Category: Aquifer

Love Itself Can Be Dangerous

Further Problems with Pleasure by Sandra Simonds
University of Akron Press, 2017
72 pages, hardcover $49.95, paper $14.95, epub $9.99

 

 

Further Problems with Pleasure, Sandra Simonds’ latest book of poetry, addresses similar themes found in her other collections. All of her work addresses important, timely subjects, yet she has proven with each volume that she is not afraid of leaving her audience uncomfortable. Her poems require her reader to work hard in order to come to a blended understanding of both content and syntax. The payoff is well worth it. To me, the most interesting of her subjects are her explorations of violence against women, the dangers of love, the complexity of living in the South, and the potential of suicide.

 

She opens this collection with a five-page poem provocatively titled, “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want to Die,” updating Marianne Moore’s sentiment for the 21st century. As the title suggests, her lines are manic, almost desperate. By linking her syntax in nontraditional ways and by ending and beginning new sentiments without regard for punctuation, she establishes the manic voice, which emerges from her Lego-like constructions of grammar and yet ends up being hauntingly beautiful. The poem opens as the female speaker, alone in a room with a man, considers how she might escape “unharmed / the way a woman has to manipulate both mind and body.” As many readers know too well, women find themselves in situations that can turn dangerous in an instant. Here, we are reminded to always consider an escape route.

 

For Simonds, love itself can be dangerous. Such a forceful theme is apparent in much of this collection. In “Spring Dirge,” she states, “Some people call it self-destructiveness / but I call it love.” Even more explicitly, she writes about the violent repercussions against women in “A Lover’s Discourse”:

 

Every so many seconds a woman is hit by a man
 with direct tectonic rage. Geology
 is some rough sadism I know
 not what. Agony is property
 but it is also agony. Vow to me, agony!
 Declare your allegiance! (Or buy me a house.)

 

Simonds’ manic voice mirrors the complexity of these lines and the familiar, cultural position of the powerlessness of women. Here, the speaker considers the payoff of an abusive relationship, one defined by agony and rage, to that of material wealth. In poem after poem, Simonds positions her speaker in these places of opposition.

 

For example, another favorite poem of mine from this collection, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” juxtaposes ideas of the feminine. The poem, set in Mississippi, describes a group of nuns who are not who “they pretend to be / One is pregnant under her habit / One thinks she ought not to touch that / One buys a Diet Dr. Pepper and Twizzlers.” Because this poem is set in the South, I can’t help but wonder about the sins and terrors of this geography. Is God dead? Has he been false (like these nuns) all along? The poem digresses into a word and sound play on “nun” and “none”:

 

This is a place of weeping things
 where the world has wept
 and wept and no one has come

No Father None     No Mother None
No Baby None Comes     No Sister
None Comes No Brother None Comes
No One     like None
It’s that kind of place
 You’ve seen it before
 It’s blind to everything, everyone

 

Although they are not officially marked, I would say that Further Problems with Pleasure is separated into three sections. The middle section, titled “The Baudelaire Variations,” is broken into sixteen smaller poems. Simonds translates several Baudelaire poems, mostly maintaining a close reading of the original, yet modernizing them in order to bring them into the contemporary world. Most of the translations follow the path other translators have taken, but a poem like “I Love Wine!” is acutely different:

 

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid
 as I walk this earth without death, without an apron
without being a wife and so my queer heart transforms into the nostrils of a
 winter
 workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced tulip sky.

 

A large majority of the poems throughout her book are in the form of an address, and here too, Simonds ends with an address—this time to someone named Felix, requesting a trip to the “Oregon coast / [to] relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams.” Historically, Baudelaire and photographer Felix Nadar were very close friends. Baudelaire claimed that Nadar was the “most amazing manifestation of vitality.” Perhaps Simonds is playing with this historical relationship and a present-day character to whom most of the poems in this section are addressed. Felix changes gender and appears to be a muse or imaginary partner. Remarkably, the name Felix is derived from the Latin for “happy.” Felix, for Simonds, is the “manifestation of vitality” that often, poem to poem, seems elusive.

 

The first and third sections of her book include both poems that reveal the hectic, intense inclinations of the speaker’s tone as well as poems that are tight, clear, and adhere to grammatical order. In both the first and third sections, the word “suicide” frequently occurs. It is a conceit that makes sense considering the desperateness of a suicidal mind. Mania and suicide go hand and hand. Simonds’ opening poems make the claim “I can’t imagine why anyone / would feel the desire to hurt a woman / who thinks about suicide every day.” Occasionally, the speaker of a poem declares that they don’t want to kill themselves, or they implode grammar into one important conviction in lines like “This is my life / I don’t want it I do.” Poems like “Ode to Suicide, Delirium, and Early REM” advertise from the beginning the difficulty the speaker has with life. Always keeping in the contemporary world, Simonds’ brilliantly contrasts a Twitter or Facebook posting about the shape of a women’s eyes to those of Mary as an icon:

 

mine are not almond-shaped, like my sister’s, my tips are “downturned,”
 something medieval and sad, something fenced-in the manuscript or
 economic,
 the way they paint the little strawberries are a technological advance,
and deep green vines up the gold-vermillion boxes to keep the text in, to keep
the lion in, to keep the flow
 of the blue flow robes in,
 Mine point down (Almond eye surgery for downturned eyes? please help,
 photos)
 the way Mary’s tips point down, the hue, a libidinous blue,
a corruption, wave, metal star work of mournful
 space —

 

I so admire how Simonds takes what to many of us might seem trivial social media moments and reminds us of the bombardment of criticism and difficulty that comes with simply surviving in the modern world. And, unfortunately for many, it becomes too much:

 

I follow these downward tips
 my eye sockets
that are not beautiful after all
 but eternally plain
as coffins.

 

In “Elysian Fields” the speaker asserts “Life is evil / That is all / I want to live because I’m stubborn.” The poem takes its title from classical mythology as the final resting place for the blessed. It also references a place or state of perfect happiness, paradise. As it is situated as one of her final poems in the collection, might Simonds be addressing the one thing her speaker searches for poem after poem? Further Problems with Pleasure, as the title suggests, is the elusiveness of that pleasure and all the obstacles that get in its way. Readers must endure the mind of one who toys with suicide and addresses difficult themes stemming from social to geographical limits and confines, but on the other end lies something real and rewarding and magical.

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Interview: Sandra Simonds

         

 

Sandra Simonds is a prolific poet, critic, mother, and professor. She is the author of five poetry collections: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming), Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron, 2016, and winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). She is also author of a free electronic PDF collection,  Untitled Collage Poems (Bloof Books, 2016). A sixth print volume, Orlando (Wave Books), is forthcoming in 2018, and Simonds is working on another collection, Atopia. Please see five poems from Atopia and a review of Further Problems with Pleasure elsewhere in Aquifer.

 

Reading Simonds’ work is not unlike plugging into high-voltage poetica, fused with the hard metal of keen intellect, unmistakable humor, the reality of ourselves as sexual beings, and charged with political and social thematic waves. Nothing is at rest in these poems; they shout and taunt, but mostly they invite an engagement to language throbbing with 21st-century life.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:
I’m thinking I was first introduced to your poetry when I received my May/June [2017] issue of The American Poetry Review, and was intrigued by your poem, “Dear Chris,” which is the first of three poems featured in the issue. It’s a hardworking poem, “long,” and of an eclectic construction that gives it restless energy.

 

Contemporary epic, or “long” poems, are my latest poetry-drug, so when I read an excerpt from Orlando in The Brooklyn Rail’s e-journal, I was smitten with its forty-eight flowing tercets, where the speaker seems to address the city of Orlando, but soon we’re accompanying the speaker in a kind of kinetic stream-of-consciousness journey, passing through the land of the body as if were a fantasy theme park like Disney World, which is referred to several times in the poem.

 

The form works fabulously against the energy, creating marvelous tension. Thoughts echo in my reader’s mind of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, yet I sense you, the poet, clearly enter at multiple points. For example, we see the speaker at their desk, trying to compose on a laptop, but they are interrupted, first by the action of another, then technology fails, and the work is lost. A hard-copy diary is remembered: “. . . and that is precisely the moment you fell out of love with me, / abandoning me to the very diaries and bookshelves of my consciousness, both as a teenage/girl and now as a middle aged woman, so I tried to figure out what I could have done back then, / what confession, what moment of weakness, what apology had driven you out of my life, / so abruptly . . .”

 

You have a collection soon to be published (2018) from Wave Books called Orlando. I’m excited about this as both a poet, and as a university instructor in Orlando; is the entire collection an epic poem, or is Orlando a long poem contained therein? Where did this spring forth from?

 

Sandra Simonds:
First, thank you for this question because I’m really excited to talk about Orlando, which I think of as an epic feminist poem that reads like fiction or memoir. In terms of structure, Orlando is composed of two sections. The first section is forty pages and each page is four very long-lined tercets; the second part of the epic is written in a kind of spiraling open form. The second part of the book, in fact, was initially forty or so discreet poems with titles that I, upon revision, transformed into one long second section called “Demon Spring.”

 

I chose the long poem form because I wanted to work in the tradition of the epic which is historically so heavily inflected with masculine energy. The “epic” has been coded “male” and I was interested in the challenges of writing an epic poem given the gender history. Who is allowed to write our history? Of course, I’m not the first woman to do this. Several feminist long poems that influenced me in this project come to mind including Alice Notely’s The Descent of Alette, Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, and Loba by Diane di Prima.

 

You are right to note that “Orlando” in the poem is an unstable character—sometimes Orlando is a city, other times, Orlando is a lover, and other times Orlando is an idea or set of ideas. When I wrote the book, this instability wasn’t intentional but it turned out to be an effective way that I could talk about both love and relationships using this figure as well as broader cultural concerns, like materialism, entertainment, the surface and what lies beneath the surface and so on. So the instability of the figure creates a kind of creative and philosophical opening that worked for me and relates to the traditional concerns of epic poetry—telling a historical, social and political story about our times but through a distinctly feminist voice.

 

TFR:
As a poet, and poetry reader for The Florida Review, I find it increasingly rare that a poem both challenges and dazzles me. I find the poems of Further Problems with Pleasure just brilliant. How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

 

Simonds:
I wanted to explore a number of themes at the same time: sexuality, sexual violence, sexual liberation, gender shame, the body, perversity, fantasy and how these things are constructed and defined in late-capitalist society. What are the norms? What is taboo? Lacan says, “Do not give up on your desire,” and I think that’s a sort of jumping off point of this book. Okay, well what does that mean for a single working mother living in the Deep South at this particular point in history? What part of our desire is “ours” and what part of it is manufactured?

 

TFR:
In this collection, is there one poem that worked as the spark for the rest of the pieces? If not, which poem do you feel best anchors the collection for you?

 

Simonds:
I think the “Further Problems with Pleasure” poems that are positioned throughout the book anchor it because these poems bring the book back to the central questions surrounding the nature of desire and, when the book veers away a little bit from these questions, they are brought back to the forefront of the reader’s mind. I also have a lot of affection for the last poem in the book, “Dear Chris,” which I wrote in response to a poem sent to me by the poet Chris Nealon. I was thinking about all of the leftists who stand up in society against hatred and violence against the oppressed. I wanted to both acknowledge the struggles that we have encountered both personally and more broadly as leftists, what we are up against, what we will be up against, but also to say that what we do every day, our actions matter. That what we did here, right now, matters, to each other and to our children and that even though we all come from different backgrounds, my hope for the future, is that our children will not have to face what we have faced and if they do, that they will be comrades, that they will be on the right side of history fighting for the same things.

 

TFR:
I’m always curious what literary fields a poet mines; what are you reading now?

 

Simonds:
I just finished Matthew Rohrer’s The Others, which I thought was great. His storytelling and the way he works with narrative is fascinating. I also just finished Rapture by Sjohnna McCray. I had the pleasure of reading with Sjohnna a few months ago and he gave me the reading copy of his book with all of his notes and directions to himself (Thank you, Sjohnna!). I love the way Rapture tells the complicated story of his relationship to his mother.

 

TFR:
I think I’d go as far as calling your poetry “combustible” and timely for what’s occurring in the both the political and social arena right now. It’s like the lines are “plugged in” and feel energized, so I must ask, any writing rituals you’d like to share? That is, where do you write best, what time of day, tea, coffee, wine or a bag of chips?

 

Simonds:
My only trick is to write when you are so desperate that you can’t not write what you need to write—when you read things in the news, write, when you feel a sense of justice, write. That usually puts a bit of urgency into the writing and makes the poems more resonant, so that when you’re drinking a cup of tea, revising those passionate poems, you don’t take out the passion, but you have some passion to work with and frame. I guess that Wordsworth covered this area long before I did, though.

 

TFR:
As a parent and an academic, a working professor, how do you find or make time to write? Is it easy for you or always a struggle, as in some sort of “compromise”?

 

Simonds:
It’s always a struggle to find time for me because I’m just a very busy person with two young children, but I think because I’ve been writing since I was a child, it’s like second nature to me. I think I’m probably a person who would write in any circumstances—in a jail or in a castle, in a factory or in an office. I can’t imagine not being a writer and writers write.

 

TFR:
Who (or what) acts as your muse? Or, perhaps there’s a particular subject you find you keep coming back to again and again?

 

Simonds:
The dead, the people who have struggled before us for social justice, the unborn, the people who will need our writing when we are dead. My themes usually center around the political—I want to make poems that are both political and creative, that are political but not obvious rants or propaganda, that touch people, that make people think.

 

TFR:
In your writing process, would you say you write more by logic (doing research, creating notes, etc.) or intuition, or some combination of the two?

 

Simonds:
I go on intuition and sound always. I have an idea or an impulse and I just follow my gut. Sometimes it’s wrong but more often than not it isn’t. I think that this kind of leap of faith is what you have to really develop and nurture.

 

TFR:
Anything that people THINK they know about your poetry, that isn’t so?

 

Simonds:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what people think about my poetry so, honestly, I have no idea.

 

TFR:
What projects are you working on at the present, and what subjects do you feel are calling you for future projects?

 

Simonds:
I’m working on an epic political poem called “Atopia.”

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Five Poems from Atopia

I like to photograph old signs 
when I drive along the Emerald Coast.
“Florida Hotel: American Owned” and
“Rachel’s Restaurant” I dreamed 
a beautiful poem up by the sea but
forgot it by morning; Make America 
Great Again vs Occupy Wall Street.
We talked about extreme weather 
and the stock market in the Gulf,
the water fluctuating around the sun
and pelicans, text message alerts
for tornados and when I got home 
I googled sinkholes and clicked on
the interactive map—14 by 12 foot,
8 by 6, 1 by 1, and read the warning 
signs, maybe the doors to your house
don’t close, maybe there are cracks
in the walls, maybe there are depressions
in your lawn, now imagine a bed
and furniture instantly falling into
the lawmaker’s hand holding up a piece
of limestone talking about an amendment
which will outlaw fracking in Florida forever 
“I’ve changed positions,” she says, “Look
at this limestone. It’s fragile. It’s porous”
and wishing I remembered my dream
of the sea by the sea, the dream enclosed
in the bulb of the sun, my body
covered by seawater, “It was almost
like there were colored rings around
the sun” your dad, the archaeologist, said
and driving home, the eye-level pelicans
and their prehistoric flight, seemed
calm, the bridge both flowing into
and forged by the metallic clouds
—
Philomel, lost cause, not quite, operatic as doves
 the oatmeal is cooking this morning and it will be a long
hurricane season from June
 to October, that season of hell as we approach
 an apocalypse, as showers fill the heart unable

 to process what is happening.
 Alone in your cabin, the outside world
 has a tongue, has words, scrolled
 and scrawled along the ridges of the bleak sky. 

 Oh Philomel, I have no pictures to post, no landscapes
 to paint, my song is sung in vain, and it is composed 
 of rubble. Fear not, Philomel.
			
Now the oatmeal burns inside its weeping pot
 and revenge is its own constellation of anguish,
 its own pattern of swallows moving across
 the luxuriant atmosphere.

 Personal history? What can we really
 make of it after so many years? 

 The metal bends, the apartment saturated with ash.
—
Our masters shift; this is the definition 
of domination
Still, Esmerelda, if you would like to take 
a dip in the filthy lake, I’m game 
and if you still have the impulse to be mesmerized by love,
I’m down for that too

I can even transform into a nude before your very eyes 
I promise
I can become just like a painting of paradise from the olden days

We could do this for a little while
before we have to go back to work again

inside the impenetrable flesh factory
where the meat screams

even though it is already dead
I’ve never known why this is 

Why does it scream night and day?
Maybe because it has no identity 

Esmerelda, they want our blood because 
they must know how sunny it is

how, long ago, we fed the horses and wept and sang 
by the fireplace; they must know

that we had such intense passions, 
that we thought the grasshoppers

eating the yellow fields were beautiful

and we looked at both the creatures
and the fields with a kind of awe

Our masters did not like this and our passions 
had to be held down
by a corresponding cruelty

the formal laws of the state
O the networks
of subjection are infinite
—

Read of an ICE raid:
men, women and children sent
to a detention center
in Crawfordville, Florida

Turn the page

Bought erasers, pencils and summer
workbooks for my children

This is a cell
All living things are made of cells

This is the earth
The earth is always changing

If lyric poetry is cruel, I am forlorn
at the loss of our wilderness

There really is an “anti-parks”
congressional caucus whose aim
is to shovel the plants and rocks
and trees into black plastic bags
and throw those bags into the sea

It is important to stay safe in Science
How do we stay safe?
Follow the rules and use the right tools 

The goddesses of Sunday welcome you
We bring you this bowl of peaches
and serve you with our porcelain fingers

Here is a napkin
Here is a knife

Your wife and children
are welcome too
— 
Glandular fever punctuated by tropical storm Cindy which
was a dud; many weeks of rain, the lymph nodes swollen, many weeks
of wind while my children play inside the supernova-like sinkhole,
Green tea and raw honey even though bees struggle for survival, Alex
searching for climate-controlled storage spaces, I yelled at everyone, the black
diamond and rattlesnake rattle fell upon me, I could tell you were trying
to communicate, I suspected it was your fault, seizure like substance
of air turned to current, maybe I blamed you for my illness, I knew
you were the one taking me down through this amber realm,
this dream space, fragile, filled with neurons, jammed with signals
signals from the dead, then the realm spilled into the black hole
of the summer solstice and out of the storm; O Angel, you were born.
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The Most Beautiful Dialect

Chemistry by Weike Wang
Knopf, 2017
211 pages, paper, $24.95
 

 

Early in Chemistry, the unnamed protagonist describes how an atom is mostly empty space: “If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world’s human population could fit inside a sugar cube.” In a way, this brief comment on empty spaces applies to the brilliance of Weike Wang’s debut novel itself. The novel’s narrative suggests more than is stated plainly on the page. It is a book as much about what goes unsaid as it is about what is said. In this way, Weike Wang tells a story full of ambition, loneliness, humor, heart, and naiveté.

 

I hesitate to describe the plot because of its familiarity. A twenty-something-year-old struggles to complete her PhD, commit to her long-term boyfriend, and withstand the great deal of pressure on her academic success placed on her by her immigrant parents. The protagonist procrastinates, meets with her shrink regularly, and drinks a lot of wine—bottles and bottles of wine. However, the surprise of Chemistry is not in a riveting plot that charts new territory; it is in everything else.

 

There is something about the protagonist of Chemistry that makes her aimlessness charming. Perhaps it is her subtle intelligence. The novel is written in vignettes, none longer than a handful of pages, most under a page in length. These scenes rarely linger, and a gesture in Chemistry does all the work that another novel might have needed pages of interiority to explain. The precise language at times more closely resembles prose poetry or a braided lyric essay than it does conventional fiction prose. The closest example on the sentence level that comes to mind is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, although at times I felt like I could deduce influences from Amy Hempel and Annie Dillard.

 

Interspersed between scenes, the protagonist ruminates on the visible light spectrum, refraction, the scientific method, the history of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of other scientific observations. These passages are always approachable and never felt overwhelmingly technical. Sometimes these facts are interspersed while in the midst of a scene, which shows the character’s wandering mind and helps the reader better understand the rationale behind her actions. For example, after the protagonist reveals that her mother knows the Shanghai dialect, which the protagonist doesn’t understand yet also considers the most beautiful dialect, Wang writes:

 

When I am born she does not speak (the dialect) with me.

