the man in the vintage army jacket said, laughing with his friends.

 

Even I barely saw me coming. I hauled him off Sam’s bike, and we fell into the black crust of gutter snow. An elbow filled my mouth with the hot taste of copper. I was punching anything I could lay hands on. A blow to the helmet, felt it crack. Stars and little birds flying around. It was all happening so fast, and then it was over.

 

Armstrong’s friends peeled me off him. They pushed me away, calling me an asshole, calling me a drunk, calling me a psychopath, calling out “WorldStar.” My head echoed. I couldn’t think of anything to call them back.

 

“We should call the cops,” one said, stammering. He dropped his phone as he took it out of his pocket. “Bet he escaped from the mental hospital.”

 

“Or the zoo,” another guy said. He frantically rubbed white sneakers. Blood was streaking.

 

“That’s not what tonight is about,” Armstrong said. “Goddammit. We’re supposed to be getting trashed, not cleaning up the city. Let’s get out of here.”

 

I shucked off the bloody tube scarf and watched them go, shaking. That’s when it clicked—Armstrong was a regular, one of the college guys that always got Chipotle delivered to the row of old brick houses on Seminary Hill.

 

I stomped around Sam’s bike, feeling deflated. I felt I had to explain myself, explain how the world was. But he knew. Probably better than me. I adjusted how the bike leaned against the pole. Tried to make it seem like a real memorial, not one more abandoned thing in a city full of them. There were several ghost bikes around town, appearing overnight after a messenger was killed. I didn’t notice them until I started riding. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

 

The old-school messengers said there was a ghost bike for everyone.

 

I rolled around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take another delivery. I couldn’t show up at a customer’s door with a mouth full of blood.

 

The cold wind blew through me. Winter was a preservative. I went back to Liquor Planet. I asked if they had free refills. Big laugh, small shake of the head. Five stars, no tip, I was thinking.

 

—

 

Stuck on standby. Algorithmic detention for not accepting enough deliveries the day before. I held a white van and let it move me through the falling light. Cars were honking to each other, saying hello, swapping stories. I was the car whisperer, I knew. The van slowed. I let go, filtering through traffic. I hoped someone would hit me so I could get up swinging. I thought about the time Sam U-locked someone’s mirror after they almost doored him. I laughed and my chest hurt. Like someone U-locked my ribs.

 

I had nowhere else to go so I went to the plaza where messengers drank away standby. When I arrived, messengers were doing track stands, motionless on their bikes.

 

A messenger tilted wildly and a yell rose from the crowd. The messenger recovered, but soon overbalanced. Maria was the last one upright. She sat easy in the saddle.

 

“Did we start yet? I could do this all night,” Maria said, shielding her eyes as she caught sight of me. “And out of the dusk, a challenger.”

 

My hands were trembling, from cold or something else entirely. I shook my head and leaned my bike against a tree bundled against the winter.

 

“Nah, my man’s too old,” a messenger said.

 

“You’ve never ridden a penny-farthing,” Maria said.

 

I sat on a cold bench. The plaza overlooked a brown field where yellow machines ate the city. The sun was between buildings. Maria rolled over, held out a beer.

 

“You used to come around more. Now when you show, it’s like you’re someplace else,” she said.

 

Maria was the closest thing I had to a friend among messengers, now that Sam was gone. Like me, she was older than most other messengers in the plaza. Unlike me, she worked for the courier collective—not an algorithm. The radio strapped to her shoulder crackled as if it heard me thinking about how she got regular hours. She leaned her bike against mine, sat beside.

 

“How long are you on standby for?”

 

“They change the rules every day,” I said, shrugged. “Could be all night, could be five minutes.”

 

“You should come to the office tonight after delivery hours are over. I’ll put in a good word for you. Turnover is so high, nobody remembers why they fired you. You can drop the foodie gigs for real shifts.”

 

“I can’t take Sam’s old job,” I said.

 

“It’s not,” Maria said. “It was Greta’s, then Ulysses’s. And they both left, same as everyone. Look around. It’s all new faces all the time. They’re not long for it anyway. Not like us dinosaurs.”

 

“The dinosaurs weren’t long for it either,” I said.

 

Below, machines with tires the size of people moved earth around. It was hard to wrap my head around the scale of it all.

 

“What about you,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

 

“I’ll never leave. Those trucks will have to pave me over,” Maria said.

 

When I laughed she tossed me the beer. It twisted in the air, and I had to catch it.

 

Another messenger clicked over the brick plaza. She asked Maria if she was signing up for the race this weekend, and handed over a clipboard. Maria signed her name and passed it to me. I looked at the names, recognizing only a handful.

 

“I’m rusty,” I said and shook my head.

 

“Steel is real,” Maria said. She patted her bike frame.

 

A light snow was beginning to fall. I thought about telling her about Sam’s bike, the drunks, the guy in the vintage army jacket. But I didn’t want to drag her down with me. I was only just keeping above water myself.

 

—

 

My phone woke me. I was off standby. Back online. Jacking in, I thought. The app promised a bonus if I completed ten deliveries during the blizzard. I unlocked my apartment door and walked through the dark basement. The world was a void beyond the glass lobby door. I didn’t know the storm was approaching, and now it was here. I never checked the weather. Whatever happens happens, I figured. I stowed a fifth in my jacket, rolled airplane bottles into my socks, feeling like an operator suiting up.

 

Outside, snow whispered against snow. The wind gusted up, the snow rushing like someone shook the world. But it always settled. I felt I was cycling through empty rooms. There was no sound beside the low crush of tires against the piste of the road.

 

There were bikes left out in the blizzard. Now every bike was a ghost bike. Every house and streetlight was its ghost, too. You only really knew a place when you saw ghosts everywhere.

 

A snowplow emerged from behind a snowbank. I stopped short, skidding. The wall of air hit me and held me. The pan of its yellow lights splashed across the white world. Salt leaped down the hill after it.

 

I brought coffee to a snowbound office. “Cold out there, huh?” the man said as I brushed snow out of jacket creases. Five stars, no tip.

 

Each delivery was a window into a life being lived. Doors opened and showed me a sliver of a world that I knew nothing about. Once, I had an order for a bunch of balloons. When I tied them to my handlebars, I pictured them pulling me into the sky.

 

The cold bit the tip of my nose. Wind like knives through my jacket. I had my lights on but could only see a few feet ahead.

 

I grinded through the morning. Before long, I only needed one more drop before I made the bonus. The slush, salt, and sand alchemized into a thick paste. I had to kick my tires free.

 

Eventually they seized entirely. I locked my bike to a pole. Figured I’d walk.

 

Then I remembered Sam’s ghost bike. It wasn’t far. The big, meat-eating tires, the heavy frame only a little twisted from the collision. When he built it, he wanted to make sure he could go anywhere. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself.

 

At the square where Sam died, I picked some garbage out of the front rack. I brushed snow off the seat. The cheap cable lock was brittle with cold, snapped without a fight. I promised Sam a real chain when I was done.

 

I cranked through the storm, slush rooster-tailing behind me. It snowed like it was the end of the world. I felt good, leaning into skids and turns, falling into snowbanks. I finished the airplane bottles and spiked them into the ghost of a trashcan.

 

While I picked up the order at the restaurant, the customer messaged me. They asked if I could pick up Advil on the way to their place on the hill behind the university. Chipotle and ibuprofen. Breakfast of champions. They said they’d tip extra.

 

I wound through snowy streets and bridges over empty highways. People sculpted cars out of snowbanks. Beach chairs, cathode-ray televisions, sawhorses stood in empty spaces.

 

I fought up the hill. I leaned Sam’s bike against a snowbank, hiked over it to the brick triple-decker. When the door opened, I knew him immediately. He was wearing a sweatshirt, but it was Armstrong. The man in the vintage green army jacket.

 

I thought about going for his throat and wondered why he didn’t do the same. Didn’t he recognize me?

 

The tube scarf, I remembered.

 

“Morning,” he said, stepping into the threshold, winced, held his forehead.

 

His eyes were glassy, and there was a video game controller in his hand. Behind him was a living room that looked like the scene of a bombing. Cans of beer stood like soldiers on every surface, guarding against the world. It seemed familiar, didn’t seem worth it. Everyone was their own little tragedies. All standing on top each other and wearing a trench coat, walking around and trying to blend in. I handed over the delivery, turned to crunch back down the steps.

 

“Wait,” he said.

 

Here it comes, I thought.

 

“Oh, you got the ibuprofen. Thanks,” he said. He flashed me a smile and a thumbs up. “Had a few too many last night. You’re a lifesaver.”

 

I showed him a thumbs up with my thick glove.

 

I got on the ghost bike as the door crashed shut behind me. I looked around at the big snowy world and shivered. Five stars, no tip.

 

A plow went by, salting the land. It sounded like rain falling softly. The streets were empty, woolly with snow. The city seemed like it was under glass.

 

Maybe I had a shot at the race this weekend, I was thinking. None of the rookie messengers could ride like this in the snow.

 

I coasted down the hill. The plow turned a corner and the wind died down and the world was quiet. The falling snow streaked past, and I felt I was at the bridge of a spaceship, jumping to hyperspace.

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Rupture

Rupture

Story by Eileen Herbert-Goodall
Images and accompanying text by Joe Maccarone
Sound Track by Lhasa Mencur

 

Outside the window, rain obscured everything except the towering eucalypt. The tree was home to a pair of hawks and Janelle hoped they weren’t getting pummeled by the storm. At times, she wished she could be like them, that she could sprout wings and fly away, if only for a while. She sipped her tea and struggled to collect her thoughts; lately, her psyche seemed split, her entire being ungrounded. She longed for answers that proved elusive. Sometimes, bad things happened and there could be no explaining why.

 

Janelle drained her cup and placed it in the sink along with last night’s dishes. Evidently, if she didn’t do them, then they didn’t get done. But there was no point raising the issue with Brian; she needed to pick her battles, to save energy.

Almost a year had passed since the incident that marked their son’s drastic and seemingly irrevocable changes, and still the doctors had no idea what was going on. Various terms had been mentioned in an attempt to identify his condition—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Altered Mental Status, Elective Mutism. They could call it whatever they liked, it made no difference—so far nobody had managed to get Jeffery to speak again.

Not even her, his mother.

Shards of rain continued to strike the window. Outside, the eucalypt swayed; leaf litter scurried across the ground, hurled about by the wind, without free will. Was she any different?

Janelle’s husband entered the kitchen and she turned to see him making coffee.

‘You taking Jeffery to the psychiatrist today?’ Brian asked.

‘No, I thought I’d palm that job off to my assistant.’

He looked at her, teaspoon held in mid-air. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Not really. I’d like you to come with us for a change.’

‘I can’t, got a huge day at work. Two open houses and a couple of contracts on the table.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more involved.’

‘Involved?’

A flush of pink crept up Brian’s neck and Janelle experienced a jab of satisfaction upon realising her words had wounded him.

‘Is that what you think? That I’m not involved?’

‘Even Doctor Berwick said she hasn’t seen you in a while.’

‘When did she say that?’

‘Last time we saw her—a couple of weeks ago.’

He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Well, somebody has to go to work around here.’

‘Excuse me?’

Brian held up a hand. ‘That came out wrong.’

‘It’s impossible for me to work right now.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why bring it up?’

He put down his cup. ‘We need an income, Janelle.’

‘I’d just like you to come to an appointment every now and then. Is that so much to ask?’

They stared at one another.

‘Sorry, but I’ve got to go.’ He retrieved his keys from the hook beside the pantry and disappeared into the hallway.

‘Of course you do,’ she called. ‘And go to hell while you’re at it.’

The front door slammed and she soon heard his car rumbling down the road.

Janelle turned to look outside once more. From where it stood battling the elements, the eucalypt appeared to observe her.

‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

Its branches swirled on with admirable forbearance. Or was it disappointment?

