Category: Aquifer

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

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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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Restless Curiosity

At the Foundling Hospital by Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
59 pages, hardbound, $23.00

The threads running through Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital are varied enough to provide the topics for a Jeopardy round: music, language and languages, names and naming, identity and origins. And Pinsky’s restless curiosity is mirrored by the various forms these poems assume. There are sonnets, couplet and tercet poems, lists, narrative poems, brief lyrics, and free-associative repetitions. What melds these disparate elements, rendering the book a seamless read, is Pinsky’s cerebral yet human voice.

 

Taking its cue from the collection’s epigraph from Pindar (“What is someone?”), that voice offers more questions than postulations. Sometimes those questions are explicit, as in “Genesis”: “Where was the kiln, what was the clay? / What drove the wheel that turned the vessel?” At other times the questions are implicit, often involving notions of accepted faith. In “Sayings of the Old” the speaker remembers an acquaintance who “hates the sanctimonious Buddha-goo / But loves to meditate.” And in “Dream Medicine” the speaker recalls a childhood encounter with his father when,

 

…from the Ford’s back seat,
I asked him, did he believe in Life after Death?
His eyes in the rear-view mirror kind of shrugged,
“I don’t know, probably not,” he said. “Or maybe
Look at it this way: you are my life after death.”

 

“I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors,” “Creole” begins, an attitude that is evident throughout this book. While Pinsky often pokes and prods at ideas surrounding religious belief, he seems much more interested in people. “The Foundling Tokens” is a beautiful meditation on how the orphaned children were identified by something tangible when they were brought in: “Bit of lace or a pewter brooch, / Identifying coin, button / Or bangle. One crushed thimble, / noted at admission.” The poem expands to include Africans on the slave passage, “the Chinese immigrants / In the dark Angel Island / Internment cells,” and the people who left “a rhyme or name” scraped “Into the very death-compound dirt” of a concentration camp. What did it avail any of them? “…almost never was / A foundling reclaimed, ever.” These poems never flinch from such hard truths, yet they wear those truths lightly, neither celebrating the darkness nor inviting pity in its wake.

 

Pinsky is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master. Everywhere in this collection I am made aware of a confidence of sensibility and craft, the sense that he can accomplish anything the poems set out to do. Partly that is surely the result of long practice. But there is also generosity of spirit here. The few explicitly narrative poems we do have are concerned as much with other people as they are with the speaker. Pinsky’s impulse is to honor the people who often don’t have a voice, such as the veteran in “Radioman” who matter-of-factly joined another platoon, his having been wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge: “We slept, we ate. / I had another outfit, somewhere to be. / They had a radioman, and that was me.” The abandoned in the Foundling Hospital, his grandmother who delivered wisdom in Yiddish, and childhood friends who have died receive the same fond attention as do Irving Berlin and Ray Charles and God.

 

There is no axe to grind here, no quarrel with fate (but neither is there complacency). Rather, there is the acknowledgement that the speaker of these poems is corporeal, one among countless. “Procession” begins with a description of the array of telescopes atop Mauna Kea and their ability to travel back through time. Inevitably, that focus leads the speaker to a meditation about our shared human past. “Innumerable names and doings, innumerable / Destinies, remote histories, deities and tongues. / Somewhere among them your ancestor the slave, / Also your ancestors the thief the prince the stranger,” all of them “…traveling a filament of light / Across the nothing between the clouds of being / Into the pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”

 

The poems in At the Foundling Hospital examine what it is to be human through the microcosm of individual experience. Robert Pinsky—sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent, but always honest and forthright—is our guide. This book is strong evidence that he deserves the respect he is so often accorded.

 

Please also see our interview with Robert Pinsky.

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Trap Door Out of the War

While higher-ups gave the suspect a spirited drubbing,
the guard stood just without, encroached upon
by a nebulae of false assassins.

Flailing until a handled door lay exposed,
he tugged it open, entering an under-earth oasis
of tropical cocktails, hula girls, a certified financial advisor
with fingers pressed together in a smart-seeming way.

Vibrant drinks clogged the soldier’s thoughts,
leaving behind a ghost-colored mustache.
Letters of endorsement reached him by certified mail

and he wondered what fate he was being commended for.
The hula girls drifted around with such absent-minded
dexterity they often were confused for weather.
The war prattled on somewhere upstairs.

Wristwatches were being synchronized in far peninsulas of the earth
and eighteen different people, at that very moment,
were voicing displeasure over the spearfish flambé.
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Moonlight & Roses

1.

My mother loved crooners—Andy Williams, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. Especially Jerry Vale. His voice has a curvature, a rounding of the Rs that made him sound more Midwestern than like a guy from the Bronx, and a higher pitch than the others that added yearning, and maybe hope.

 

I know she liked his looks. Short, with lustrous black hair and sparkling brown eyes, Jerry had a smile that covered the bottom half of his face, his teeth gleaming and strong. He looked nothing like my tall, stooped, blond, green-eyed father, whose dentures came out the minute he stepped inside the front door, who sang “Waltzing Matilda” when he sang at all.

 

My mother listened to Jerry Vale as she did housework—“The Impossible Dream” while scrubbing the bathroom, “Two Purple Shadows” as she washed windows, and always, she sang along, a clear, trilling soprano, trained in the church choir. She even accompanied Jerry in Italian—“Amore, Scusami,” “Al Di La”—note for note. She pronounced pasta as “paste-uh,” but Jerry guided her effortlessly through the language of romance.

 

His calm tenor confessed love of the most resonant, enduring kind, and enunciated it so slowly and clearly, his sincerity couldn’t be doubted. My mother, with her faraway blue eyes, wiped a rag slowly over the bathroom mirror as she and Jerry admonished their hearts to “Pretend You Don’t See Her,” to instead smile and pretend to be gay. When I mocked the songs—there were so many good lines to ridicule—my mother looked hurt, and usually said something on the order of, “Just wait, honey. Someday, you’ll see how true these songs are.”

 

That idea brought me up short later, when I was alone in my room. When had my mother picked the April rose that only grows in the early spring? Whose fingers had touched her silent heart and taught it how to sing? My father? His fingers were yellow with nicotine, and the rose bushes he planted in holes in our lawn all died before eking out a bloom.

 

With their absolutes and abstractions, Jerry’s songs glorified relationships I deemed unhealthy, songs in which the beloved was the singer’s reason to be living. While my mother swooned at the implied subservience—If they made me a king, I’d be but a slave to you. Your kiss is all I need to seal my fate. You’re my everything. Love me with every beat of your heart—I worried about the all-encompassing nature of this love, which seemed like a beast ready to swallow one’s life whole. In the songs Jerry sang, even a chance encounter ended with the lovers at first sight being in love—and staying together—forever.

 

The songs I listened to created more troubling particulars—romantics hiding behind bottles in dark cafes, or solitaries driving the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston as they bade goodbye to the moonlight ladies. Nobody’s love was undying or encompassing. Even the most buoyant tune conveyed love’s trepidation—The dizzy dancing way you feel gave way to love being just another show, from which your final responsibility was to leave ’em laughing when you go, and if you care, don’t let them know.

 

And gosh almighty, baby, yes indeed—sometimes the terms were laid out right up front: You and me will only see tonight.

 

2.

The flat truths and bleakness of the songs I loved, my mother found depressing. “What about the moonlight and roses?” she asked once, near tears, as we argued our conflicting soundtracks. I was, at most, sixteen, and if not completely inexperienced, then close enough—a fact I tried to hide with a knowing smirk.

 

She said my ideas about love were all wrong. Someone brought you the roses, arranged with ferns and baby’s breath in a crystal vase. You admired them in the moonlight streaming through the tall windows of your hotel room, in Paris maybe, listening to a tinkling piano from the next apartment, while you sipped champagne—with someone. Someone was the key to your happiness. Moonlight and roses simply set the stage.

 

I probably turned sarcastic, asked when she’d ever been to Paris, had roses delivered, sipped champagne in a hotel room? Maybe she said, Well, not Paris, but Stuttgart, that time your daddy and I went to a banquet there, and stayed overnight. And I would have snapped back, Oh, that time you fell on the stairs and broke your ankle? Was that because of champagne? I was under the impression that you were drinking bourbon that night.