Studies have shown that the brain feels exclusion not like a broken heart but like a broken bone. It is physical pain that the brain feels. (55)

 

This braiding of scientific data with narrative allows access to the particular way that the protagonist sees the world and interprets her own thoughts. The intelligence and external pressure put on the character to succeed make her refusal to complete her PhD and accept her boyfriend’s proposal acts of defiance. In a way, the protagonist is rebelling in the only way she knows how—via stagnation.

 

Stable relationships are few and far between in Chemistry. Yet these strained relationships don’t erupt into emotional outbursts. The conflict is impossible to separate from the protagonist’s identity as a first-generation immigrant who moved from China to America as a child. Her boyfriend needs more than she can give. She can’t even appreciate him fully because “it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon” (192). If her romantic relationship is strained from her Chinese qualities, her familial relationships are strained because she has become too Americanized. Unlike her parents, the protagonist has forgotten most of her birth language and doesn’t have much of a relationship with her relatives back in China. At times she is embarrassed by her mother’s accent and pronunciation, a common thread in immigrant literature. In an interesting reversal, however, both narratives also encourage the protagonist along both continuums. Her boyfriend begins learning Chinese in order to better relate. Meanwhile the protagonist has tremendous pressure to be successful in a conventional sense—a prestigious degree and job—placed upon her by her parents. In this way, the parents are pushing the protagonist further into the American dream narrative. This clash in both sets of relationships traps the protagonist between two worlds, making it impossible for her to fully inhabit one or the other.

 

Chemistry manages to capture a sense of knowing in the unknown. Scientific facts are approachable in a way that makes you consider whether you always knew the processes of meiosis and that lonsdaleite is a mineral that is “58% harder than diamond.” The whole book feels familiar in the same way, like running into a friendly acquaintance that you can’t quite remember where you met. After saying goodbye, you may find yourself hoping that you stumble across paths again soon, that the atomic empty space isn’t quite so vast.

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the crossing

we are building a viaduct

because we decided

this time,

we will not  travel

underground, live in the great dismal,

drag our bodies through the marsh,

hide in the cattails.

in the plain view of daylight

above the gorge,

as high as millau in france,

our railway.

 

once we perfect the art of brick making,

you can decide how many are needed.

that woman over there, maybe she can

decide how many tons

our spillway can hold.

this old one with the braids

like a hive,

i hope she’ll teach us about

about steel.

she knows how to reduce

sulfur from iron to keep it strong.

look at her hands.

look at her crafted shoulders,

but do not touch unless you

are invited.

 

darlings, there is a job

for us too.

ours might be the gathering kind.

talkers sing like brave birds.

poets plow the top soil

dancers paint with perennials.

 

we will call all hands.

hurting hands are beautiful.

photographers shoot

for our annual day of remembrance.

we can alternate hosts.  I’ll sign up for that.

we have all agreed, no borders.  no borders.  no borders.

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2017 Editors’ Awards Are Here!

Posted on by cahcmsadmin

Before Hurricane Irma descends, we’d like to announce the winners of the 2017 Editors’ Awards. Thanks to the many fine writers who submitted their work and made our choices oh, so difficult. This year’s winners and finalists are:

Poetry Winner
Allison Adair, “City Life” and “Hitching”

Poetry Finalists
Dana Roeser, “Late July”
Rebecca Morgan Frank, “Gerbert of Aurillac and the Magic Eightball”

Fiction Winner
Eliza Robertson, “Louise McKinney Correctional Center for Women”

Fiction Finalists
Mike Alberti, “Two Floods”
Lenore Hart, “Thirteen Ways of Living with a Wolf”

Nonfiction Winner
Renee Branum, “Bolt”

We hope to publish a profile on each winner and finalist here and in social media as the months progress to next spring’s publication. Congratulations to these fine writers. Next year’s contest will open in January.

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Sister/Brother Poems

My Sister Sings Reba at Forty-Three

for Shawna

 

To worship the earth, we barefoot down

to the water because we have never been

clean, and for this dirty mercy, my sister

 

kneels in her wet suit to the smell of surf

wax at 7 AM, kneels to the car key stashed

in the wheel well and the first open eye

 

full of ocean, and yes, Lord, no way around it,

my sister, today, will accept a broken nose full

of the granite reef handed down to her

 

by the gods of the southwest swell. By blood,

by green, by mud, by tide, my sister will be

held under by the world, but because she swans

 

back to the surface punched out of breath

but having survived, my sister kneels

to pray in the key of steel guitar and sunshine

 

to the ripped-down posters of old rodeos,

to the wet way of hay on a boot heel, to the tush-

push and the electric slide and the wide

 

mouthful of wild she finds while surfing

the hot highway home in the back of a golden

Ford F-150. My sister survives, and you could call

 

my sister the breeze these many July mornings,

but my sister does not soar like a sky on nights

when beneath the weight of the pistol

 

in her waist she serves with a police badge of shine

across San Francisco, for my sister must know

how a kid’s face caves in on the Fourth of July

 

after a firework has flown half-way through it,

and my sister must kneel to find a dead father

in the street on the double-yellow line,

 

to find a runaway daughter, to survive

a man standing in a creek at midnight, firing

a rifle at God. My sister knows the trauma

 

as water, the song as rugged, the body as sinking,

so, Lord, thank you for saving my sister who sings

with what it means to be the bull and the rider

 

and the war paint melting down the face of a rodeo

clown, what it means to chase a smile around

a filthy ring, yes, Lord, to chase the next wave,

 

or the next dance of tight asses in Wrangler pants,

or a next of kin, or the last long finishing note

of the evening before loading up the truck

 

with loneliness and heading home because, finally,

Lord, in the filthy bar, here we are, and, finally,

Lord, here before us rises my sister like an ocean

 

beside the microphone while muddy lights crumble

down dirty upon the black cowboy hats of the country

band, and by brown bottles of California mud, here, the filthy

 

chords are about to start, and my sister saunters up

in the armor of a leather jacket, of purple lipstick, of steel teeth,

of burgundy boots, and you who are listening should hold

 

your breath because my sister’s got a tattoo

of a bull on the wave of her back, and she’s going

to buck you off, and she’s going to elbow you down

 

deep because my sister knows how long to hold you under,

and how to save you, and how to kill you, and how to tell you

someone you love is dead, someone you love is still alive.

 

 

My Heart Is a Time Machine

 

Another brother’s funeral has ended,

and I must take my body back

to May of 1999

to stop the sunshine,

must begin again in our hotel room

with the girl

too drunk on Wild Turkey

to stand, the girl

hoisting a full keg

of Keystone Light

up onto her shoulder,

the girl grenading the keg

through the coffee table,

the girl leaping up onto the bed,

the girl taking three fan blades

to the face

that send her somersaulting all the way

through our hotel window

and onto the sidewalk outside.

I’ll forgive you for laughing

as my friend, Devon,

and I

and the whole room are now

because my friend, Devon, and I

are twenty-five

and high

on the same pills

which will in seven months

in a different hotel room

in a different town

whisper him into a permanent sleep.

Now that we are here,

I promise to tell you the truth—

on this night

in May of 1999,

you cannot tell anyone in this room

in these bands

with these ukuleles in their arms

and these floating festival feelings they have

put into their mouths

to stop. You can never tell anyone

to stop

anything, friends, so you must forgive us,

forgive them, forgive the drunk girl

who stumbles back into the room

and waterfalls down

another slug of Wild Turkey,

the drunk girl who only wants the drummer

to love her, and you must forgive

the drummer who never will,

forgive Devon and me

so deep into a conversation about Roger Waters

we don’t notice the anger

the drunk girl gathers in her elbow

which becomes the shining purple mountain

over the drummer’s eye,

forgive us for not noticing

when their story ghosts like a landscape painting

silently into the background

of darkness

inching toward light.

Forgive us for not laughing anymore

because is this hello or goodbye,

because it is almost morning, and I’m still

uncertain, because what do Devon and I look like,

now, leaving the broken window behind?

Dawn seems to have eased out of us

something as tender

as a full head of long hair,

and I believe we are whispering

about the opening guitar solo

of the Wish You Were Here album, now,

or the album is playing

somewhere, now, and we are

sneaking so quietly

through the courtyard, Devon

and I, as the soundmen

breaking down the festival stage

wind up their cables

like kind fathers

tying their daughters’ shoes,

as the drunk girl snores

on the drummer’s lap in a pool chair,

and Devon walks in front of me

with the almost finished bottle

of Wild Turkey in one hand

we are passing between us.

There is a joint for the both of us I am licking,

and when we round the corner and stare straight

into the Pink Floyd sunrise,

forgive me, friends,

there is always an instant

every time I am telling this story

when I get here

that I want to be the one disappeared

by light who never was

because no one wants to be what’s left over,

and what’s left of this morning?

Hello or goodbye?

I seem to be saying both,

we are almost finished, and forgive me

again for going back so often, my friends,

but I need you to squeeze inside

my blood and help me remember this

final sunrise in which Devon

is taking off his shirt

and letting down the blonde rainforest

of his hair and dancing

to the music that is only in his head,

and one-by-one the waking people

are coming into the field to join him,

a flock of musician women and men

dancing barefoot circles in the dirt

to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

playing only in my friend’s head,

and my friend Devon is spinning around

silently in the center of all of us,

playing the bottle of Wild Turkey

like a saxophone,

like a last photograph,

like a parting metaphor,

like a sentimental machine

which is in very few moments

of monumental pressure

strong enough

to stop time.

 

 

Please also see our review of Sommers’ first book, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire. Continue reading “Sister/Brother Poems” →

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Riding Out the Storm

The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire by Ephraim Scott Sommers

Tebot Bach, 2017

94 pages, paper, $16

 

 

In storytelling, the phrase “coming of age” is as ubiquitous as “once upon a time,” yet the trope has led to some of our most beloved and widely read literature, from On the Road and Catcher in the Rye to children’s book series like Harry Potter or even Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie set. Ephraim Scott Sommers’ poetry collection The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire, released earlier this year by Tebot Bach, carves out its own niche in the “coming of age” canon that reflects the raw realities of twenty-first–century family life and employs the creative use of language and musicality that makes poetry enjoyable as well as thought-provoking. It’s all there: the boozy adventures, the bad decisions, the wayward wanderings of youth, but you don’t need to have a long trail of destruction to look back on in your life to appreciate the themes, images, and wordplay in Sommers’ collection. There are many entry points into this fine work.

 

The starting point of Sommers’ journey is his family and friends in his hometown of Atascadero, California, which is a logical starting point for the sort of reflection this collection promises. There is a lot of alcohol. There is generational violence. Yet there is also a respect for and humanization of deeply flawed but deeply loved people. There is a warmth in the childhood memories of dirty work boots stomping down a hallway or a diesel engine idling just outside the bedroom window. The poet places a certain reverence on his family members and close friends through stark imagery, a hallmark of this collection. In “The Hardest Thing,” a poem about the difficulties of forgiveness, is Aunt Diane who “scorches / a pork shoulder with a blow torch / and spits Skoal onto the back of a golden / retriever[.]” In “Shotgun Christmas,” the poem’s speaker is a child waking from a nightmare to find that “Santa won’t arrive in your doorway, but your mother will, / barefoot, in a nightgown and curlers with a sawed-off / shotgun dangling from her right hand.” The members of this family lack polish, but are strong, protective, and fierce. The poems bear both ambivalence and undeniable love.

 

Despite the warmth and respect the poet affords the characters of his earlier life, many of the poems are starkly honest about the difficulties of life in Atascadero and the unhealthy coping mechanisms that the men and women of Atascadero—including the “I” and “you” speaker of many of the poems—have adopted as a result. While a bulk of the collection speaks to this idea, one of the best examples is the tragically complacent “A-Town Blood,” wherein heroin use is “great Pegasus rides to the dragon-heights / of clouds above a Chevron parking lot,” and where the best way to escape the boredom and the pure existential dread of drone strikes and mass shootings and nuclear meltdowns is smoking weed in a blue lawn chair. Meeting one’s buddies at the bar after everyone gets off from their construction jobs leads to drinking, snorting coke in the bathroom, and “shitting in a urinal or ninja-kicking / the sink off the wall” as a remedy for drudgery and malaise bordering on despair, for powerlessness parading as denial.

 

As the collection progresses, we see a shift toward stability, maturity, a shift toward a different type of profession, to a long-term romantic relationship, to the inevitable settling down. Poems like “Labor Day” and “Memorial Day,” with their hard partying and heavy drinking, give way to “Us Sleeping in on the Fifth of July,” where the early inklings of love are the high instead of drugs. The substance of addiction is a person. In “The Dirty Tangerine,” the speaker’s “greatest adult discovery” is “that not everything / of these bodies we share between us must be sexual[,]” and slowly we see committed-relationship love replacing familial love and the love of childhood friendships. The speaker and his lover create a new sense of home away from Atascadero.

 

Poems of California shift to poems of Michigan. There is a metaphorical and, at times, literal loss of family and old friends. It is a shift both in terms of geography and loyalties, and in the poems that result from that shift, we see the poet’s complicated emotions regarding it. There is guilt mixed with a strong sense of inner conflict, of wanting to run, of wanting to stay. “Tornado Warning” tells the story of a man riding out a storm in Michigan while his father lies in a hospital bed in California. The father becomes a stand-in for Atascadero itself, and natural disasters like drought and tornado are stand-ins for the family disaster the man feels is his own doing. This and poems like “Forgettable City” highlight separation and loneliness. Leaving Atascadero for good is wrapped up in leaving family, in abandoning while feeling abandoned. And the old adage about not being able to go home again proves true in “Judas Home for Good Friday.” Here, the speaker calls himself a traitor, “the local rat on his knees, / knuckling a front door bloody, screaming, I still love you, / Atascadero, you bitch!” Perhaps this is why so many poems toward the end of the collection have such a strong sense of farewell and bittersweet nostalgia, a progression that I found deeply satisfying as a reader.

 

But it’s not just the familiar coming-of-age themes that avid readers of poetry will appreciate in this collection. Sommers’ use of language is musical and just plain fun. For instance, he often turns nouns into verbs. A group of hungry drunks “hurricane” inside an In ‘N Out Burger. During a trip to the emergency room, “[t]he fragrance / of fear windmills through us[.]” And in “Ruby,” the speaker tells her that “no one in the universe can / black-dress and macchiato-skin / into Club Soda like you[.]”

 

And the entire collection is typified by a frenetic stream of consciousness that gives the reader a sense of tumbling headfirst down the page. In the midst of this not unpleasant madness, many poems are touched here and there with particularly lovely moments of melody and striking imagery, as in “O Hospital Holy” when “our questions grow down / from the ceiling, solidify like stalactites[.]” The images emerge in sudden bursts, forcing the reader to slow, to stop, to reflect.

 

The stream-of-consciousness style in earlier poems seems to mirror moments of wild youth. In later poems, the same style conveys a sense of being overwhelmed and overpowered, of asking, as Sommers does, “What will we do with all the world’s unhappiness?” It was only in reading these later poems that I realized the earlier poems do not function as mere nostalgia, but as attempts at self-preservation. To move beyond the past and make peace with a sometimes frightening present becomes a new challenge for the poet who closes the collection on a note of hopefulness, pointing out that “we are only beginning to live.”

 

The interplay between form and content creates a collection of very accessible poems. Whether your entry point is, as it was for me, the subject matter and themes or the crafting of musical language that draws many readers to poetry, there is a lot to appreciate here for longtime fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

 

We’re also happy to present two new poems by Ephraim Scott Sommers.

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Hula

https://youtu.be/aPRr4yBh3P0

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Some Imaginary Conversations

These single-panel comics are part of a larger series of Imaginary Conversations. Another, “Comfort,” was published in the 40.2 print issue of The Florida Review.

 

 

 

 

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Growing Up a Haitian Immigrant in the United States

“Growing Up A Haitian in the United States” is published in cooperation with the Self Narrate project, and the in-video “subscribe” button connects with their site. To subscribe to Aquifer, please click the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page.

 

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Poems

Elegy with Bats

                                   Austin, Texas

 

They poured out from under the Congress Street Bridge

as twilight came on, first a few, then like a dam bursting

 

dark figures plumed through a darkening sky,

bits of ash billowing up—to thousand the air,

 

as Dante would say—like memories of our sister

swirling around us.  She too had darkened in the last years,

 

so we strained to recall all of who she was,

her quick mind, her fearless missions, fierce beliefs,

 

teacher and human shield—before stroke stole her thought,

and she became for us not unlike the bats, half-seen,

 

swarming in jittery clouds.   My sister, so quick

to fix a problem, fluent in Kierkegaard, Sartre,

 

Spanish and French, on her last visit had shrunk down

to opinion’s endless sputter of self,

 

wanting the last piece of toast, first cup of wine,

the talk focused on her, annoyed by a tree out front,

 

insulted by sunflowers next door.  Stupid, stupid, stupid,

she stomped past those bright yellow petals, bonnets

 

brimming each round face.  She hated the ones slumped

like dying Christs on their stems.

 

Pathetic! she said, as if anger were the last ember of self,

now without sonar, flitting, aimless, amok—

 

until at the end, my niece said, she was silent, her gaze fixed

on some unknown world no one else could see

 

any more than on that bridge, as the bats dispersed

into the deepening night, we could discern

 

when the last one had flown.  Still, we lingered,

our eyes adjusting to shades, densities of dark,

 

as if we could see where a last breath, a life goes,

a soul cut loose from the body’s tether.

 

We stood in a crowd of others, locals and visitors

like ourselves, lingering in the summer night,

 

the heat of the day finally gone down with the sun,

which had, I reminded myself, not gone down at all.

 

It was earth that turned.  And there, on the bridge,

the crowd thinning, I had to grasp the rail for balance,

 

as the thought filled me: the earth actually spins

day after day in space, no visible string, no pedestal,

 

or base to hold us, nothing but that turning,

and the weight, the sweet pull of other celestial bodies.

 

Heritage

Our grandfather, had he still legs, would be here

on the shore in Point Pleasant, New Jersey,

photographing footprints in dunes.  Had he a mouth,

 

he’d make a joke and laugh.  Had he ever sat with us,

he might have named the stolen horses that rode

our family across the channel, Cork to Scotland,

 

and then to the North, newly sober and starched.

We might know what ships and when and why to America.

Likewise, my grandmother, had she still hair to unpin

 

in our presence, might have softened her face,

and had she walked with us along the shore, might have

named the shells we loaded into sagging swim caps.

 

As to our father, had he lived into the 1960s,

into Bull Connor and police dogs, might he have rewritten

the letters disparaging all colors and faiths not his own?

 

Knowing our family heart, its failure and early blight,

can we at least hope that between clutch and stop, death

had time to work—death’s horses and ships, its lenses,

 

hairpins, its hammers and lathes, its endless waves

out there in the North Atlantic, making the water rise

and fall in place, until where we stand near shore

 

it snags, tumbles, throws itself like dice, like bones,

boxcars, snake eyes, chips of quahog, moon snail, tar

aswirl at our feet, tugging the sand out from under.

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Two Poems

“With Affirmative Action and All”

There is not enough silence in all of Pittsburgh
to explain the quiet in that room

 

between the two of you, not the televised silence
of a Steelers’ riot on mute; not the stillness

 

of the Duquesne Incline failing to scale
Mt. Washington and rise above the grime

 

of steel mills. Not the muffled gasps of black boys
kicked and dunked by whites while lifeguards

 

look on at the Highland Park pool, summer ’31.
Not the dampened blast of the Lower Hill, razed

 

to pave a parking lot and build the Civic Arena,
with “no social loss” in bulldozing homes

 

of immigrants and blacks. Not the stifled sobs
of teen August Wilson fleeing Gladstone

 

when his teacher accuses him of plagiarism.
But Pittsburgh, why bully you, City of Bridges:

 

steely with pride, grappling with all your histories?
Why choose you, and this old horse I ride

 

repeatedly, haphazardly, backwards through time—
why choose you, when, in any given American

 

town, there is a room inside a room inside a room
where thought shapes word shapes action—shapes

 

memory, shapes history—where synaptic gaps
deepen, now, into fissures, into canyons.