 

At first, he simply drew around the sides of a piece of paper—a wolf’s face here, a doodle there—but after a while, he began to write.

 

He read over the letter, then screwed it up and threw it into the little bin beside his desk. It was baby-ish to write about the noise inside his head. Stupid.

Jeffery stood, walked to the window and looked outside. He wanted to run around in the rain and let it wash the bad memories away. If only the wolf-men would leave him alone.

Doctor Berwick had brought a colleague into their session—one Professor Lycan from the Institute of Psychological Studies, who was apparently researching “unusual” psychological childhood conditions. Janelle wished Doctor Berwick had sought her permission to have this man present. Even a little warning would have been nice. She didn’t like the idea of Jeffery being observed by someone she didn’t know.

The professor’s hair, along with his neat beard, was gray-white. He wore round, steel-framed spectacles and sat scribbling in a notebook that rested against his legs. The sound of his pen running across paper seemed to fill the room. So far, he had said very little.

Jeffery stared at his shoes. Janelle could feel the tension emanating from his little body. She wondered if the doctors felt it too. Probably not. They weren’t attuned to him the way she was.

‘And there’s been no change in his behaviour?’ Doctor Berwick was saying. ‘No indication he’d like to interact more?’

‘Not particularly,’ Janelle said.

‘He’s still doing his drawings?’

‘Yes. ’

‘That’s good.’ Doctor Berwick glanced at Professor Lycan, who continued to write with feverish intensity. ‘It’s vital that he has a creative outlet, somewhere to express his feelings, so to speak.’

The professor looked up from his notebook. ‘Mrs Watson—’

‘Please, call me Janelle.’

‘Alright, Janelle—Jeffery is twelve years old, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how would you describe your relationship?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Would you describe Jeffery’s attachment to you as positive?’

She tilted her head. ‘Of course.’

‘What about the relationship with his father?’

‘Brian works full-time, but when he’s home they get along well. Why do you ask?’

The professor placed his writing materials on a nearby desk. ‘Studies have shown that parents of behaviourally inhibited children often perceive them as vulnerable. Such perceptions can influence how they engage with their children.’

‘How so?’

‘For instance, parents who regard their children as socially withdrawn often endorse practices that discourage independence and exploration.’

Janelle held the professor’s spectacled gaze.

A clock on the wall ticked.

‘Are you suggesting my husband and I are overprotective?’ she asked finally.

‘I’m sure the professor is simply trying to get an idea of Jeffery’s life at home,’ Doctor Berwick said.

‘His life at home is fine. I take it, Professor, you’re aware of the incident my son and I witnessed around a year ago?’

‘Doctor Berwick has filled me in on that history, yes.’

‘That history, as you call it, is where the problem lies,’ Janelle said. ‘Before then, he was a content, happy boy. He attended school, enjoyed play-dates with friends. He spoke. But after that day, everything changed.’

‘No doubt there’s significant traumatic residue associated with that event,’ the professor said. ‘But Jeffery needs to realise that what happened is in the past. He needs to make peace with the bogeyman.’

‘The bogeyman?’ Janelle was at a loss as to why the professor would refer to the stuff of folklore and scary night-time stories when discussing her son’s condition. It was 1987, not the Dark Ages. Surely he understood that what Jeffery had seen was terrifyingly real.

‘I think Professor Lycan means we want to create a safe environment in which Jeffery is encouraged to face his fears,’ said Doctor Berwick, ‘to understand that what happened was an extremely unfortunate, one-off event.’

Wasn’t that what she’d been trying to do? To make sure he felt safe? To make sure the goddamn bogeyman didn’t, once again, come in and blow up his world.

 

 

‘May I ask Jeffery to do something?’ the professor said.

Janelle crossed her arms. What was she supposed to say? ‘Okay.’

The professor grabbed his pen and notebook and passed them to Jeffery. ‘I believe you like to draw.’

Jeffery nodded.

‘How about you draw whatever comes to mind when you think of that day at the bank. You remember that day, don’t you?’

Another nod and then Jeffery opened the notebook. No one spoke as he tended to the task at hand. Janelle shifted in her seat as the clock on the wall continued to tick.

A few minutes later, Jeffery placed the notebook on the desk and dropped his gaze to the floor.

The professor retrieved his notebook and studied the image. He then handed the notebook to Dr Berwick, who examined it briefly before passing it to Janelle.

 

 

There had been two of them: they’d burst into the building screaming orders, shotguns raised, their faces hidden behind strange wolf masks. The first man had hurried towards the counter and started yelling: ‘Everyone get down and don’t move.’

Janelle kept still, her face pressed to the floor. Jeffery lay nearby, eyes pinned open by toothpicks of terror.

‘Open your drawer,’ the first man said. ‘Get the money out. Come on. Put it in the bag. Now.’

‘Okay, okay,’ the attendant said.

‘Come on. Money in. Move it.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Shut up and move.’

‘I’m going as fast as I can…’ the attendant said, fumbling with the bag, ‘…doing my best.’

‘Christ, shut up. Or you’ll get a bullet in the brain.’

It occurred to Janelle that perhaps she was having a nightmare, that her psyche was drawing upon some movie she’d seen, or a story she’d once read. Maybe it was all just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream.

‘Sorry,’ the attendant said. ‘This has never happened to me before. I—’

‘You wanna die?’

‘No, no, I don’t.’

‘Then stop talking.’

‘Sure, okay. I just—’

The sound of a gunshot bounced off the walls, reverberating in what was otherwise a terrible and gaping silence.

‘What the hell?’ The second man strode towards the counter. ‘We said nobody shoots.’

The first man answered: ‘You heard him—he wouldn’t shut up.’

‘Jesus! Grab the bag and let’s go.’

Janelle watched Jeffery, who now had his eyes squeezed shut. She would do anything—anything—if only he were kept safe.

The second man began shouting orders: ‘Everybody stay down and no one else gets hurt.’

Before long the men had fled through the building’s front doors, and the horror was over. Or so Janelle thought.

She glanced from Doctor Berwick to the professor and back again. Janelle felt somehow responsible for what she was looking at, for the memory that had scarred Jeffery’s mind. But what could she have done? How could she have possibly foreseen events set to unfold that day?

The professor took the notebook from Janelle and turned to Jeffery. ‘You must have been very scared.’

Jeffery shrugged.

‘Do you see such wolf-men very often?’

He nodded.

‘In your mind?’ The professor pointed to his temple. ‘In your dreams?’

Another nod.

‘Sometimes I have bad dreams, too—everyone does.’

‘It’s not from a dream,’ Janelle said. ‘The men were wearing wolf masks.’

The professor continued to focus on Jeffery. ‘Well, you know what?’

Naturally, Jeffery didn’t answer.

‘Those bad men aren’t coming back,’ the professor said. ‘They’re in prison and they’ll be there for a very long time.’

Janelle was certain the offenders had never been apprehended. What, exactly, was the professor up to? ‘I think Jeffery’s had enough for today.’

 

 

The professor stared at her. For a moment, she thought he would insist upon having them stay, so he could continue studying them as he might have studied curiosities at a freak show.

Instead, he said, ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you both. I hope we can talk again.’

She rose to her feet. ‘Come on, Jeffery. It’s time to go.’

‘Thanks for coming in.’ Doctor Berwick stood and clasped her hands together. ‘Be sure to make another appointment, won’t you.’

Janelle kept quiet as she led her son from the room. Who would they turn to now?

By the time they arrived home, the day had cleared. After lunch, Janelle took Jeffery outside. There was a pond in the back garden and he enjoyed playing near its edges. As they approached the eucalypt, she spotted something on the ground—a nest, and beside it an empty egg. She wondered about the baby bird and scanned the tree, but saw only leaves and branches. Jeffery squatted down to survey the damage.

 

 

After a while, he looked up at her. He seemed neither upset, nor surprised, by what they’d found. Janelle took him by the hand and they continued on.

When they reached the lake’s edge, Jeffery crouched to inspect the water. He’d linger there for hours given the chance, and Janelle would have been happy to let him. Truth be told, she dreaded her husband’s return from work every day, the forced conversation, the awkward silences. She only ever managed to relax when he wasn’t around. Then again, maybe she really had become selfish and difficult, as Brian claimed the other night.

She sat on the garden seat facing the pond. Shafts of golden light shifted upon the water.

As was often the case when she had time to think, Janelle began to mentally list the potential reasons as to why she and Brian had grown apart. To begin with, they hardly had any common interests. Years ago, they’d enjoyed sailing—that was how they’d met—but the hobby fell by the wayside after Jeffery came along. Their financial situation certainly didn’t help; the real estate agency had been struggling for months and money was tight. Then there was Jeffery’s refusal to speak, which had been a tremendous strain on them both. And yet, he wasn’t to blame for their problems; he was just a scared, young boy who’d been damaged by the world.

In any event, it seemed neither she nor Brian had the courage to voice the truth: their marriage was in trouble. It was easier, she suspected, for them to pretend that the benefits of their relationship outweighed the drawbacks. Besides, they needed to consider Jeffery; keeping their homelife on a relatively even keel was essential to his wellbeing. She watched as he skimmed stones across the lake’s glassy surface. She had failed once to protect him, but wouldn’t do so again. Not if she could help it.

Later, as they walked to the house, Janelle again inspected the eucalypt. There was still no sign of the hawks.

Janelle placed their meals on the dining table before pouring them each a glass of water. Jeffery gave a smile, which she knew was his way of saying thank you. Brian continued to scan the real estate section of the newspaper. She sighed, but he gave no sign of having noticed.

She sat and began to eat. Janelle had experimented with a new casserole. The recipe promised to deliver “a knock-out punch of flavor”, but she thought it tasted bland. Then again, maybe the problem rested with her. Perhaps she had lost the capacity to enjoy anything.

At last, Brian put down his newspaper. ‘How did it go today?’

For some reason that she couldn’t identify, Janelle felt the need to make her husband work to deliver meaning. ‘How did what go?’

‘Jeffery’s appointment?’

‘It went smashingly well. Thanks for asking.’

Brian thumped the table, making Jeffery flinch. ‘What’s gotten into you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes you do. I can’t do a thing right these days. It’s as if my very presence offends you.’

Janelle realised this was quite possibly true—maybe she couldn’t stand being around her husband anymore. She began to clear their plates. ‘Actually, your presence would have been very much appreciated today.’

He leant back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I want you to be happy—I want us to be happy—but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix things.’

Janelle couldn’t think of a response. She knew Brian was trying to move forward, to take a step in terms of bridging the yawning rift that stretched between them, yet her instinctive reaction had been to freeze. She seemed unable to reconnect on any level. Perhaps she’d become accustomed to their dysfunction, maybe even addicted to it.

In any event, the moment passed.

‘I work hard to pay the bills,’ he said, ‘to keep a roof over our heads—’

Janelle returned to the table. ‘Oh, that’s right, I don’t work.’

And there it was—the relentless merry-go-round of hurtful misunderstandings and accusations that swept them up in its momentum, again and again.

 

 

‘I never said that.’

‘But it’s what you meant,’ she said.

‘Why do you always twist my words?’

Jeffery jumped up. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Just stop.’

Janelle stared at him, transfixed. It was as if Jeffery were the only person in the room, the only person in the world. His expression, pleading and distraught, swamped her vision. She knew she should say something. Anything. But the shock of hearing him speak had struck her dumb. Slowly, she rose to her feet.

‘Son?’ Brian said.

Jeffery turned and walked away.

Janelle watched his receding form, then met her husband’s gaze. His face was filled with pain…and something else. Relief? Hope?

Moments later, Brian trailed after their son.

She started to follow, then stopped. She needed time to process what had happened.

Janelle crossed the kitchen and peered out the window. Silent and watchful, the eucalypt stood looking in. Upon one of its branches, two small shapes sat huddled together. She watched them for a while and then returned to the table once more.