 

Her “someone” picked his nose at the dinner table, walked around the house in his boxer shorts, left his dirty socks balled up on the floor for her to pick up and throw in the hamper. He kept stacks of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on his bedside table, beside an ashtray filled with cigarette butts that she’d empty the next morning when she made their bed. He got angry with her over trifles, called her stupid when she did something wrong. Sometimes he introduced her as “my first wife.” When the other person looked puzzled, he’d explain, “It keeps her on her toes.”

 

I don’t know why I couldn’t let her have her fantasies. I’m not sure what I got out of making her feel sad, unless it was a tightening of my own precarious grip on a world that I’d barely tested—and that had barely tested me. She knew I laughed at her plastic flower arrangements, her treacly music, her bedside copies of The Daily Word, the musicals she watched open-mouthed on TV, weeping as couples sang their devotion. I laughed when she periodically broke into song, sometimes just a single line—Starlight looks well on us! Moonlight becomes you! Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars! So much moonlight you’d think my mother carried a beast inside her that yearned for lunar liberation.

 

3.

It’s a warm June evening, a full moon hanging above the blue spruce—the strawberry moon in this hemisphere, but the cold moon down below. Trees and bushes encircle our small backyard so that at night, it feels almost like a room with a wide door at either end, the occasional breaks in the foliage like windows onto the alley. I like just to sit out here and feel the night weighing in around me with all its mystery and substance, all its scents and secrets. Sometimes I hear small disturbances in the underbrush—rabbits, the neighborhood possum, an elusive groundhog the size of a small dog that’s lived around here for years. Sometimes I hear an occasional, abbreviated birdcall, as if some parent bird’s reassuring a nestling. Sometimes people walk down the alley, quietly talking, and I watch them, motionless and invisible in the shade of my neighbor’s hemlock hedge. The moon casts shadows that seem clearer cut than those in the day—a literal black and white demarcation on the grass.

 

But this night, my husband and I are dancing under the full moon. Blood on the Tracks plays from my iPhone—the same phone I used minutes earlier, to call him down from his study, to lure him into the backyard to see the moon. Damp grass cool against my bare feet, long cotton skirt swaying against my ankles, I’ve had way too much wine and my husband is cold sober. I’m not sure how one is supposed to dance to “Tangled Up in Blue,” but we give it a shot, holding hands and jouncing around the yard, laughing.

 

I like to think that whatever illusions we had about one another vanished years ago, victim of daily familiarity and perceptiveness. We’ve been together nearly forty years, married for most of it. Marriage is not a straight line, it’s a wheel. During one declension, my husband told me that if he had to make a choice between his work and me, he’d choose his work. He knows if the boat was sinking and I could only save one person, it would be our son. We have hurt one another deeply. We have helped one another vastly. He brings home champagne for special occasions. We’re the best of friends.

 

Only four of the twenty-nine rose bushes in our yard were here when we bought this house. As we twirl around the yard, I point out how the white and pink roses shimmer, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. Their scent hangs lightly in the summer air.

 

The song ends and my husband says, “Let’s hear it again before I go back upstairs.” He’s working on a poem. Having hammered all day on a story that won’t give, I’m letting off a little steam. This time we slow dance, moving with awkward familiarity. “Stop trying to lead,” my husband says, as he does each time we dance. Of this song, Dylan remarked, “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.”

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The Girl in the Boat

The nurse presents my second daughter, but my eyes are still trained on my first across the room—too silent and large and blue in the hands of the doctors. My boyfriend shakes his head. I say: We’ll get through this. He kisses Lily, sticky and swaddled in my arms, stares at Daisy as she takes her first uncertain breath, and leaves. Two days, the doctors say. Two months. Two years. And then, we honestly don’t know; she could go at any time. The girls and I live with my parents. When Lily comes home from school, she watches TV with her sister, helps feed and change her. Nobody can reach Daisy like she can. Seems to laugh at her funny faces, seems to watch her color and finger paint. Everything is “seems to” because who can be sure? Both girls have my brown-speckled blue eyes but few would see a resemblance beyond that. Daisy’s head is abnormally large as if somebody had stuffed a globe inside, warping her brow, her nose, the space between her eyes. And like a globe, the inside of Daisy’s head is largely empty, occupied by only a small cephalic ocean.

—

On the girls’ fifth birthday, Daisy is brought to the emergency room in a Koala onesie after seizing during cupcake time. Born with only a brain stem and a hint of the cerebellum. Never to be voted the nicest, the most stylish, the leader of the pack in a yearbook. Never to go to school or fulfill a dream. The doctors say probably a lot. She probably hears but we don’t know if she can understand. Her eyes are fine, but there’s nothing to process images with.

 

I know she can recognize me, I tell them again.

 

In the waiting room, Lily eats Funions from the vending machines and builds a Lego pioneer wagon on the ground. Her grandparents buy her an ice cream from the cafeteria and a bear from the gift shop. She asks me if her sister is going to die.

—

Whenever I bring home Daisy from the hospital, which seems like every week for the first couple of years, I carry her everywhere. Already, we have beaten the odds. There is a fold-up playpen in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and in the basement next to the washing machine. Lily, though the same age as Daisy, has had to grow up fast. She asks me to look at what she did at school—a macaroni necklace, the Valentine’s Day cards she got in her construction-paper mailbox—but I only know about these things because I see them days during a rare moment of rest. My father lumbers to the dining table every morning and gives Lily the comics from the paper while he works on the Jumble. My mother wishes I would let them watch Daisy more, so I could take Lily out. “The poor girl doesn’t know what to do with herself,” my mother says.

 

“When Daisy gets better,” I say. “When I get a full-time teaching job.”

 

My mother waddles around the table, trying not to put pressure on her gout, and whispers into my ear: “Andrea, she’s not going to get better. We love her, but you can’t keep living like this. We can find someone to help.”

 

“She needs me. Besides, where are we going to find the money?” I point to the stack of unopened bills on the table. 2nd notice. 3rd notice. Envelopes from collection agencies. I am afraid if I leave Daisy for too long, what little spark resides in her will disappear entirely.

 

“She doesn’t even know who you are.” My mother holds her hand to her mouth after the words leave, wishing she could take them back. She picks up her bowl still half full of oatmeal and begins washing dishes.

—

At school, I set up a playpen in the corner of my first class. Daisy regularly has check-ups at the university children’s medical center, so it saves me the trip back home. I have managed to secure three sections of composition this semester as an adjunct, which means I might be able to pay the minimum for some of the medical bills. I have gotten used to the looks—the “I’m so sorry” look, the “you poor woman” look. One girl says she’s adorable. Another girl asks how old she is. Only one boy directly asks “What’s wrong with her head? Why’s it all big like that?” The girl next to him shoots daggers into his eyes. “What?” he says. “That’s some straight alien shit.” But I’m not angry. And I know it’s true. I haven’t talked about my daughter to anyone outside the family before. And, frankly, I’m sick of hiding. “She was born with a rare condition,” I begin. I want them to understand. Here, unlike the grocery store or the park, they have to stop and listen. And after the first class, I pack up my books and collapse the playpen. I drape a blanket over the stroller without even thinking about why, and rush to the next class to introduce my daughter all over again.

—

At Lily’s fourth-grade parent/teacher night, Daisy sits on my lap while Mrs. Lee, floating around the room in a floral muumuu, talks about student projects. Daisy is wearing jeans and a My Little Pony sweat shirt a size too small. Her eyes scans the room as if she is seeing for the first time. The other parents smile awkwardly. Daisy’s drool has created a large, dark circle on a shoulder of one of my three decent work blouses.

 

“Every student completed a portrait of a family member. They had to capture what they believed to be the essence of that person—their job, their personality, their hobbies, their favorite food,” explains Mrs. Lee.

 

The parents circle the room, browsing the brightly colored bulletin boards for the work of their children. I put Daisy in her wheelchair. Fireman, doctor, someone who likes spaghetti and meatballs, construction worker, and at the far end of the room is a portrait of a girl with a large head wearing a pink dress under a rainbow. The head takes up most of the poster board and inside it, Lily has drawn a stick figure girl in a boat on blue waves. No sail. No oars. Simply adrift.

 

“She said her sister is lost inside of herself,” says Mrs. Lee, standing behind me. “She’s a special girl, Lily. To think like that. She loves her sister very much.”

 

“She does,” I say. But I know it’s been hard, that at times Lily wants to hate her sister, the musty fold-out bed she shares with me, the way I rummage through Goodwill bins before the school year and during Christmas.