View-Master Virtual Reality Starter Pack: Mortality Reel

1.
A canyon of memory floods
as the zip line slips: first bike,
first dance, first kiss. Broken bone.
And more: first love, wedding cake,
two kids. Soft spot pulsing
on each newborn’s crown. And you,
in the blur of greenery and river
and craggy rock, you release
every spring, pulley, or counterweight
that ever held you back.

 

2.
Slammed by a PAT bus. Mercy. Swift
and painless. Seven angels gasp
but you are unperturbed, descending
with a steaming non-fat chai tea latte
into the counterflow lane from the curb.

 

3.
One moment you leap and dance amid
a snow-topped mountain cap backdrop
and the next, without notice, you huddle
in bed, doting spouse dropping one perfect
tear upon your furrowed brow. Somewhere
afar, a sitar twangs and wails. A mysterious
virus. Rare injury. Lightning seizing
your whole and healthy spine
when you least expect it. No
choreography for grief: an entire troupe
of sequined mourners, it seems,
will fail to bring you back.

 

4.
Legs crossed upon a mat in the dusty outpost
you attain such enlightenment that time slows,
giving you full minutes to regard the smooth
cartridge hurtling toward your chest. It makes
of the air a gel. A web. A balloon stretched to snap.
Welcome to bullet time. You were never so much
in your life as you were around it: observing it,
remarking on it. Given this moment of dead time,
you can at last see from every given viewpoint.

 

5.
Overpriced vintage fountain pen
pokes through your bag, piercing
your backside. Infection follows
and you fall to sepsis, bringing credence
to claims that, daily, writing involves risk.

 

6.
Pitch darkness. Silence. Pure emptiness.
A familiar voice in the distance.

 

7.
The truth is, you don’t see it coming even there
in the wrinkled bed for the sixth—or is it seventh?—
visit that season. Your beloved covers a bowl
of canned peaches, the only taste, nowadays, that
appeals. You want to save it. You plan to eat it
later. You wait for your children to arrive
at the bedside as they always do, exhausted
and deeply happy to see you still there, still alive,
bright-eyed but—they know—shrinking. Your face
is fuller now with fluids your kidneys retain
which helps them forget that your legs, under
a stack of sheets and blankets, are nearly fleshless.
You know the doctors by name and they, you.
You know which nurses will glide in to usher
each dumbstruck family member from the room
hours after you’ve passed to the next world,
hours they’ve spent sobbing, wondering,
and pleading, your chest still rising and falling
in rhythm endlessly, it seems, as though
the only barrier between you and them
were the blissful sleep of recovery, a dream
of being lifted with love and carried home.

 

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Bearing Witness

Collected Poems: 1974 – 2004 by Rita Dove

W.W. Norton, 2016

432 pages, hard, $39.95

 

 

In reading Rita Dove’s National Book Award finalist, Collected Poems: 1974 – 2004, we bear witness to her maturation as both a woman and an award-winning poet. Dove opens this volume of seven books with a prologue, “In the Old Neighborhood,” set in her childhood home. The collected works are the ebb and flood of leavings, travel, and homecomings, hers and her personas’, and the lessons one learns over the course of lived experiences.

 

In the first of the seven included books, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), narrative poetry is the dominant mode, as Dove reflects upon adolescence. The work is short and terse as compared to poetry published in later sections, and it can also be romantic and dreamy, such as in “This Life”:

 

With a Japanese woodcut

of a girl gazing at the moon.

I waited with her for her lover.

He came in white breeches and sandals.

He had a goatee—he had

 

your face, though I didn’t know it.

 

 

Even early on, much of her poetry focuses on spaces both political and cultural, and we are able to see the evolution of her interest in social justice over a thirty-year span, beginning with “Teach Us to Number Our Days,” in which she alludes to police brutality:

 

In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor

is more elaborate than the last.

The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,

each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet.

 

 

Furthermore, Part III of Yellow House focuses exclusively on slavery, often in persona form, in a manner that is as thought-provoking as it is haunting. For example, “Someone’s Blood” depicts a slave mother and a child of unspecified gender, a choice that conveys how the situation could apply to any slave mother and child. As this mother and child are permanently separated, the mother asks the child for forgiveness for giving him or her life, as chilling an image as possible and one likely to echo throughout the many mother-child interactions we see in daily life.

 

In contrast, the next collection, Museum (1983), a more challenging read, is perhaps the most concerned with form experimentation, and in Dove’s increased risk and related excitement, readers cannot help but to be enthused as well. The poet begins to manipulate form in such poems as “The Hill Has Something to Say”; each stanza begins with a line that serves as a continuation of the title: “but isn’t talking.” The second stanza then starts “and takes its time.” This pattern continues for four additional stanzas, providing a powerful sense of the layering of time in a place.

 

Later, she offers “Sunday Night at Grandfather’s,” a concrete poem in which the stanzas create triangles with a one-word bottom point, capitalized and emphatic: “Ghost,” “Drunk,” “Son.” Stanza two, for example, reads:

 

He hated Billy the parakeet, mean as half-baked sin.

He hated church-going women and the radio turned

Up loud.  His favorite son, called Billy

Too, had flown the coop although

Each year he visited, each

Time from a different

City, gold

Tooth and

Drunk.

 

 

With a “museum” theme employed, this collection appears least concerned with contemporary socio-politics; simultaneously, it seems as though Dove is traveling, both literally across the globe, across time, and figuratively within, gaining perspective.

 

In Thomas and Beulah (1986), a semi-fictional chronology of her maternal grandparents, form takes on subtler aspects and pace quickens as readers learn about the title characters’ romance and marriage, first through the eyes of Thomas and then Beulah. Beginning in 1921 and ending in 1969, this story in poems is imbued with historical detail that helps us to see what life was like for a black Ohioan couple throughout and following the Great Depression, as well as from images that build a complex portrayal of their life together—personal, professional, and parental, from courting to death. In “Variation on Guilt,” the universality of fatherhood is explored as Thomas’s wife is about to give birth; although determined, he is scared:

 

Wretched

little difference, he thinks,

between enduring pain and

waiting for the pain

to work on others.

 

 

Thomas and Beulah is a touching and insightful rendering of intimate family life through the lens of black history.

 

While Dove’s volume contains considerable range, the fact that she is a black woman is always in our consciousness. Inversely, in, for example, “Nothing Down,” “A carload of white men / halloo past them on Route 231,” and whites or whiteness seem always to linger in the shadows of the African-American experience. To further illustrate, in “Taking in Wash,” Dove writes, “She was Papa’s girl, / black though she was,” though her father himself pales in the winter due to the “Cherokee in him.” Only the dark mother whose color “never changed” is there to protect the speaker from the possible predations of the light-skinned father upon his dark-skinned daughter, a reference to skin color as a persistent issue within the black community, beginning with the mainly forced integration of white genes into the population during slavery.

 

Grace Notes (1989) is a return to narrative as well as to beauty innate in the everyday. Dove meditates on subjects as random as grain silos, as if casting farther into water to capture vivid imagery, ending “Silos” with “They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They / were the ribs of the modern world.”

 

Yet, she moves beyond the personal and the aesthetic, finding ways to sew a thread of racial inequality into the whole cloth of the collection. In “Crab-Boil,” she recounts the distress of crabs meeting their untimely demise, and Aunt Helen’s

 

laugh before saying “Look at that—

 

a bunch of niggers, not

a-one gets out ’fore the others pull him

back.”…

 

 

The aunt is waiting for herself and her niece to be run out of the event and back to the “colored-only” beach “crisp with litter and broken glass”; however, the poem is set in Ft. Myers in 1962 and the niece, who narrates, does not believe the aunt about either her crab analogy or her assumption that they will be removed from the event. However, if it should happen, the persona determines, “…I’m ready.” Readers are energized by subtle changes as in her books Dove works from slavery through decades of slow progress toward the 2000’s.

 

Mother Love explores the modern sonnet while breathing fresh air into the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, entwining the story with the modern day in myriad ways. In the preface, Dove notes that she likes “…how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders… are stultifying.” She continues, “The Demeter/Persephone cycle of betrayal and regeneration is ideally suited for this form since all three—mother/goddess, daughter-consort and poet—are struggling to sing in their chains.” The poet proceeds to interlock the ancient story with contemporary life. In “The Narcissus Flower,” it is simply through use of universal “you”:

 

The mystery is, you can eat fear

before fear eats you,

you can live beyond dying—

and become a queen,

whom nothing surprises.

 

 

The eight-part “Persephone in Hell” is set in contemporary time, with references to such items as “good tennis shoes” and “honking / delivery vans.” Similarly, “The Bistro Styx” contains a modern setting. Perhaps most interestingly, “Exit,” written using second-person point of view, could be construed as either Persephone leaving Hell or any woman making a hard decision. Such effective hybridity proves fascinating and speaks to the issues of women across time.

 

On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1995) contemplates freedom, racial tension, journeys down roads with familiar and unfamiliar stops, when where an individual sits counts. In “Cameos,” Dove tells a story of a couple, Joe and Lucille, and their children, this time beginning in 1925 and lasting fifteen years. In the title section, “On the Bus with Rosa Parks,” the poet makes clear her point of view about Parks’ action, about activism or lack thereof. “Freedom Ride” uses direct address in the final resonant stanza:

 

Make no mistake: There’s fire

back where you came from, too.

Pick any stop: You can ride

into the afternoon singing with strangers,

or rush home to the scotch

you’ve been pouring all day—

but where you sit is where you’ll be

when the fire hits.

 

 

Dove asks readers to see the Civil Rights movement and ourselves in relation to activism through new eyes.

 

She also interlaces issues of gender, demonstrating how interwoven these social issues are. For instance, in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, the son’s story is recounted from his decidedly male perspective:

 

Sisters,

laughing….

Idiots,

he thinks. No wonder

there’s so many of them.

 

 

Dove makes the interesting choice of not revealing the sisters’ fates until near the end of American Smooth, written nine years hence, in “The Sisters: Swansong,” a short, sad sequel, concluding in a powerful one-line stanza, “We all died of insignificance.” Both gender inequality and racial injustice create the texture of the world Dove illuminates.

 

Dove plays strenuously with form again throughout American Smooth, such as when she writes “Rhumba” with the dancer’s thoughts and moves flush left alternating with the instructor’s dialogue in right flush, as if the words themselves are dancing—words that combine, then center for an embrace mid-practice.

 

In this final collection, named after a form of ballroom dancing that allows for the independent creative expression of each partner in addition to close embrace, it is as though Dove’s soul is at last dancing, too. Her words convey a sense of inner calm, of release, not present in the previous books. In the title poem, a couple is in perfect sync:

 

I didn’t notice

how still you’d become until

we had done it

(for two measures?

four?)—achieved flight,

that swift and serene

magnificence

 

 

“Fox,” too, is reflective of such inner peace and joy:

 

She knew what

she was and so

was capable

of anything

anyone

could imagine.

She loved what

She was…

 

 

In American Smooth, Dove exhales and invites readers to do the same.

 

By the end of this masterful collection, Dove has come full circle to the themes she highlights in her prologue. The final word that flows in in American Smooth is “home.” While reading, we travel as we remember the textures of home and contemplate the idea of “home.” In her poem, “Looking Up From the Page, I am Reminded of This Mortal Coil,” the poet asks, “What good is the brain without traveling shoes?” Just as with Dove, in the span of thirty years of writing, we, through reading, leave the volume more enlightened than when we entered. This collection brings a world of experience home to us.

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Interview: Rita Dove

              

Rita Dove’s works include the poetry collection The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1980);  the verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1980), winner of  the Pulitzer Prize; Museum (Carnegie-Mellon University Press 1983); the short story collection Fifth Sunday (University of Kentucky Press, 1990); the novel Through the Ivory Gate (Pantheon, 1992); the poetry collection On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems (Norton, 1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;  the poetry collection American Smooth (Norton, 2004); and Sonata Mulattica: Poems (Norton, 2009). Dove has also written lyrics for composers including Tania León and John Williams, and her work Thomas and Beulah was staged as an opera by Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2001.

 

Dove’s numerous honors and awards include a Heinz Award in the Arts and a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal. She is the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Rita Dove was the youngest person to ever serve as US Poet Laureate when she was elected to the position in 1993.

 

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was released by Norton in 2016 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Over three decades of work, Dove maintains a lovely tension, dwelling in the everyday beauties of a person, a day, a single moment while also commenting on that moment’s place in the broader world. To read Dove’s work is to range far afield while always coming home.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

Reading your poems, I was in awe of your consistency of style throughout the years. I was trying to come up with a brilliant opening question, but the first thing I came up with was what is it like having a Collected Poems the size of the doorstop, something with such heft?

 

Rita Dove: 

It is a mixed kind of joy. It’s very interesting, because when I agreed to do this my wonderful editor said, “We can put together the whole collection, and it would be great to have the poems under one roof.” I thought, oh yeah, that would be wonderful, but as I started putting it together it felt like I was building a tombstone. It is strange because you feel like I’m not done. I’m not done. I’m just in the middle of things.

 

It was wonderful in the end, especially going to copyediting when I didn’t expect to actually read the poems together at that point. To go back and see them almost as a stranger would see them and say, “Oh, wow, did you write that?” It’s still kind of amazing to me to look at the book itself, as you said, something with that heft, and say, I did this, really?

 

TFR:

You mentioned copyediting, and I wondered if you had done much editing of the previously published poems, if you’d given in to the compulsion to tweak.

 

Dove:

I did not give into the compulsion to tweak. I made a vow to myself years ago that I would not go back and edit poems once they were published. It just seemed to me that if I believed in them enough to put them out there not only for magazine publication—because I did obviously tweak things between publication in a journal and collected in a book—but in a book, I thought well, that was how I felt at that time. I would be falsifying that particular stage of my life, you know, the eye of the poet, if I changed them. So, I didn’t tweak anything, but when copyediting I was looking for typos and things like that. I’m a terrible reader, so I read it backwards.

 

TFR: 

You literally read it backwards?

 

Dove:

Well, not word for word backwards, though sometimes I would read word for word. A lot of times I would read backwards line by line. I wanted to shake myself out of the sense of the book because you can be lulled by the narrative.

 

TFR:

As you were going through some of the pieces did you find that you encountered things that you wanted to explore more that led to new work?

 

Dove:

I think I’m still in the process of sorting that out. I do know that there are some of the poems, particularly in the very first volume that I published, The Yellow House on the Corner, where I feel like I want to explore a certain almost dreamlike landscape that I abandoned after the first book. With every book I tried to go off in a different direction in the sense of where the eye goes, where the vision goes, what the vision is.  I know that from the first book to the second book, I remember turning my gaze more outward instead of inward and looking at the world. The way the world stamps things is important hence the name of that volume—Museum.

 

I’d love to go back now after all these years and after all these other books and look at that interior more. In fact, I have started writing a poem which is a counter to one of the poems in the first book. So, it has inspired me.

 

TFR:

I noticed that, from the first one, “In the Old Neighborhood,” many of your poems describe gardens—gardens and flowers are a consistently repeated image. Did you ever take up gardening?

 

Dove:

[laughs] It’s really crazy because both my parents were excellent gardeners. My father had a vegetable garden and all these roses that you see a lot in the poems. And my mother was also really, really good with flowers, and I have a little black thumb. Things will die if I touch them. I do love flowers and gardens, but I’m truly hopeless, which is probably why they appear so much in my work. If I can’t grow one, I might as well write one.

 

TFR: 

In many of your poems, and certain books in particular, you explore history. Do you feel that the poet has a responsibility to history as much as being in the moment or that one infuses the other?

 

Dove:

I think that every poet has their own things that they cannot deny when they’re writing. I would say that every poet has a responsibility to be absolutely honest and true to whatever is compelling them to write, whatever emotions are compelling them to write. That may result in poems that have historical connections or not. For me, growing up as I did as a young black girl, the connection between history and the lives that I saw was so apparent that I would have been false if that had not entered the work. It seems to be a part of life. So, for me, I considered it absolutely imperative and necessary to always have that balance of history there in the work.

 

TFR:

Do you find that sometimes it’s harder to spend time in the present in your work than at others?

 

Dove: 

That’s a really fascinating question because after I started to work on the Collected Poems I did give myself an assignment. I often will do that after one book, to go off in different direction.  My assignment this time was to stay in the moment, so you really nailed it on the head. To just stay in the moment is something that I’ve been pushing myself to try to do. I think the last poems in the volume, the poems that appear in American Smooth, are about trying to capture that moment, the moment where you’re absolutely in the present and everything else falls away.

 

TFR:

When you go through people’s bios they always like to mention firsts, and you have a number of firsts such as the youngest poet laureate at the time. Did you ever feel that was an undue burden being qualified as the first and somehow having to break new ground?

 

Dove:

The burden comes from, first of all, feeling like I didn’t do anything but be myself and be there at the right time. Then there is also the burden of the attention which can sound a little bit facetious to people who say, “Oh, come on, the burden of getting this or that?” But what happens, especially for a poet, is that your work happens in a very intimate space, a very introspective sphere, and suddenly the lights are turned on and everyone’s looking at you. And you’re going, “No, I can’t write if you’re looking at me.” I would have young people write and say, “You’re my role model. I want you to mentor me.” Mentoring is really finding someone who is living near you in life so you can figure out how to shape your life in the world that you exist in. Me being your mentor makes no sense, because I don’t know you. There’s also that feeling that, as a role model, someone would take everything I said as gospel. I don’t take everything I say as gospel, so that was an undue burden. I felt like I would have to think three times before I said something for fear someone would just write it down and think that was the end-all and be-all, and it certainly isn’t.

 

TFR:

For a poet you have a very and broad readership, broader than a lot of poets, but do you have an ideal reader? If someone could airdrop a case of your Collected Poems, where would you want it to go?

 

Dove:

Oh my gosh. I can’t predict that ideal reader. When I write a poem, I don’t think this is for this kind of reader. I’ve been constantly and pleasantly surprised by the responses to the work from people that I would not have imagined could be moved by it. I remember in England once, a young black guy with lots of braids came up to me and he said he really loved this poem “Daystar,” which is a poem about a mother who was looking for a moment’s peace from her children. He said he just really connected to it. To this day I do not know why he connected, but I would not have predicted that. So, the ideal reader would, in the abstract, be someone who would take each poem as it is, without any preconceived ideas of what kind of poet I am.

 

TFR:

Because you are such a well-known poet, have you ever had people shy away from the idea that they might appear in one of your works or people who were trying to put themselves  in a piece?

 

Dove:

I think that happens probably more with novelists than it does with poets. Among family members, there was a time when I felt that some wanted to get their story told. They would tell me a really good story and say, “You oughta write a poem about that.” Sometimes people didn’t want things told. I have never published a poem about anyone that I knew or a family member without showing it to them first. I feel that I can’t stop myself from writing it, but I can certainly stop myself from publishing it. More than people trying to get into the poems, people have suggestions for poems.

 

TFR:

Have you ever taken one of those suggestions for a poem?

 

Dove:

My husband is a novelist and journalist, and often, when we’re driving and such, we give each other ideas. He says, “I’ll give you that one,” and I say, “I’ll give you this one, I’ll give you this line.” Then we kind of sort them out. But, yes, I have taken some. Sometimes, I’m like yeah, that is a good idea.

 

TFR:

Being married to writer, do you find yourselves exploring the same territory or do you stake your claims to different territories?

 

Dove:

I don’t think we’ve ever had a dispute over territory in any way. Maybe it’s because we’re from different disciplines. Fred sees things with the novelist’s eye and a journalist’s eye, and I see it from a poetic eye. As far as I’m concerned, a novelist and poet can write about the very same incident and it will come out remarkably different.

 

TFR:

Do you find that your process has changed at all through the years, not just how you approach the beginning of poems but how they come to completion?

 

Dove:

I think in terms of how they come to completion, it has stayed the same. I’ve never known how they come to completion. Usually there’s a moment of great despair where I think this is going nowhere, and it’s a process that remains mysterious to me that at some point things begin to click and come together.

 

How I approach the beginning of the poem has changed slightly in terms of the editing. I always write first by hand. I need the physical thing. Of course, I’ve graduated from manual typewriters, to Selectrics, to the computer. I do miss the old banging, that physical punctuation. Now I print things out instead of having a typed sheet, and I still mess it up by hand.

 

TFR:

Do you keep all of those drafts?

 

Dove: 

I do.  It’s a mess. [laughs] You know, sometimes I will actually find a line that I’ve discarded in a poem that’s long completed, but it really belonged somewhere else. I am also experimenting more with dictating certain portions, mainly because I’m traveling so much.