 

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Thousands and Thousands of Thousand Oaks

When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire

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Two Poems with Parents

Sleeping in My Childhood Bedroom as an Adult

Glow in the dark stars tumble

into black, their light hanging

 

like the feet

of a man tied to death. I trace

 

the outlines of memories and pull them

to my nose, they smell like

patchouli and my father’s

velvet coat. Gray shapes

 

dance to the window. Are they

the ghosts of my dead dogs

or the angels I overheard

my mother asking for help? Or maybe just

teenage headlights, sneaking back into their parents’

driveway. The laundry

room moans and shakes

 

behind a poster

of New York City’s face. The dryer thumps

against my wall. Round

round round. Clothes rise

and fall

like the air lifting up my chest. My mother’s

Elvis T-shirt. My father’s white

 

briefs. The noise goes

in circles. Up

and down. Taped on the fridge

is a photo dated two

days after my birth. My mother is holding

my head to her chest, my feet swing above

 

Elvis’s bleached teeth. And I still remember

my father

getting nervous and shouting

and shutting

 

the door when my brother and I found

him in his white briefs. Rise

and fall. I focus on the dark

and the noise and the clothes

that make the

dark warm. Up

 

and down.

Rise

and fall. Round

round round.

 

Sitting in a Classroom Where Everyone Is Smarter Than Me (Except Maybe That Guy with the Taco Tattoo)

I want to pull my knees to my chest

and make myself small and see

through like the balled-up sheets

of cling wrap I find in the drawers of my mother’s

kitchen. But I don’t do that

because I wouldn’t be small

or see through to the people

sitting across the table. They would still see

a girl with uncombed hair

wearing a baggy t-shirt she got free from a bank

because she never learned

how to not be ashamed

of her breasts. And they might find it strange

if this girl slipped her feet from

the mud-painted rainboots

that keep her weighted

to the government-bought linoleum,

and then if she pulled

her feet and the hand-knit socks

that held them up to the seat of her chair,

and what if her neck let go

so that her forehead sat balanced between

the tops of her knees.

Yes, that would look strange.

Instead I move my left thigh

over my right and tie my calves

into a knot. I can’t see

my legs beneath the table

but I imagine them as the twisted strings

of green and pink

taffy my father pulled from his suitcase

whenever he was afraid

that he’d been gone

for too long. Throw away

your wrappers, he told me. My mother yelled

when she found them

rolled into worlds

and tucked inside

the corners of kitchen drawers.

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Two Poems

Once when I was eight

and my sister seven, tensions boiled over

 in a game of hide & seek

& I slapped her. Thwack.

 Her head shook while streams on her cheek

loamed into deepening red.

 She didn’t talk to me for a week.

No chocolates, no sorry, no nothing.

 I even did her homework for a day. Still nothing.

She finally spoke when she found me

 crying in a corner after India had lost a cricket match.

Today, years later she isn’t picking up my calls

 & I’m here wondering if she’s busy

or simply pissed with me.

 I haven’t seen her in long & in this hour of prolonged dusk,

I’m trying to summon facts on her.

 But as I pace on my balcony, phone in hand,

watched by a sun rasping blood across a browning sky

 all I gather is the colour of her slapped cheek.

And how on reconciliation after a week, she had said

 I just wanted to see you cry.

 

Sambar on my shoes

I spot you in the cafeteria sitting with a faceless stranger

while I await my dosa at the desolate counter

you sip what seems like watermelon juice although

I’m sure my blood is just as gruesome and thick

that must be how your cheeks are so red and faint

like blushes of sky at dawn attracting birds of fury

and strangeness unknown I see some wrens beak you playfully

the crimson spreads through your neck like a field of clover

the stranger inundated with anticipation he crosses his legs

underneath the table when you let out a laugh

I head back to work my appetite punctured my spirit flensed

my dosa tray trembles in the tremors of discovery

buried fears don’t nibble they swallow

I try to tell myself it was probably someone else

but I find incriminating evidence when my colleague points out

continents of sambar on my white converse shoes

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Among Schoolchildren

Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.

 

As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.

 

Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.

 

How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.

 

To be sure, the children had cause to worry.

 

Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.

 

There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.

 

Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.

 

For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.

 

The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.

 

A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.

 

Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.

 

When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.

 

The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.

 

Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.

 

On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.

 

“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.

 

In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”

 

The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.

 

“Joey!  We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.

 

For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.

 

I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours.  Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.

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Future Holdings

Future Holdings documents the abandoned construction site for what would have been the tallest building in the world (Sky City) in Changsha, China. After a few short weeks of building activity in 2015, government authorities halted all construction and local residents eventually allowed the foundation to fill with water and become a fishing pond. Located on the northern edge of Changsha, Sky City would have been the first structure visitors would come across as they traveled along the Xiangjiang River. Today, though, the only elements that tower over this habitat are the construction cranes that fill the horizon. I first photographed this site in 2016 and have returned each year since. Each time, I was struck by the calm and quietness that enveloped this landscape despite the fact that with more than 7 million residents, Changsha would rank as the second largest city in the United States. My goal with Future Holdings is to investigate political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of our contemporary lives through issues of hubris, the relationship between humans and nature, and the evolution of cities like Changsha.

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No Problem, Mon: The Batty Boy Adolescent’s Quick Survival Guide

Become a Christian

There is no exception. When Grandma’s getting ready for church tomorrow, tug at her skirt hem and say Grandma, I want to come to church too. She’ll scowl. She’ll remind you that Big Reds said the same thing five years ago, but now he sleeps in every Sunday and had that seizure the other day from smoking weed. Stand your ground. Point out that you’re nothing like your brother, and that it’s her Christian duty to set you on the path of righteousness. She’ll smile. She’ll call you a mouthy little bitch.

 

Stick with it. Go to church every Sunday. Every Sunday. Starch your white shirt. Press neat creases into your wool slacks. Save any little money you have for the collection plate and cherish the pocket-sized New Testament she’d originally given to Big Reds. On the bus ride to town, ignore the other kids. Sit by your grandma and assume the stoicism of a proud martyr. This means no complaining about: the holes in the bus floor, the rents in the bus seats, the heat pressing in from all sides. Sweat will run into your eyes and pool beneath your butt. But Jesus endured much worse on the cross, so keep quiet.

 

Don’t Make Friends

Okay, this is a two-parter. So first off, don’t make friends with the kids at church. I know this is tempting; church is so damn boring (can you believe it? Jamaica in 1998, and part of Holy Trinity’s church service is still in Latin), and these kids, they’ll want you to catch butterflies with them at first, out back, in the churchyard, ’round where the tombstones are. It’s a trap. They’ll grow eventually (well, the girls you’ll witness — the boys will start to disappear around 13). They’ll grow somber, like those heavyset women in church with the lining of their slip always dipping below their skirt. They’ll start to wear blouses that button at the neck, and fasten their hair in no-nonsense plaits. They’ll start to invite you to summer retreats and choir practices and, when you politely decline, exhale gasps of frightened outrage that seem way too heavy for their flat chest. You’re not here for all that work. So just keep to yourself from the outset. Sit by your grandma and shake hands with the ladies and the old men as they walk by.

 

When your grandma dies (terrible loss, really), you can ditch that fancy church in Kingston and go to one in your own area. Don’t go to one in your direct neighborhood, though — go to one on the other side of the gully where the roads are less formal (snaking through bushes) and the houses have a delicious ad hoc quality to them — zinced and planked and set atop cinder blocks. Notice how the roof of this church is flat. Notice how the windows aren’t stained. Notice how the floor is dirty, how the walls are bare and how the pews aren’t pews but fold-up chairs. Notice how the women here jump and wail and mash their faces into foregone ecstasy. Notice how, no matter what church you go to, the preacher’s son is always tall and square-jawed and smiling at you in a way that makes you wonder if there’s anywhere Satan doesn’t have a house.

 

Speaking of your hometown, this brings us to part two of this section: don’t make friends with the other boys in your neighborhood. That’s asking for trouble. Eventually, they grow into teenagers and confront the futility of trying to make it anywhere. They never know their fathers, and they never make it past the tenth grade. They spend time under the lampposts, by the gully bank, against the old trailer, slapping dominoes, shooting dice, slipping their hands under their girlfriends’ skirts. They’ll want to pull you in on it too. Seal the bands of brotherhood. The Christian defense won’t work here. They’re too basic, too disaffected. My yute, you doh see di girl a check fi yuh? Why yaa act like a pussy?

 

Trust me. Way too risky. Best to stay inside at all times. Except when you have to go to school, of course. Your mother will send you to good schools in Kingston, far away from the locals. That’s good. After school, when you get off the town bus, head straight home. People will call to you. They’ll say Brown Boy or Scholar or Preacher. It will be out of deference. They’ll admire your discipline. Still, don’t call back to them. Nod politely or smile. Sometimes you can hold up a hand in acknowledgement. Carry around your bible for good measure too. They know you go to church, but it’s good to reinforce this every once in a while.

 

Keep up at your studies. Otherwise, you won’t have an excuse to stay indoors. Your mother will begin to think it unnatural that a boy is spending all his time in front of a television, atrophying his muscles, neutering his presence. Studying is an excellent pretext. It assures her you’re determined to make the best of her sacrifices. It buys you some good bonding time with her too. She’ll bring you milk sometimes, a whole glass. She’ll put her arms around you. She’ll say you’re nothing like your brother (Big Reds’ been disappearing for days at a time now) and squeeze a little harder. You’ll feel her lips on the top of your head. You’ll remember how soft they feel pressing against your skull. You’ll wonder when will be the last time she holds you like this.

 

Avoid All Types of Playing Fields

This might seem random, but it’s worth noting. Whether cricket or football or basketball, they’re all the same — trouble. This won’t be a problem where your schools are in Kingston; all the playing areas are walled off and/or privatized. In your hometown, though, they’re plentiful, cropping up in dubious makeshift forms in the most inconvenient places. Be vigilant. Keep abreast of the changes in landscape and avoid the main thoroughfares. Playing fields line them. I know it’s tempting to watch the boys at play, but you’ll thank me. What do you think will happen when a ball comes your way? Don’t think it won’t happen, ’cause it will. And those men, the ones you like to watch, will lean on their haunches and heave at the air, expecting you to throw it back. And, bless your heart, you’ll try, but your throw will go awry (your wrist — always a bit too theatrical). Or you’ll try to kick it back, concentrating with all your might on lining up the ball with the plate of your foot, but the ball sails wild. It goes clear over the light wires onto a rooftop or across the gully into the bushes — it will go everywhere but straight (Tee hee). The men will laugh. They’ll call you skettel, Shelly-Ann or Big Reds’ likkle sister. They’ll ask you what color panty you prefer. Even though it’s in good fun, it’ll hurt. You’ll develop an ironic fear of balls.

 

On your walks home, best to take the long way through the back roads. Through the flimsy dirt lanes webbing through the groves and wild grass that cordon the town. Buck up, though; you’ll make a friend. His name is Mr. Turner and he’s a sweet old man. Grey sideburns dip from his bald head and line his weirdly smooth face. But he has such nice brown eyes, bright balls of coppery brown eyes. He lives in one of those wobbly wood shacks that crop up by the back lanes like monstrous weeds.

 

He’ll call you over one day and offer you butterscotch. You’ll notice his house is not as ugly as the others; it’s a confident little wood square set atop slabs of concrete. And, look, he has a little garden to one side — bright bunches of cherry bougainvilleas dripping from a trellis of a fence. He’ll be sitting in a small wicker chair behind his front grill, the inside of his house dark behind him.  He’ll tell you how you look like his grandson, who’s also about seven, and offer you butterscotch candy in a yellow-gold wrapper. You’ll start taking that lane regularly; you’ll tell him about your day at school in exchange for candy. When you get a little older, he’ll start giving you plantain tarts and little patties he baked himself; he’ll tell you about the daughter he hasn’t seen since his divorce thirty-odd years ago. She’s about forty now and has a son whom he’s only seen in a few pictures she’s sent. You look so much like his grandson, he’ll say; he’s probably growing a beard too. You’re curious; you didn’t even realize you were growing a beard. Come here, he’ll say, you’re growing some fine little hairs. He’ll reach his hand through the grill and you’ll move close. He’ll sweep the line of your jaw with a shaking finger. Are those really baby hairs? you wonder. Or is his hand that coarse?