 

“And this must be Daisy. I was hoping I would get to meet you.” Mrs. Lee opens her mouth and pauses before leading me to the hall. “A close friend of mine had a daughter years ago. Cancer. She was eight.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I say.

 

“The reason I’m telling you this is because I saw what an illness can do to a family. I can see it some days with Lily. Like she’s still processing something that happened. My friend went to a support group down the street at the Lutheran church. She said it helped.” Mrs. Lee hands me a pamphlet for the group, squeezes my hands, and returns to the classroom.

 

I imagine myself in a dimly lit church activity room, sitting in a circle and saying my name. Hi Andrea, they would say in unison. A few years ago, I would have dismissed the idea without a thought. I examine the pamphlet with a photo of unreasonably happy people holding hands in a circle before putting it in my purse.

—

“Wish she wouldn’t parade that girl around town. I don’t know how much longer we can survive this. What if something happens to us?” Mom loves to talk dad’s ear off in the kitchen after she thinks everyone has gone to sleep. I tiptoe to the edge of the kitchen door.

 

“Don’t talk about her like that,” he says.

 

“You don’t think I care? It’s just that maybe we all would have been better off if she hadn’t beat the odds.”

 

“But she did.”

 

I spend most of my day thinking about that girl—how to keep her comfortable and safe and happy. I dream about a life she’ll never live: Daisy is flying a kite. We are fighting and Daisy storms out the door because she can’t go to a concert. She’s kissing a boy I don’t approve of. In this alternate reality, she is lithe and athletic with a competitive streak in contrast to Lily’s bookishness. She wears her hair in a pony tail tied with brightly colored scrunchies. And, oh, how she loves to laugh.

 

I wake up smiling when I have these dreams, and the weight in my chest suddenly evaporates. I want to believe for a split second that all of it was true. I look at Daisy, hooked up to a monitors and an IV, and think, I want to hear you laugh.

—

One summer weekend, I drop off Lily to a birthday party. These are the few glimpses I get of the kind of family life I once aspired to. The parents who throw parties live in tony neighborhoods with manicured gardens and joggers in spandex running beside yappy dogs. Before the door opens, I try to straighten my hair, yank out the wrinkles on my shirt with my hands. Usually the invitations include Daisy as a courtesy, but I’ve never taken up the offer. But on this day it is raining hard, so I walk Lily to the door with our lopsided umbrella. “Welcome, welcome.” The parents shuttle Lily into the family room where other kids are playing video games. They see Daisy in the car and insist we come inside.

 

Around the island in the kitchen, the parents mingle—talking vacations, people I do not know, summer camps that Lily would love. We are sitting down on the periphery and after everyone has introduced themselves, it seems like we are forgotten. Every so often, the hosts checks on us, says they are so glad we could be here. Right. I force a smile, take a sip of a mimosa. When one of the children runs into the kitchen and sees Daisy, she gasps. Her parents mouth a feeble sorry. And this is my cue. I thank the parents for having us, tell them I’ll pick up Lily later in the afternoon, and promptly leave.

—

Waiting in the dark hall of the Lutheran church, I watch the parents, the single fathers and mothers, file into the only lit room, as anxiety fills my veins. I am alone for the first time in recent memory. They all know each other: How are things? I’m so sorry, I just heard. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. I practice my introduction: My name is Andrea. My ten-year-old daughter Daisy was born without most of her brain. I don’t know if I’m just nervous about being new or speaking, or if it’s having to confront the realities of others on top of my own. Support groups are supposed to help, right?

 

“The free doughnuts help,” a young Indian woman approaching the room says. “First time?”

 

“That obvious?” I answer.

 

“It’s my third month. But I remember lurking in the hall. Marched right back to my car the first time.”

 

“And you’ve been coming back, so—”

 

“A lot of us have been going for years. Talking helps. But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to all of it. I come for the doughnuts and just being next to people who understand. I’m Diya, by the way. Shall we?”

 

I nibble on a cruller the whole hour and choose not to speak. There’s a man who lost his son to leukemia ten years ago, a couple with a daughter with cerebral palsy, and Diya, who talks about her son with autism and how something so seemingly small like asking for orange juice brought her to tears. “It’s the little things,” she says. “When you have children like ours.” Everybody nods. After the session, Diya invites me and the girls to join her and her son at the zoo the next weekend. She is smoking, and I ask for one more out of camaraderie than anything else. “I have these free admission vouchers,” she says. “I know we just met, but it might be nice to see someone from here outside of that Sunday school room.” After I had the girls, most of my friends slowly disappeared (maybe we did). We get birthday cards, a Facebook like. But not much else.

 

“Fuck ’em,” says Diya, referring to anybody who gawks at us walking down the zoo’s paths. Lily leads the way, skipping far ahead while Diya occasionally has to pull her son, Alok, back to the fold. Daisy, in a lion-shaped stroller, seems to be quietly enjoying the Serengeti. At the giraffe exhibit, Diya hands me a feeding ticket for small bucket of leaves. I struggle to carry Daisy out of the stroller and with Diya and Lily’s help, hold her up against the railing, so I can guide Daisy’s hands to the sky.

 

“We’re going to feed the giraffes, sweetie,” I say. I place a few leaves in Daisy’s palms and curl my hand over hers. “Look, here it comes!” I tilt Daisy’s head up. The giraffe leans in close, examining us. And for a moment it seems like the giraffe is studying Daisy, like it can sense something just out of human perception. Daisy makes a gurgling sound. And with his long, purple tongue, the giraffe slurps the leaves from our hands. Diya snaps a photo. A few feet away, Alok seems to be having a good time. One leaf, two leaf. The baby giraffe leans in and lingers just long enough for his hands to stroke its face. No leaf. And Alok begins screaming and kicks his bucket across the wooden walkway. Diya pulls away Alok from the exhibit, as people begin to stare and whisper to one another. Lily is still feeding, and I call out to her to catch up.

 

“I still have leaves,” she says.

 

“Now,” I say. I see her mumble something before leaving her bucket on the ground.

 

At the cafeteria, I thank Diya for the day. “We haven’t been able to treat ourselves to something like this in a long time,” I say.

 

“Same,” Diya says. “But you need to try. Makes you feel normal. Getting you those chicken wings for example. It’s always Alok, Alok, Alok. And that’s fine. But you forget to be decent to everybody else including yourself. Think that’s why my husband left.”

 

I don’t know what to say to that. Just like most people don’t know how to respond to Daisy.

 

“You’re lucky you have your parents,” Diya says.

 

“Sometimes. I don’t think my mother really sees Daisy like I do.”

 

“Like a person.”

 

“I don’t want to be that harsh. But, yeah.”

 

Diya pulls out her phone and shows me the photo of Daisy and the giraffe. It looks like Daisy is laughing, staring right back at the animal as if they are in on a big secret. If I told anybody about this day, about what I thought the picture captured, they wouldn’t believe me. Doctors would say possibly, but really would think I’m seeing things in my daughter that aren’t there. But, for me, the photo is proof that there is a girl on a boat on a tiny ocean inside of her, trying to make it to the shore.

—

Before I know it, I become one of those people in group who have been there for years. I measure the times I can’t bring myself to talk in the pastries I stuff in my mouth. It’s half-price admission today at one of those hands-on science museums, and we’ve made plans with Diya and Alok. I’m getting Daisy dressed, pulling a sweater over her head, when I feel her tremble. Her seizures usually don’t last longer than a few moments, but this time the shaking continues. I hold her tight as if she would crumble apart if I let go and call out to my father to get the car. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.

 

At the hospital, Daisy is sleeping, and I realize that I had dozed off, too, when a nurse walks in. My parents are in the waiting area, but I told Diya to go on to the museum and to take Lily. Outside our room, I see a bald little girl walking around with her family, holding a stuffed bunny rabbit almost as big as her. She waves. I wave back. I’ve become accustomed to the children’s ward here—the hope, the lack of it, the sounds of parents sobbing behind curtains, the fantasy castle wallpaper that is supposed to transport the patients to a happier place. But I need to hope for Daisy. I need to want something for her apart from my need for her to be alive. I flip through the television—another school shooting, a young protestor talking about their student loans and food stamps, a strike at one of the colleges I teach at. Fair wages. Child care. I think about the hospital bill when the nurse comes in and checks the IV.

