Category: Aquifer

Three Poems

EMERGENCY: I FLING

open the call box—
the black phone handle, barraged
with red fire ants.

 

LONELY COUPLE

Hugh and I started a band called Lonely Couple
and wrote a song by the same name.
We only performed it a handful of times, in Boston,
where were undergrads. I was the lead singer,
I thought though, looking back, we harmonized:

Wilfred Bourgeois, you’re part of us
And this is a song for you

So I guess I was simply a singer without an instrument.

Our friends have left us all alone
At this lonely table for two.
Wilfred, would you marry us?
It’s the hardest thing to do…

I played the accordion and keyboard
but we didn’t own either. Hugh strummed a guitar
with a colorful strap from Guatemala. He’d make
me dinner at his Kenmore Square apartment—
usually spaghetti with ketchup
that he thought was the same thing
as tomato sauce. I didn’t have the heart to tell him
there was such a thing as jarred Ragu, and besides,
it actually tasted good. This was what marriage was
about in the abstract, learning to love another’s innocence
and quirks. He was dreamy as he played his chords,
but we knew he was headed for the Peace Corps
and I for grad school. Wilfred Bourgeois,
my uncle, had visited us and made quite an impression,
so much so that we put him in a song.
He had lost his wife when she was young
and never remarried. Maybe we saw him as a romantic—
and that Hugh and I would love each other more
if we weren’t together forever. But it occurs to me now
how smart we were not to pin each other down,
how we drifted on without too much drama.
We populated our band with classmates, theater
or music majors, who came and went.
Some would later become famous
for sex addiction or Wall Street banking.
One of these guys had a girlfriend in cosmetology school
who teased my hair with a tiny pronged comb
so I could more resemble Kate Pierson from the B52s.
I knew how to shake on stage, but grew stiff
if someone tried to take me home after the show.
I wasn’t married to Hugh and never would be,
but we had loyalty and respect. I’m remembering him
and all this, which I’m surely remembering
at least partially wrong, because I found the lyrics
of our one and only original song
in Hugh’s perfect penmanship. It was folded
in the laminated menu of an Indian restaurant
where we apparently performed once
for a samosa and dal.

 

ODE TO THE AMPERSAND

& what one reviewer calls
the “sly female squiggle”
in reviewing Julie’s new book
which is full of ampersands
& magic that makes me see
the ampersand’s tilted hip,
one leg folded up & sat upon.
The Latin curvy cursive,
& her French cousin, the treble clef,
were my favorite symbols
to draw as a kid. How easy it was then
to conflate words & music. The &
folded one leg atop the opposite
knee, a calf draped below,
a foot hooked, dangling a shoe.
The appeal of all that coiling
& twirling, notes & script—
one definition, I suppose, of verse.
O, ampersand, you bring
two names closer together
than even the word “and,”
which, according to the Writers Guild,
simply means that those credited
worked on the same screenplay
but quite possibly at different times,
maybe one even rewriting
the other’s work. An ampersand
between writers’ names
means that the two
were in the same room, collaborating
side by side, & though technically
I write this ode alone, it is really
with Julie Marie Wade (poet)
& Sarah Sarai (reviewer)
who make me remember
how much I loved to draw
the ampersand & treble clef
& play the keyboard
which I learned from Mr. Solek
who was a member of a polka band
called The Happy Bachelors,
& he did seem happy
as an adult who wasn’t part
of a Mr. & Mrs. or a Mr. and Mrs.
The Dating Game was big then.
“Bachelorette Number One,
if the whole world were listening,
what would you say?” The cover
of the Bachelors’ album was pink
which didn’t imply anything
to me at the time, but now I wonder
if those bachelors were gay—
Mr. & Mr. or Mr. and Mr.—
or simply young & hetero
& capitalizing on their single status
like boy bands do now.
The Bachelors recorded together
in a studio, twisting horns
& button accordions,
the “sly female squiggle”
a part of all creation. I listened
to the album on my parents’
record player & imagined
all the kinds of adultness
I could possibly one day inhabit,
all the associations of sound & symbol
& word. I thrilled at the polka music
that lived inside the polka dot,
the pulsating bouncing ball
in the “Sing Along with Mitch,”
the seed that would one day blossom
into karaoke. Yesterday
the Supreme Court
struck down DOMA
which meant a lot of celebration
& yet this morning we read
that the ruling won’t help couples
in the 35 states that have laws against
gay marriage & sometimes an “&”
feels more like a “but.” “Bachelorette
Number Two, if you could live anywhere,
where would that be?” I download
the actual ruling & am soon adrift
in legalese. Nothing & everything
has seemed to change this 27th day
of June in the year 2013.
My sister & her husband celebrate
their 32nd anniversary
in Florida, where two women
in love can’t wed. I’m in Portugal
where transportation workers,
fed up with austerity measures, strike,
but those who can afford it
flag down taxis, the drivers of which
are happy for the extra work.
One tells me about his memories
of the Carnation Revolution
&, because he was a kid
when it happened, how
he thought every conflict
from there on in would be solved
with flowers in rifle muzzles.
I feel the same nostalgia for
Roe vs. Wade &, since I was a kid
when it passed, I am dismayed
Wendy Davis had to filibuster
two nights ago in Texas.
“Bachelorette Number Three,
if you could travel back or forward
in time, what year would you visit
and why?” How easy it is for me
even now to conflate words & music,
memory & fact,
& that one simple afternoon
when I wrote my first song
in the book Mr. Solek
gave me, the pages lined
with staffs, & I made my ornate
treble clef, & writing
was writing, & marriage
was in a far off key
I could barely hear, & then I made
an ordinary sandwich
& read the liner notes
on The Happy Bachelors’ LP sleeve
& each ampersand flipped
to become shoulders & arms,
hugs between each musician’s name.