 

TFR:

I was compiling these questions some time ago, and a lot has happened since then.  Earlier, I was asking about writing about the present and writing about the past. In moments when you feel you’re caught in the midst of history, does it change how you feel about what needs to be said, or people’s expectations about what needs to be said?

 

Dove:

I think that people are looking for someone to articulate what is happening to us and how we can move through it, not only practically—which is more the politicians’ role, or more the activists’ role—but also emotionally how we can handle this. That’s really the task or the challenge that we want our writers, our poets to do. That’s the age-old call that one has. I wouldn’t consider it a burden. I really consider it a kind of a clarion call. I know that I and many of the writers that I know—because we’ve been communicating—we feel compelled to keep working even more vigorously than ever, but also to articulate this. Now that can come out in many ways. It can come out in overtly political poems. It can come out in poems that remind us who we are as human beings. That is exceedingly important in this time. So much of the beauty of being a distinct individual in a tribe of individuals has been battered and obliterated. We need to take the language back and claim it. That’s what poets do.

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Family Cookbook

Beans

Because they’re cheap and good and always last longer than the government checks that boil away in the Pyrex pot that sits on the flame building pressure and steam to slow cook the garlic and salt and bay leaves to a river-brown broth that soaks to the bones that bloom from the cactus of your mother’s garden to fill up the table like supper.

 

Tortillas

Which you love more than bread but never get right with an ingredient missing from the salt shortening flour that sticks to your skin with a white you can’t wash so you form instead an imperfect round ball rolled into the shape of a ghost ship from Iowa where your father came from before he sighed through the curtains of a hospital room to fill your house with a silent moon on a cast iron comal you watch through the window of a telescope lens at the end of a tunnel where you wait with a plate the size of the hole in your stomach.

 

Enchiladas

Rolled up tight or laid out and layered like your mother’s whole family in the back of the Buick on a bed of quilts as warm as onions and cheese while they drive from Los Corrales to Los Angeles to Los Corrales again so Carlos can paint enough wartime ships to fill the mouths that sleep through the desert with road stripes stabbing like forks and knives to pull them apart before they’ve even arrived.

 

Milk

The pint-sized shadow you watch over your shoulder from the junior high quad where Chicano boys launch cafeteria bombs to stain the blond pages of history books drying sour as promise while you try to adjust the misplaced target that hangs on your back.

 

Hamburger Meat and Fried Potatoes

Filling the pan like a family reunion in your grandfather’s yard for the cottonwood shot of Uncle Mike and his Schlitz and Tony’s Dean Martin sheen and Georgina’s Rita Moreno smile and your mom’s “Nixon No” eyes and your Creedence Clearwater bangs and everyone mingling like salt and pepper made moist from the steam and sticking together to come undone like a mismatched salad of crispy and soft that feeds you like nothing else can.

 

Chilindron

Because you never eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day since your mother adopted stray ducks geese and owls and planted a branch of dried cedar in a tub of rocks from the Rio Grande where the Christmas tree stood and said “Being different is good” and if you really want to know the truth she’s more Basque than Latina and made of garlic and red peppers and ham and chicken and lemon juice and white wine and olives and tomatoes that retain their own flavor while still remaining whole and isn’t that the point of sustenance anyway?

 

Smothered Steak

Your deceased father’s favorite pounded soft with a mallet until the muscle breaks down and the fiber gives way and the Gold Medal ash is forced into the folds and served up with brown gravy and drowned Southern-style like a history you don’t know and a family you can’t name and a serving you can’t swallow no matter how hard you chew.

 

Frito Sandwich

When the fridge is a warehouse of forklifts and crates and your sister spoons filling from a cherry pie can while your mother draws bones on a university canvas and you sprinkle corn dust on a heel of bread to convince yourself that the salt crumbs are sugar.

 

Oatmeal

With warm water and chicken bouillon cubes because your dogs will eat anything when they’re hungry enough.

 

Chile

Red like the sand of the Jemez Mountain stream where you swim to escape the chlorine eyes of the North Valley rich kids and sleep in the sun on a saucepan boulder sizzling with oil and water and salt to make a paste from the grains that dry on your skin and fill your pockets with an ember glow that warms your belly and fires your lips until you fan your face and hold your breath and try to smile to extinguish the pain.

 

Betty Crocker Cake Mix

Any flavor any kind when the first check comes and the grocery cart fills and you pick one treat to carry you through from one Friday to the next from Lost in Space to All in the Family with a silvery glow in the darkened room that you just might find by licking the spoon.

 

Posolé

Steaming the kitchen windows in red amber and green through the Christmas Eve boil of pork hominy garlic you see your own face staring in from outside like a ghost on the ditch on the way home from school with his hand raised hello like the dreams of your father who was born on this day and now waits in a box of photos in the closet to swallow the moths of memories that pass like the snow drifting down into paper bag candles filling with feathers of light.

 

Cinnamon Bread

Because it wasn’t as bad as it might seem and sometimes you walked through the kitchen door to find your mother at the counter with white flour and brown sugar making from scratch a kneaded loaf with a yin-yang eye curling toward a center uniquely its own to show what she said and what you try to believe that yes being mixed can be good.

 

Chile

Green as the cottonwoods above your bed and the water in the acequia behind your house and the horizon in the morning as you leave for good and the taste in your mouth that won’t go away and the cans you open 1,000 miles east and the bland you swallow when that’s all there is and the image emulsion behind your eyes and the roasting drums in the parking lot and the capsaicin smoke that writes your name across the sky that lets you know that the burn you feel is real.

 

Beans

One more time at the end of the month when the glass bowl rises like a mesa on the llano with shoulders to carry the whole damn family to an aquifer you swim with both hands wide to reach the roots you use as a spoon to drink the broth that fills furrows that reflect the clouds that that pulls the rope along the highway that draws you home.

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Eli’s Ships

A couch was to the left, the bed place to the right;
my writing desk and the chronometers’ table faced the door.

—Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer”

 

 

We’d been talking at the bar for a while when she finally told me her name, Angela. “It’s Angel with an extra A, for attitude.” She heaved forward in a laugh, a dark sheet of hair whipping over her face. Silver jewelry glinted in the blur.

 

“Great mnemonic. I learned a lot of them on the Tammy Sue.”

 

“So was the trip worth it? Research-wise, I mean.” She arched one eyebrow, as dark and precise as a swoop of calligraphy.

 

I wasn’t sure what to say.  Already, my experiences aboard the Tammy Sue—the tense silence of the night watch, the sudden squalls, the odd sense of being outside of time when we were on open water—seemed on the cusp of dissipating, as if they’d never occurred. I’d recorded extensive notes, but I had trouble capturing how close I’d felt to Conrad, how oddly serene I’d been as rain pelted my foul-weather gear. This sensation, I’d noted at the time, was like that of a man in possession of a beautiful idea, impervious and even invigorated by the inevitable cascade of doubts. But now, back on land, I could hardly remember the feeling.

 

“It was extremely fruitful.” I lowered my voice in an effort to sound more certain. “I understand Conrad’s work much better, especially his use of his first command, the Otago, as a metaphor for time, social class, the body, relationships—”

 

“You know what? You’d love my son Eli’s work.” She handed me a pamphlet from a box at her feet.  Sun-faded and curled at the corners from humidity, it featured a smudgy watercolor boat and a photo of a dark-eyed young man staring at the camera through a ship-in-bottle held up to his face.

 

“He does them all. Galleons, barkentines, schooners—he’s crazy about boats. Go to almost any harbor on the East Coast, if there’s a sailing ship hauling tourists, you’ll find Eli’s ships in the gift shop. She reached over and unfolded the pamphlet. “Just read the description. He’s a true artist.”

 

Serenity Ships: Sail into Your Dreams!

Each Serenity Ship-in-bottle is custom handmade work of art, precisely scaled, using only the finest authentic materials,
including teak, steel, brass, copper, fiberglass, sisal, hemp, and a number of exotic woods upon request.
The bottles are hand blown and every ship sails forever on a sea of diachronic glass, which sparkles with the dynamism of sun-streaked waves.
We can create any ship—from miniatures of real vessels to fanciful ships seen only in the mind’s eye—
and bottle their aesthetic and emotional power for evermore.

Look in my bottles and feel yourself swayed by the light chop of dreams.

 

When I looked up, Angela was arranging several ships in bottles along the bar. They were small—no bigger than my thumb—and each was attached to a silver chain.

 

“You’re going to love what I brought today, Simon,” she said to the drunkard at the corner of the bar, sliding a bottle toward him. He pressed his eye to it and made swooshing sounds to mimic waves splashing on the tiny boat. “Damn, it looks just like my uncle’s old shrimp boat, Lorilei. How’d Eli even know—?”

 

A heavy-built tattooed woman let the door to the kitchen swing closed behind her and headed toward us. Angela turned to me and whispered. “Check it out. She’s famous for insulting customers.”

 

The wall behind the bar was jammed with crude hand-painted signs, full of boozy epigrams and boasts. The largest sign—Gloria Be Thy Name!—was surrounded by dozens of caricatures of Gloria, all depicting her as a spiritual figure—sitting on a cloud with a cocktail shaker, plucking a feather off her angel wings to garnish a drink, anointing a drunk with a whiskey bottle. A poster of a man with missing front teeth had a small sign beneath it: Snapped his fingers to ask for a refill.

 

“What’s this?” Gloria slid over to us, leaning over the bar, taking in the lined-up bottles then fixing her eyes on me. Her head was shaved except for a bleach blond swath drawn up in a high ponytail.

 

“Gloria, meet Julian. He’s a scholar and a sailor. He was just at sea, part of his research.”

 

“At sea. Of course. Looks a little wet behind the ears —”

 

“Gloria,” Angela cut her off. “How ’bout a Briny Squall for Julian?”

 

“A fine idea,” Gloria said. She came back with a large glass, swirling with dark liquid and what looked like flecks of gold. The rim was salted and garnished with a single desiccated lime. It spilled as she plopped it on the bar.

 

“The world famous Briny Squall.”

 

The drink rolled down my throat as if it were a syrup vapor, like nothing I’d ever tasted. I hardly needed to swallow and a full one-third of the drink was gone.

 

“Please. Just have a look,” Angela prompted, sweeping her hand above the tiny bottles on the bar. I picked up the closest one, the Golden Hind. I expected a crude plastic jumble, but the ship was so finely detailed and scaled that I thought at first it was a line drawing pasted to the back. As I turned the bottle, the shadows of the sails and spars moved across the deck.

 

The hull was constructed of the thinnest slivers of wood, bent and notched and shaped into an uncanny replica. The sails resembled silk, with edges that appeared finished—though I could not detect a single stitch of thread. All the lines of a real galleon were there, but they were cobweb-thin and translucent, only manifesting when the light hit a certain way. A crow’s nest, smaller than a ladybug’s shell, was dark and swirled as if shaped from the smallest piece of burl wood. A jagged pattern, like the profiles of faces, edged the bowsprit. The galleon sat in dab of blue glass so pale that I could see a deepening field of bubbles.

 

I pulled the bottle away from my eye. All the shapes around me appeared huge and undefined, as if I were peering through a smudged telescope. I blinked twice and everything returned to normal proportions.

 

“Amazing? Am I right?”

 

“They are…” Tiny winches, portlights, locker latches, even the compass cards were rendered with exquisite accuracy. I could detect only one tiny flaw when the boats were level on the bar. Each horizon was askew. Not one of the boats floated on its proper plane. Old Ironsides tilted slightly forward; Pride of Baltimore listed to port; the clipper Flying Cloud was weighed down unnaturally in the stern. Somehow this small defect made the ships even more alluring.

 

“Oops, one more.” Her focus shifted to the smooth crease between her breasts, where several silver chains terminated in the neckline of her plum-colored dress. She pulled one of the necklaces over her head and handed it to me. The bottle on it still held the warmth of her body. I lifted it up to the light to get a better look. It was the barkentine Otago, Conrad’s ship, the name clearly stenciled on the bow.

 

“Amazing…” I muttered as I stared into the bottle.

 

“Is that the one you were talking about?”

 

“It is.” Like the others, it was rendered perfectly—and it floated, only slightly cocked, on a perfectly still sea. I could almost sense the slow, almost imperceptible heaving under her hull as Conrad and his crew drifted on the windless South China Sea.

 

“All his ships are completely authentic. Even the interior stuff that can barely be seen with the naked eye.”

 

“It’s a beautiful rendering of the exterior.” I said. “But I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that no one can faithfully recreate the Otago’s interior plan, at least not when Conrad sailed her. This I know for sure.”

 

There exists only one good photo of the Otago, a blurry image of her under sail near Australia. Her salvaged helm adorns a museum ship in London, and what is left of her hull lies rusting in New Zealand, but the interior arrangements of the Otago have baffled Conrad scholars for years. My mentor, Dr. Marvin Kendricks, long maintained that the labyrinth of rooms and passageways within the Otago helped shape Conrad’s notion of human psychology. In fact, Kendrick’s unpublished paper described how the stowaway “secret self” in the “The Secret Sharer” was actually Conrad’s id flitting around the frontal lobe, trying to avoid discovery.

 

“Well,” Angela stirred her drink. “You might be surprised. Eli’s ships are like nothing else you’ve known—flawless, and not a detail left unfinished. Maritime museums all over the world have his number on speed-dial. I bet he knows the Otago inside and out.”

 

I took a sip, not wanting to offend her with my skepticism. And, of course, it was possible Eli had stumbled on some obscure maritime records, information that might guarantee my dissertation would leave a mark. I’d heard stories—Kendricks sometimes told them—about scholars who would find paradigm-shifting research in the most unexpected places. Interviews with elderly neighbors of a canonical author. Old letters hidden in a barn loft. Brilliant marginalia languishing in a box of deaccessioned books. The fact that she had a replica of the Otago could be a sign.

 

“You should come meet Eli. He works a boat show in Jacksonville every Monday. I can take you there tomorrow.” She opened the chain in her hands and leaned forward, placing it over my head. “It’s meant to be worn.”

—

A heavy after-rain fog hovered in front of me, cleaving as I walked to the waterfront park across the street. I relieved myself behind a bush and teetered a bit when I zipped up my pants. The St. Marys River was calm and empty—just like the sea Conrad describes in “The Secret Sharer.” I tried to picture the Otago in the grips of such stillness. I pulled the miniature out from under my shirt and held it in front of my eye, lining up its hull with the real horizon behind it. The ship was luminous against the moonlight, each of its filament lines lit up. My vertigo transferred to the boat, which began to bob in its glass swell. A small yellow shape flicked up out of the crow’s nest. The tip of my thumb slipped into a small divot in the base of the bottle as I turned it to get a better look.

 

Startled by footsteps from behind, I turned to see the silhouette of a man, no bigger than a toddler. The next thing I saw was his pipe—a wild squiggle of burlwood with a hot coal pulsing in the bowl. A fine mist of what smelled like seawater—salt, fish, seaweed—burst forth with each puff. He stepped into the moonlight, illuminating his yellow sailor’s suit and the metal eyelets of his leather, lace-up boots. His face was cramped, wizened; his crow’s feet ran down his cheeks and pushed up against the accordion folds of his smile-lines. His irises, as he met my eyes, were a shifting shade of blue, turning from nearly white to deep navy as if they were portholes to a sea behind him.

 

I reached out, but he jumped back and gave a tsk-tsk motion with one finger. There was something familiar about him. I blinked once, expecting him to vanish, and it hit me. He was a color version of a woodcut I’d seen in a book titled Legends and Superstitions of the Sea. He was a kobold, a sprite of German folklore meant to assist sailors at sea. How curious, I thought. Just another specter of my thesis research, conjured from whatever chemicals circulated in my nervous system. The sea-going kobold had a special name…what was it?

 

The kobold coughed and small iridescent flakes issued from his nose. A few landed on my hand. Fish scales. He drew a piece of gray netting from his breast pocket and wiped his nose.

—

“Orange garbage bag by a mile-marker sign. Gets me every time.”

 

My body was shaking as I awoke. The side of my head was resting on the passenger window; the thick glass vibrated and blurred my vision. At first I thought I was still on the Tammy Sue, waking up for early morning watch, but then I saw the mirror of the Volvo and a slice of moving highway in its view. Angela’s voice startled me when she spoke again.

 

“See that orange bag? State-issued. Makes me think of this guy I dated, Owen.”

 

The sun was just edging above the clouds, and a bright glare from the west intermittently blasted out the view through the windshield. Auroras blurred the edge of my vision. I dropped my head and rubbed the back of my neck as Angela explained how she and Owen met on a highway cleaning crew. They’d tried to stab the same fast-food bag with their trash pickers, met each other’s eyes, and laughed. “And that’s how the whole Owen mess began…”

 

She hit the accelerator and swung into the passing lane. Every few minutes, something along the road would remind her of another man who’d come and gone from her life. A billboard for a Christmas décor depot reminded her of T.J. and his cat, Glinda, who needed emergency surgery for eating tinsel—something Angela had to pay for, the mooch. I nodded, trying to follow, but her voice soon faded out. My worn copy of Norbert Sherwood’s seminal Conrad Adrift was lying open and face-down on the floor. I flicked through the pages, causing Kendricks’ accusing marginalia to shudder and twist like a flipbook cartoon.

 

“And then guess what Crater did? Just guess?” Angela voice got louder and higher, and it seemed perilous not to follow what she was saying. “He left me for Uma Kline, that meth-head farmer.”

 

“You had a boyfriend named Crater?”

 

“Yes. Suited him. The asshole.”

 

“I’m sure Eli understands. You might have made a few bad choices, but no one is perfect,” I finally said, trying to respond to the main theme of Angela’s story—how each one of these failed father figures had driven Eli deeper into his ships-in-bottles, and further from her.

 

“Shit, AC’s out.”

 

Angela went quiet as she turned the car’s blower knob, cocking her ear toward it, as if trying to unlock a safe. I was glad for the break. That morning, I’d awakened to the sound of Angela knocking on my hotel room door, with no recollection of getting there. One of a dozen rooms in the clapboard hotel next to the bar, it was a small, slightly grimy space stuffed with antiques apparently plucked from the curbs of St. Marys. I’d never blacked out drinking before, and the morning felt like a fragment chipped away from the rest of my life.

 

“I look forward to meeting Eli,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sure Kendricks would like to hear about him too. And if he knows as much as you say he does, he’d get a prominent mention in my acknowledgements, at the very least.” I checked my watch, four p.m. London time. “Do you mind if I call Kendricks?”

 

My cell phone worked poorly ever since leaving the Tammy Sue—the captain said the salt air wreaked havoc with circuitry. Kendricks was inscrutable face to face, but 4,000 miles away through a salt-soaked phone, he was barely intelligible. He’d just presented a paper on Conrad’s “Chance” using babushka dolls as an organizing metaphor (“The dolls are stories in stories. The dolls are repressed selves within repressed selves. The dolls are meta.”) It had gotten a cold reception.

 

“Oh, so now every carnival barker thinks he’s a Conrad scholar,” Kendricks sighed when I told him about Eli’s Otago, “as if the field wasn’t already crowded with clowns and charlatans.”

 

Kendricks was in one of his moods, I could tell. It was probably best to save talking about the Otago until he cooled down. I changed the subject. Kendricks had an encyclopaedic mind for sailing folklore, so I told him about the kobold in my dream. The line was silent for such a long time that I thought I’d lost the connection.

 

“How well do you know this woman, this…Angela?”

 

I glanced at Angela, who was picking at something in her teeth.

 

“I met her at The Eagle’s Nest, a sailor’s tavern in St. Marys. She’s great.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d realized what I’d said. Angela smiled, ever so slightly, but kept her eyes on the road.

 

“A bar? The fishing boat stint was your chance to get a true sense of the sea. Now you’re talking about toy ships and bar floozies and a damn Klabautermann—that’s the kobold you’re describing, by the way—and I don’t hear a word about your dissertation’s progress. You’ve got to stay focused. Remember what happened to Nathan? All it took for him to abandon his work was Sherwood leaving that singed puppy dog on his doorstep…You’ve got a target on your back now.”