 

Support Group Meetings: Bear Claw, Eclair, Sugar Glazed, Cherry Fruit Filling.

 

Daisy is still in and out of the hospital a month after her last bad seizure, and my parents have taken out a second mortgage to keep us above water. “Just throw our ashes over the Golden Gate Bridge or something,” my dad says. My mom says little, and I’ve learned to be okay with her resentment—I understand it, even. I have only received one class this semester, and have started to apply for other jobs—Target, Starbucks, anything I’m vaguely qualified for on Craigslist. The strike continues at school. Part of me wishes I could march with them, but I can’t afford to lose money. They carry signs that say “Education Not Administration” and “Support Your Teachers.” When I cross the picket line, my coworkers, many who probably know me as the woman with that kid, do not shame me.

 

When Diya finds out that I need to dress up as a lusty Statue of Liberty for a mattress store as part of their Memorial Day sale, she suggests helping me start a GoFundMe campaign. She comes over one day with a video camera, and helps me and Daisy dress up.

 

“You want to look good, but, you know, not too good,” Diya says.

 

“What are we supposed to say?”

 

“Just talk about Daisy’s condition. And I’ll splice that with some music and pictures of her growing up. Talk about the struggles you have as a mom, the medical bills donations will help with.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems weird asking strangers for money.”

 

“Lots of people are doing this. If people want to help, let them.”

 

We shoot the video in our backyard with the sun behind us for angelic effect. Daisy is sitting beside me in her wheelchair. When Diya says action, I begin reciting the lines we rehearsed, but I feel like a carbon copy of Suzanne Sommers in those Save the Children commercials. For only five dollars you can really make a difference. We start over. “Let me tell you about a girl in a boat in the middle of an ocean. She has no oars, no sail, and the sea is calm. On a good day, she can see land, and there’s a glimmer of hope that she’ll make it, although she never will. Let me tell you about my daughter who was born without most of her brain.” I talk for longer than I imagined, as if I were teaching a class on Daisy. This is who she is. This is what she has. This is our life together. This is what the doctors say. And this is what I know to be true.

 

Within a matter of minutes, a Facebook friend of Diya’s donates twenty-five dollars.

 

“The first of many,” Diya says.

 

By the end of the month we have thousands of followers on social media. I’ve connected with other parents dealing with hydranencephaly, a young woman taking care of her older brother with MS, a young man with Down syndrome who lives with his best friend. For them, Daisy is more than just a good cause but a symbol of hope.

—

When Lily goes off to Oberlin on a full ride, it’s like part of the shore inside of Daisy has broken off. She is less responsive when I talk, smiles less, and is throwing up her food more than usual.

 

“Stay out of trouble,” Lily tells her sister. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

 

“You’ve earned this,” I tell Lily. “Look ahead. We’ll be fine here.”

 

“If anything happens,” she says.

 

“Go,” I say, starting to cry. She grew up and I missed it.

—

I hire a part-time home aid with Lily gone, and decide to stay home more, grading tests online. Mom and Dad, of course, are getting older, and I’ve been begging my mother to let me take her to the doctor to check out her fainting spells. She says it’s nothing, but I’m certain she’s lying. My dad thinks so, too.

 

“I’m old,” she says. “I’m supposed to be cranky and falling apart.”

 

“Doesn’t mean we can’t put a band-aid on whatever is wrong.” She shrugs me off whenever I prod her and tells me to mind my own business, which honestly pisses me off. And if it were just her being stubborn, maybe I would let it go. But she’s been different with Daisy, too. She rolls her granddaughter next to her while she watches The Bold and the Beautiful. Most of the time, they just sit there. But occasionally, my mother will turn to Daisy and talk to her.

 

“That one is having two affairs,” she says. “Her husband is a bore, so who can blame her?”

—

I don’t go to support group nearly as much as I used to. Tonight, Diya isn’t there, and there’s no one else I recognize, but I talk anyway. It’s probably one of only a handful of times I’ve opened my mouth in group: “Daisy has helped a lot of people see their children,” I begin. “And I think my mother has finally seen my daughter.” And maybe that’s all any of us can for hope for: to be seen with clarity. That’s all I’ve wanted for her.

—

It’s nearly midnight when my father and I hear the crash. I can see my mother’s legs on the floor as I approach the kitchen. A shattered glass kettle, her frail body, the coffee mug Lily painted in the first grade.

 

“Mom,” I yell. “Mom. Wake up!” But she remains still. My father’s hands are shaking on my shoulders. I rush to her, trying to clear away the shards on the ground. I can feel glass digging into my knees, as I lean over her, trying to remember the CPR training I received as a summer lifeguard when I was a teenager. Tilt head to clear airway, breathe, compress. I turn to look at my father. I hear my mom’s ribs crack beneath my hands.

 

“I’m here,” he says.

 

“Call 911,” I say. “Now. Dad, wake up! Mom needs help.”

 

“Nine-one-one,” he repeats. “Right.” He shuffles into the living room and returns with my phone, offering it to me. “I don’t know how,” he says.

 

At the hospital, the doctors say it was an aneurysm. Quick, unexpected, supposedly painless. The kind of death Daisy probably won’t have. We’ll have a small memorial over the summer when Lily returns, although I haven’t told her the news yet. This morning, I picked up her urn. Mom sits on the night table next to my father, and for every night after that night at the hospital, Daisy and I have slept at his side.

 

“She loved her, you know,” my father said after the doctor gave us the news. “Called her a beautiful child.”

 

A few days after the memorial, Daisy and Lily are in the living room watching movies like old times—Goonies, Mean Girls, Bring It On. It is the eve of their nineteenth birthday, and Daisy is having one of her better days. To date, the longest someone has lived with her condition is until their early thirties, but that’s a rare case, and I’m not necessarily hoping for that. Lily is dating someone but is being mysterious about the details, although she whispers things about a boy named Dave to her sister. We eat cake in the afternoon, and Diya and Alok join us for a trip to the planetarium’s family day. We’re all reclined back, looking at an ancient night sky. Our guide zooms in on a star that goes nova, washing the room in the purples and reds of a nebula. He talks about how this expanse of gas and dust and rock is the birthplace of planets, of new stars, and of us, how the iron in our bodies are remnants of stars. It’s strange how something so bright could flicker out and yet have meaning billions of years later, creating life on a planet so drastically different from another. I turn to Daisy and point her hands to the Little Dipper. “That’s you, Daisy,” I say. “That’s me.”

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Two Poems

Nocturne

No one’s drowned in the boarded up well out back in a century. When I pry up the nails to let in some sky, the voices the moss maintained rise like a cloud of bats from the mouth of a cave. Hungry to be heard, as any static thing, I say to the dead you are lucky to be so permanent, so practiced at loneliness, so close, so goddamn close to journey’s end. Maybe they’ve had enough of this living forever. Maybe the mystery has never been the where or how, but why this need to be forgotten. There are many ways to scream so no one hears, and each sounds just like a child alone again in a night-heavy farmhouse, making monsters of his shadow and friends with his dead, running wild out into the dark with only a hammer and his silence;  a door he can’t remember opening slamming shut behind him.

The Animal

All the cruelties are different, but there’s something familiar in carrying our children safely through the world by our teeth. In pressing an empty mouth up to the only part of us that nourishes. Sometimes, with winter at its deadest, in eating our young and starting over again in spring. It’s spring, thank god, and all we have is an open pasture of half-broken foals. A rusty cage for the chronic wild. A spindle-legged wire fence wrapped in teeth separating one neighbor from the next. When it comes down to it, son, I don’t think I’ll ever eat you. But here I am, telling you things you already know about love.

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Enough Sealant to Pool the Concavity

March 12th

Most evenings I go for a short walk around the neighborhood, my route always the same. I take a right on 1st, another right on S Street, uphill three blocks to where it Ts with 4th, east two blocks on 4th along the Calvary Cemetery, then back to 1st via U Street. Last night was my first walk since Bree’s death, and I wondered: why such a cemetery-centric route? My route could just as easily rectangle or staircase south towards Reservoir Park, where students from the U play Frisbee and parents admire their kids from playground benches.

 

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the grid I call home: “First surveyed in the 1850s, the Avenues became Salt Lake City’s first neighborhood. Today, the Avenues neighborhood is generally considered younger, more progressive, and somewhat ‘artsy’ when compared to other neighborhoods. Many young professionals choose to live there due to the culture and easy commute to downtown. It is also one of the most important strongholds of the Democratic political party in Utah.”