“Ode to the Ampersand” references Sarah Sarai’s review of Julie Marie Wade’s book Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013) in Lambda Literary.

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What the Bats Say

… an excerpt from A Million Fragile Bones, out later in April 2017 from Twisted Road Publications. A Million Fragile Bones details the beauty and peace of Alligator Point, Florida, before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels (210 million gallons) of oil, affected 68,000 square miles of ocean, and washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. Connie May Fowler had spent sixteen years in the haven of Alligator Point before being immersed in the year-long nightmare that was the Deepwater Horizon spill.

 

 

We are one decade into the new century and spring is glorious on the sandbar. All manner of new life—winged, finned, footless, and four-footed—is emerging on land and in the sea. The estuaries and marshes are alive with activity as birds mate, lay eggs, tend to their young. The water churns with promise: baby fish, newborn dolphin, tiny sharks. Life below and above the surface is abundant. It’s as if my known world is throwing a party.

 

The frog that lived in my shower all winter has moved to my garden. The banana spider (AKA “Banatula”) is spinning a splendid, huge orb just outside my living room window. In the early morning it shimmers with dew diamonds. Cedar waxwings were here for one delightful day, ascending and descending in balletic perfection from the pines towering above my studio. Purple martin scouts arrived three days ago; their families will soon follow. I dig in the dirt on the kitchen-side of the shack and discover a cache of pearly white, oval eggs the size of my little fingernail. So, it seems, the lizards are doing their part to keep up with the promise of spring. A rat snake has taken up residence on the back deck. The dogs keep their distance. Wrens fly in the house, swooping, darting, as they hurry to find the perfect nesting site. A pair of mating osprey obsessively brings sticks to the platform at the top of the osprey pole where they are engineering a very messy, large, but functional nest.

 

Nearly everything out there in the deep blue sea is heading my way.

 

Embattled, overfished blue fin tuna are spawning. We’re only one of two marine nurseries on the planet that host the blue fin. They favor the Gulf’s northern slope, which is a critical habitat for them. Indeed, as the Gulf goes, so goes the blue fin tuna population.

 

Gag grouper, other species of grouper, snapper, and spiny lobster are also spawning. And all their babies, over the course of the next few months, will migrate to the estuaries and marshlands of the northern Gulf where they will find safety and nourishment. They will grow. Life abundant will happen. Again.

 

Brown shrimp are at their reproductive best April through May and September through November. Their eggs float through the Gulf, eventually turning into larvae. Plankton is the larvae’s manna. As they grow stronger, nourished by plankton, they, too, travel into the northern Gulf along with their seafaring cousins. There, amid the nutrient-rich estuaries and marshes, they will begin to resemble shrimp.

 

Bottlenose dolphins, full-timers in the Gulf, are giving birth right now: March, April, May.

 

Oysters, the beleaguered lifeblood of my zip code, are spawning in the waterscapes of my front and back yards.