 

When you go back the next day, he won’t have any patties for you. His spatula fell behind the stove and his hands are too big to reach back there. Do you think you could reach back there and get it for him? He’ll ask to see your hand. He won’t be smiling. Still you consent, and he’ll grab your wrist with a strength you didn’t know he had. Will you come and help me? he’ll say. His grip is hard, but his face is as still as dead water. You nod, holding his eyes with yours. He tightens his grip; his eyes are balls of thunder in the dark. Yes, you say again, and tick your mouth into smile. When he lets go to open the grill, run! Dart straight through the fever grass — tall, sticky fever grass slapping your wrists and scratching your neck.  Cut into the burned-out clearing, then dash through the field of wild bush they call Deadman’s Fall. Jump the gully. Keep running. Keep running. Run until you reach the guinep tree at the top of the hill that overlooks the Fall. Take a breath. Drop your book bag and take a breath. Laugh, boy, laugh. Throw your teeth to the sky and laugh.

 

You’re such a tease, you’ll think to yourself. You’re such a motherfuckin’ tease.

 

Make Up a Girlfriend

Yes, that’s right. When you’re in high school, you’ll want to make up a girlfriend. Your classmates are from a different type of environment from yours. Their houses have carports, and they use summer as a verb. Thankfully, they’ll have some amount of decorum. They’ll not expect you to share sex stories, as they know you can quote Ephesians. Still, being Christian doesn’t exempt you from having a girlfriend. It’s convenient to make one up. So here goes: Her name is Rachel. She goes to your church in your hometown, and her favorite show is Step by Step. If they ask why you never bring her to one of the formals, just say that Kingston frightens her. They’ll believe you.

 

Be sure to have more interesting tidbits about Rachel so that she sounds like a human being. Keep cryptic notes on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights at home. Things like: R was born on May 6, 1988. R likes pink hibiscuses. R does not get the appeal of video games but has a brother who plays constantly so doesn’t mind it so much. In the unlikely event that your older brother (he’ll be back from jail around now) finds these notes on the inside cover of your book, tell him they are notes you’ve made on the novel’s protagonist, Romeo. He’ll believe you.

 

Near Final Note

All this work is wearying I know, but think, an American college is right around the corner. And I swear to you, there, you will have reached the promise land. There are, of course, practical matters of concern — Where do you do SATs in Jamaica? — Where are the American college applications? — What is your story? And how do you craft that into a compelling narrative? — Do foreigners qualify for need-based aid? What’s your mother’s salary like in US currency?

 

Daunting? No doubt. But now that the exit is so close you get to indulge in a bit of fantasy as a reward. Actually, it will be a good form of motivation. That’s right! You can finally start to imagine what type of boyfriend you’re going to have. Can you believe it!? B.O.Y.F.R.I.E.N.D.

 

Okay, so let’s see, he’s going to be your roommate — tall, broad shouldered, athletic build but not too hard. Blond hair, parted bangs and a baby face with a smile so earnest you’ll be convinced he still drinks milk with dinner. Hey! He’ll look just like James Van Der Beek. Yes! And he’ll wear flannel, and be from some outside-sounding place like Montana. He’d have played football in high school and, like you, had to work very hard to bury his difference. You’ll realize he likes it when you mistake American football terms. He doesn’t get to correct you often, so you give him this opportunity. “Oh my god, it’s end zone not field zone!” He’ll find this ignorance charming, and sometimes chuck you on the shoulder. He likes your accent too. You’ll sometimes catch him mouthing a word you’d just said, slightly in awe. And that is how it will happen, in the dark of your dorm room one night. You’ll both be sitting up in his bed against the wall, your head rested on his shoulder, his arms scooped around your back. It doesn’t matter how you got there, just know you’ll both be slightly drunk. He wants to know how you say ‘hello’ in Jamaican. Hello. And now he wants to know how to say ‘what’s up.’ Whaa gwaan. Whaa gwaan…he’ll contemplate it in a heavy whisper, gently rubbing the curve of your side. Your hand is now across the barrel of his chest, and you’ll marvel at the contained force of his heat. And even more, you’ll marvel at the exquisite realization that you’ve finally found your first friend.

 

The Return Home

So this is where I take my leave (for further tips on navigating the complex identity issues related to race and alienation within the American queer scene, please see Yes I Lacan: Dislodging the Pane of the White Gays”). But before I go, just a word about your return trip to Jamaica: don’t bother with the coming out thing. This trip won’t be about you. Plus, your mom will be in a weird space with Big Reds’ death and all. She’ll look different when you see her, inching instead of walking, and her eyes will have sunken in. There’s something unmoored about her — this wild hair and rumpled skin. Was your mother always this ugly?

 

There’ll be no words between you. She’ll squeeze your wrist and turn to the cab then stay silent on her side of the back seat. Her hair used to be sleek and jet black, and her nails were always polished in a ripened pink like the insides of a guava. But her hands look cracked and dead now. You’ll think to take one of hers into yours, but what kind of a gesture is that after 15 years? No, better to think about the flurry of e-mails Big Reds had been sending you, the ones that would be irritants before his disappearance and a torment after: Hey bro, how are you?; hey bro, do you think you could help me with something?; I promise I’ll pay you back; How’s teaching going?; Please, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious; Hope you’re well, bro; Let me know when we can talk. Consider that he probably begged your mom for help too. Ponder the possibility that she ignored them as well.

 

As the cab turns out of the airport and onto the Palisadoes, it will hit you like a brick of cold that it happened here, somewhere in the crevices of this wiry road snaking through the ocean. Or maybe they didn’t do it here. Maybe they chopped your brother up elsewhere, loaded the parts in the trunk of his car and left it at the lip of the airport in a whip of theatrical irony. Well, that’s assuming Big Reds was trying to get away from something. And that’s assuming “they” knew what irony is anyway. Oh dear, look at you, trying to construct a narrative.

 

Look out at the city, across the maw of dark water to the clump of small buildings huddled by the waterfront. This is Kingston. There’re more buildings, you’ll remark.

 

Yeah, the Chinese, she’ll say.

 

When you move to hold her hand, she’ll stare back at you from the plane of another world.

 

Mum, how did this happen?

 

How you expect me to answer that, son?

 

Simple. Just tell me what you know.

 

Her mouth too looks old, limp in a mesh of wrinkles.

 

I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the IMF.

 

The IMF killed Big Reds?

 

She’ll shake her head, raking the air with the teeth of her tin-gray hair, and you’ll remember, you’ll remember, she had grown ugly right in front of you. She’ll be saying something about the murder rate and the state of emergency, but you’re trying to remember your mother as a pretty woman, when she used to kiss you on the head and her hair would fan about you like a sheet. Why did she stop doing that? Maybe it’s because you stiffened when she started growing ugly. When was that? Maybe when grandma died. All her powders and creams had disappeared around then. Or maybe it was around high school; there was talk about her hairdresser money going to your monthly lab fees.

 

She’ll be talking about some riots. Do you remember the riots after the Free Zone got shut down? You won’t remember any riots. You’re trying to remember your mother’s hands, the way you witnessed them putrefy because of the clothes washing she started doing on the weekends. Whose clothes were they? It hadn’t concerned you to ask. But the money you remember going to Big Reds’ first bail because of…the riots?

 

Was Big Reds in the riots?

 

She’ll look at you, concerned.

 

No baby, Big Reds wasn’t in the riots. He’d already moved to MoBay, trying to find another job. Remember?

 

Why can’t I remember any of this? You’ll ask.

 

Maybe you were focused on the wrong things, she’ll say.

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Interview: Min Jin Lee

cover of Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee.     Cover of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

 

After being born in Seoul, South Korea, Min Jin Lee came with her family to the US at the age of seven and was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. She studied history at Yale University, graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, and worked as a corporate attorney in New York City. Her short writing has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other magazines, and she served as a Morning Forum columnist for the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea for three seasons. She is also a well-known and well-traveled speaker on writing, politics, film, and literature, serves as a trustee of PEN America and as a director of the Authors Guild, and currently is Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.

 

The recipient of best story prizes from Narrative Magazine and The Missouri Review, Lee has also been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as an honorary doctorate from Monmouth College.

 

Lee’s first novel, Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2007) was selected a Top 10 Novel of the Year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. It was selected for various special recognitions and awards by the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Book Sense.

 

Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2017), her second novel, published after she lived in Japan for several years, was winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times bestseller. It was recognized on more than seventy-five “best books of the year” lists and is translated into twenty-nine languages.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

One of the things that struck me, and that I really admired as I read Pachinko, is that it’s an epic. And that you chose—or, might we say, dared—to write on this grand scale, which I think a lot of women, especially, hesitate to do. And especially as just your second novel, how challenging to do that. Could you comment about your decision to do that? Did you set out to do that as a kind of statement—”I can do this too”—or did it evolve out of your original inspiration?

 

Min Jin Lee:

That’s such a good question. First of all, thank you for reading the book. Because it’s a huge surprise. When I meet people who’ve actually read it, I kind of think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” [laughter] Thank you so much. My ancestors thank you, my parents thank you.

 

TFR:

Oh, that’s sweet. Thank you.

 

Lee:

No, really. It’s really quite a gift for someone to give you twenty hours of their lives. It is. It is, especially nowadays. But going back to your question about epic and the decision to do it—I initially had written this book from 1996 to 2003 and it was not an epic. It was based on about ten to twenty years, and it was meant to be a book about Solomon, who appears at the very end of the book now and is a minor character. And then after I moved to Japan in 2007 and I interviewed all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized that I got it all wrong and the only way this book and the story would work is by making it an epic. And I was terrified, because I didn’t have that kind of ambition.

 

TFR:

That’s so interesting that you felt compelled to do it.

 

Lee:

I had the ambition to always write an omniscient-narrated, social novel—that was absolutely clear. But to write from cradle to grave, that was not my intention. It really upset me that I had to start all over again [chuckle].

 

TFR:

That’s a tough process. How did you stay on track?

 

Lee:

I outline all the time. I’m not attached to my outlines, but I outline constantly. My outlines, my character cards. I have little cards with people’s birthdays and where they went to school. And then, also, I interview prolifically. I constantly interview. I work like a journalist a lot.

 

TFR:

That makes sense. It was fascinating to me that the setting just seems so vivid and so real, even from the historical past. I was really interested in that research process and what you think research offers the fiction writer.

 

Lee:

I can’t imagine writing fiction without research for the kinds of books I want to write, because I am writing social novels. So, both of my novels have required an enormous amount of research. I’ve interviewed well over a hundred people.

 

And I’ve also taken classes that I didn’t want to take. For my first book, I took a class at FIT on millinery [laughter]. I’m not a fashion person. And I met all these people who can make things out of felt and put these things on their heads, and I thought, “Oh, you’re really different than a shoemaker.”

 

I was interested in the process of making. And I feel like I haven’t met enough people from all these different corners. And I want to write stories about people who aren’t represented. I also want to write about poor people, and poor people often don’t leave any documents… So I have to interview.

 

TFR:

Free Food for Millionaires, your first novel, is notable because you don’t make it only the story of Casey and Ella and their generation, but also of Sabine and Casey’s parents. So many coming of age stories are written as though young people know only other young people [laughter]. It’s great that you managed to include the parental generation there. In Pachinko, you extend even further across generations. And you started to speak to that a minute ago, saying that, “To tell the social story, I realized I had to do a bigger picture.” But what makes you want to extend that reach to the whole social novel? Is it a cultural matter of respect for our elders or other political or other social factors that influence you in that regard? How do you feel that came to be something that’s your goal?