 

I used to think about death constantly—that was during my religious teens… I was going to insert a quotation from the Bible here, something along the lines of “Always keep in mind your last days, and you will never sin,” but those memories are so distant and the internet is so choked with sin and warnings about sin that even Google’s divine algorithm is powerless to help me find the verse. I saw my classmates doing what teenagers do, and I couldn’t believe they could just ignore the punishment in store. Even if they didn’t believe—wouldn’t they at least be wise enough to acknowledge the chance that the fire was real and gamble on the side of avoiding it? As those fears gradually then suddenly receded, as I realized that disbelief could be active rather than passive, I experienced an unexpected side effect: my new certainty that everything would go black when I died alleviated my fear of death rather than intensifying it. There was nothing I could do about its inevitability, so it wasn’t worth thinking about. And at least there was no punishment in store.

 

Even these brief thoughts risk flashbacks I’d rather avoid—I admit I wouldn’t be recording them if not for my employer-prescribed grief therapist’s insistence. Or that neglecting to do so would suggest that I’ve inadequately grieved my daughter’s death. I keep myself very busy, and I’m not sure that time off work is really going to be beneficial. I haven’t had time just to sit and think in years—and that has suited me fine.

 

During my walk yesterday evening, I noticed for the first time the abundance of crack sealant on 4th. The other roads in the Aves are not so heavily sealed (I had to check), making me wonder if 4th is more heavily or less heavily trafficked, better kept up or worse. I took these pictures today.

 

Some metaphor was nagging my mind, the sealant as intestinal or labyrinthine, but it escaped my articulation until I passed by T street and saw painted on the asphalt what I momentarily mistook for graffiti. Since I couldn’t read it, I found myself tilting my head, then walking around the graffiti so that it would be north of me, thus, said my logic, legible. Strange logic since the Aves reads bottom to top, 1st being the southernmost street, a grid radiating outward from Temple Square.

What appeared to be ornate black writing highlighted in white turned out simply to be the coincidental crossing of street sealant with the strip of white paint notifying drivers where to stop for the stop sign.

 

Writing, it occurred to me. The street sealant is just like a type of writing.

 

I mean, the white line is certainly a type of writing. Although I don’t think I’d ever consciously acknowledged this feature of roads’ communication with drivers, it says “Stop here” just the same as the white letters on the red octagon. I looked at the black sealant lines more closely.

The beginning was a mess, a snarl of capital Rs and As and Ys. Then a sort of W or M, a cursive R and the number one. A zero with a slash through it (Greek phi or theta), a T, an A, a P. Trailing off into maybe a Z at the end.

 

No, these marks are meaningless flukes. It’s not much like writing. Not like the actual graffiti I discovered on my fence returning home.

MOST timid tagger in the city. I think I’ll leave it there.

 

I think my anxiety over starting this journal, of writing something for the first time since a college creative writing class, something that doesn’t have to do with projecting city water supply, must just be causing me to see writing everywhere. Not just the names on tombstones, which—for the first time in all my walks—were those of human beings, not just those dashed dates that were the most different of all the days McNeil or Duddshuh or VanWaggoner called their lives, not just the giant U on the side of the hill that here could stand for University or Utah or Utes… The power lines themselves seemed to sag and crackle with communication that only my dimness kept me from deciphering.

 

Today I got a few strange looks for photographing the asphalt, particularly because I have a dumbphone and the only camera I own is a video camera that also takes stills.

 

March 13th

Last night, my route was disrupted by the presence of a stranger headed north on U Street. My feet just started following him. Along the eastern edge of the cemetery, I tried to stay far enough back that I wouldn’t arouse suspicion, but close enough that I might get a look at his face when he passed under the streetlights. I wanted a face to paste on my absurd fantasy. There was no reason for my heart to be pounding so hard, for me to feel the thrill of the hunt. He entered a house and was greeted, I saw through the window, by a kitchen-full of twentysomethings holding cans of beer. Hanging back, I wondered what the reaction would be if I knocked on the door, asked if it was an open party. I had never visited this section of the Aves by foot.

 

March 14th

I set out again last night searching the dark streets for Bree’s lover. It’s crude to think this way—my daughter’s death as a liaison—but my mind ignores all pleas of decency.

 

I know that my chances of encountering Bree’s lover are slim, but it wouldn’t be the most remarkable coincidence this month. I brought along my camera even though I’m not sure if it would work in the dark or what I’d do if it did. My ears were even more alert than my eyes, filtering the night’s noise for a sound that’s familiar even though I can’t remember ever having heard it. Suctionless unstoppering. Metal that’s heavy.

 

As I walked by the cemetery on 4th, I noticed a little neon light that someone had used to decorate a loved one’s headstone. It was a meager flare in the night: red to purple to blue to green to yellow to red to purple to green to yellow to red to purple to… A depressing sort of vigil, and I found myself thinking: if I’m to be remembered thus, I’d rather be forgotten. Regarding my cremated remains, my instructions will be Dump wherever. I’ve always liked Zion National Park and could see my ashes borne from the peak of Angel’s Landing. But it’s such a popular destination that there’d be people all around who’d get bummed out. Also—I thought before realizing the thought’s absurdity—I’m afraid of heights.

 

Above the cemetery, the letter U luminescent on a hillside, blinking: red red red red red red red… My mind transformed it into “you.” Zoom out even a miniscule distance (proportional to the cosmos)—the grave’s little light and the bombastic U would be equally invisible.

 

March 15th

I told Rich in our session today that boredom is not helping with the grieving process, and he suggested that I take up a hobby or two. We decided on Nintendo and piano, both of which have been sitting inactive in the house since Bree’s death. I used to play piano, but I never really got into video games. Also, whereas the musical instrument is unchanged since the last time I’d played it (and for two centuries or so before that), the new WiiU system Bree’d brought into the house had evolved into something radically different than the gray console on which I’d last chased a one-up mushroom down a bottomless pit, much to my young daughter’s delight. The hulking controller alone threatened to overwhelm me. It had its own screen, and everywhere I looked there was another button or joystick. The first game I fired up was called ZombiU, not quite the type of therapy Rich would approve of, I’d imagine. It took me hours to get past the game’s intro, a weaponless character fleeing zombies through a subway to get to the “safehouse,” following the instructions of voice that identified itself as “Prepper.”

 

The safehouse contains 1) a metal locker where you can stow weapons and ammo and health packs that you pick up on your missions across embattled London, 2) a work table where you can add modifications to your weapons, 3) a computer system that provides you with surveillance of the game’s various districts, 4) a generator you have to refill with fuel every so often, 5) a bed where you regenerate as a new character when you die—I find it’s best not to get too attached to any single character, and 6) a manhole cover you lift off to reveal the entrance to the sewers. ZombiU inverts the sewer system into a place of speed and safety, allowing you to warp at loading-speed between the safehouse, Buckingham Palace, Brick Lane Markets, etc. The surface overrun with verminous versions of homo sapiens, the previously proximal space between civilization and its subconscious has become a haven for what traces of humanity remain.

 

 

March 16th

The presence on Bree’s desk of this vintage toy:

The goal is to negotiate a ball bearing from the START alcove around a maze of plastic partitions without allowing the ball bearing to fall through holes in the surface that represent a variety of hazards: Haunted Mountains, Black Mountains, Blood Lake, Man Eating Plants, Poison Desert, Tiger Valley, Sargasso Sea, and so on. I spent twenty-three minutes playing it before finally reaching the FINISH. Tucked within that right angle, the ball bearing is away from hazards but doesn’t know what to do with itself. It rests in an infinity of safety and boredom.

 

March 17th

Today Rich asked how my grief documentation is going, and I told him that I have nothing to write about.

 

He told me there’s always nothing to write about. I’m not sure how clever he was intending to be.

 

I’m auguring snarls of tar sealant, I told him. I’m stringing Bree’s status updates on telephone lines. I’m reading everything I can find about the Well of Souls.

Not a natural cave per se, but a chamber beneath the Foundation Stone, where Abraham purportedly attempted to sacrifice Isaac and/or Ishmael. But cave-like—but inside–a chamber further interiorized by the Dome of the Rock. Pierced Stone. Wikipedia: “Jewish tradition views it as the spiritual junction of heaven and earth.” I tried curling into a ball in the deepest corner of my unfinished basement, but it isn’t the same.