 

I’d heard all this before. Whenever Kendricks was upset, he’d talk about Nathan, his lost superstar student. Nathan had become so involved in caring for a burned puppy that he dropped out mid-semester to work at a pug rehab center. He never came back. Kendricks maintained that one of his rivals—Sherwood, he assumed—had planted the maimed puppy on Nathan’s doorstep to ruin Kendricks’ chances of having a star protégée. I hated when he brought Nathan up. It made me think that he was the true nadir of Kendricks’ mentorship, and that I was just a pale second act. I shook away the thought. Kendricks was just tired and upset.

 

“Everything is fine, Dr. Kendricks. I’m fine. Wait until I tell you what I saw on the Tammy Sue. The boat had a rope ladder just like the one in the ‘The Secret Sharer,’ and it made me think about how Conrad disorders his narrator’s perceptions—”

 

“Just be careful. Don’t leave your drinks unattended. And call me if anything… goddammit.” A sound of shattering glasses and a chorus of cussing and voices overwhelmed the line. Kendricks came back on, panting. “Goddamn cheap limey glasses! You can bleed in a bar over here and no one cares! Hey, Redcoat, can I get a damn rag?”

 

The line went dead.

—

Traffic piled up as we approached Jacksonville, and the Volvo kept stalling out as we idled, creeping forward every five minutes or so. Up ahead, cars were slowing down and stopping as they reached the margins of a growing traffic jam. Angela hit the brakes suddenly and swore as the back of a pickup truck seemed to rise up to meet us. Cars in the left lane whizzed past us, then slowed and stopped.

 

A green sedan idled in the right lane, its window lined up with mine. At first, the car seemed to be empty except for the driver, a harried-looking church matron with a grim, forward-facing expression. But as I gazed in the car, the muted leopard print of her cardigan swirled and resolved into the kobold’s small, hunched body. I blinked and the kobold’s face was pressed against the window—mashed, really—as if he were some kid mugging for his friend. The window flattened his lips as he rolled his face to the side so I could see him wink. Then he ducked from view.

 

A small square of fabric slowly rose up in his place.  A thin wooden stick followed; it was a small flag divided diagonally into two colors, one half yellow, one half blue. I immediately recognized it as an international maritime signal flag, but I had to think for a moment before I could identify which one. It was the Kilo flag: I wish to communicate with you.

 

The flag lowered and the kobold’s face appeared, his eyes on mine. His blue irises curled up like an old Japanese print of a wave, his pupil tucked in like a surfer. His face was wan and his smile lines loose. I nodded, since he seemed to be waiting for a reaction.

 

Now he lifted a simple blue flag with a white cross above his head and wiggled it. Not one I recognized. I reached toward the back seat, grabbed the maritime signs and signals book from my bag, and flipped through it, my hands shaking. Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.

 

The line of traffic shifted and we shot forward. I put my hand to my chest and took a breath.

—

You have reached the voicemail of Dr. Marvin Kendricks. I’m not here right now, because there is no ‘here’ and there is no ‘I,’ since this is simply a digital reverberation of my voice in an infinite temporal loop. Leave a message or not.

 

“Dr. Kendricks? Call me back, okay?” The gas station doors slid open, and Angela strode out, flicking her hair and turning as if the laconic glances of the old men smoking by the ice machine were flashbulbs. I hung up the phone.

 

“Here you go. Red Alert Gatorade. Fixes everything.”

 

I’d told her that I was feeling sick, and hoped that’s all it was. A fever. Too much stress. A rare variety of delayed-onset seasickness. I shook the Gatorade and suddenly thought of Kendricks’ warnings. I stared at the thin plastic filaments that joined the cap to the no-tamper ring.

 

“Mind if I have a sip?” Angela grabbed the bottle and opened it, taking a long chug. I looked around the gas station. Everything looked normal. I felt normal. There was no need to assume anything was terribly wrong. An old man passed in front of the car, scratching his paunch and turning toward us to flash his yellow teeth at Angela. He climbed into a pickup with mudflaps of busty reclining women, a sticker of Calvin peeing on a Ford insignia, and a pair of metal testes hanging from the trailer hitch. I tried to come up with a clever comment about trucks as loci of American machismo, some comment to restore normality, when one of the mudflap silhouettes curled upward, as if the woman were doing a sit up.

 

As her knees moved toward her breasts, the black shape melted into a profile of a small figure, her breasts now the brim of a hat, her legs folding over to become the kobold’s nose. The black silhouette of the kobold’s face then spread out and pixelated, resolving into a red and white checkerboard flag. This one I knew—any sailor would. It was the Uniform flag: you are running into danger. The flag rippled before it blinked to black and seeped, like batter in a pan, back into the shape of the busty woman.

 

I grabbed the door handle and pulled. The handle swung loosely on its hinge.

 

“Did you need something else from the store? The passenger door gets wonky, you can’t open it from the inside sometimes.”

 

“Let me out. I’ve got to get out of here.” I jerked the handle several times then

mashed the power window buttons. Angela grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward her.

 

“Hey, Julian. Calm down. What’s the matter?”

 

“Something’s really wrong with me. I need a doctor, or something. I think I’m hallucinating.”

 

Angela put her hands on my shoulders, turning me to face her. She leaned forward so our eyes were only inches apart. The heat of her presence and her smell—overripe and hot, like composted berries—made me woozy.

 

“Eyes look fine. No dilation.” She moved her hand down my arm, pinching my forearm hard and then looked down at my skin. “Normal refill and color.”

 

I felt the heat of her skin and the thin cool swaths of her silver rings as she took my wrist in her hand. She watched the dash clock and counted under her breath.

 

“Pulse 73. Healthy range. You’re fine, Julian. Don’t panic. Long car rides can have weird effects. Motion sickness, low blood sugar, tricks of the light.”

 

“You’re not a doctor.”

 

“True. But being around so many users and drunks made me an honorary paramedic, practically. I know when someone’s about to crash, and you’re not.” She was still holding my wrist, still locked on my eyes. “Can I just say something, Julian? Thank you for listening to my whole sob story about Eli. I’m really glad our ships crossed.” Angela leaned forward then scooted upward, pressing her lips to my forehead. Her t-shirt slipped open and I could see that her nipples, half obscured in shadow, were pale and pointed. Something about their shape, their pinkness, made them poignant to me. Innocent. Angela finally pulled away, squeezing my wrist.

 

“I think your heart is working fine.”

—

“He’s probably just taking a lunch break,” Angela said, rising up on her tiptoes so she could scan past the crowd and the few dilapidated trailered boats. She sipped from a tropical cocktail she’d purchased at the entrance.

 

The “boat show” was nothing like I imagined. It was more of an ad-hoc flea market in an abandoned mall parking lot, with some booths seeming to be official—all with the same sized black fold-out tables—and some completely makeshift, like the man sitting in a director’s chair with a single Rubbermaid container of jumbled hardware at his feet and a hand-painted sign that read “All Offers Considered.” Even the more formal booths were basically selling junk—dirty old chains, ripped sails, waterlogged old chart books rife with countries that no longer existed.

 

Eli’s booth was striking in comparison. A blue velvet cloth covered the whole table, serving as padding for a large, beautifully made display case. Beneath the glass, at the bottom of the case, stretched a sea of bunched blue satin, subdivided by a grid of small docks, coated white like the soft rind of Camembert cheese. There were dozens of miniscule ships in the display case, each neatly aligned in the scaled down marina slips, each held in place by hair-thin docklines hooked on silver cleats the size of earring backs.

 

Strangely, only a few of the ships were in bottles. A small sign noted that Eli would place the ship in the bottle upon purchase. The strain of performing this final act before an audience, I reasoned, was what caused the skew of each horizon. A wooden box, filled with impossibly small but recognizable tools (screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, even a hammer the size of nail), lay open, next to the pile of pamphlets. Each tool sat in a velvet compartment, as much works of art as the ships.

 

Angela suddenly put her drink down and rushed forward. “Eli,” I heard her say, as she hurried toward a young man who walked with a slow gravity as if each step constituted a separate decision. He wore a loose pair of multi-stripe harem pants and a plain yellow t-shirt, the kind one would buy in bulk. Angela reached out as if to hug him, but he held up a hand and the two spoke for a few moments, occasionally glancing at me before walking over.

 

“Eli, this is Julian. He loves your boats. He’s a sailing scholar! And a good man.” She linked her arm with mine. I blushed, flattered and surprised.

 

“Julian,” Eli said, moving his mouth as if the word were a delicacy. He looked like Angela, but his face was wide and blurred, his small features submerged in baby fat and stubble. Dark hair hung past his ears in a tangled fringe like seventies-era drapes. He moved toward me and looked me in the eye, cocking his head and squinting as if my face were fine print.

 

“It’s nice to meet you, Eli.” I put out my hand, and Eli’s hand alighted on my wrist like a bird, his fingernails lightly perched.

 

“You’ve been at sea,” he murmured, lifting his hand and looking upwards as if he could see Tammy Sue cutting through the clouds.

 

“Yes, Eli, Julian had just come ashore when I met him. Enlightening and educating a fishing crew, in fact.” She squeezed my arm as she said this. Enlightening a fishing crew? That’s how she saw me? Warmth rippled through me.

 

“Eli, your ships are exceptionally rendered. I’m especially curious about the Otago.” I released myself from Angela’s grip to pull the bottle out from under my shirt. “If you don’t mind, could you share your sources?” I held it up to the sun for Eli, but when I did all I saw was the kobold, mashed into the bottle, blinking a large eye at me, the blue iris swirling like a funnel cloud. I dropped the bottle, feeling suddenly weightless and distant, an outside observer looking in.

 

Eli stared at my sternum where the bottle rested and raised his eyebrow. “Ah, my friend, the kobold. What a surprise.” He glanced at Angela. She was obviously pleased.

 

“You see? Julian gets along fine with the kobold. That’s how I knew.”

 

Fine? Kendricks was just a call away—911, too. But it was as if I was paralyzed and the phone in my pocket miles away.

 

“No, no. Let me tell him,” Angela was saying. She reached for the bottle, looked briefly into it, then let go. It hummed against my chest. “Julian, I have to explain something. You are perfectly fine. The kobold isn’t a hallucination. Eli has conjured—.”

 

Eli held up a palm to Angela’s face. “Summoned.”

 

“Summoned, yes. Eli, because he is such a caring soul”—she glared at Eli, droning the last bit like a teen employee reciting corporate patter—“has summoned for me a warding spirit.”

 

“Better.”

 

For the next several minutes, Angela spoke, with Eli breaking in. Men who fell in love with Angela saw the kobold, a sea troll … no, a protective spirit, a Klabauterman. Each one of them eventually left her, and a few of them lost their minds … absented themselves from Angela, thereby giving her a chance to grow. Freddie disappeared after having a square-rigger tattooed on his calf because the kobold told him to. J.J. broke into an electronics store to steal a white-noise machine to try to drown out the kobold’s voice. And Crater? The love of her life? The most corrupting of corrupting souls. Crater saw the kobold sitting in the sidecar of his Harley, right next to his black lab and drove off the road. … no, it was a yellow lab. For seven long years, the kobold had wreaked havoc on her life … if by wreaked you mean prevented.

 

“Prevented,” Angela pronounced the word slowly, just as Eli had. “Maybe so. Especially if it led me to Julian,” she said, squeezing my hand.

 

Eli rolled his eyes.

 

“Eli! You said yourself that a good man, a man who could see inside the ships, would not shrink from the kobold. Well, I’ve found that man.” Now Angela dug her nails into my palm. She began to give off a heat, and a sour smell wafted from her. “It’s over, isn’t it? Please, Eli. It’s time for the kobold to leave.”

 

“Your Julian looks unsettled,” Eli declared. “He’s just another imposter, and the kobold toys with him.”

 

The floor swayed and I took a deep breath, hoping it might help steady my feet. But all it did was draw Angela closer. The sweat on her hand mingled with mine. Warding spirit? It was insane talk. But they’d seen the kobold’s blinking eye just as clearly as I did. Was there such a thing as a shared hallucination?

 

Kendricks would know. I had to talk to him. He always told me to interpret Conrad’s sea stories as if only his narrators were real. His theory was that Conrad’s art mimicked the trickster mind of a sailor on night watch, conjuring whole worlds to avoid confronting the featureless darkness of a calm sea. “Becalming,” Kendricks had said, “is worse than any storm. In a storm, you’re preoccupied with keeping your ship afloat. In a calm, anything can take hold.” Could becalming happen on land? In the mind?

 

Angela turned to me, speaking in honey tones. “Julian, can Eli look into the bottle?”

 

I felt myself reeling back, my hand on the bottle. At that moment she and Eli seemed no more real than the kobold. And only the kobold, with his semaphore warnings, seemed on my side.

 

“I’d better go—”

 

Eli lifted his hand. “Wait. Don’t be afraid. Let us just see what the kobold has to say.”

 

Angela lifted the bottle over my head, and the motion was so proprietary—as if I were casually hers—that I was too surprised to react. For a moment it got snagged around my ear, and I felt her fingers press my earlobe to free it. Eli took the necklace from her, walked around the booth and came out with a jeweler’s loupe. He looked into the bottle, turning it under the sunlight and squinting.

 

“I can’t find him.” He muttered. “Not in the berth, not on deck, not in the galley, not in the bilge….” He rattled off nearly every part of a ship, then looked up. He turned the loupe around and peered through it at me, his face cocked if I could only be apprehended in the peripheral. “How strange.”

 

“Really?” Angela said, turning to me. “That’s wonderful.” She looked relieved, though I felt more unbalanced than before. I put my hand on Eli’s table to steady myself. Angela touched my shoulder; a tracer of sensation trailed down my back and petered out. I could feel the same undertow that I’d experienced beside the St. Marys River pulling at me again.

 

“I’ll get you some water, Julian. Don’t go anywhere.”

 

“I’m fine. I just need to step away and…” I managed, but she’d already disappeared somewhere among the other vendors’ tents. Eli was suddenly in front of me, holding the bottle at eye level. He raised his soft voice to an announcer’s volume, though somehow still in whisper.

 

“Did you notice? I hope you did. The ship you were wearing is the rarest version of the Otago. I’ve only made three.” He frowned. “Crater, that idiot, smashed the other two.”

 

I put out my hand to brush the bottle away, but I couldn’t resist one look.

 

The Otago had been transformed. It now floated absolutely straight on the horizon, almost unnaturally balanced. And the topsides were gone, cut away so that the cabin, as depicted in the map, was fully exposed. As my eye followed the L-shaped cabin that fascinated Kendricks, it twisted and fragmented into a labyrinthine jumble of more L-shaped cabins, mirror images within mirror images. My eyes seemed to be capable of focusing on smaller and smaller objects as they moved into the ship, so that the indistinct blurs of details too small would blossom into clarity the more I looked. There were infinite sleeping bunks and infinite dinners of soda bread and infinite broken sextants the captain had laid out to fix, and as my eye continued to move deeper into the cabins, I noticed that each new one had a small detail out of place, a different colored blanket, an unlaced boot on the floor where in the last cabin it had been laced, and so on.

 

“It’s spectacular,” I murmured. I looked up and the light had shifted. Angela’s abandoned cup had sweated through to the tablecloth, and her cocktail umbrella had sunk into her melted drink. How long had I been looking? How long had she been gone?

 

“Wait until you see the very center,” Eli whispered.

 

I looked back into the Otago’s bottle, following the cabins from the beginning, half hoping I might see the sprite again. Just as the last cabin opened before me, and my eye seemed to brush the curtain from the sleeping quarters inside, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. Kendricks—I was sure—but let it ring. There, in the bunk where the murderer from the “The Secret Sharer” had been secreted away, lay Angela’s sleeping body. She wore the same striped dressing gown that Conrad described. She opened her eyes, and I saw my own face, gasping in astonishment, reflected in the blue sheen.

 

“Can you see her? It’s the smallest, animatronic replica.” Eli breathed.

 

“Yes…”

 

“My masterpiece. I think it’s time to finally show her.”

 

The figure turned with a small mechanical ping. My eyes settled on the curve of her shoulder, which shifted as if from her breathing. I reached out to touch her but found myself pulled in again, inward and inward, until the fabric of the dressing gown filled my view. The threads expanded then loomed like I-beams; a single fiber widened into a constellation grayed out by too many stars. Feeling my knees weaken, I willed myself back up to the main deck, thinking perhaps the kobold might yet be hidden among the anchor rode. Nothing stirred.

 

I turned to look for Eli, but could not pull myself free of the ship. An orange sun trailing light through the clouds blotted out the sky. The horizon line crumbled and what I had interpreted as a sunset was now a mass of color, a circular pattern moving across my visual field. The bright wad pulled away with a squeak, revealing a blurred and massive hand and Eli’s head—a distant monument. I stood on the teak deck of the Otago and watched as Eli polished the sky from the outside with a chamois the size of a thunderhead. I leaned over the rail and my glasses fell to the glass sea below, skidding and spinning before going still.

 

“Angela?” I called. Her name rose up and pinged around the bottle, echoes begetting echoes, compounded by the bottle’s sudden motion. Eli’s fingers, like some kind of stretched-low and ominous moon, draped the sky. He nestled the bottle into a dark pouch, into the depthless velvet pile, into the miniature slip. The silence was beyond a hush; it shrunk every sound. The sunlight diminished to a tenuous thread. Faintly golden, it illuminated the fish scales I coughed up every time I laughed or screamed or called her name.

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Interview: Derek Palacio

     

 

Derek Palacio’s first novel, The Mortifications, was published in 2016 by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Crown. The story of Soledad and her two children, Ulises and Isabel, immigrants to Connecticut from Cuba, and the revolutionary father who haunts their lives, Uxbal, has been called “extraordinary” by The New York Times and a “gorgeous and challenging debut” by Kirkus Reviews.

 

Palacio earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. He is co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing program for teens in Nebraska, and is a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program. His previous work includes the novella How to Shake the Other Man (Novella Books, 2013) and the story “Sugar,” which was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.

 

We are delighted to also share his story “Kisses” in the 41.1 print edition of The Florida Review. “Kisses” was chosen as our 2016 Editors’ Award in Fiction by final judge Mark Wisniewski.

 

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I wanted to start off by asking a little bit more about something you said in your Kenyon Review interview. You said, “I am not writing about Cuba so much as I am writing about my idea of Cuba, my abstraction of the island.” Can you talk a little more about the difference and, perhaps, how you think this idea of Cuba as opposed to the reality of Cuba—if we admit that there is such a thing—influenced you growing up and becoming a writer?

 

Derek Palacio:

It really begins with my father who’s from Cuba. He left when he was five years old in 1956, so he left the island a very young age. What he remembers of the place are just some fragments, these sort of brief, visual snippets of the house he grew up in, some of the gardens out back. He has an image of his father on horseback that he remembers, but, even for him, it’s all sort of ethereal.

 

So, growing up with that—I feel like that was probably the foundation of my understanding of Cuba, which was inherently and innately a little bit dreamlike.

 

Then just having to learn about Cuba through books and TV and from such a long distance. We didn’t even grow up in Miami with other Cubans. We were up in New Hampshire, pretty far away. There were a lot of intermediaries between me and the island, and I think that contributed to this idea of I’m trying to write towards Cuba and get an understanding of Cuba but admittedly until I go it’s always going to be a little bit cloudy, a little bit murky, a little bit intangible.

 

TFR:

Of course, it would have been a different time then anyway. Things do change, and so there’s always that aspect of it as well. It’s almost like we have a new generation of Cuban-American authors. In some ways we might see a parallel with Jewish holocaust–related literature, where we had the survivors and their generation, the Elie Wiesel generation, and now we have Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Mendelsohn, and others, who are much younger, second- or third-generation, but still writing with reference to that. For Cuban-Americans of your generation, how do you see the Cuban migration mythology working in new ways?

 

Palacio:

It’s interesting you bring up sort of that Jewish literary tradition because I’m a big fan of Eva Hoffman’s, and she writes [in After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust] about the way the children of survivors or a couple of generations down from the Holocaust, the first thing they learned about the Holocaust is the myth itself, and they have to move from the myth to the reality. I remember reading that and thinking to myself, That explains exactly sort of the trajectory I’m on in my own writing.

 

I’m dealing with Cuba from a distance, and I’m hoping to get closer to the reality and piece it together. So you start with the feelings you have about the island, feelings you’ve been taught about the island from your parents, and then you move from that to the place itself or at least other sources about it. It was wonderful to read Hoffman and see that other people have written from this sort of weird, amorphous emotional center and then found the place later in different forms, in different versions. That’s not to say I think that one is more true than the other, but I found that really heartening and interesting.