 

Some sea life remains in deep water as they trek northward, but those requiring oxygen, such as sea turtles and the twenty-eight species of dolphins and whales that make the Gulf home for at least part of the year (twenty species are full-time residents), necessarily spend much of their time near the water’s surface.

 

To celebrate the Gulf’s bounty—its vibrant cycle of life, life, life—nearly every coastal village and hamlet hosts seafood festivals. There seems to be one close by every weekend. Oh what I would give to be crowned Panacea’s Blue Crab Queen! But I’ll settle for a T-shirt and the knowledge that nature’s delicate balance appears steady, prolific, bountiful.

—

In the midst of all this new life I, too, have given birth of a sort. How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, my seventh book, is winging its way into the world. This inevitably means I have to follow it out there to places far from the sandbar. I hate leaving the Point in the spring. And I also still feel very much like a newlywed, which makes sense given Bill and I have been hitched only a few months. So I bop back and forth, spending as little amount of time on the road as I can, always hurrying home so I can measure how much progress the jasmine has made (a lot), if baby mullet are jumping yet (yes), if the baby osprey are flying yet (no), if we have any crabs in our traps (sometimes yes, sometimes no), if Bill’s blue eyes still make me shiver (yes).

—

Bill doesn’t waste any time. As soon as I hit the road for my book tour, he takes it upon himself to paint the interior of the shack, put up new shelving, and renovate the kitchen, including the addition of recessed, built-in shelves. I call him from a central Florida hotel room that smells like wet swimsuits and stale beer.

 

“I miss you,” he says in a southern drawl that confounds me since he is a Midwesterner.

 

“I miss you, too.”

 

“I love you.”

 

“I love you, too.”

 

“You sure do have a lot of things.”

 

“What do you mean?” I thought I lived the life of a frugal hermit.

 

“Your altars. I’m having to disassemble them so I can paint.”

 

“Oooooh.” I imagine my poor husband collecting all the bits of bones and shells and dried flowers and spell books and feathers and more, gathering them into assigned portions of the kitchen table so he doesn’t lose anything, so the altars can be reassembled just the way he found them.

 

“Pile it all up and I’ll deal with it when I get home,” I say, sensing his unease at the responsibility he feels for the ephemera of my life. But I also know the painting, the building, the renovating: It’s his way of nesting, of making the shack ours, not just mine, of him working his way into the mysterious nooks and crannies of married life and paradise.

—

The newlywed in me has decided to cook a five-star worthy dinner every night, using homegrown ingredients whenever possible and creating every morsel from scratch. Though it looks like I’m cooking (and I am), I’m also casting spells. I whirl through the kitchen, seeking spices and solutions. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love.

 

I’ve just finished kneading my dough for tonight’s dinner bread: Cuban bread complete with a palm frond down the vertical length of the loaf. My whole body—crown of my head to tips of my toes—is dusted in a thin layer of fine flour. I think about working my way up to pain de campagne, a daunting recipe in Julia Child’s Baking with Julia. It requires “capturing and nurturing airborne wild yeast” which floats in the air only after many days of tossing yeast about as part of the bread-baking ritual. I’ve never had the nerve or need to “coax wild yeast and bacteria and harness their energy.” That sounds like a job for a physicist. I sneeze. Flour, if not yeast, flies through the air, resembling dust motes. I catch my reflection in the mirror that hangs on the wall closest to the living room. I appear painted, ready for battle. I study the birdfeeders hanging from the rafters of the deck. A bevy of hummingbirds sup. My back aches. My hands hurt. Why didn’t I just pick up a loaf of French bread when I was in town? Who am I trying to impress with all this homemaking mania? He’ll be home soon and I’ve got to get this place cleaned up … oh my God.

 

I tiptoe over to the door, snowing flour as I go, trying to make less sound than the wind. Perched at the same feeder are a rose-breasted grosbeak and a blue grosbeak. The blue grosbeak could easily be mistaken for an indigo bunting, but the grosbeak is larger and has broad, cinnamon wing bars. I don’t think there is any other bird one could mistake for the rose-breasted. Its deep crimson shield glimmers against its white belly and black head.

 

These, like the avocets, are two birds I thought I’d never see—individually or together—unless I move to Mexico where they winter or the Great North where they breed in the summer. Once again, I experience the thrill of living on the edge of the world, a cusp where water and forest meet, a dynamic wonder-ground.