 

March 18th

In an effort to learn how to better use the controller’s touchpad to navigate post-apocalyptic London, I stumbled across a ZombiU promo video online that demonstrates the various functions of the touchpad. The hands holding the controller get increasingly twitchy as the three-and-a-half-minute video progresses. The viewer is not sure why. At the video’s conclusion, the arms’ veins and arteries blacken, its flesh molders, and—if that isn’t enough—an off-camera screech testifies the game’s ability to infect those who would dare play it. It’s a clever marketing scheme—and accurate in different ways than I think its creators foresaw.

 

March 19th

Bree’s birthday. I don’t drink very much except tonight. Made the mistake of going on her Facebook page and scrolling through the birthday wishes and her last posts. In my current disbelief system, the continued persistence of her Facebook and Twitter and Instragram and Pinterest pages are the best approximations of a soul and the afterlife that we can attest to. The first step in the science fiction scenario of being able to upload our consciousnesses and live forever.

 

I unfriended the friends who wished Bree a happy birthday without realizing that she’d plummeted to a lonely death. Now only 21 people like her “suicide” post, down from the initial 42. Police and logic eventually ruled that her death was not suicide. It was an unlucky night, and sometimes you just happen to vague-book right before you die of incredibly natural causes: Wikipedia is heaven when you don’t want to remember anymore.

 

Lo, Google informs me I’ve been quoting Bree quoting Nick Cave. Sweep me away for an hour or five, Wikipedia, you means of discovery and forgetting to which I return again and again. Give me discography, give me Murder Ballads, by God give me personal life.

 

March 21st

One infuriating aspect of the ZombiU is that, when your character dies and you regenerate as another character with another name and former occupation at the safehouse, you lose all of the resources that were in possession of the character who died. That zombified character’s location is marked with a skull on the sewer map, and if you want your weapons and ammo and health packs back, you have to go to that location—now armed only with a cricket paddle, a handgun with six rounds, and whatever you were wise enough to stow in the safehouse’s locker—and kill the character you’d been trying so hard to keep alive. If you die again before doing so, all those supplies are gone.

 

Discomforting, what comforts us.

 

Not only does my bedtime get pushed back further and further each night by my urge to meet just one more of the game’s objectives. Just one more, just one more… But the game’s content, graphics, and geography are corrupting my daily perception. I begin grafting the face of Arthur, my daughter’s lover, onto the zombies I clobber or shoot or incinerate. I bring a crowbar on my patrol one night. I imagine access to a sonar map of the Avenues in which I am the locus of radiating pings and my daughter’s boyfriend is an elusive red dot. Manholes, too, are marked.

I begin expecting the infected to pop out at me, and I scout for escape routes. I see a section of the fence around the graveyard that has been displaced, and I gauge whether or not it’s enough space for my character to fit through.

 

I love how the post topples in segments, in super slow motion. The way wrought iron gives way to chain link. The mysterious symbol on the third block from the bottom.

 

In ZombiU, I would scan this symbol with my gamepad and it would provide me with a clue to a clue to a clue that would lead me to Arthur, my daughter’s lover.

 

March 22nd

We are infected—piano has taught me that. Twenty years ago I taught my hands a Chopin mazurka, and these past two weeks my hands have taught it back to me. It’s so strange how much knowledge lives on in us unacknowledged, atavistic/instinctual or just part of our daily ballet. I reached a level in ZombiU called “Ron Freedman’s Flat,” which includes a room where you have to pick off zombies that have been lulled to the nepenthe of throbbing bass and black lights. Even though they’re not technically alive anymore, their bodies remember actions they performed during life and respond automatically to stimuli.

 

I put my wallet in the toaster today.

 

Trying to memorize the Chopin, my brain will alert me to a difficult series of upcoming measures. I’ll be fine now, fine now, but I’ll feel the approach of chord or ornamental figure that I know will trip me up. And it will trip me up, and I will go back to one of my bookmarked measures and start again. But that chord or figuration is not content to simply remain resistant and rotten; it will spread its clumsy amnesia backward to meet my oncoming fingers. I will greet the dementia a measure earlier than before, rewind again, get tripped up two measures before the first time. More and more of the piece will fall into darkness until I end up admitting forfeit and bringing the sheet music back out so the whole mazurka isn’t engulfed.

 

I worry that all memory works this way. For example, I’m confident in my general memory of our “therapeutic” family trip to Zion the year before the divorce, or Bree’s reluctance to move back in with me when she didn’t get accepted anywhere but the U. But then I try to recall something specific from those scenes—the words of a conversation, what we ate for dinner—and my inability to do so taints the whole year of life with such unreliability that I’m left wondering if it ever really happened.

 

March 23rd

This morning I awoke to find the city workers applying sealant to the section of 1st right in front of my house. Behind their truck they pulled a giant orange tank streaked with tar and dirt, and I wondered about the similarity in temperature and consistency of this sealant compared to the tar used in the defense of castles in the Middle Ages. Google: tar or pitch, along with stones, hot sand, molten lead, and boiling water were dropped on enemy soldiers from “Murder Holes,” holes in castle ceilings, barbicans, or passageways. Google: tar is more or less fluid, depending upon its origin and the temperature to which it is exposed. Pitch tends to be more solid.

 

My mind moved to treasure seekers combing the beach sand with metal detectors as I observed the workers trace their wands over the asphalt in cryptic glyphs. Wikipedia: “The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field. If a piece of electrically conductive metal is close to the coil, eddy currents will be induced in the metal, and this produces a magnetic field of its own.” No, the discs at the end of the wands were more like the spongy proboscis of houseflies, trailing a line of black blood instead of lapping it up. Google: labella.

 

The workers chatted about an overly affectionate cat that had disrupted their workday, about the prospect of giving it a black stripe of sealant, about an episode of Pepé le Pew remembered from childhood. For half an hour they discussed where they’d eat lunch. One of them was in favor of Whole Foods, the other Wendy’s. After they’d moved on, I stepped outside to examine their work. The newly laid sealant was a blacker black than old sealant but glistened gold in the sun, veining the dull asphalt with light.

In places, the sealant pooled in shallow potholes like miniature versions of the tar pits that trapped dinosaurs and preserved their bones. Wikipedia: “Most tar pits are not deep enough to actually drown an animal. The cause of death is usually starvation, exhaustion from trying to escape, or exposure to the sun’s heat.” Wikipedia: “Over one million fossils have been found in tar pits around the globe.” Wikipedia: “‘The La Brea Tar Pits’ literally means the the tar tar pits.” I was bothered by places where the workers had not dispensed enough sealant to fully pool the concavity. It seemed like they’d missed an opportunity to clear a wound of dirt.

No, I realized, not clear the dirt. I wanted infection. Containment of today’s irritants, a burying again of the meager portion of planet that sees light and feels the wind. Perfect infection. It seemed unfortunate to me that tire tracks already dirtied the tar in places, an irrevocable and inevitable tarnishing given the tar’s consistency. Wiktionary: “tar” and “tarnish” do not share an etymology. Even if they did, tar can be tarnished—and the more dust that sticks to it, the more it’s pressed down by tires, the more that it’s weathered by sun and snow, the less likely you are to notice it. Unlike the usual tarnishing that stands out as a defect—like a stain on a shirt or a crack in a dish—tar is tarnished into invisibility.

 

HOT CRACK SEAL diamond-shaped signs warned drivers, and I had the urge to test the substance. I found it quite cool and pliable.

My fingerprint held its shape for longer than I cared to watch.

 

(Stepping back out an hour later, I was relieved the divot was gone.) As there were many more cracks in the asphalt than the workers could possibly have filigreed, I wondered what their system was for determining that this crack was fine for now while this other needed attention. Rich, what’s yours?

 

It’s true: at Whole Foods you can accidentally spend like fifteen dollars on a salad.

 

March 24th  

The cemetery by my house was brought up as an option when Bree’s death forced Gail and me into conversation. She suggested it might be difficult for me to live in such close proximity to Bree’s grave. I thought it was a hilarious suggestion, but I didn’t laugh.