 

TFR:

Do you have plans to visit Cuba?

 

Palacio:

So, two weeks ago I made my first trip to Cuba. The Mortifications came out at the end of October and then I left for Cuba on October 28 and got to experience it first-hand, which was just wonderful. [This interview was conducted on 19 November 2016.]

 

TFR:

How did that work in relationship to your book? Were there things that you were thinking, I wish I had known that, I wish I had captured that? Did it feel like these two things are part of each other?

 

Palacio:

I would never claim I got it all right, but I don’t think I got it wrong. When I was writing the book, I was very conscious of the fact that I was writing without a certain layer of expertise that we assume or hope for from our writers in a lot of ways. I knew I was going to make mistakes, but I did my best to err without abusing the material. What I saw there was interesting because the book takes place in the nineteen-eighties, but now we’re thirty years away from that, so I knew it would be hard to compare. But there were enduring elements to the island.

 

The journey began in the center of the island, then we moved to Havana, and it was wonderful to see the way the landscape looked and worked, and that seemed to fit closely with my ideas about it. I felt at least in that that regard some element of my writing felt true.

 

TFR:

Do you feel as though you were reliant on the previous generation of Cuban-American authors? Did you read a lot before you pursued your own mythical approach?

 

Palacio:

Very much so. The book that really got me started writing about Cuba was Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls.

 

I’d read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, I’d read Christina Garcia. But there’s something about that book—it was in Cuba. It wasn’t about people coming to America or assimilating to a new culture. But it was also just so expansive. I think of that book and the way it begins in the countryside and him growing up in a very rural area and then moving toward the man and the city. That book for me showed me how Cuba is so big and there’s so much going on there and I have these connections I’ve been thinking about for a long time and maybe now is the time to start exploring them in a little bit more deliberate way.

 

TFR:

I loved your evocation of the landscape.

 

Palacio:

Thank you.

 

TFR:

One of the things that interested me about your book was that I thought that your use of the third-person limited point of view was really masterful. The way that you could get very close to one character and then back away a little bit—that’s the great thing that third-person gives you is that flexibility. But I was also interested in how that affected the characterization. I was fascinated by Isabel because I found her repellent but riveting.

 

Palacio:

[laughs]

 

TFR:

So, I wanted to know if you had a favorite character and whether the decisions that you made about your characters influenced the point of view choice that you made. How did that work for you?

 

Palacio:

When I first sat down to write the book, I had just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s “The Insufferable Gaucho,” which is a wonderful story about a guy who returns to a home he’s basically forgotten about. I got fascinated with that idea, which seemed to mirror some of the things that we’re going on in my dad’s experience and maybe for Cubans in general. I thought the book was mostly going to focus on Ulises and in the early drafts it does. Even still it narrows down at some points and we sort of we forget some of the other characters. However, getting them back to the island in that first half of the novel required that everybody’s pieces were moving in line with each other or affecting each other. The Isabel storyline became so much fun to write and so much fun to think about. Originally, he was going to be an older brother and Isabel was going to be a younger sister, and then I realized there’s some balance that needs to happen here, and so that’s when I decided that they would be better if they were twins. Neither one of them can make it back to Cuba without the other or to that reckoning that happens at the end without the assistance of the other.

 

TFR:

Because in some ways they are so different. You can imagine that there might be a break between them except that being twins really bonds them.

 

Palacio:

Yeah.

 

TFR:

Are you a writer who extends love to all your characters? What’s your relationship with the character of Isabel, this odd Catholic visionary? Is she a character you love?

 

Palacio:

I think so. I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic school even all through college so I can relate to a lot of the Catholic systems that she’s trying to discover herself in and through and as a part of. Writing her was fun because she has a sort of wild spectrum of experience compared to some of the other characters. But it was also very difficult writing her. The scene where she has her vision and then her experience at the hospital where she doubts whether or not she actually had that vision—those were difficult to write. I have those same questions about faith, and I think about what role it does and does not play in my life anymore. I think even through our twenties—which is where she gets to by the end of the novel—that’s a period of thinking about rejecting your old self and wondering How do I reject parts of myself and keep other parts? It can be hard to stomach.

 

TFR:

Isabel reminded me of those mystics like Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen, those visionaries of previous centuries, or Dorothea of Montau, as depicted by Günter Grass in The Flounder.

 

I don’t mean to give Ulises short shrift—he is a great character. It felt to me like Ulises was the more obvious you character, but you channeled yourself into both of them in a really interesting way. Can you talk about the ways in which you draw yourself out through your characters? Is that something that you do consciously?

 

Palacio:

I’m becoming more conscious of it. I’m married to the writer Claire Vaye Watkins, and she and I talk a lot about our differences. I tend not to write about biographical stuff very often, and she tends to make good use of that in her work. Or at least that’s the way we used to think about it. Right after I published this book and started re-reading it and understanding it in the ways that you can only after you get some distance, I was Oh, there’s a lot of me in this novel, or at least a lot of the things I worry about.

 

The inspiration for Isabel was the female lead from Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. What I loved about her was seeing a character so driven to get a want and to feel and experience a want and then just drive drive, drive, drive for it. That’s something that Isabel has, that persistence, that just moving forward. But it’s also something I think I have a bit of myself. With Ulises in terms relationship to me, he can sit back and see things, and there are times when I pull back, too. It was a nice dynamic to have in terms of working out the plot.

 

TFR:

It works beautifully. I wanted to ask you a more general question about the evolution of The Mortifications and the process of writing. You have been working on a collection of short stories about Cuba for quite some time. Is the story that we’re publishing in 41.1, “Kisses,” part of that collection that you’ve been working on for a while? What relationship does The Mortifications have to that short fiction? Did it come out of one of the stories or was it something separate?

 

Palacio:

It was originally part of that collection, and I thought when I sat down to write it that it would just be a novella, around 60 or 80 pages, but by the time I got a solid first draft done, it was around 200, 220 pages. I was like, well, I guess am writing a novel. I was lucky that I got to share it with my [MFA] advisor. I was fearful that she’d say, “This is good, but we could cut a hundred pages and it would be a lot better,” but instead she said, “This is good, but we could add a hundred pages and it would be a lot better.”

 

Once I knew that, I sort of devoted most of my time to work on the novel for the last few years, and only now I’m trying to return to the collection and filling out the gap that taking the intended novella out of that collection left behind.

 

TFR:

So, “Kisses,” the story that we’re publishing this spring’s print Florida Review [41.1, 2017] is a futuristic story. In The Mortifications, there’s certainly religious mysticism, if not the fantastic. Can you comment upon the element of fabulism and futurism in your own writing? That tradition has been so different in Latin American as compared with the U.S. How do you see all of that working in your writing and the way that attitudes toward the non-realist is changing in the U.S.?

 

Palacio:

I saw an article that was up online at LitHub about how having Bolaño published and do so well in America really opened things up nicely for more translations of Latin American literature, and this switch has been beautiful. I love Valeria Luiselli. I just read Mauro Javier Cardenas’s The Revolutionaries Try Again. There are all these wonderful books that are coming out of that tradition, and I think the other thing is that sense that behind the magical is also the political.

 

When I was thinking about writing this future Cuba story, I had just also seen that documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop about Banksy and graffiti artists, and I was like Oh man, what an interesting guy, and I was thinking What would that would look like in Cuba, people sort of marauding around in a futuristic Cuba tagging things? You know, what if the state grows a little bit and there’s a little bit less control in some areas but greater control in others? Once I got into it, it seemed possible to imagine some of the ways the politics would expand. If we’re going to open up relations with Cuba, then why not put a tunnel under the Florida Straits that will take you straight from one place to the other? Similarly, the idea of the World Cup happening in Cuba I think is actually a really good prediction—I feel like we’re gonna do that soon [laughs] because every Third World country that is trying to come onto the stage as having developed and grown—that seems to be now a hallmark of that process, right? You get the World Cup. So I was interested in trying to figure out how those elements might converge and what they might look like.

 

TFR:

I want to ask a little more about the science fiction aspect. I ask because there seems now to be a lot of ground being staked where, rightly, I believe, writers want to tear down the wall between science fiction and literary writing, but sometimes it feels forced. Obviously, we didn’t think so in your story. But how conscious was that decision for you?

 

Palacio:

For me, especially in this particular story, the draw of the future, of a futuristic setting was not so much about just having that element. I had been reading something about the Confederate flag issues going on in this country, and thinking about how in the future, in the way that we have Confederate apologists now, depending on what happens, we may have these hangers-on to the Cuban revolution, people who look back on it with extreme nostalgia and are willing to overlook things like the Special Period and all the hardships put on those people. That was really the doorway into it—trying to imagine, Wow if I can go this far ahead and explore that element, it would be in service to grounding out what a believable future would look like in Cuba. But also all in the service of exploring that story’s main character. If the future is tied to those sorts of character elements, then I think there will always be a place for it.

 

TFR:

I think that’s particularly relevant right now because we’re in a moment when the future feels more immediate, and many of us have been projecting into the near political future, rather grimly sometimes, about what’s going to happen next.

 

What else can you tell us about The Mortifications or about what you’re working on now, where you’re going, what’s next?

 

Palacio:

I think that writing The Mortifications was sort of a mythic experience, but now that I’ve been to Cuba I’m trying to work on new projects that move me more toward a realism that explores what I now better understand. Of course, I’m still coming to understand more about the island. I’m trying to finish that short story collection that we talked about, but I’m also in the process of starting a novel series about a Cuban-American Olympic swimmer who fails to make the U.S. team and so he defects to Cuba to swim in the Olympics. Looking back on The Mortifications, I noticed many times it was not engaging with my own anxieties about calling myself Cuban and trying to understand what it means to be Cuban—you know, I don’t speak Spanish. In the novel I was trying to reconcile some of that through all of these weird trappings, and now I’m more aware that the best course of action for me is to run right at it [through the Olympic swimmer character].

 

TFR:

It’s interesting how there’s this draw toward it for you, like you never felt at home in New Hampshire. Did you not feel at home in New Hampshire or is it just a tension?

 

Palacio:

I love New Hampshire, and I love the friends and family I still have there, but I don’t know if I would call it home in the way we all mean when we say home. It doesn’t satisfy maybe all the needs that I would look for in a home. It’s a wonderful place, and it served me very well, but, yeah, there’s something about my Cuban identity and discovering that, engaging that once I got into writing that seemed important.

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Invitations to Linger

Infinite Altars: Poems by James Brasfield
LSU Press, 2016
92 pages, paper, $17.95

 

 

In an age submerged by torrents of evanescent information, the poems in James Brasfield’s second book, Infinite Altars, extend invitations to linger that prove a pleasure to accept. The collection has at its heart an instinctive patience, asking of its readers a corresponding willingness not just to witness or overhear, but to engage in the construction and accumulation of meditative insight. That responsive participation constitutes the most valuable (and these days, somewhat unusual) pleasure of lyric poetry, which Brasfield’s book offers generously throughout.

 

                                                             From our
seeing more closely, always more closely
in our extreme attention, light’s angles and subtle shade,
a recognition comes, this for the first time always—
such presence, hidden from plain sight, emerges,
as though it trusted our seeing—...

These lines from “Homage to Piero Della Francesca” in the book’s vividly pictorial opening section could be understood as a motto for the entire collection’s acts of attention, which consistently draw what Hopkins called inscapes out of their hiding places in ordinary experience. The volume’s opening poem, “Northern Bay,” gently turns its detailed landscape vision indoors and inward: “Diamond glints coming in, wind-driven, / a rhythm like rows of woodgrain / through a plank table…,” deftly evoking the life lived in “a room / arrayed with what’s been salvaged from a tide: / what a hand reached for, what remains.”  The lyric strategies Brasfield explores are various: painterly meditations on the act of perception (“Window Frame”), delightful symbolist impersonations, as of a snail in “The Night of Daydream,” the gently mythic and allusive “Map,” and a lovely homage (“The Magic Gardener”) to Stanley Kunitz, one of Brasfield’s teachers and a presiding, one might say permission-giving spirit for the collection as a whole. The sensibility informing these poems thus establishes itself as trustworthily ambitious, refusing merely performative gestures, while premising a range of subject and approach that’s amply fulfilled by the book’s succeeding two sections.

 

If the book’s opening portion invites us to experience the evolution of perception toward illumination in language gently, slyly, honestly aware of its own interposition between what it presents and who perceives it, the middle section features pieces more various in their subjects and development.  Daringly long, cinematic sentences still find their inherently apt pacing enhanced by Brasfield’s excellent instinct for line, but the range of tone broadens, and several of the poems pay discreet homage to canonical American voices.  A gentle resonance of Hart Crane informs “Brooklyn to Menatay,” in which a train ride fosters access to the original inhabitation of this continent. “The Incorporation” recalls surviving factory work with a wonderment reminiscent of Philip Levine, and “Standard Time” meditates on the provisioning of firewood in manner that brings to mind Robert Frost and perhaps Richard Hugo. Brasfield closes this section of the book with an affectionate, evocative elegy for his long-widowed mother, “Afternoons Into Evenings.”

 

The elegiac tones established in that section’s closing poem gently suffuse this beautifully crafted book’s final third. Haunting poems such as “Demopolis” (a portrait of Brasfield’s grandmother), “Stray Stone,” and “Daylight Ghosts” have the courage of their mystery, of their moods and intimations.  The social, the familial, the solitary aspects of experience all find expression here. Often in this culminating portion of the book, place and memory find each other out, penetrating experience to discover imaginative obligations, as in these lines from the poem “Soundings”:

 

                                   Despite
a shell held to my ear,

there is no sound to memory—
 only remembrance, how-it-was-heard,

as in the museum I saw de Kooning’s
 Screams of Children Come from Seagulls.

Seeing it, I heard them again.

 

If a book of poems is indeed, as Wallace Stevens once opined, “a damned serious affair,” obligated to sing essences back into experience, it’s heartening to read Brasfield’s, so firmly rooted in its variety of  impulse and settings, from Kiev to Brooklyn to Savannah, and so convinced of the value of patient, reverent attention, and its potentially exalting pleasures:

 

...a lark singing
 and you barefoot, standing in the celestial
 solitude of your identities—all around you
 silence has sung light into song.
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Watching You Sleep on the 5th Day of Your Life

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

                                                ~Michael Chabon, Summerland

 

 

1.
Son, fathers fuck up. Fucking up is what fathers do. I’ve spent my adult life trying not to be my father—a man who loves quickly and leaves even quicker. But I see him in me—his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. You have his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. My hair is thick and black, like his. Your hair, even when you emerged into the world, is thick and black, like fine spun silk. I see my father. In me. In you. One day you will look at me and think, My father is a fuck-up, like how I looked at my father five years ago, waiting for me in the lobby of a Bangkok hotel after a two-year absence. I stayed hidden, spying him from behind a column, noticing how age had had its way with his body that sags and slouches, and thinking, I love you, but you have fucked me up. At that moment, anger turned into pity. “Let pity, then, be a kind of pain…,” Aristotle wrote, which makes me think his father fucked up, too. When the time comes, son, do not pity me. Let me apologize now, when you are asleep and dreaming, I hope, of whatever makes you love. And forgive.

 

2.
Son, you came into being like a Florida thunderstorm—quick and hard. Elephant rain, your Thai grandmother likes to call it. You announced your arrival through your mother’s screams. The commotion out of her mouth was your commotion. Her anguished face was your face. The midwife and nurses could not find your heartbeat, that rapid little sound I loved to listen to during prenatal check-ups. It vanished. I knew something was the matter. I knew by the organized chaos in the room—the fifteen or so nurses buzzing around, everyone doing something. And then, in the midst of this hectic-ness, you came out. “He’s arrived,” the midwife said. Arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around your neck. There was a forever second of silence until you cried. And then I cried. That night, at the hospital, I could not sleep. I hovered over you, as I do now, checking the rise and fall of your chest, the twitch of your tiny fingers, making sure you were breathing and alive.

 

3.
Son, when you become a father, time will lose meaning. Your mind will propel you into the future, your child grown and happy. You hope you are responsible for that happiness. Or, you will imagine the unimaginable, and it will knot your jaw, and it will fist your hands. Time for a father is not linear. I have seen you through college, seen you married, seen all your successes and regrets. I have gone backwards, too, when you did not exist, when I did not exist, witnessing this lineage of fathers, who strayed. My past is your past, son. Time intertwines like a suffocating weed. It is not measured by light, but memory, which is timeless and unpredictable. Where, I wonder, will this memory of your sleep be thirty years from now? What will harken it? At my death, it is this memory I want to slip into and carry with me into the next life.

 

4.
Son, a few days before your arrival, a man entered a nightclub and extinguished forty-nine lives. When news broke, I shut out the world. I wanted you to enter a happy world, in a happy family, in the arms of a happy father. Happiness, however, is illusory. The truth: the world hurts. Six hours before your arrival, I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me. In it he writes to his son: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” There is so much that I want to shield you from, so much I do not want you to witness. But I wonder if you already know the world is broken. Sometimes you furrow your brow in your sleep, like you do now, a look of someone betrayed, and I think we all begin our lives with a cry, our first breath the beginning of suffering.

 

5.
Son, your mother worries people will not know you are hers. You have inherited all that is Thai in me. She fears, when you look at her, you will not see a mother but a simple white woman. But she wanted this. “I hope he looks like you,” she said. “I hope he looks like you,” I said. You look like this country. You were born from a yellow man and white woman, who wakes you with kisses, who holds you so tight fearing you might evaporate. Son, love your mother. Son, love her more than you love me. See yourself mirrored in her eyes. But do not forget your father. He will be there. He promises. He promises so many things.

 

 

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The Best Life Is One Lived for Others

“The Best Life is One Lived for Others” is published in cooperation with the Self Narrate project, and the in-video “subscribe” button connects with their site. To subscribe to Aquifer, please click the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page.

 

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binding we

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

you have declared war on our bodies, and our bodies

have fallen on each other in piles

along the gravel and the wood

and the tile of a dance floor

and these holy spaces have become our graves

and the sidewalks our pyres because we are burning up

from our no and our why and our no more

 

we, our breasts, our bodies,

in all their shapes and sizes are heaving

in piles on one another, breathing

the force of love enough to hold the parts of us we do not

recognize, enough to stretch the parts we hold dear

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Drew Ex Machina

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

July 2, 2004

Pulse opened in Orlando, Florida, when I was nineteen and Drew had just turned twenty. We had met the first week of college, eleven months prior.

 

Drew danced like a maniac. Sometimes he would pull you up to him and slam his body against you. It was the same way he hugged. And tickled. With loving force, one might say.

 

We didn’t go to Pulse the night it opened. Instead, we spent the weekend in Clearwater with my family. We played Dance Dance Revolution at the mall, talked about doing a semester abroad in London, and danced in my room to Drew’s favorite song of the moment.

 

“Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis Bextor.

 

October 10, 2004

Pulse was remarkably non-Orlando-esque, according to Drew. Since I had only been to gay clubs in Orlando and Tampa, I didn’t have much basis for comparison. But I trusted Drew when he told me this was what the clubs in bigger cities were like.

 

Our favorite was the white room. He described it as “…rather miraculously immaculate. You’re not quite sure if the walls are windows, mirrors, or projection screens. Hoorah for ambiguous decor!”

 

I loved the whimsical way he would describe things.

 

April 13, 2005

“Club partners for life!” we screamed at each other on the dancefloor that entire night at Pulse. And then the next night at Firestone. Whenever we were together, a ten-foot wall couldn’t have kept people from wanting to spend time with us.

 

That’s the way we liked it.

 

Drew was like a soul-brother to me. Maybe it was because we were both Geminis (and he would swear to you this was exactly the reason). Maybe it was because we both had endless amounts of energy. I didn’t care what it was. I could have gone out with him every single night.

 

That year, it seemed like I did.

 

April 23, 2005

We attempted to crash Grad Nite at Disney World.

 

We talked about it for weeks. We would join up with the group from my high school because they had extra tickets. It would work out because we both still looked like we could have been in high school.

 

It failed because my friend on the bus never answered her phone. I am a terrible liar, but attempted to pretend that Drew and I were separated from our group. The manager took us to the Grad Nite ticket counter and once they looked up my high school, our plans were thwarted. He was laughing hysterically while I was on the verge of having a panic attack for lying and nearly getting caught.