 

Lee:

This really goes to who I am. I’m a historian, so I really care about the long view. People have often asked me, “How did you work on these things?” And I kinda think, “Well, if you look at different examples of people who make things, you should really expect failure. You should really expect suffering. You should expect obscurity.” Guaranteed obscurity.

 

[laughter]

 

And then you should try to pick a topic that you really care about. But in terms of picking generations, I don’t think any of us really makes sense without understanding all the people who inform who we are, whether they’re biologically related to you or culturally related to you or your community. For example, if you are a Mormon, you don’t really make sense without understanding Mormonism. It’s such a specific American religion. So I wanted to very much talk about every corner and every level, which is nuts, which takes a long time.

 

TFR:

It’s interesting too, because it’s against the flow right now, which is all … shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. Snip it, snip it, snip it, snip it. One reason why I enjoyed Pachinko so much because it was a novel I could sink into the way I’ve sunk into novels so many times in the past (and not so much these flash-by novels so common now) and just really get that larger picture.

 

Lee:

I do know that what I’m writing is very against the grain of my contemporaries. I am writing a social novel of the nineteenth century kind with modern sentences. At the same time, I wanted readers to stay with me.

 

TFR:

It’s well worth doing. I have one more comparative question. It seems likely that Free Food for Millionaires was rooted in your own personal experience…

 

Lee:

Some of it, yes.

 

TFR:

… as a Korean-American who attended an Ivy League university, and experienced conflicts maybe similar to Casey’s. But you’ve noted that Pachinko stemmed from this history lecture that you heard. How did you make that transition from writing about something that was closer to your own experience—and this is obviously still something close to your heart—to something larger than your own experience or slightly different from your own background? How did you make the transition?

 

Lee:

Actually, I had no intentions of writing Free Food for Millionaires because it was way too close to home [chuckles]. I had written Pachinko in another iteration well before I published Free Food for Millionaires, because I’m a very political person, I’m a very theoretical person. I’m actually much more comfortable talking about global feminism, poverty, the refugee crisis. I actually like that. Until I read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I would not have written Free Food for Millionaires.

 

TFR:

So the transition was actually the other way round for you.

 

Lee:

When I noticed that Naipaul had the courage to write about his hometown, I said, “Well I’m going to write about my hometown of Elmhurst, Queens. And I’m going to write about the Koreans that I know,” because there are so many different kinds of Koreans and they were interesting to me. And I figured, well, I’m not gonna be successful, I’m not gonna make any money. I’ve made this incredibly stupid decision to quit being a lawyer [laughter]. I might as well write the book I want to write. I think honoring that was really helpful for me. That’s the reason why I wrote it, but it’s really uncomfortable to write about yourself. Really uncomfortable for me.

 

TFR:

So while some people feel more comfortable with starting close to home, your background in history perhaps meant you were a person more comfortable with the large-scale. In some ways, it was a relief to come back to Pachinko and be able to turn a little further out? Could you tell me a little bit about your reasons for going to Tokyo? Did you do that primarily to work on the novel? Or was that for other reasons and then it was just suddenly all this material presented itself? You began to meet people? Or how did you develop your routine of interviewing other people and doing research there in Japan?

 

Lee:

I always interview people for my fiction. Even Free Food for Millionaires, I was interested in writing about money and class.

 

TFR:

And the millinery class [chuckle].

 

Lee:

Right. And so because I did all those things, I’m very comfortable with the interview form. I also grew up incredibly shy, but in interviews, I feel like it’s okay to talk to people.

 

TFR:

You have a role.

 

Lee:

Yes, I have a role. And also, in the service of a story, it’s okay to ask all these questions. I went to Japan because my husband got a job and we needed the money and the upgrade. So we went and I got to interview so many Korean-Japanese people. And the initial interviews are very hard. It was really hard to get those interviews. But once people realize that I’m a harmless fiction writer, they’re like, “Oh, okay. All right, fine. Let me introduce you to my friends” [laughter].

 

TFR:

These interviews, I’m sure, influenced the rich array of characters in Pachinko. I’ve a hard time figuring out which particular character or characters to ask about so many are well-developed. But Sunja, of course, is the cradle-to-grave presence in the novel, and I loved her so much. She was a fabulous character. But I also want to ask about Yoseb and Isak. They were the two who struck me as the tragic figures in the book. And I wanted to ask a little bit about whether you felt… Sunja went through many, many, many difficulties, but she seemed to have this stronger spirit. And is there a little bit of a feminist commentary in this book? Do you feel that the women survive better than the men? And is that something that you feel is sort of more generally true in the world? That women can face this kind of conflict and travail better and intact?

 

Lee:

I think it’s not so much a matter of inborn resilience of women. It’s a matter of all the cultural messages that men and women receive. I think that men from oppressed minority groups still have the burdens of the masculinity of the outer world, and consequently, the choices that they make in order to become men in that world are very often unfavorable to their lives. And they become tragic characters. So for the two characters that you mentioned, Isak and Yoseb, Isak really cares about being a really excellent person, so he decides that he’s going to become a man by being a martyr, and that’s a tough road.

 

[laughter]

 

Whereas Yoseb, his attitude is, “I’m going to try to become a man by having conventional ideas of providing for my family.”

 

If you’re an oppressed minority male, it’s difficult to provide for your family.

 

But going back to your initial question about how women in these groups survive. I really admire many women that I’ve met, who are illiterate, who are really poor, and the way they survive… And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I think women who—across culture, across race, across class, around the world—have this in common, which is that our biologies force us to make decisions that are not only about our individual lives. And one of the things I heard over and over and over again is that women are supposed to suffer. And in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in older countries, that message is, I think, relayed over and over again, because women don’t have the same rights as in advanced Western nations, and, also, they are older countries.

 

Even in Europe—I’ve met women from Germany who have to leave their work to make lunch for their families at 2:00 every day. It’s an advanced nation, and yet it’s an older country, and the expectations of femininity are different.

 

This is the other flip side of suffering—if you can bear humiliation, it’s easier to survive. You may not like the kind of life you have, but you can survive. I think it’s harder for men to bear the same humiliation that women bear.

 

TFR:

That’s beautifully put. Do you resist the labels? Or do you consider yourself a political writer, or a feminist writer, or a Korean-American writer?

 

Lee:

Presbyterian writer.

 

[laughter]

 

TFR:

What do you think about all those labels that I’m sure that get used for you quite a lot?

 

Lee:

It’s fine. The fact that people think that I’m any kind of writer, I’m like, “Thank you.”

 

[laughter]

 

Just to be obscure and to not be read for such a long time, I’m so grateful to have readers.

 

TFR:

Would you read us a favorite passage from Pachinko?

 

Lee: Yes. [Reads from xxx].

 

TFR:

I love that passage because it’s just that moment of change.

 

Lee:

And wonder.

 

TFR:

And wonder, and there’s so much that’s coming together there in terms of the relationships that are going to be built and explored in the novel.

 

Do you have any words of advice for anyone wishing to write a historical epic kind of novel? Or any other good tidbits about you or your writing process?

 

Lee:

When I teach my writing classes, I often meet really talented writers who feel discouraged. And I always say that, “If you could choose the topic that means the most to you, then the external discouragements will feel a little more bearable, because you are staying closer to the things that you love.” So I think the pages need to be something that you love and that you want to turn to as opposed to something that the world is judging, and that will help you stay with the project longer.

 

TFR:

As opposed to what is “selling” or what will be popular?

 

Lee:

Yes! Or what they think will be… admired. I always try to discourage that. And what’s the expression that I’ve heard? “Forget being the best, be the only.” You can do that if you really honor the thing that you care about.

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Wedding Season

Free again, my panther

life takes off fast—palmettos

and snakes in the path.

The beautiful sea grape

is aging like it’s winter;

leaves of talkative platters,

some big as my hand, still

grow heart-red veins

 

but have gone soft

and pale at the edges.

My very last husband

sheds his brave persona

and slithers into the bamboo

for good. Leaving

 

him there, I remember

that on nights like this,

thousands of baby

sea turtles hatch

and make their determined

way to the water. Life

goes on, the planet sings,

unaware of all our betrayals.

The waves swell

and collapse. I hear

 

the corks and lantern-lit

shouts of new wedding

feasts all over this ringing

world. If champagne comes

in midnight blue, I’ll toast

their tight bouquets of joy

as clouds bubble

against the sky in

their incessant kissing

with the moon.

Glowing sand pushes

up from every step

like sifted white

hills of cake flour,

the only light for miles.

 

 

Please also see Russ Kesler’s review of Susan Lilley’s book Venus in Retrograde, in which this poem later appeared.

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Stories Inspired by Midnight at the Havana Zoo

A Kind of Solitude by Dariel Suarez
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
Willow Springs Book, 170 pages, paperback, $19.95

 

Cover of Dariel Suarez's A Kind of Solitude

 

Elena, the keeper of the address registry in her neighborhood in Havana, is an outstanding citizen and an exemplary neighbor. But all that comes undone when the police come knocking at her door, find out about the contraband cheese in her fridge, and demand the name of the supplier, her old friend Emilio.

 

Isidro hauls his eighty-year-old father, a Santería practitioner who is writhing in pain, in a wheelbarrow through the storm-lashed, flooded streets of Havana to the hospital. As Isidro struggles getting the proper treatment for his father in a hospital with limited resources, he finds himself reconciling his family’s beliefs and his own lack of faith.

 

In both these stories, “The Inquest” and “Possessed,” Elena and Isidro find their solitary lives disrupted; there’s palpable angst and longing, and that sensibility forms the heart of Dariel Suarez’s debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude. The mélange of eleven stories, set in Cuba and largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, offers an intimate, penetrating, and nuanced sociopolitical commentary of living in a communist country facing severe economic crisis. There’s critique, criticism, flavors of patriarchy, but also a portrayal of the infallible beauty of hope, yearning, and ambition. Suarez’s characters are neither heroes nor victims. They are, in turn, bold, shrewd, cruel, corrupt, melancholic, contemplative, kind, dignified, and—as portrayed in the story “Primal Voice”—actual rock stars.

 

The opening story, “The Man from the Zoo,” is at once magnificent and heartbreaking, and appropriately sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Two men, Arquímedes and Orlando, steal a giraffe from the Havana Zoo in the middle of the night for an American trophy-hunter family. The story is fast-paced, yet periodically slows down to let you catch your breath and to reveal the history of the men and their motivations.

 

Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Suarez moved to the United States as a young teenager in 1997 during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. His writing is reflective and critical of his country of birth; his prose is lyrical yet incisive, but not pedagogical. His Cuba is not a private or enigmatic Cuba, where revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries are smoking cigars and plotting government takeover (though some of his characters have fought alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and marched in service and in protest of the country), but a Cuba that is deconstructed via the power of fiction and rendered approachable and open.

 

The title story, “A Kind of Solitude” [originally published in The Florida Review 40.1, Spring 2016] takes us deep into Cuban countryside, where sixty-year-old Eladio, a man who prefers the company of his farm animals over humans, prepares to leave for the city after he realizes that at his age he needs the protection of companionship. Haunted by the suicide of his wife, he nonetheless looks forward to uniting with his long-term mistress, Griselda. He ruminates about his love and devotion to both women, but as the evening progresses the focus changes—there’s an intruder on his property, and Eladio must act, for better or worse. The story showcases powerfully the way that fleeting choices can change our paths.

 

In “Mudface” we come to terms with the games and cruelty of young boys. In “The Comforter,” corruption and a young man’s integrity come head to head.  And here we see Suarez’s brilliance in how he portrays the ugly interiority of complex, flawed characters, shaped by the sociopolitical landscape but shown without unnecessary judgments or justifications. The Special Period in Cuba was a time of great economic crisis with overwhelming shortages in food, medicine, energy, healthcare, and opportunities. Through the eleven stories in this collection, Suarez offers a multitude of perspectives and plot lines that wade through these difficulties and showcase human desire and ambition. In the story “Hope” we follow the motions of Vladimir who is yearning for a better life, a life his mother doesn’t want. We find a similar yearning in the story “Daredevils” where Suarez explores the friendship and love between two young men, Yaisandar and Miguel.