March 26th

It’s one month since Bree’s death, and I could tell at our session this morning that one month is Rich’s milestone for tiptoeing the concept of forgiveness into the conversation. A difficult homily to a man who walks the streets for hours every night looking for blood. I didn’t respond well at the session, but now I have a moment to consider what makes forgiveness so difficult in this situation. I’ve tried to imagine him (I’ve imagined him a him) generously, someone beaten down by society, someone sick and poor who met the wrong prophets at the wrong time. I imagine him ignorant of his actions’ consequences—or, knowing, bereft. A story of the Aves and the Ave-Nots. I imagine him as Arthur, a tenant I evicted from my Liberty Park rental a few years ago. I’ve had to evict tenants before when they’ve fallen behind on payments, promised they would pay me back if I could just give them more time—but Arthur was the only one who I believed and evicted anyway. It’s a stupid, impossible fantasy, just my attempt to imagine some kind of scenario in which I deserve this misfortune. (I never attempt to fit Bree into this equation of who deserved what.) Once I imagined Arthur’s face on the shadows I screened for, it was locked there and I couldn’t shake it. Recalling his last name, Stenger, I imaged him the timid tagger MOST, signing his name on the wreckage of my household as an elaborate work of revenge art.

 

When I imagine forgiveness, I imagine someone kneeling before the one he or she has wronged, a benevolent hand eventually placed on the shoulder or head of the wrongdoer. Rays of sunlight. But forgiveness is especially noxious in my situation because he might not even know he’s wronged me, wronged Bree. He might have experienced none of the setbacks in life that I’ve imagined. Forgiving someone who has not asked—does not even know they require forgiveness—someone who might right now be continuing to enact the potential need for forgiveness from any number of strangers… Perhaps the person and the guilt we’re forgiving is always a projection, but in this case what I’d be forgiving would not be an actual human, but something in myself. And, currently: no.

 

March 27th

This heart on a telephone pole in my neighborhood:

What’s the first thought this cheery decoration inspires? The violence of a screw through the heart’s heart. My mind these days.

 

March 28th

I haven’t sat down at the computer in my home office for a while, but today I was feeling particularly anxious about Kenneth’s ability to deal with my work responsibilities in addition to his own. Taped above my computer, I saw and remembered, is a printout of the fake email I wrote under a pseudonym that got me in so much trouble, the leaking of which—coinciding with Bree’s death—led to my mandatory leave.

Free speech has its limitations; the most frequently cited example is yelling drought in a desert. Shortage during a shortage. Double sacrifice, career and daughter of Senior Analyst, to mountain gods appeased. It’s barely stopped raining since the funeral.

March 30th

With nothing else to do, I drove two hours today and visited the Spiral Jetty for the first time in my life. Surrogate brain: “The sculpture becomes submerged whenever the level of the Great Salt Lake rises above an elevation of 4,195 feet (1,279 m). At the time of Spiral Jetty’s construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low due to drought. Within a few years, the water level returned to a normal level, submerging the jetty for the next three decades. In 2002, the area experienced another drought, lowering the water level in the lake and revealing the jetty for a second time. The jetty remained completely exposed for almost a year. During the spring of 2005, the lake level rose again due to a near-record-setting snowpack in the surrounding mountains, partially submerging the sculpture. In spring 2010, lake levels receded and the sculpture was again walkable and visible. Current conditions fluctuate.” That’s either from Wikipedia or the ether, but I searched current conditions fluctuate moments after copying, pasting, navigating back—and the phrase was cut from the entry, edited away by a stranger. Current conditions do not fluctuate, apparently. It’s our confident knowledge that’s suffering a constant erosion.

 

I walked the length of the Jetty to the center, my sneakers collaborating with its entropy. Back to my car, however, was a straight line.

 

A young couple Bree’s age pulled into the parking lot with a kayak on top of their car, apparently failing to anticipate how far the lake had receded from its usual shoreline. I call this washed-out photo “The End of a Relationship.”

It was very sunny.

 

A couple hundred yards south of the Jetty are the lithic remains of an oilrig from the 1950s.

Oil seeps from the lakebed where the petrified forest of old dock posts juts skyward.

 

Texture-wise it reminded me of a tree on 1st Avenue, the barky carapace of slow spillover where the trunk takes root at the corner of lifting sidewalk slabs.

 

The oil, you can play with it.

 

And, like tree bark, it eats irritants at glacial pace.

 

March 31st

Today I added a paragraph to my fake, all-too-real e-mail to SLC residents:

 

April 1st

Today I started learning a piano piece just because I like the name, Debussy’s prelude La cathédrale engloutie (The sunken cathedral). I’m starting to remember why I had to finally give up trying to relearn the piano years ago. I always told myself starting back in that my life would be enhanced if I could just play, say, that one Chopin mazurka I love so much. But then my usual human affinity with the number three would make me want to learn two more pieces, perhaps become a Chopin expert of sorts. No, I would learn one piece—or three pieces—from all the major movements in old music: baroque, classical, romantic, modern. Pretty soon, one hour of practice a day would become two, three, and I’d again recall that I seem unable to just dabble in piano.

 

Wikipedia: “This piece is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent. Sounds can be heard of priests chanting, bells chiming, and the organ playing, from across the sea.”

 

I’m also remembering that the more you try to channel passion or sadness or joy from your real life into your performance, the more you tend to botch it. Your mind must be like the driver on a highway whose exit is coming up pretty soon.

 

April 2nd

At night I’ve made it a habit of walking on the street rather than on the sidewalk, mainly because so many of my neighbors have motion sensor lamps with the wattage of a prison guard tower spotlight—and/or hyper dogs who don’t know they live in the Avenues. These streets are quiet at the hours I walk, but I’m always alert for cars, especially since I’ve been dressing in darker and darker clothing in anticipation of meeting Arthur. Tonight—I guess it’s last night technically—I heard the sound of a car approaching me from behind. I stepped aside, but something was different than usual. Then I realized: the car didn’t have its headlights on. Then it did—its red and blue strobes as well. Even as my heart quickened, I reasoned that it probably had nothing to do with me, and I waited for it to pass.

 

But a cop got out of the car and began to approach me. Backlit, her features were indiscernible to me even as I was blasted with light for her.

 

“Sir, may I speak with you for a moment?”

 

“Is there a problem, officer?” I delivered my line.

 

“Can I ask if you have any weapons on you?”

 

I told her that I had a crowbar, if that counted as a weapon, and I set it down on the pavement. Yes, that is my only weapon. This bag contains a camera. I handed her my camera bag. She unzipped it and gave it a fleeting inspection.

 

“What are you doing out here tonight?”

 

“I’m just out for a walk.”

 

“Why are you carrying a camera and a crowbar?”

 

I didn’t reply.

 

She continued, “There have been reports of a suspicious man walking around the neighborhood, filming. And we’ve had a problem with theft of sewer covers in Salt Lake City recently, including in this neighborhood. Would you know anything about this?”

 

Again, I was in possession of such exact answers to her questions that I struggled to articulate them. She seemed to interpret my silence as resistance.

 

“Do you live in this neighborhood?”

 

“Yes,” I said, “I live on 1st Avenue. The man with the camera is probably me, but I haven’t been shooting video, just taking stills for this project I’m working on.”

 

“Project?”

 

“The theft of manholes is why I’m out here. Like the neighborhood watch.”

 

“It seems that the neighborhood watch is worried about the neighborhood watch.”

The sign was disconcerting to me as a kid; I thought the watching-eyed black figure was the neighborhood watch, rather than a caricature of the type of man the watch wanted to scare off. (I’d imagined him a man.) I never liked the straight line from the tip of his hat to the small of his back. I never liked how the forbidding red bar obscures any tapering of his midsection, as if his gumshoe hat is the peak of a crooked mountain. His hat spins like a top when he’s excited; I’m not sure why, but it does. I still can’t figure out the slice in the side of his head. If it’s a leering grin, then the letch has an eye at his ear region or a mouth on his cheek. Is that the collar of its trench coat or the jut of a bottom jaw? I guess maybe he’s talking out of the side of his mouth? Psssst…

“Why do you have a crowbar with you?”

 

“Why hasn’t the city installed locking manhole covers?”

 

“I’d like you to come down to the station with me just so we can clear a few things up. Are the photographs you’ve taken still on this camera?”

 

I didn’t want to get taken down to the station or even sit in the back of her car while she sorted things out.

 

So I told her.