 

We talked about crashing Grad Nite every April. We swore that one year, we would finally succeed.

 

We had infinite chances, right? We would look seventeen and eighteen forever, right?

 

May 1, 2005

From Drew’s journal. Gemini’s horoscope: You’ve never understood people who refuse to try new things. In your mind, even if you give something a shot and it doesn’t work out, it’s still better than being bored. That attitude is about to come in plenty handy, thanks to an interesting new friend who’ll bring you the opportunity to broaden your horizons. If your passport isn’t current, better see what you can do about that. You may end up with an invitation to travel.

 

A song lyric from one of his favorite bands, The Pet Shop Boys, comes to mind. We were never bored because we were never boring. Using the past tense still hurts.

 

November 6, 2005

Another excerpt from Drew’s journal. I told him he should write a story about this. How right and how wrong he was.

 

I imagine the end of humankind not to be in the form of a nuclear winter, a massive AIDS virus, or the evaporation of natural resources. Instead, I see the men and women of this earth reaching a quiet, still end.

 

Terribly, suddenly, all women would become infertile. At first, there would be a race to find a cure. All the scientists would rally together around this one cause — the fight for the survival of our species.

 

But eventually, hope would dwindle… the young would grow old, the old, older. Nightclubs and coffee shops and college campuses would close down, religions and governments would grow quiet. There would be no war or famine. The last remaining people would lie down in silence, no one watching. The end of humankind would be gone. In a whisper.

 

The future wouldn’t have much meaning to this sort of people. The only thing left after their departure would be the good things, and bad things, that humanity has done. The only way they could find peace would be to make amends to the world.

 

I’m not sure that they could.

 

I’m not sure they could, either.

 

April 30, 2006

Something I remember about Drew is that he was always down on himself. About his looks, about not fitting in with “the gay community.” I often felt similarly. It was hard to finally find a community, but to feel like you didn’t necessarily belong to it.

 

I wish he knew just how beautiful he was. I think he found that after college.

 

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly” was his personal motto. He did do it perfectly, however painful or awkward it may have been.

 

November 16, 2006

Diva Invasion was a huge drag show put on by UCF’s GLBSU every year. I was one of the event planners and had convinced my mom to join us.

 

I remember watching her laugh while grabbing one of the drag queen’s boobs. She said it was unfair that they were nicer than her own.

 

The after-party that night was at Pulse. My mom bought all of my friends a round of martinis. While Drew and our other friend, Christopher, were busy dancing with my mom Night at the Roxbury-style, my girlfriend and I snuck off to make out in the bathroom because it was a safe place to do so.

 

April 16, 2007

The Virginia Tech shooting was something that felt so close to home, yet so far away.

 

How? Why? These were the questions that kept popping up. These were the questions we would continue to ask for years to come. How could someone do this? Why aren’t there tighter gun laws?

 

Drew wrote: I’m feeling kind of shaken about the events at Virginia Tech today. I didn’t find out until I got home from class and went into the office. At first I didn’t really understand what was going on. Now I’m feeling like I could cry about it.

 

It’s hard trying to find a balance between caring and understanding (how could we?), and distancing yourself from the situation, passing it off as just another 32 bodies; as lifeless, heavy sculptures, as silence.

 

But, are we even supposed to try and find a balance? Are our emotions honestly constructed so mechanically?

 

[The] bodies weren’t enough. The implications of this could be so much more.

 

Sociologists will be happy. Not since Hitler has a mass murderer given so much fodder to disassemble and analyze. Maybe we’ll get inside the mind of a killer, but at what cost?

 

January 20, 2008

“You’re already in New York! All you need is a monkey and a popcorn machine!”

 

That was Drew’s response to my mini-existential crisis while I was deciding between psychology and writing graduate programs. After graduating from UCF, I’d packed up my entire life and moved to New York to live with my family for a while before figuring it out.

 

Instead of figuring it out or becoming a street performer per Drew’s suggestion, I fled the country and backpacked through Europe for six weeks.

 

Sometime in 2010

I had finally chosen writing for my graduate degree and stayed in NYC to pursue it. Sometime in 2010, Drew and I had a falling out. I don’t remember the specifics because this is how juvenile it was.

 

He was a die-hard anti-Apple Android fanatic.

 

He bought an iPod.

 

I made a joke about him buying an iPod.

 

That turned into a heated argument. He told me my “literature” “made his eyes bleed.”

 

I told him that a therapist should be more sane than his patients.

 

And we didn’t speak for several years.

 

June 2011

Every Monday, I would meet my New York friends at either Stonewall or Duplex. We would drink on the cheap at both places and play Guitar Hero at Duplex.

 

It was odd to think about drinking and dancing at a place with so much historical context.  In fact, I’m not sure I even thought about it at the time. The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street is where the riots started that set the tone for the entire LGBT movement. But by now, as at Pulse, we felt safe there.

 

When we played Guitar Hero, there were a few times that I thought of Drew. I remembered, very vividly, a photo of him, Christopher, and our other friend Andrea. They were sitting on my couch the night of Christopher’s twentieth birthday. Drew had just bought him the game.

 

I thought about it, but I didn’t reach out. Twenty-somethings can be like that.

 

September 6, 2014

After pacing back and forth through the Barnes & Noble on Colonial eight times, I sat down in the cafe and pulled out my phone. I had moved away from Orlando six years prior. I lived in New York, Alabama, and was now living in Denver.

 

I had just gone through my usual series of unfortunate events post-breakup:

find a rebound,

rebound,

be hurt by the rebound,

regret breaking up with my original girlfriend to begin with.

 

I hated that I was in Orlando. Somehow, the humidity made the hurt feel worse. Somehow, it made me feel more stuck.

 

Drew was the first person I texted. He and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years because of the iPod debacle, but had begun speaking again from our respective parts of the country. He texted me back immediately, and just-so-happened to have been in the same shopping center.

 

“Fair warning: I look like shit,” he said.

 

“Fair warning: Same,” I responded.

 

We sat and talked for two hours before deciding to head back to his apartment. He lived around the corner and wanted to show me his place and force me to play Dance Dance Revolution with him—something I hadn’t done since college.

 

That evening, it felt like no time had passed. We talked about all of our silly college inside jokes, read the DSM, watched a bit of Eurovision, and took some photos together.

 

He still had the mug I made him for his birthday, years prior. It showcased photos of us from the evening we tried to sneak into Grad Nite at Disney in 2005.

 

After I left his apartment, I got a text message: “You left your sunglasses here!”

 

I responded for him to hold on to them. I’d get them from him the next time I saw him, which would, we hoped, be sooner than several years.

 

We were better at staying in touch, but didn’t see each other for a year and a half because I was living in Denver and he was still in Orlando. I had no idea how, of all of our friends, he was still the one to remain there. He always talked about moving but never pulled the trigger.

 

May 29, 2016

After spending two days texting back and forth about plans, Drew and I finally agreed to meet for brunch on Sunday. I finally got to meet Juan, the beautiful boyfriend in all of his photos.

 

We met at International Plaza in Tampa and went to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch because I couldn’t make it to Orlando. We, of course, made fun of ourselves the entire time. I think “Tampa’s finest!” was the caption on the Snapchat I added to my story. That afternoon was the first time I’d seen him in over a year. He and Juan were so cute together. It looked like they shared a wardrobe, which I found out­—they did. Drew seemed more calm. Way more calm than I’d ever seen him.

 

He still hugged me too hard. He still made an “mmm” sound when he did it. The way he hugged made me feel like he was hugging me with different senses. Can you taste a hug? I bet he could.

 

He felt older that day. We felt older that day. And not just because I had just turned thirty-one and he was about to turn thirty-two. Another thing we had in common was what some would call a “Peter Pan Complex.” It served us well. On my thirtieth birthday, he wrote to me saying, Welcome to the first day of the “wow, there is no way you’re actually 30!” club.

 

Before parting ways, he gave me back my neon green sunglasses. He’d held onto them for a year and a half.

 

June 10, 2016

How about the weekend of July 8th? We can go to Global Dance Festival at Red Rocks!

 

This was the last discussion I had with Drew. I was about to buy my tickets for the weekend-long dance music festival in Colorado. I had already begun planning out our entire weekend; all the vegetarian restaurants and breweries I’d take them to, a beautiful hike or two, and, yes—a gay club.

 

I warned them when I was sitting with them drinking strawberry lemonade in Tampa: If you come to visit me in Denver, you’ll end up wanting to move.

 

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Drew said with a smile.

 

June 12, 2016

The morning of June 12, I woke up inundated by text messages and missed calls. I defaulted to text messages, even though three of the missed calls were from my mother.

 

“Oh my god, I am so so so sorry Sara” was the first one I read.

 

“How are you holding up? I am so sad to hear about Orlando.”

 

“My thoughts are with you. I can’t believe what happened.”

 

“Have you heard from Drew?!”

 

Eight hours earlier, I was sleepwalking. My dog barked to go out at about one in the morning, and I sleepily walked to the door, put his leash on, walked down the stairs, and walked him around the block. A neighbor screamed my name, and I distinctly remember telling her I was sleepwalking.

 

That’s the thing about sleepwalking. Much like hypnosis, you are somewhat cognizant of what you are doing, but you can’t control it. I waved to her and kept walking around the block.

 

I came home, took Baxter’s leash off, put my sandals back where they belonged, and got back in bed.

 

At that very same time, one of my best friends from college was lying on the floor of Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. At that very same time, he and forty-eight other people—his boyfriend, Juan, included—were being shot by a madman with a military-style assault weapon. And killed.

 

After reading the text messages and not having a clue what anyone was sending me condolences about, I opened Facebook. There were several more messages waiting for me there. But the first thing I saw when I opened the app was Drew’s mother, Christine. All over Facebook. All over the news. She was in tears. She had heard about the shooting right after it happened and, while Juan was already at the hospital being treated for gunshot wounds, Drew was still nowhere to be found.

 

I was hoping, like many of the rest of us, that he was just in shock and hiding somewhere. But for him to not check in on social media or answer his text messages? Unlikely. I sent him a text message at 8:57 a.m. MST: “ARE YOU OKAY?!?!?!”

 

That would be the last text message I sent him.

 

I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I couldn’t be alone. A week prior, I had begun dating someone new. And as soon as she woke up, she asked if I needed her to come over. No questions asked.

 

So she did. She lay in bed with me while I obsessively checked my phone, texted with my friends from college, and took phone calls from my friends and family. They were looking for answers.

 

I didn’t have any.

 

Twelve anxiety-inducing hours went by before anyone had any information. All day, I spoke with other people from our college friend group. My friends called me crying. As the hours dragged on, my hope that Drew was in shock and hiding grew dim.

 

All I could think about was the heat and humidity and the bodies. The blood all over the walls of the white room at Pulse. The couch that we used to sit on and take photos. I couldn’t believe they would take so long to remove the victims, considering the weather conditions.

 

Then I thought about how maybe it was a homophobic issue. How maybe they had to take extra time because it was a gay club and it was gay blood and, even though we are in 2016, there are still laws barring gay men from donating blood.

 

This is the way my anxiety thoughts work. These are the things that scamper across my brain constantly.

 

I couldn’t do much that day besides stare at the one police scene photo that was on every news story. The blue and red lights together created this amethyst, purplish color.

 

It somehow felt better than blue and red.

 

June 14, 2016

I went to the vigil in Denver that Monday. Besides the rainbow over the park, I found absolutely no solace in being there. I hated every moment of it. The executive director of the LGBT nonprofit I used to work for made it all about him.

 

All about his experience.

 

All about Denver.

 

All about a community who didn’t know Drew. All about people who had never been to Pulse. All about people who may not have ever even been to Orlando.

 

I felt selfish for thinking this way, which triggered more anxiety. I texted my other best friend from college, Christopher. He was at a vigil in Houston. I assumed he was feeling similarly.

 

Pulse Nightclub was a place in Orlando that I went to every week in college. Sometimes twice a week. Oftentimes with Drew.

 

When it was time to light the candle at the vigil, all I could do was watch the wax drip down. All I could do was feel the pathetic fallacy of the rain and hear the pitter-patter of the raindrops against umbrellas and ponchos.

 

I still didn’t cry. I felt like I was still sleepwalking.

 

June 15, 2016

I spent the day trying to make travel plans for myself and Christopher because he was working in the clinic all day.

 

The city of Orlando came together in a huge way that week. Several airlines donated flights and many hotels worked with the city Chamber of Commerce to help those who were grieving.

 

I booked our flights and hotel, completely free of charge, while on a hike with my friend Becca. She convinced me that getting outside and climbing a mountain would help.

 

When we got to the top, we sat back to back on a rock and looked out at the wilderness below us. I couldn’t help but be terrified about the next few days and how they would play out. I had only been to funerals of people who lived full lives. Who died of old age.

 

And still, I sleepwalked down the mountain.

 

That evening, the new girl I was dating came over and sat with me while I made bracelets for my friends. They said THEDRUPROJECT, which was Drew’s Internet handle for everything. I didn’t know how else to keep busy. I didn’t know where to put this sad energy.

 

It was as if he created the memorial for himself while he was still alive. He was always working on himself. He was always a project in progress.

 

June 16, 2016

When I arrived at the airport and checked in, I tried to muster the words to thank the people who worked for the airline who flew us for free.

 

Instead, they thanked me. They told me how sorry they were. They walked me through the airport. They gave me a voucher for food and drink. They put me on the airplane first.

 

I was sleepwalking then, too. I was moving through the airport, nodding my head, saying the words back that seemed like the words I needed to say.

 

I don’t remember any of them.

 

I remember landing at the airport in Orlando. I remember getting my bag. I remember getting in my friend Ashley’s car and her driving me to the hotel.

 

But it was all a blur. I felt as though I was peering through the eyes of someone else. Someone who was grieving. I wanted to extend my sympathy to this caricature of myself.

 

When I got to our room, I hugged Christopher for a good five minutes. Resting my head on his chest felt right. It was the first thing that had felt right in days.

 

June 17, 2016

The morning of the wake, Christopher and I walked across the street to the memorial set up at the Dr. Phillips Center.

 

There were photos of all forty-nine victims. Tons of flowers. Rainbow flags. Emotional support dogs from Alabama, even. People from all over the country were there, paying their respects.

 

I hung one of THEDRUPROJECT bracelets on the photo of Drew.

 

We went to lunch. Slowly, people came to meet us. Slowly, we made our way through the day until it was time to go to the wake.

 

“Will you walk up to the casket with me?” Christopher asked. “I need to see him. It’ll be some sort of closure.”

 

I agreed, but felt funny about it. I had never been to an open-casket wake or funeral. I wanted to be his support, though.

 

The wake was a procession of friends from my past. I hadn’t seen most of these people since graduating. We all sat around, watching the slideshow of photos from college. We shared Drew stories.

 

I hugged his mom for as long as I could. I had no idea how she was smiling. How she was comforting other people.

 

Christopher and I waited until the very last second before walking up to the casket. The wake ended at 8:00 p.m. and we approached at 7:30. The second I looked, I finally broke down and cried. Because looking at his body in a casket—the first body in a casket I’d ever seen—was like visiting a wax figure museum and seeing a cheap knockoff of a celebrity I once loved.

 

That was not how I wanted to remember him.

 

After the viewing, I went and got a tattoo of a phrase I’d been thinking about for five or six years: deus ex machina. The literal meaning is “machine from god.” In literature or theater, it is a plot device–a random character is dropped into the story to guide it to a happy ending.

 

I sent a note Drew had written to a friend of mine who does lettering for a publishing company. She pulled out all of the letters to create the phrase just perfectly.

 

He’s my Drew ex machina now.

 

June 18, 2016

“You and Drew were my first friends in the gay community.”

 

“You made me feel safe to come out.”

 

“The way the two of you welcomed any new friend into your group had such an incredible impact.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

A lot of people came up to me at the funeral or the days leading up to it to tell me versions of that. I had no idea that’s how we were viewed. I had never even thought about it. I’m sure he hadn’t, either. We might have been self-conscious and felt like we never fit in while in college, but nobody would keep us from being our authentic selves—whatever that was.

 

I don’t remember much from the funeral itself. Being inside of a church made me rather uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. It was a Catholic service inside of an Episcopal church, but what difference did it make? When it was time to take the cracker, neither my mother nor I knew what to do. So, two Jews went up to the altar and had a snack.

 

It was disgusting. The cracker, death, being at a friend’s funeral, the lack of gun laws, all of it.

 

July 17, 2016

Today, one day short of a month since the funeral, was the first day that I forgot to wear my THEDRUPROJECT bracelet.

 

I noticed I had forgotten it as I was walking to my car, but didn’t stop to go back because it would have made me late. It did make me pause, though.

 

It made me pause like so many moments in the first month post-Pulse. Like the moments where I had panic attacks in enclosed public spaces because I was afraid of being shot. Like the moments where I thought of something I wanted to tell Drew and couldn’t. Like the moments where I paused to reflect on how Congress could have turned down four common sense gun law initiatives while contemplating even one of the 200+ pieces of legislation that were proposed to discriminate against the LGBT community.

 

When will we, as a country, stop sleepwalking and do something? Remembering is simply not enough. Remembering is what we do.

 

I will never receive a too-hard hug again because we haven’t done enough. I will never be able to send my friend a song I know he would like because we haven’t done enough. I will never be forced to watch Eurovision or play Dance Dance Revolution again because we haven’t done enough.

 

We need to do more than just remember.

 

August 12, 2016

Another anniversary. It’s been exactly two months. It somehow simultaneously feels like two days and two years and it feels like a Sisyphean nightmare where I finally feel like I am okay before a find out a new detail or something reminds me of him or I just do that thing I do where I spend an hour looking at photos of him and I have to go chasing after the boulder as it races back down the mountain. Call it sleeprunning.

 

I know it’s not productive.

 

But neither was trying to eat 63% of a container of melon the other day. His mother posted on Facebook that his heart weighed 250 grams. No mother should know that. Nobody should know that. But now I knew, and it was a matter of time before something triggered me into needing to find out how tangibly how much that actually is.

 

The thing ended up being a container of pre-cut melon I bought the other day. I took it out of the fridge to have a few pieces and when I was putting it back, I noticed the container said 680 grams. I stopped everything else I was working on or doing or thinking about and stared at the container for a good several minutes before delving in and trying to eat as much of it as I could. I needed to have exactly 63% of it. Because then it would weigh 250 grams. And then I could feel what Drew’s heart felt like.

 

I couldn’t force myself to eat enough of the melon, so I took it out of the container.

 

I stood in my kitchen and held the container.

 

And immediately felt shame. What a morbid thing to have done. All I can wonder is when I will wake up or the boulder will just stay put long enough for life to feel normal again for more than a few days—for the anniversaries not to seem like every 12th, every Sunday, every day.

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Where Do All the Dead Names Go?

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

Three days after the shooting, I walked into my therapist’s office. She said, “Talk.” I didn’t know what to say. What do you tell people, after something like that? Do I tell them how when I was nineteen and barely out, I walked doe-eyed into Pulse with X’s on my hands and the hope that a girl might ask me to dance? Do I tell them that I felt safe to be myself for the first time, that we were all there for the same reason—to be open and unafraid? That we were all untouchable, then, and even though I left without a dance I understood that this was a place I could always go.

 

Do I tell them that people like me are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes? Sometimes you forget that there are people out there who want you dead. They want you to die. Every day I am alive is an act of defiance. What do I tell people?

 

How do I tell them what it was like, waiting to hear from friends who’d gone out that night? Answering messages to let people know I was alive. I was not there, but God, I could have been. I could have been with friends on the dance floor, sweating to music, spilling the secret that I had a crush on a friend who was dating another friend, rushing out to the patio bar to avoid a girl I slept with once who never called me again, stuffing dollars down the briefs of a young dancer. Ordering a vodka and cranberry. Admiring the shot girl’s legs. Dancing so hard that I got hungry and stumbled across the street to order fries off the value menu at Wendy’s. I could have been.

 

In the days after the shooting, I had an older gay woman put her hand on my shoulder and tell me it shouldn’t have happened. That she and others marched and protested in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s so that now people like me would be safe. It should have been us, she said. Not you, not you.