 

It was the story “Marching Men,” however, that affected me the most. There’s a moment toward the end of the story when the protagonist, Eloy Manduley, participates in the parade at La Plaza and brings to fore the triumph and tragedy of the Common Man:

 

. . . and the steady chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” resounded within different pockets of the crowd. Eloy held his umbrella against his chest—the handle down at his right hip, the metal tip at his left shoulder—and raised his chin like a proud soldier. He was in sync with the throng. He knew the majority of people had been forced to participate, yet the men marched on with determined steps, stout voices, and celebratory gestures … for the first time in his life, Eloy was physically part of el pueblo, a nation brought together despite all odds. If only Gladys could see him. Maybe he could surprise her at the airport. Maybe he could take her dancing at the carnival at El Malecón.

 

At a recent reading from A Kind of Solitude at Boston’s Brookline Booksmith, Suarez also spoke about the process of writing his book. He spoke of the research involved, the craft and linguistic choices he made, and the challenges of choosing to write about a Spanish-speaking world in English—a language not his first but preferred because, he said, even though he loves speaking Spanish he didn’t think he could do justice to the Spanish language by writing in or translating his stories to it. He further talked about how writing about Cuba through his stories helped recalibrate his world view. For me, both the talk and the book reinforce the importance of reading international (and multilingual) authors. Dariel Suarez’s story collection contributes further to the American publishing landscape what Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others like them have helped evolve and enrich—the scope and possibilities of what constitutes the universal experience in literary fiction.

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Green Matter / Gray Space

Green Matter / Gray Space is a play on words from the terms “green space” (an area of grass, trees, or other vegetation set apart for recreational or aesthetic purposes in an otherwise urban environment) and “gray matter” (the darker tissue of the brain and spinal cord, consisting mainly of nerve cell bodies and branching dendrites). The increasing population growth in cities calls into question (or enters into a gray area) the future of green space. When every area of a city is constructed for housing and other buildings, the area of green space per capita shrinks. If the vegetation that has, over time, been ripped out to make space for more human activity can be thought of as the gray matter of the ecosystem, what is it that we are doing to the intelligence of our planet’s environment? With climate change, our insatiable waste, and minimization of plant life, how will our health as city dwellers be impacted by the diminishing environment we rely upon for water, air, and food?

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Salvaging Beauty

(for Alan)

 

Peonies are blooming

to the point of collapse.

They lean into each other

with nothing to say.

Gracing lawn and stones,

thousands of fragrant petals,

extravagant as wings

relinquished.

 

To make final bouquets, I take

every flower that does not dissolve

at touch—late blooms, buds

surrounding first display—

pinks, bold and blushed;

shameless yellow;

white, center-stained

with crimson.

 

Every vase chipped

or cracked I fill;

vases on every table

in the house. I leave

the lawn scattered

with petals and stems.

I wait for the scent

of this dying

beauty.

 

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A Balm to Soothe the Fevers

Bluer and More Vast by Michael Hettich
Hysterical Books, 2018
Paperback, 82 pages, $15.00

 

Cover of Bluer and More Vast by Michael Hettich.

 

In Michael Hettich’s Bluer and More Vast, the reader bears witness to a man who is barely and beautifully tethered to the world around us. These small prose poems are  evocative, tender stories of companionship, confusion, home life, memories of fathers, and dreams of wives and husbands dreaming together. In “The Double Dream of Sleeping,” we are invited inside:

 

One night, my wife and I dreamed the same dream: we had carried our mattress to the ocean, thrown it into water and climbed on. We lay together in that bed as we drifted out into the deep water, in a night that was teeming with stars and silence.

 

What happens next, as throughout the collection, asks more questions of us than provides answers: What is memory? A dream? Family? Can small things save us?

 

The man and his family here reside in tandem with opossum families and insect worlds and the forest dwellers and everywhere the presence of birds, the birds, the wild Florida birds. Their homes are in the water and in the branches and the moss and the boat. We are all in it with him and looking around and wondering. Hettich brings a David Byrne-like beautiful befuddlement to it all: Is this my beautiful wife? Who am I? How did I get here?

 

Reading a new collection by a white male poet isn’t usually first on my poetry list these days. I have spent too many years on assigned books written by white men, and I need to catch up on years and years of missed and silenced voices from my queer, brown, trans, young, female, Asian, and other and other and other poetry family. I approached Bluer and More Vast with my armor up. I was curious. What does a seasoned white male poet have to say to me, a woman, right now? Right now?

 

In the end, I am grateful for the read and review. Taken as a whole, the collection feels like a balm to soothe the fevers whipped up in my body—and so many othered bodies—these days. Oh, these days. Even my teenage daughter has been taught dozens of dark, dystopian YA books in recent years—a response, they say, to our untethered, anxious world. Hettich’s prose is like a pill one can take to quiet some of the angry male voices on the air, across the bumper stickers that berate us, the defiant, spewing Supreme Court nominees.

 

The speaker of these poems is a man at once fully grounded and light as air—someone who puts a soup in the crock pot and carries injured long-necked herons to bed (“The Guest”) and who loves his wife. Really loves her. So many love poems here. Did Hettich know we needed this? In “Sunday Morning” a man recalls a long list of the books he and his wife are reading, and the passing of the days together:

 

We were putting our reading aside and going out to putter in our garden, to listen to the cardinals and mockingbirds and mourning doves, to smell the spearmint we’d planted by the henna tree. It was raining then, softly, and we let ourselves get wet, soaked through to the skin, which belonged to us now.

 

The beautiful, dreamy poem “To Sing The World” almost asks what is love? And it is not too sentimental; rather, in Hettich’s hands, it becomes serious meta-commentary in a world battered by a lack of gentleness.

 

Magical realism works well for these poems, especially because they occupy that murky, liminal place: the prose poem. Hettich’s emphasis is on story and mood more than traditional poetic elements like sound or metaphor. What is happening to these people, these fish, the deer with bird nests nestled in racks on their heads at the beach (“Solitude”)? Strange and confusing things, sure, but the reader is not scared. The language is evocative and beautiful, so the brevity of each piece lends an urgency to the collection that is hopeful instead of harried.

 

Hettich’s words play with idea and imagery, giving us just enough weirdness to want more. Does he want us to know he is dreaming or does he want us to just not care for once, to get in the poem and go? “The Ordinary Wonders” encapsulates much of the trip we are taken on, via spider web and the neighbor’s lusty libretto. These poems and this speaker are something to sing about. And so, in turn, are the little and big lives always happening around us. Like Mary Oliver, Hettich skillfully slows us down, and we look together on the wading birds in ways more studied than sappy, more insightful than ordinary in spite of the quiet subject matter.

 

And we wonder, too, as we sink in steel lawn chairs with Hettich and our ancestors all around us smoking pipes and bringing wayward turtles to our laps. All along the birds and the neighbors and the mothers keep singing and the opossums lumber. It is the big world in our small yards. It is knowing:

 

Everywhere we look there are reasons to go home

 

I felt like the poet carried me through this book because I needed to rest. It felt good to know, just a few poems in, that I could be taken well care of with words. The poems were the lullabies, the myths made by us, and maybe they were breadcrumbs, too. Maybe Hettich is a kind of prose poem Pied Piper, but he is not leading me far from home. He is trying to tell me, trying to tell us, that home is the safe place and the vast, relentless water rising all around at once. It is loving the person beside us as much as the people still in our dreams. It is standing in the shallows every chance we get. It is our feet finding sand dollars in the water while we still can.

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The Shrapnel of Being

Reading Life by Chris Arthur
Negative Capability Press, 2017
Paperback, 202 pages, $15.95

 

Cover of Reading Life by Chris Arthur.

 

Chris Arthur, a native of Ulster, Ireland and a long-time resident of Wales and Scotland, happens to be one of the prominent authors of long-form, meditative essays published in America. All but one of his books have appeared with a US publisher, and he makes frequent appearances in Best American Essays as well as a variety of US literary journals. Reading Life, his sixth collection, declares again a kind of trans-border citizenship through his lifelong residence in texts and the literary imagination. It offers his most direct commentary on the form of the essay itself.

 

“Perhaps no essayist,” he muses, “is worthy of that name unless he or she succeeds in creating objects which do not resemble their usual descriptors but are instead depicted in that elemental rawness which shows how little, in the ordinary run of things, we allow them to resemble what they in fact appear to be.” The sequence of negatives and reversals in the sentence indicate the complexity of the task: truth is, of course, elusive; evidence is illusive; the essay, with its epigrammatic etymology of provisionality and its seventeenth-century pedigree, must somehow get beyond these matters and uncover the bones.

 

Writing instructors often coach students in the practices that lead to a “writing life,” and Arthur’s title hints at a kind of companion practice, how to establish a life as a reader. In this vein, he re-examines texts acquired in his youth, such as novelist Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, “a piece of literary flotsam picked up on one of the many occasions when I was beachcombing in bookshops in my late teens.” On the occasion of his ten-year-old daughter being assigned to read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, he wonders whether the novel’s gruesomeness might be at best a “curious choice” or “unsuitable” for children that age and decides to re-read the novel alongside her to consider the question carefully.

 

But these sorts of reflections—living with and re-living familiar texts—are just one of Arthur’s intentions in Reading Life. In “reading” the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist’s purpose. “Essays deal in the shrapnel of being,” he writes, “turning over now one piece, now another, carefully running the fingers of their prose along the edges, testing for sharpness, looking for hints of connection, feeling for the cut-off remnants of joins, trying to reconstruct a sense of setting, context, contiguity, extrapolating from the minuscule moments and objects that create a life reminders of the massive milieu in which they and it are embedded.” The extended metaphor—stunning in its disruptive mashup of violence and contemplation—exemplifies Arthur’s method. He favors complex and suspended syntax; he crafts intricate details that subtly interconnect.

 

Arthur’s essays have always worked by way of fragments, assembling mosaics or braiding multiple narratives. His style lies in the scope of these assemblages and the patient, measured pacing with which he brings the pieces together and an unseen pattern emerges. Sometimes those fragments are literally objects—a whale’s tooth, for example, that Arthur subjects to close examination and free association, linking the memory of his childhood visits to the dentist who gave him the small artifact to consideration of the unbroken texts of DNA, “a paired line of antecedents going back some 60 million years to the land animals whales once were … [leading] finally to the same destination: that moment of naked singularity, the great beginning, the point at which there was something rather than nothing.” (This was one of my favorites in the book, recalling in some ways “Miracles” from his 2005 Irish Haiku, in which the fossilized bone from a whale’s ear resonates with connection to cosmic unity and the disunity of religiopolitical violence in Northern Ireland.)

 

Arthur’s omnivorous attention “reads” moments from literary history—a passage in the Goncourt brothers’ Journal containing an image of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France; a few degrees of separation regarding Seamus Heaney and his famous Bog Bodies poems—and from personal experience—leading a group of writing students out into the snow on a quest for found objects as writing prompts; “listening” to the histories associated with three walking sticks Arthur inherited. Through these readings, the richness he gleans includes delight in language itself (acquiring new words like “sett” and “clough”), companionship in shared meaning (“one of the things I’ve always liked about second-hand books is the way they hold the spoor of other readers and how, following their tracks, a sense of almost tribal complicity can be kindled”), the sudden shock or surprise of entering an alternate point of view (“why did this glimpse of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France strike me so forcefully that it felt—still feels—as if it left a splinter?”). Such “splinters” stay a long while with the reader, too—that’s part of Arthur’s power as prose writer, to deliver images, or facts, or anecdotes that work their barbed way more deeply in.