 

I do not take lightly the responsibilities of living at a migratory crossroads. Seed in the feeders. Parsley for the swallowtail caterpillars. Milkweed for the monarchs. Bee balm and hibiscus and honeysuckle for the hummingbirds. Clean gourds for the purple martins. Bat houses for the bats. Seashells placed in the birdbaths so butterflies can drink without risk of drowning.

 

It is April 20, 2010, and all seems right with the world.

—

The following day, April 21, as the sun descends into the Gulf’s blue horizon, washing the cumulus-slurried sky in ribbons of purple, gold, aqua, and radiant hues as yet unnamed, Bill and I are enjoying what we call “bull bat hour”—cocktails amid the bats newly emerged from their slumber, mammals on the wing feasting on mosquitoes and no-see-ums.

 

Out here on the sandbar, twilight shimmers. Dragonflies stir the air with the metallic thrum of transparent wings; they hover and flit, dive and ascend, resembling tiny bursts of tumbling stained glass, occasionally resting on a stem, a limb, a blossom, my hair. Purple martins pierce the jasmine-laden breeze, competing with the bats—the former eating supper and the latter breakfast. Seabirds return to their roosts. Overhead, terns chatter so raucously my dogs bark at them. As the birds glide out of sight and earshot, the dogs exchange satisfied glances. I believe they think their barking drives away the noisy aviators. My favorite pair of great blue heron plaintively squawks, their voices calling each other home to their nocturnal rest in the sentinel oak at the edge of the harbor.

 

If one is lucky enough to be on the water at bull bat time in a calm wind, you will hear the creak of the pelicans’ wings as they skim the water on their way to the western end of the Point where they gather in a great feathered conclave, on a beach populated only by ghost crabs and what the surf brings in—star fish, sand dollars, sea urchins—until daybreak when they take to the sky again.

 

But it is the bats I watch. Their scientific name, chiroptera, means hand-wing, surely one of the more appropriate and poetic designations ever made by science.  Evolution has gifted these animals to the point that it is only a minor exaggeration to say, physically, bats are exquisite wings attached to tiny faces.

 

I have had many close encounters with bats, the first being when I was perhaps eleven or twelve. It was a blistering August evening and I was watching Sanford and Son with my mother when I happened to look down and see a saucer-sized bat resting atop my sweaty bare foot. I said, “Oh, oh!” instead of “Holy shit!” because my mother was the only person allowed to cuss in our house.

 

Fear spiking, I was trapped in a quandary: stay hidden and still while hoping for the best (translation: maybe the bat would just fly away) or run into the world—visible, shouting, flailing (translation: risk the ridicule of my mother and all humanity). Inaction versus action and its attendant but unknowable results is a puzzle that confounds me to this day.

 

Mother, steeped in her own time zone, laughed as Redd Foxx grabbed his chest and delivered his classic quip, “Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you!” With her cigarette bobbing between clenched teeth, she glanced at the bat—the whites of her eyes flashing with Bette Davis flair—and muttered out of the left side of her mouth because the right side was in charge of the cigarette, “Son of a bitch! Goddamn it. Don’t move.”

 

She marched into the kitchen—I remained immobile, fearing any movement would inspire the winged Fury into a feeding frenzy—and then returned with her pine-handled broom, which she held aloft with fierce conviction, her pose reminding me of the Joan of Arc prayer card I kept hidden in my top dresser drawer beneath a nest of fading underwear.

 

I was terrified Mother was going to beat the bat to death and, in the process, reduce my foot to pulp (she swung a mean broom), but instead she simply proceeded, her cigarette fashionably akimbo, to chase the bat out of our roach-infested rental, screaming “Out, out, you bastard!”

 

Fearing my foot might be infected, I dabbed it with what was left of my Coca Cola (the boys down the street had told me Coke could take rust off a radiator, so surely it would fizz bat germs from flesh). I looked up. Mother was back, her hair on end from the struggle with bat and broom and screen door.

 

“How do you think it got in here?”

 

“How the hell do I know?” She tilted the broom against the doorframe, flopped onto the couch, lit another cigarette using the ember-end of the old one, and that was that: my first bat encounter.

 

But it would not be my last. Indeed, walking at twilight remains hazardous. Bats simply don’t see me. When foolish enough to take an evening stroll, I bob and weave in an attempt to avoid head-on collisions, looking as if I’m performing a spastic imitation of Mohammed Ali’s graceful ring dance.