 

How do I tell them that my brother was one of the first responders? That a man’s bullet came for his skull but instead got his helmet. That he came home with blood on his boots. How do I tell them how much he cares? Would he run into the building again, knowing a bullet was coming for him? A thousand times over. I want them to know him, to know that his hair curls tight like mine, that his favorite film is The Empire Strikes Back, that he’s a vegetarian. He’s my brother. Those first few days after, I had to prove to myself over and over again that he was still alive. I felt like I had to protect him. I’m part of the Pulse community, but also knit into the world of law enforcement. I don’t think about what should have been done. Did the police take too long? Did they not want to go in because the people trapped inside were queer? No. No. Maybe people don’t remember the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. Thirty-two gay men burned to death in 1973 at a gay bar in New Orleans. A man’s charred remains were visible to onlookers hanging from a window well into the next day. Press was minimal, jokes were made on talk radio. The police called them queers. No one was arrested. The case was eventually closed. Pulse was not the UpStairs Lounge. This is not 1973. Things are not how they were. This was not the UpStairs Lounge. My brother, and every single one of his fellow officers cared. At least that much is different. At least I know that.

 

When we were alone, finally, I laid my head against my brother’s chest and listened to the beat of his heart. Every steady pulse saying I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m still here. I listened to the pulse I almost lost, remembered the Pulse I did lose.

 

And later, alone in my room, I sat in silence and mourned for the forty-nine heartbeats that no longer were. The heartbeats of my other brothers and sisters. I repeated their names, struggled on pronunciations and felt the syllables twist my tongue, and now those names live forever in the spaces between my teeth.

 

How do I explain?—I want to know where all the dead names go. I want to know who swallows them. I cannot. I want to ask, when will it okay for me to move on? How do I carry these ghosts on my back? I can’t imagine putting them down—I’ve already promised to hold them forever. They are mine now. I carry their heartbeats in mine. I wish I could say I am not afraid, but there are days I am terrified. I have been practicing being unafraid since the moment I cut my hair and took the hand of a girl I loved on a crowded street. I am starting to understand that is something I will have to practice all my life.

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Dancing in the Dark

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

The headlight fell off again. It’s a little sooner than expected, but I’m not altogether surprised. When it rains, water creeps under the packing tape securing it to my car, gradually weakening the adhesive so that over a few days it peels off completely, leaving me driving ten MPH under the speed limit and dragging my front left headlight down the road by its cord like a stubborn dog that’s got its own ideas about where we need to go, which currently is the nearest CVS and quick.

 

I’ve been making excuses for not fixing it for the past six months, since I lost control of my steering wheel at a Pollo Tropical and careened into the white picket fence bordering the restaurant’s friendly front doors, bulldozing a family of shrubs along the way. Seated in the wreck, I counted down the seconds wondering when someone would emerge from the building to ask me if I was okay, or at least scold me for driving with headphones on, but no one seemed bothered. Unsure of a proper course of action to take and growing more annoyed that no one had as much as pointed and laughed at me, I stepped out of my car and tip-toed toward the fence to survey the damage. No harm done. The shrub had simply been pushed to a lean, like it had clocked out for its smoke break and would be back to work in a minute. Except for the fallen headlight, my car, too, seemed blithely unfazed by the accident, so with no one to answer to, I went on with my day, driving to work savoring my stale Get-Out-Of-Jail-For-Crashing-Into-a-Global-Conglomerate card.

 

Ever since, it’s been all “You’ll fix it with your next paycheck” and “It’s not like the light doesn’t work. At least now it has character.” Even more dumbfounding, my stepfather is a former mechanic and I have a close friend who recently repaired my taillights who would be delighted to help with the headlight problem, yet I don’t ask either of them for help. Part of me believes I deserve this headache, as if by getting away with crashing into the Pollo Tropical, I owe it to the universe as cosmic penance to be burdened with this slight inconvenience.

 

It’s not just the Pollo Tropical. Three years earlier my legacy of driving into things that are not roads began when my right front tire collided with a curb on a side street outside of Pulse, the Orlando gay bar with the least accessible parking, almost all next-to-impossible parallel spaces. Inspecting the damage with my fingertips and feeling the rubber only barely dip where it had scraped the concrete, I thought, “Idiot. You are such a lucky idiot.” Add to my cosmic debt the time I almost drowned in the community pool in my uncle’s apartment complex when I was ten. When I got a flat driving home from school and my car skidded down a six-lane road and glided neatly into a ditch. Being rushed to the emergency room after donating blood and fainting just steps outside of the Big Red Bus in full sight of a team of nurses. And being gay, because—despite the rush of revolt I get when I put on my patent leather boots and silk floral blouses in the morning—I am often confronted with the irrational idea that I’ve survived being gay. Irrational because surviving being gay seems like such an antiquated notion. My generation doesn’t survive being gay. This is 2016. My mother watches Ellen. Ellen watches Modern Family. A drag queen has a single on the Billboard dance charts. Even so, when I got the call from my best friend that a man had walked into Pulse, our Pulse, and used his gun to do what guns do, I was again thrust into acknowledging the harsh truth that I have survived being gay.

 

I don’t want to ask myself what I would have done had I been inside of Pulse between 2:02 and 5:15 a.m., yet I still do. “Would you have made it?” I find myself wondering while doing the dishes, surrendering to my pesky ego. “Would he have looked at you and seen something worth sparing?” In these moments of selfishness, I am the universe’s incontinent pet and it is shoving my face into a puddle of my urine, trying to house train me by asking, “Why do this? What are you going to learn from this mess?”

 

A coworker, a classmate, a woman at a garage sale noncommittally perusing through a copy of Atlas Shrugged all are interested: “Did any of your friends die?” Each time, my face is pressed back down to the floor. “Why do you ask?” I want to know. “Do you really think this is going to get us anywhere?” Each time, I could say no, thank you for asking, and maybe attribute my apparent sudden weakness to something else, perhaps a potassium deficiency, anything that would give me a valid reason to grieve when none of my best friends are dead at Pulse.

 

In the chaos of the first few days after the shooting, when there are still phones inside of Pulse ringing, a nagging pang in the back of my head follows me wherever I go, questioning my certainty that everyone I know is safe. In describing this doubt to a friend, I tell him that I feel like Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone. I am at the airport running towards my gate, already late for my flight, when suddenly it hits me: Kevin. The people I love the most are accounted for. My best friends are safe, I believe, but what about Kevin? Am I forgetting Kevin?

 

I remember a night at Pulse several years ago—the same night I rammed into the curb. It’s the week of my twenty-first birthday and I’m electrified by the power of gay spaces, partly because I can finally legally order a drink at Pulse. I rush home after the club to write in my diary, still buzzing from too many well cocktails and schmaltzy after some of my first public flirting with being a gay man. I recall a vow I made with myself that I would only drink one beer so that if my tire was deflated by the time I got back to it at the end of the night, at least I would be sober, and how I promptly broke that promise when I ran into my ex-boyfriend inside the club. Given the choice between being drunk on the phone with Triple A or lucid at Karaoke night with the guy that broke up with me over text message, I opt for an all-you-can-drink wristband and fall in love with the first cute guy I see. He’s a blur with a blond Mohawk and he’s punching at the air a few feet away from me on the dancefloor. Even in the dark I can make out how white his skin is, as if all the lights in the room have conspired to make him someone important. I’m not even beside him, but I’m already imagining us reading back to back in our country home in Connecticut and laying my head on his chest. I don’t introduce myself but I do Charleston a few times in his general vicinity which is just as good anyway as long as my goal is to drive home alone on a bad tire. I never get his name. All of my best friends are safe, but three years later, I worry about Kevin.

 

I could stretch the truth. Yes. To those who are curious if anyone I loved was there, I could describe the night I met one of the victims, not exactly a friend, but someone that I used to know. I could catalog the drinks it took me to grow the balls to walk up to him that night at Savoy, the gay bar popular for its aging go-go boys and $3 beers, the bar with the shotgun behind the counter that one of the bartenders once told a friend of mine is always kept loaded “just in case.” I could feign wonder at how despite not quite being drunk, I still found myself serendipitously falling into him, pretending to catch myself on his pleasantly toned arm that barely seemed to register the new weight of me. I could admit that the mixture of a recent breakup, liquor, and a tough pop song about life after love had me diving wholeheartedly into my own private rom-com. I could say that when I kissed him, silhouetted against the lurid neon lights spotlighting our half-empty glasses of booze, wrapping my body in his like this is what my arms were always meant to do, I thought, “Finally! So here is why it’s all been worth it.” I could recall his mouth, soft and sticky with cocktail syrup, so that when I took a step back to get a better look at him, late 20’s, with an impish grin that made him seem like he was keeping a good secret, I could still taste the lingering sweetness of him on my lips. I could tell them he had a boyfriend back then, watch their faces closely to see if that changes what they think about him now that they know he’s not perfect—this is a real man who is now gone. It wouldn’t matter, really. Either way, they would just be glad that I’m safe, that it wasn’t me, that I survived being gay.

 

The inquisitive woman at the garage sale who wants to know if any of my friends has died asks me for help piling her second-hand loot into the back of her car. “I’m so proud of your generation,” she says, handing me a trashcan designed to look like an antique apothecary jar to stow in her trunk. She looks at me warmly, adopting me in the way true parental spirits take in all stray children, and drives off satisfied, convinced that she has nothing to worry about. I would have never been there, not her sweet, chaste, not-that-kind-of-gay son. It’s almost like it never happened at all. But her story is wrong. She is too eager to get back to her daytime soaps, and her picture of me, of us, is not complete. It has been sanitized like the tools of the apothecary that inspired her fun, new trashcan.

 

Flashes of bad times come to me, too. A time, for instance, when I find myself in front of Jarred—from a year ago—with a half-naked twink in a full Rambo getup.

 

“Hey,” Jarred says. He turns to his friend and whispers loudly in his ear, “He’s friends with Michael.”

 

His friend appraises me up and down. “That would make sense.”

 

“Edgar’s an apathetic blogger,” Jarred goes on.

 

“I’m an apathetic blogger,” I say, testing the role out. I run MarthaStewartVEVO.tumbler.com.”

 

“You’re short,” the friend says out of nowhere.

 

“I found your underwear under my bed the other day,” Jarred says.

 

I try to hide my disgust that he only just found the old briefs I abandoned in a whirlwind after we hooked up more than twelve months ago. “Congrats!” I almost say.

 

But Jarred isn’t finished. “I almost texted you, but I wasn’t sure it would have been appropriate.” They both giggle and elbow each other and roll their eyes.

 

“What do you do for a living?” Rambo asks.

 

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not alive.”

 

“Cute.”

 

“Did I upset you two?” I ask. “Because I don’t understand why you’re trying to be mean to someone who has done nothing to either of you.”

 

“I’m just a cunt,” the friend says, so genuine it hurts. “You have pretty teeth,” he adds.

 

Friends of mine have joked about how the catch-all slogan of late—Orlando Strong—sounds like a 5K marathon, disguising the unquestionable homophobia motivating the shooting with a baffling motto that sounds like a quote from The Incredible Hulk. “Orlando Strong!” The Hulk would bellow, tearing his lab coat to smithereens before growing three times his size and pounding on the bad guys. Erased is the queerness essential to the LGBTQ lives lost, replaced with generic calls to action to be McOrlando McUnited as if acknowledging our varying sexualities, genders, or authentic stories would make our lives any less worthy of reverence. Of representation, civil rights activist and author Audre Lorde wrote, “The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” I want to make myself visible. I need to be strong, not just #OrlandoStrong.

 

When I am fourteen, I wade into the full potential of my power when I tell my mother I am gay at a Saks Fifth Avenue. Even so, I prepare for this moment like a breakup, doing it in public in the hopes that she won’t make a scene. When I am sixteen, my history professor asks me to prove my worth, instructing our class to debate whether gay adoption should be legal, a debate in which I am the only student who believes I am not inherently a bad role model. At twenty-two, my best friend is sexually assaulted at another gay bar in Orlando. I am almost handcuffed for “disturbing the peace” after screaming at the officers called to the scene to stop laughing. For years, that is what being gay has felt like: disturbing everyone’s peace.

 

I have stripped off my mesh tank top to dance in midnight foam parties, undressed in cars tucked deep into parking garages with strange men I met on the internet, had my first kiss with a boy folded inside the lush red velvet curtain in sophomore drama rehearsal, a kiss so new and strained it felt like banging cutlery. Alongside all of this, I have survived being gay. Never tragically—always magnificently, absolutely fabulously. Still, I would be lying if I said I’ve gotten away with it unscathed. My queerness has, in fact, had its toll on me, a price of admission I can only imagine many closeted LGBTQ youth are skeptical of paying in the wake of so much hate. Even when it doesn’t get you, death snags you, tearing off your outer layer like in a horror movie where the virgin outruns the masked villain, leaving him behind clutching her crumpled cardigan, knowing they are destined to meet again in Act 3. But the real world isn’t a horror movie. In the real world villains have Sig Sauer MCX assault-style rifles and their stories are echoed in today’s pop hits, cleverly concealed in the lyrics to Foster The People’s deceitfully mellow “Pumped Up Kicks” blaring out of the stereo system at The Gap. They doff their corny masks to reveal centuries of support backing their hate: doctors declaring us mentally ill, legislation banning my friends from donating our tainted blood, preventing us from holding jobs, turning partners away from visiting each other in hospitals, expelling our transgender brothers and sisters from bathrooms, conveniently forgetting to hold our killers accountable in countless, nuanced ways.

 

Days after the shooting, gun sales in Florida double—people thinking that if they had weapons of their very own, they would have made a difference, or else worried that this will be the last straw, the deadliest mass shooting since Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook. A Florida congressional candidate announces a contest on Facebook to give away an AR-15 rifle. Now that we’ve seen the worst of it, surely gun legislation will tighten. Better stock up while we can.

 

However, this fight is not entirely unfair. We, too, are more powerful in disaster. Even when we are killed, we cannot die. We are like the mythological beast Hydra—cut off one of our heads and three will rise in its place. Stop our Pulse and our hearts will beat three times as strong. We are faeries, they tell us, and I believe them because we are nothing short of magic. I have witnessed our enormous political and social power first hand. The morning after the shooting, lines at blood drives wrapped around blocks—our indomitable, mighty dragon’s tail. At vigils, swarms of us gathered so tightly in grief that in the rooftop images splattered across every major news outlet we resemble the shadow of a fantastic beast hovering just out of sight. More than all of this, though, I am most overwhelmed by our power over death at every Orlando gay bar the week of the shooting, packed with the fiercest of activists bouncing along to our favorite queer anthems, my comrades in revolution singing along to three different versions of “Born This Way.”

 

Three years ago at Pulse, I am in trouble. My best friend has ditched me for a one-night stand and my ex-boyfriend has teamed up with a drag queen to openly debate whether I qualify as being short, yet a moment on the dance floor redeems it all. That night, I write in overly romantic prose, hoping to trap the moment like a lightning bug in a jar: I’m finally 21 and I’m alone on the dance floor flailing around to the tune of “MMMbop”, alone and engulfed in a swarm of gay guys. They are anything but apologetic. They have a few drinks in them and are at their most honest. They push when they are intruded on and shout when they have something to shout. You’ll never see a gay man so political as when he’s dancing to Hansen.

 

Looking back at that night, it’s easy to imagine that I’m still in that crowd on the dance floor, singing along to the nonsensical words of a cheesy ’90s song, alone yet part of a tribe more powerful than any dynasty I’ve ever heard of. It’s hard not to laugh at myself for ever feeling bad about a drag queen calling me short when all along the only thing that truly matters about that night and every night since is that there was a drag queen at all, that I got to be at Pulse in the first place, just as it doesn’t matter that there aren’t really words to “MMMbop” as long as in my memories there will always be music to dance to and a gay space to lose myself completely in. I can’t help but think of anyone who has ever been to Pulse or any other gay club as my friend, my clan, in the truest, most authentic sense: Who else will you allow yourself to unapologetically sing along to Hansen with? Where else could I have ever learned to take my first steps toward love? As last call pulled everyone away from the dancefloor, I remember feeling my best friend grab my hand. He did not leave with his one-night-stand after all. Together, we make our way to my car a block away from Pulse. Lo and behold, the tire did not deflate. It’s looking a little rough and is featuring a brand new gnarly war-wound, but it will be fine.

 

Back in the CVS parking lot, again I find myself patching up my car. I reinforce the headlight with a fresh layer of packing tape, securing it into place and testing it to make sure the light works. It does. Despite falling off and being dragged through two hundred feet of pavement, it’s still burning bright. I know it’s dangerous, if not altogether stupid, to not get it professionally fixed, but I can’t help but dismissing it as yet another thing I’ll get to eventually. Right now, I have to get to work and there is so much work yet to be done. It’s only for a little while longer, anyway, I tell myself. It’s a rough bandage, but in a bind, I can trust it to help me see where I’m going.

 

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Vanish

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

In Italo Calvino’s version, the world began at one point, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0—with all of her love, she made noodles for the boys—and then, like that, stars appeared. Land, the moon. Ocean waves, curling and releasing. Doves. Palms.

 

In my version, I am not as pivotal as Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0, and I may never be, but I made noodles for the ones I loved: The woman I was dating, and the man who asked me, softly—“Can you teach me how to put on makeup?” And I said, without hesitation, “Yes,” and the woman I loved—she helped, too. I remember this: We went to the drug store, and I pretended the makeup was for me. He chose red, plum—the colors of autumn. And then we drove to my rental room, and Douglas sat on my bed, and Anna did too. I made spaghetti. We opened tubes of lipstick, palettes of eye shadow.

 

In the time it took for a woman’s love to become the land, tell me—did the sky stretch and open? Did the boys press their hand­s to its boundary, cupping each burning star? I’ll never fully understand the journey from one point to many, but I can tell you this: Every day we create worlds.

 

And in my rental room, on my bed, Douglas and Anna and I—we navigated a world that felt new, its boundary moving outward like a wing, or like oak leaves fading, then deepening, into umber.

 

If nourishment is the link between our true selves and the stars, then I wonder what can ever be their undoing. Bullets, golden and sparkling. A false map that says: Love is not love is not love.

 

The night of the massacre, music played, humans kissed. Queer humans. It was Latin night. Douglas, Anna and I stayed home.

 

With one bullet, the land and sky caved in.

 

And another, and another.

 

This is not the story of finding oneself. This is the story of how the universe became one stone.

 

Sometimes poetry is not enough to bring us comfort.

 

Sometimes, not even the language of the human heart can cup autumn’s colors, hold them dear in their becoming.

 

Sometimes we tell stories of love, of how one kiss can fill a soul with abundance.

 

Sometimes we go to sleep, and when we wake up—so much has vanished.

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Pulse Remembrance

Posted on by cahcmsadmin

This week, we are waiting for a new issue of The Florida Review to be printed. We are also reliving the horrible day last June when we woke up to news of the Pulse shooting here in Orlando, made all the more acute by another act of senseless and murderous violence in our city yesterday. Although the reaction to Pulse from the literary community arose immediately last year, and poems and essays flooded online publications one after another from across the country, it took us here in Orlando a while to recover enough to write a word about it. In fact, we are still recovering, and we will never recover.

We appreciated the outpouring of support, but felt that our proximity demanded a response, and we decided to publish five pieces in our fall issue related to the Pulse shooting. They have been a source of healing  and comfort for the authors who wrote them, for our editorial staff, and for many of our readers. This week, in remembrance of those who lost their lives that day last June, UCF is holding a day of remembrance on campus June 8, and we would like to share these five pieces more widely on Aquifer, one each day from June 6-10. On June 11 and 12, we will be silent, holding our breaths, listening to the whispers of souls.

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All Their Awful Particles

I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family.
I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.
I scrutinize their bodies, green as acid, for traces of mine.

 

How can I stop looking at them?
At their faces?

 

Their bones strung together
are the beads of a necklace
I wind around my neck.

 

Their lives pour into me through a silver faucet
I cannot turn off. Their deaths, too—

 

suicide, suicide:
the familial sickness.

 

Surely it has congealed within me,
all their awful particles.
Surely I have been marked.

 

If I were the firstborn, mystical or clean
like a sheet of cotton twisting in the wind—

 

No.

 

I am a piece of slate stained,
scarred with footprints of the dead.

 

Are they confessing what they’ve done
to make me?

 

They lay their hands on me
like strips of seaweed.

 

When I place my mouth at my feet,
unable to speak,
I feel their malformed sadness run through my hair like a comb.

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