 

Reading Life is distinguished from his previous books in its deliberate commentary on form and theory. Essayists often like to comment on the meandering, fragmentary, organic approach that seems fundamental to the form, and Arthur has done so before. But here he devotes more direct consideration to such matters. Instead of losing himself in the unfolding energy of the essays, more often Arthur remains a self-conscious, authoritative as well as authorial presence. It’s sometimes as if he’s holding a subject before his own and the reader’s gaze, while simultaneously commenting upon what gazing feels like and explaining how sight casts an upside-down image of the world on an imaginary screen on the back of the eye.

 

And so “Sonatina for Oboe and Bayonet (Reading All Quiet on the Western Front),” the piece in which Arthur and his daughter read two distinct editions (his a 1963 edition with a cover depicting the dead and dying, hers with “only…an artful image of a poppy”), the story of their reading widens to recount their discussion of what a bayonet actually is (a knife the size of an oboe, he explains at first) and to examine one from the World War I theater purchased long ago from a junk shop. Soon the essay also provides a close reading of its own movement, Arthur explicating for the reader the image he’s just drawn, laying out the layers of symbolism he perceives there, making what moments before were implicit, explicit. The prospect of his own daughter on the floor between the musical instrument she plays at school and the authentic German bayonet her father has brought for her to look at “makes a powerful cameo … freezing into a kind of icon of incongruity that’s at once symbolic and interrogative,” Arthur muses. “It symbolizes vividly the way in which our world is riven by the coexistence of opposites: gentleness and brutality; compassion and cruelty; beauty and ugliness; creativity and destruction; peace and war. These polarities can pull apart any equilibrium of meaning we try to lay between them. Their sudden alternations act like military rounds, pounding the semblance of order on which we build our lives.”

 

This, too, is vintage Chris Arthur. Calm and articulate, while pointing to the firing guns.

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Ghosts in the Trees

Day of All Saints by Patricia Grace King
Miami University Press, 2017
Paperback, 96 pages, $15.00

Winner of the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize

 

Cover of Day of All Saints by Patricia Grace King

 

Patricia Grace King begins her novella Day of All Saints with an image of ghosts: “Ghosts in the trees. Martín wants to rip them all down. If he could, he’d bury them deep in the flowerbed that he’s uprooting, or stomp them into the grass.” These ghosts, Halloween decorations that adorn a yard in Chicago’s affluent north side, are anything but playful; rather, they represent the suppressed memory of trauma, specifically the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, which haunts Martín Silva de Choc, and, indeed, the pages of this stunning short novel. It follows King’s two previous fiction chapbooks, The Death of Carrie Bradshaw (Kore Press, 2011), and Rubia (winner of our very first Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Prize here at The  Florida Review, 2012). Her work is growing in power, and here she draws on her three years spent in Guatemala working with refugees of that country’s civil war.

 

Although the primary narrative, set in Chicago in the 1990s, unfolds over the course of a single day, King skillfully weaves in flashbacks that take place in Guatemala City. There, Martín, a young language instructor, lives with his grandmother, Doña Ana, and his aunt, Rosa, in the El Incienso barrio, to which he moved when he was four, as “civil war ripped through the rest of the country.” In the first of these flashbacks, Martín falls in love with a US foreign exchange student, Abby, even as her social, economic, and national privilege cause her to fetishize, to romanticize through a Eurocentric lens, the very neighborhood in which Martín lives. “This feels Mediterranean, somehow,” says Abby, “‘If you just nearly shut your eyes … If you look through your lashes.’” Indeed, the crux of the work hinges on how Martín and Abby, though in love with one another, cannot communicate in a meaningful way due to their different cultural identities and experiences. Doña Ana, in telling of her former life in the Ixcán in the 1970s, echoes this difference when she juxtaposes Guatemalan culture with US culture. Of her own culture, she says,

 

And I had my own small diversions: nights I sang with the neighbors, down at the Pérezes’ house—the Pérezes had a marimba—and the priests’ visits on weekends. They came regularly then, to say Mass on Saturday and to hold Spanish classes for us women, since back in the highlands we’d mainly spoken K’iché.

 

She follows this observation with one of US culture during the same era: “In America, what were they doing—roller-skating? Donna Summer? Don’t look so surprised; I know who she is. Electing Señor Ronald Reagan, too, weren’t they? Who sent our Army so many guns.” This cultural difference, and its underlying significance, permeates the work and is ever-present in Martín and Abby’s relationship. When they move to Chicago, their bond becomes tenuous, and their different social positions and histories more starkly defined. As Abby attends art classes at a university, Martín works as a day laborer. And while Abby has her own past trauma related to her mother, she ultimately has the privilege of security. When she leaves Martín, haunted as he is by the brutal deaths of his parents and extended family members, she finds safe haven in the home of her mother on the north side. Martín, however, bewildered and alone in a new country, finds himself without such material and emotional sanctuary.

 

King writes a story within a story within a story, and she does so in lyrical language with details so vivid that the reader cannot help but enter the picture she paints. In the primary narrative, Martín searches for and then finds Abby at her mother’s home, and in the secondary narrative, Martín and Abby fall in love in Guatemala. In the tertiary narrative, Doña Ana, over a dinner prepared for Abby at home in El Incienso, begins the story that is the heart of the text—the traumatic events that occurred in the Ixcán and that haunt Martín and his remaining family members.

 

This narrative, begun in a flashback sequence, ultimately enters the primary narrative as Martín faces the ghosts of his past, who appear before him in a memory long suppressed. He can no longer banish these ghosts, nor can the reader, who encounters them, and the world they inhabit, at every turn. They are “[t]he heat [of the Ixcán, which] was this thing that sat down on your skin and would never let you up. And the mud—you would sink in it up to your knees. You could lose your own shoes in that mud.” They are “‘[t]he fog on those mountains … something you miss when you’ve left them—how it flies from the peaks like white laundry.’” These ghosts drift through the text, hovering on the periphery of the psyche in both Martín and the reader.

 

In Day of All Saints, King makes a thoughtful social statement about cultural difference and First World privilege: as Martín observes, “Halloween: a day of no real significance in Guatemala. What matters, instead, is El Dia de Todos los Santos, Day of All Saints, one day afterward.” However, she does so without ever allowing that statement to overwhelm the true focus of the story: Martín’s strength and fortitude, indeed the strength and fortitude of his family, the other residents of El Incienso, and the citizens of Guatemala, which shine throughout the course of the text. King’s characterization of Doña Ana; Aunt Rosa; Don Gustavo, Aunt Rosa’s romantic companion; and Ernestina, the young woman of Ixcán who chooses to leave behind her village and her birth name in order to fight for the resistance, is honest, nuanced, and deeply affecting, largely because of how King understates their sacrifices.

 

Ultimately, though, Martín is the character who most affects the reader, not, solely, because the narrative is focused through him, but because of the complexity of his character. He is a man in love with a foreign woman, a woman who wishes to heal the wounds of his past in the same way that she wishes to heal a wound on his hand, but he is also a man deeply connected to his place of origin, his remaining family members, and his fragmented history. He haunts us, as does the ending in which, hunched against the trunk of a tree in the Palm Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, he confronts the ghosts of his past that have now entered his present. It is closing time at the conservatory, but this room is the ever-present Ixcán, where the guerillas, dressed in “camo-green,” await to aid survivors of the army’s ruthless actions, and he is trapped there “[a]mong the wet trees.” He knows that “soon the people in green will come for him too,” with a green-aproned conservatory attendant poised to tell him, “‘Sir, it’s time to go now.’” Where will he go when he leaves the Palm Room? One hopes to a sanctuary of his own creation.

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Interview: Marie Howe

Cover of Marie Howe's Magdalene.     Cover of Marie Howe's What the Living Do.     Cover of Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

 

Marie Howe is originally from Rochester, New York, and is the author of four poetry collections, of which the most recent is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), a musing of the channeled voice of the Biblical Mary Magdalene. The oldest girl of nine siblings, she did not seriously write poetry until the age of thirty. Howe, whose brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, has said: “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely.” Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I’m so excited to get to speak with you: Irish Catholic grade school commonality! Oh my, the stories! Reading your poems cues me in as to your own immense, lingering remembrances of an American Irish Catholic upbringing, grade school, and family. Your collection of the death of your brother—

 

Howe:

What the Living Do—

 

TFR:

Yes—I’ve taught that book—it resonates so much for me personally, and now I have the chance to ask you how your most recent book, Magdalene, came about.

 

Howe:

I feel fortunate to have been brought up in a tradition that had a very strong symbolic world. I was the oldest daughter of nine children. I’m the only one who went to a convent school, Sacred Heart in Rochester. I first went to parochial school, then this convent school. From a very early age, the gospels, and what we call “the old testaments,” and of course what the

Jewish tradition calls the Torah—the stories meant a great deal to me.

 

TFR:

In what way, specifically?

 

Howe:

Well, they felt archetypal and deeply poetic as there were so many silences in them.

 

TFR:

Silences?

 

Howe:

Yes, silent space where they could be inhabited, and of course in the Jewish tradition there’s midrash, a critical explanation where the Torah is considered a living document, and the rabbis imagine into those silences, and continue to create the Torah. I always loved those stories and the spaces one could inhabit within them—all those stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the Jewish great dilemmas, or debates as they’re also called.

 

TFR:

I studied the Kabbalah in an undergrad course on world religion and love that aspect about Judaism—the intellectual debates with the sense that the faith is in a state of evolving. I like this idea of “silences.”

 

Howe:

Yes, exactly. And the silences, well, Moses was a stutterer—I was a stutterer as a young person, and I identified. Really, so many of the stories, right up to the New Testament, I was able to identify with, and those stores still mean a great deal to me. Some people grow up with the Greek myths, or other some other kinds of symbolic worlds, but that was the world I grew up in, the Biblical one.

 

TFR:

At the side of my nightstand when I was a child, I had a huge children’s Bible storybook with the most amazing illustrations. I still have it. I feel the stories helped create who I am. It’s not that my beliefs are the same as when I was a child, but as a writer, they’re so foundational when you hear them at a young age. Do they always find a way into your work?

 

Howe:

Not always, I mean there are many poems where they don’t, not really, but like any interior world they are there, somewhere, always in the background. They were for many people, for many writers, like Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. You know, he spent years writing about the Abraham and Isaac story.

 

TFR:

In Fear and Trembling—

 

Howe:

Yes, and for me, always of course like many girls, it was Magdalene’s story that appealed to me. I knew from a very young age that how she was depicted was wrong.

 

TFR:

I always questioned the Cain and Abel story, why an all powerful being would prefer a lamb over wheat. It always bothered me. Mary Magdalene too, I always thought of the scene where the crowd was going to stone her.

 

Howe:

I knew it, always, I just knew it. And then later, when studying the New Testament and the early Church, I studied with Elaine Pagels, actually, who wrote a book about the gnostic gospels, and how the church fathers created that persona of Magdalene we came to know. [The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, 1979].

 

TFR:

This is why I love your book—you’ve given her the voice stolen, and let her take advantage of the empty space left.

 

Howe:

We’ll never know, as much as we want to know about the historical woman, and as a woman I can identify with a her searching for meaning and for her own subjectivity outside the norms that existed for her then.

 

TFR:

That is sad, really, right? I mean all the women of the Bible, and there are so many! Their voices have been filtered, right? We only get to hear the redacted male versions. When did this idea come to you, to focus poems on her? Is this the first you wrote of her?

 

Howe:

I’d been trying to write in the voice of Magdalene for thirty years. I think trying is the key word there—for me it was a kind of receptivity that had to occur, I think I had to grow up!

 

TFR:

I get that. I’ve had to move away from the religion of my childhood, and then sort of dance with it through the years. Or maybe I should say break up with it, and reconcile, and then do it all over again. It feels like it will be a life-long process. As a poet I’ve written in the voice of Eve, Noah’s wife, stuck on that boat, questioning her husband’s sanity, and recently a piece where I envisioned Adam going through a divorce in twenty-first century Florida before heading off to Vegas. I never thought about Magdalene, really, and now I feel a bit bad about that. I did do an ekphrastic poem based on a de La Tour painting before I knew of your collection. I’m interested: When you found yourself exploring, felt her voice coming out, would you say you were channeling her? That’s how I feel they come to me, as if I’m the receptacle and I let them speak.