 

My theory (untested and probably without a shred of scientific merit) is that the bats’ echolocation bounces right through me, rendering invisible my corporeal self, this being a result of low blood pressure (mine, not theirs; I’m not even sure if bats possess blood pressure).

 

And, yes, surely there are other explanations: the bats are drunk, having feasted on fermented fruit; a rabies epidemic; they just like to fuck with me. I don’t know. I’m sticking with the low blood pressure-echolocation theory because it makes a good story.

 

But the plot thickens. On a sultry summer night in 1996, I walked to my downtown Nashville hotel after a book event. I felt pretty full of myself. I’d given a good reading and signed lots of books. The storeowner was delighted. Even the sales rep who’d made a surprise visit seemed appropriately satisfied. So I might have had a bit of a swagger. I might have even caught my reflection in a skyscraper’s plate glass window and not recognized myself. In short, I was happy.

 

As I approached the civic center, which was a mere two blocks from my digs, chaos splintered the placid evening. People driving home after a production of Carmen honked and cut each other off and made obscene hand gestures and behaved, generally, the way folks normally do in a traffic jam: as if their very lives depended on them being the ones to lead the elephant parade.

 

The cast and crew milled about on the sidewalk, waiting for buses to take them to their next tour stop. Their hump-backed equipment, scattered hither and yon, resembled brooding prehistoric snails. I noticed most in the gathering were male which, probably due to anthropological reasons, made me both fearful and excited. When this realization tumbled to the front of my brain—poof!—Confident Connie was gone, and in her place stumbled a gal haunted by her past, riddled with self-conscious angst.

 

No longer buoyant, I threaded my way through a Gordian knot of noisy masculine chatter—all of it in Spanish or Italian, I wasn’t sure which, maybe both—bodies and shadows in motion, cased musical instruments, suitcases, props. I felt unmoored, as if the night had suddenly been infused with a bad case of buckle your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a dark shadow glide through the air and then felt it unfurl in a soft embrace against my neck. It fluttered, gentle and feminine, in the light Southern summer breeze. An image of Isadora Duncan (whom I desperately wanted to be once I got over the shock I would never, ever look like Sophia Loren no matter how many hours I lay in the backyard dirt while slathered in iodine-laced baby oil) wafted through my consciousness: Isadora dancing through life, a fabulous long scarf floating in her wake. One of the men—they were yelling and wildly gesturing—must have tossed into the Tennessee Williams night a crepe paper streamer.

 

In addition to hoping the paper was yellow or pink so it would complement my pale linen suit, I did what my mother taught me to do when men acted the fool: I ignored them.

 

But it didn’t work. Their catcalling escalated. Still, I marched on. Don’t you dare look at them, you little heathen.

 

The crepe paper caressed my skin in a rhythmic beat normally reserved for something with a pulse. Since when, I wondered—my fear nebulous, unfocused—did crepe paper possess cadence? I grabbed at my neck, took hold of something soft and warm—the men screamed—gazed at my hand, and delivered (at least in my emotional mind I did) a shriek that scarred the night.

 

In my very own hand—a hand that only moments prior felt very ordinary—I held a small bat. Or rather, it held me. The creature clung to the fatty rise of my palm, pinching my skin with something tapered and sharp. Fang or claw? I did not know. I flicked my wrist as hard as I could. The bat’s talons—or were they teeth?—dug deeper. Its wings fluttered in black vampire perfection against my chunky, yellow Bakelite bangle. The goddamned bat, as my mother would have said, wasn’t letting go.

 

The teeming mass of male humanity shouted what I assumed was advice. I did not speak their language because, though I made As in high school Spanish, I retained very little knowledge except that one should never develop a crush on the new guy, at least not while he’s still new and untested.

 

Clueless as to the meaning of the men’s swift phrasings, the rapidity of their words in all likelihood fueled by fear, I continued to vehemently shake my arm. I could not bring myself to pick off The Creature of The Night, which was unfortunate because no matter how hard I shook, flung, or gyrated, this demon seed of Dracula remained attached to me like a black diamond wrist corsage.

 

There, amid the heat and wavering light and cacophony of male counsel, I brought the bat closer and inspected, faintly fascinated, and praying I wasn’t bleeding.  Its little face resembled that of a wee dog with giant ears.

 

The bat looked at me as though I was a mere curiosity and it held all the power. The good news: It had not fanged me. The bad news: I realized bats possessed tiny, powerful thumbs crowned with flesh-ripping claws.