 

April 3rd, 2015

TAKE SHORTCUT

X

Venn overlap of tragedy and comedy. Our cities are pocked with holes—but as we drive through the rainy night, we trust that the covers will be in place. Rather, we don’t even think about it. Maybe tomorrow, but no hole will open in my life today or today or today.

April 5th

Rich asked me at my session this morning if I think I’m making any progress. I wanted to tell him that the question is stupid and canned. I’m not sure if progress would look like grieving less or grieving more.

 

But I realized today that I am making progress. Just one month ago I was asking road sealant to form the letters of the Latin alphabet. While I continue to be suspicious that all things visible and invisible are a form of writing, I’m beginning to understand that they speak to us each in their own distinct languages, and that any attempt at augury—inevitably biased and imperfect—requires transcription. Maybe this is what separates artists from the rest of us.

 

Desperate our clinging to this crust. Fragile our traction. How utterly dictated by coincidence is all life on this planet, even more so the circumstances that impossibly collided to make me this creature here and now rather than someone else some other time, some worm, or continued nothingness—all the possibilities of existence and non-existence in the infinite combinatory of life. So maybe I can stop holding court against one tragic coincidence, zoom out and count the heap of flukes that endow me with the love and sorrow and language to name them. Maybe I can start a new grief journal that grieves my lost daughter instead of myself.

 

Two dots in time and space wretchedly intersected. That is all.

 

And when we’re gone, if we’ve failed at our mission to eradicate life on planet Earth, how long before there are no traces we were ever here? Cosmic time, proportional to our brief tenure.

 

In my dream I must have gotten a job as a city utilities worker, because I’d taken the liberty of bringing home some equipment. The tar tank had a pull cord and started like an outboard engine. My first line of black tar was reserved for her laptop. I coated the keys, the screen, the speakers, the mouse, the hinge where it closes. I sealed the line between her mattress and headboard, headboard and wall, all along her pillow. You’d need a knife to open her closet and chest of drawers after I’d finished with them. Her alarm clock was no good anymore.

 

Internet: the Jewish tradition of covering mirrors during the ritual of Shiva is of uncertain origin, one theory being that—since humans are created in the image of God, and since a human’s demise represents a rupture between living human and living God—the image of the Creator itself shrinks with the death of its creatures.

 

I covered the mirror in Bree’s bedroom—then all the mirrors in the house. The task of containment felt incomplete, and I applied a line of sealant all around her doorframe, my dream-physics causing it to stay put and not drizzle down the face of the door. Following some alterations, my upright piano featured 36 black keys and 52 black keys. My cell phone and camera were encased where they sat. Let the windows be shut upon them.

 

Still dissatisfied that some therapist or third dot might disturb our hard-fought solitude, I applied a gag and blindfold—so that, should I ever make it back, I would never be able to betray the route to friends or enemies.

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Interview: Denise Duhamel

    

Denise Duhamel is the author of How the Sky Fell (1996), Girl Soldier (1996), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999), Kinky (1997), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001), Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), and SCALD (University of Pittsburg Press), out in early 2017 after this interview was conducted. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013.

 

In this interview, we focus on Blowout, that rare poetic collection that expertly bridges the distance between the earthbound and the abstract.  The pieces are utterly approachable but still manage to surprise in their perception.  Duhamel distills decades into the moments that most inform the path from childhood love to the adult dismantling of those early aspirations, sparing no one, least of all herself, along the way. We are also happy to share three new poems by Denise Duhamel here on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

 

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

I just want to say that I enjoyed this book so much. I identified so much with what you said, which is so rare. Reading, you may think, that’s beautiful, but you don’t necessarily see yourself in other people’s work. But with so much of what you wrote, I thought, I have had that experience. When you were writing, did you have an idea that you would speak to that feeling, make those connections with readers?

 

Denise Duhamel:

No, in fact I thought, like anybody who goes through a divorce or bad breakup, that my situation was so particularly weird and worse than anyone else’s, kind of over-dramatic about it. I thought it was such like a midlife story, but love is love and being betrayed is being betrayed whether you’re seventeen or ninety-nine.

 

TFR:

I also wondered if you made a conscious choice to talk about things that were a little bit more every day, down to earth.

 

Duhamel:

I had a friend say “When you write, you have God and a banana, and then there’s a whole world in between.” So, for me, the god, the abstractions, I’m not really interested in that much. I’m really more interested in the day to day and how we get through these things, and using pop culture or using our friends, or reading bad self-help books, whatever it is that get us through. I was more interested in that than a big statement.

 

TFR:

Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?

 

Duhamel:

Yes, absolutely.  I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.

 

TFR:

I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?

 

Duhamel:

He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything.  We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go. 

 

TFR:

No.

 

Duhamel:

I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.

 

TFR:

I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.

 

Duhamel:

I gave a reading this morning with Catherine Bowman who had this wonderful poem about going through a divorce and then going back to etiquette books and Emily Post. Emily Post had this weird quote about how when a woman is going through  a difficult time, like her husband leaves, the worst thing she can do is mention it because that’s not ladylike. But the realities of our everyday lives can be powerful and help us connect even if we think we’re the only ones going through it. If you put it out there it’s very possible that a lot of people will be nodding, oh yes, me too.

 

TFR:

I had wondered–since you had a poem talking about a new friend who wonders if you steal stories from people–whether you found that people are more concerned they will end up in your poetry, or more interested in ending up in your poetry.

 

Duhamel:

It’s very funny. Even though Blowout is very memoir-esqe, I think every time you try to write a poem you’re going towards a bigger truth than the truth of what happened on this day. You have to always be fabricating. In some ways people like to think they’re in the poems when they’re not or think, I can’t believe you wrote about me. And I think, no I wasn’t writing about you or vice versa. 

 

TFR:

Are there certain poems you run by people prior to publication?

 

Duhamel:

Yes.

 

TFR:

Have you ever then not ended up publishing something based on someone’s reaction?

 

Duhamel:

No. It’s only if I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone, which is so female. I don’t think men think like this, but maybe they do. I would never want to intentionally hurt an innocent party.  It’s my reaction to what happened. The people or villains in the poems have their own side of the story.

 

TFR:

You have a couple of poems in this collection where the speaker is much younger. What do you think it is about pre-adolescent love that lingers?

 

Duhamel:

Especially when you go through a divorce or a really bad breakup, you kind of have to ask yourself, it’s got to be me on some level. It feels like you have to at least investigate that, so I found myself going back to a boyfriend I had in kindergarten who I wanted to do things that he wouldn’t, or a painter that I knew on the lower East Side, and these patterns of disappointment. That was really fun to do actually.

 

TFR:

The fourth-grade boyfriend was good.

 

Duhamel:

Right? You finally get someone who really likes you and you just miss him for whatever reason.

 

TFR:

The book isn’t completely chronological but there does seem to be a lot of forward movement.  Did you work in some purposeful chronology to the book?

 

Duhamel:

I did. I tried really hard because I didn’t write the poems in order. When you put a book together you’re just kind of culling from poems you’ve written over a span a time. “How It Will End” is the first poem, so you think it’s going to give away the ending, which it both does and doesn’t.

 

TFR:

You had mentioned in one of your poems becoming a Reverend of the Universal Life Church, which I did as well.

 

Duhamel:

All right. [Exchange of high fives.]

 

TFR:

You talk about it being appropriate, having been divorced, but I wondered if you thought being a poet also gave you a special ability as an officiant, someone who could produce ceremony.

 

Duhamel:

I didn’t think of it like that at the time. I was just doing it to help my niece who didn’t want a traditional religious wedding, so I said I would do it. I had another friend who had done this, and you did it. It seems like a poet thing to do. I have to say, it’s almost like you put on the cloak of that official and you get all this wisdom. One of the women at the wedding had just lost her sister and she was my age and her sister died of cancer and she was crying in the bathroom with her daughter and then the daughter said, “Talk to her, she’s a reverend.” And I thought, oh no, oh no, oh no, but I rose to the challenge, and I said your sister is with us now. Don’t ask me how I said that, but she was comforted. So, I think there are these roles that we can play. I don’t know if her sister was there or not, but I felt like I’m going to comfort her and I did since I’d taken on that role

 

TFR:

You have to wonder the reaction if the daughter had said, “Don’t worry, there’s a poet here.”

 

Duhamel:

That would be the best, if they said, “Go talk to a poet. They see the big picture.”

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