 

Howe:

Well, it is and it isn’t, I mean in the book she’s me, she’s you, she’s a contemporary woman, she’s a woman who’s still in history.

 

TFR:

“Still in history.” Could you speak to that phrase a little more?

 

Howe:

I mean every poem, of course, for me is different. Some are more like just me wearing a mask of Magdalene, but sometimes it’s like everything is there, and I feel she is me, she is you, she’s the woman over there. That what was taken from us, from us women, was our commonality of her—she was turned, by men, into a repentant prostitute, who was closed off to us. I feel she’s the female principle trying to integrate herself.

 

TFR:

I wanted to ask, how you feel about it—that she’s the one who always had to be forgiven for something, or Eve, right? These voiceless women who’ve been reduced, in so many ways, to objects in need of forgiveness.

 

Howe:

According to the story, it might have been her, or it might not have been her. A lot of those female figures were combined in the gospels to one kind of object, a female representational object for men.

 

TFR:

To fit into their narratives.

 

Howe:

Right. Have you read the gnostic gospels and the gospel according to Mary Magdalene?

 

TFR:
No, only the old and new, the little blurb-version in my Catholic Bible.

 

Howe:

The gnostic gospels were outlawed by the Catholic Church, and we had no access to them until they were found in the late 1940s in a cave in Egypt—

 

TFR:
The dead sea scrolls?

 

Howe:

They were found along with the dead sea scrolls, but they really were the Gnostics, the early Christian communities who called themselves the Gnostics, and there is a gospel according to Mary Magdalene. There’s a story that you can get, though the original scroll was tattered and there’s a lot of empty spaces, as it’s ripped up, perhaps missing some pages.

 

TFR:

A physical object that was found then. Is there an idea when she wrote it?

 

Howe:

There’s also many different ones, gospels, thirty or forty of them. As Elaine Pagels notes, there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and in it she is “a character.” Whoever she was, the early communities split off into different kinds of communities, you know, then someone dies, a leader or writer, and arguments arise: He said this, she said that, they were all priests at that time, it was circular, both men and women, in a circular community that was eventually outlawed by the hierarchy of the patriarchal central church that determined priests and bishops should be all male, with no women in even perfunctory roles.

 

TFR:

Which of course left us with two thousand years of patriarch-diluted history.

 

Howe:

Yes, oppressions of female history!

 

TFR:

This book, this collection, I feel, on oppression, is quite timely. On the other hand, when wouldn’t it have been? It’s two thousand years in the making. What do you want to say to young female poets, with your own revelations, about what we’ve always known of as sexual harassment?

 

Howe:

The key thing we’ve always known is that women know women who have been beaten down, drowned, burned, killed, beaten to death by men. I mean, I love men, but the patriarchy has to end. That’s the political feeling I have, as a poet. I feel Muriel Rukeyser’s great poets’ voice of [German artist] Käthe Kollwitz in the poem of the same name, comments in her poem, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I feel we need to tell the truth about our lives. and we’ve been telling the truth all along, but no one would write it for us. There were a few women writers, but they’re almost invisible. We have to tell the truth about our lives. So I would tell young female poets, “Tell the truth about your life. Whatever that means.” All of our young women poets need to tell the truth in such a way they become transformed in the telling, which is what poetry does. Mere complaint doesn’t do it, mere witness doesn’t even do it. Something has to occur in the telling that’s transformative to the writer.

 

TFR:

Thank you for that. I find in some contemporary poetry it’s men and women ranting, and the ranting doesn’t do it.

 

Howe:

This is a very mysterious aspect of art, right? That somehow through language and style, silence and metaphor, and musicality, and writing into a subject, not merely about a subject, but into what you don’t understand about it, about the subject, then one becomes transformed in the act of writing, and one discovers something one doesn’t know, and that is what art is for. There’s nothing wrong with witness, we need it, but art transforms the maker. Art transforms both the poet and the reader.

 

TFR:

Do you feel once the poem leaves you it becomes the reader’s?

 

Howe:

That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn’t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can’t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around—that’s what I’ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn’t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world—this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.

 

TFR:

I tell my students I probably only appreciate about 30 percent of the poems I read, and of that 30 percent there are only a few I love, but those poems help me live. I take them with me when I try to go to sleep at night after a horrible day. In your book, What the Living Do, you endured the death of your brother. I had a younger brother who died at forty-three of alcoholism.

 

Howe:

I’m so sorry! In my family too, we dealt with that. I feel the same way. Poetry saved my life.

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Natural Order

I’m a little more prairie than you, Mom.
Grew up a stone’s throw from winding,

 

forested trails. Trees arched over gravel
roads, and the place in the powder sky

 

where their branches met, a cathedral ceiling.
You buried downed birds in shallow graves,

 

in a vacant lot by your apartment. I watched

a whole deer decompose in a field. Made a school

 

project of her. Every quarter, on my class trip

to buckthorn country, to the task of weeding-out

 

invasive plant species, I saw the same doe
sink deeper into the ground. Drew her outline

 

on a worksheet more and more skeletal
with each visit to her muddy bedside. Mom,

 

you too have watched the seasons change.
Your childhood rotted into caretaking,

 

like a sun-bleached cordgrass giving
its whole self back to the ground.

 

When you were seven, you started buying
the family’s groceries each week—

 

cans of beans stacked in a bike basket,
cradled by cornstarch and white flour.

 

In elementary school, all my teachers
had the same four-pronged chart

 

of the seasons: spring turned
summer, then a gentle decline

 

into fall and a snowman

smiling through winter.

 

Nothing in nature actually follows

this pattern. A field mouse breeds

 

too many young, swallows
half of them back into herself.

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When God Is a Woman

How many householders meet in

a whorehouse?

 

How many mujras dwell in a kotha?

 

How many neonates hew to a bordello?

 

Like her admirers

the god is silent.

In her sinews

hides a hint of soil

from the yard of courtesans.

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Cosmos Obscura

Warning: This video contains flashing images.

 

Score by Irina Escalante-Chernova

 

In Cosmos Obscura, the universe is at once known and unknowable. New patterns, rhythms and metaphors are born from old ones, and familiar celestial bodies are refracted into strange and unusual forms. The visuals were created from photographs taken from the Voyager II spacecraft. Photographs of the planets and their moons were abstracted and animated in order to create various patterns, rhythms and images.

The musical work was originally created for 8 channels and subsequently adapted to the stereo version. The music focuses on the work from different backgrounds with the noises of nature and those which have an electronic source.

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Monads and the Cosmic Jigsaw Factory

My scientist friend—his name’s Adam but he spells it “Atom”— calls me about the latest breakthrough. He says physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle. His voice is urgent, almost cracking.

 

I say, “I’m tired of spheres. Tell me this new particle is noodle-shaped.”

 

He says, “Monads, they’re called monads. They don’t have a shape, but they might have a soul.”

 

I’m no conspiracy theorist. Still, sometimes I get the suspicion that the scientific community is really a secret society of comedians who get a kick—a 2,500 year-old kick—out of human credulity.

 

Atom is out of breath. He says he has to go, but he’ll keep me updated. He makes it sound like he’s right there, in the midst of the action, his hands touching the lever of a particle accelerator, his eyes obscured by fancy goggles. I use the word “scientist” somewhat liberally. Atom teaches AP Physics at a charter school.

*

When my wife and I were still doing marriage counseling (a year before our divorce), Atom was full of suggestions. He kept championing the need for proximity. He’d call me up and say, “Are you close? I mean, you know, close?” He’d suggest that my wife and I take a sample of each other’s blood and put the samples under a compound microscope, and then—as husband and wife—spend time marveling at the shifting landscape within, how each drop of our blood was a unique eruption of lentil-shaped lava.

 

On some level, I think he was right. My wife and I were failing because we had run out of topography.

*

The next day, Atom calls up again. This time, I stop him mid-sentence and say, “Soul? I think I misheard you yesterday—did you say monads have souls?”

 

He says, “It’s complicated. At the very least, monads have perception. Not to mention appetite—”

 

“Jesus, they get hungry?”

 

“More like inclination. Or desire. They long.”

 

There’s a lull on the phone. On Atom’s end of the receiver, I can hear clinking glasses and a droning electronic voice, as if Atom’s at happy hour with Stephen Hawking.

 

I say, “Look, it just doesn’t sound very, uh, scientific—”

 

“What?”

 

“All these metaphors.”

 

“Actually, at the subatomic level, nonidentity is the norm. Nothing is what it seems, and thus metaphors are the most accurate form of language we physicists have at our disposal—”

 

Atom’s voice is drowned out by cheering, even wild abandon. Wherever he is, it sounds like a team has just scored.

 

I say, “So, uh, what do they want?”

 

Atom says, “Who?”

 

“Monads.”

 

“Omniscience.”

*

To be fair, it’s not just Atom who’s monad-struck. All the media outlets—NPR, CNN, FOX, even ESPN—can’t get enough. Monads this, monads that. Despite being infinitesimal, monads are bigger than sliced bread. The title of one article reads, “Sentient Particle Added to Our Subatomic Zoo!” Oddly, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the whole zoo analogy. After my wife and I split, Atom wouldn’t shut up about quarks and leptons and gluons and all those other subatomic “animals” that escaped from the primordial zoo.

 

Atom said, “The Big Bang was the first prison break.”

 

I said, “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

 

He said, “Imagine how many inmates we’ve yet to tag.”

 

It dawned on me later that Atom was talking about women. Other women. Soul-bonding with particles that were not my wife.

*

Atom keeps calling. Sometimes I wonder if I’m Atom’s only friend. He strikes me as the kind of person who believes friendship is monogamous.

 

He says, “The perception of monads is directed inward, not outward.”

 

I say, “Omniscience—I don’t understand—how does a particle seek omniscience?”

 

“Monads are navel-gazers. Each monad is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: its own existence belies the contours of its neighbors. Thus in studying its own being, each monad is in fact intuiting its cosmic neighborhood.”

 

Atom goes on to describe how monads understand the world concentrically. Monads reason from self to neighborhood to neighborhood’s neighborhood, etcetera.

 

It all sounds a bit alarming. Like an invasion. Minus the green humanoids with laser beams.

*

I rub my eyes into the wee hours of the night. Everything is out of focus except negative space. A hat suggests a head. An outlet, a plug. Contours become clues. I imagine my body as one gangly, oversized monad: it too is a jigsaw piece with a shape that suggests a connection. What connection? I only know the answers that are incorrect. All the hands I thought my hands fit into.

 

You get this sinking feeling when you turn forty—alone forty, divorced forty, table-for-one forty—you get this sinking feeling that the cosmic jigsaw factory made a mistake. A manufacturing error. Honestly, I think Atom knows this feeling all too well. I think it’s why he won’t stop calling. The cosmic jigsaw factory expresses its deepest apologies. No one’s perfect, it says. But the truth is, well, how to put it? Your piece was shrink-wrapped in the wrong box.

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Broken Models

Rachel Poliquin, in her 2012 book The Breathless Zoo, writes that “Taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing,” revealing our hopes and dreams about our place in the natural world. Natural history dioramas present a carefully constructed, perfectly encapsulated and controlled experience of nature, revealing as much about humanity as the nature depicted. In Broken Models,  Steensma Hoag negotiates access to dioramas in various stages of being decommissioned and uses these fictional spaces to create imaginary scenes. By introducing a worker wearing a white Hazmat suit, which evokes images of advanced technology labs in which the environment needs to be protected from the worker, the series suggests a scientific method of understanding and quantifying our experience of nature and comments on our failed construction of the environment as an inexhaustible resource.

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