 

I am superstitious. Of this, I am unashamed. After all, I was raised by a woman who believed she spoke to demons. How could I not believe in signs, ghosts, spells, Barnabas Collins, and the possibility that all bats are secret goatsuckers? I didn’t need a refresher course in the occult to know a clinging winged rat was not a good omen.

 

Panicked to the point of nearly losing control of my mind and bodily functions, I flicked my hand so violently I distended my wrist. The bangle flew off, ricocheting into the tangle of men and equipment. Pain radiated up my arm and fissured in the maze of my elbow and shoulder. The bat, possibly suffering from thumb distension or shriek-induced deafness, did, however, release me, promptly disappearing—a shy apparition—into the chaos of moon-filtered chiaroscuro and city bustle.

 

Before I could begin to track down my Bakelite or worry myself into a frenzy over how many agonizing rabies shots I would have to endure, a young man jumped in front of me, danced an agitated jig, and said in a thick accent, his eyes wide with what I interpreted as both fear and wonder, “No worry, ma’am, no worry. Bat good luck!”

 

What the hell was wrong with this guy?

 

“It was a fucking bat!” I said, rubbing my wrist, the sensation of the creature’s claws and wings haunting my neck and hand. I triple-checked: no broken skin, which I was pretty sure meant (a) I didn’t have rabies and (b) I remained an outsider among the ranks of the vampiric dead.

 

“I know, I know!” His feet slowed as did his speech, and he repeated himself, allowing the syllables to hang in the air longer than necessary, each vowel oozing into a viscous slur. “Noooo wor reee.  Baaaat goooood luck.”

 

Fourteen years and many trials later, I stand on my back porch, testing fate again, wondering what sort of luck I would have had without that bat encounter. Bill hands me a glass of wine as I watch the evening’s first wave of chiroptera flicker though the gathering twilight—black silhouettes shattering a prism sky. I take stock. Was life a series of mistakes and trials interrupted by small moments of joy? That would suck. Was it a mixture of luck and fate, good karma and bad, depending on a cosmic roll of the dice? Did cataclysmic things happen to decent people just because? Did the Old Testament God occasionally wake from his eternal slumber and screw with people simply for shits and giggles?

 

A bat swoops within a foot of me. I don’t flinch.

 

“That was close,” Bill says, bringing his Jim Beam on ice closer to his chest, as if he suspects bats have a proclivity for brown liquor.

 

“Do you think Job deserved those boils and plagues?” I ask, slapping at a no-see-um.

 

“Absolutely not,” Bill says, keeping his gaze pegged to the sky that is now quite crowded with winged creatures. I think Bill is about to expound on what he thinks of God’s treatment of Job and it probably isn’t complimentary of the Lord Almighty, as a faded relation of mine oft refers to Him, but our attention is snagged by a thread of conversation emanating from the house. We had, like poor earth stewards, left on the TV.

 

A CNN talking head reports that overnight in the Gulf, gas, oil, and concrete from something called the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded up the wellbore to the deck, where it caught on fire. Eleven platform workers are missing. Rescue and recovery operations are underway. A Coast Guard petty officer insists there is no sign of a leak.

 

“A rig exploded and there isn’t a leak? How can that be?” I ask Bill. I gaze out at Alligator Bay, worry mushrooming through every corpuscle in my body. I can’t survive the destruction of this pristine estuary, this amazing ecosystem where if you are a fish, a marine mammal, a land mammal, an insect, a bird, a mullet, you’ve found one of the greatest places on the planet to birth babies. Or, if you are a grown woman with a painful past, you find solitude and grace, states of being that if you’re lucky lead you down the path toward forgiveness and new love.

 

“They’re lying again,” Bill says, a matter-of-fact nonchalance lacing his words.

 

One of the herons glides to its roost in the big tree. It lands amid gnarled branches and squawks—a warning, an avian sigh, an issuance of old pain, a call to its mate (I’m home. Where are you?): Which one I don’t know. But I fear Bill is right.

 

I rest my head against his shoulder, watch the winged world feed, my memory flashing on a horrific ingrained image: oiled birds dying horrendous deaths in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and I find myself praying to whatever is out there. Please, dear God, no.

 

Then I voice a hope that makes no sense, at least not to my husband. I slip my hand into his and say, “The sky is full of good luck tonight.”

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Interview: Paul Lisicky

        

Paul Lisicky is the author of Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012), The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011), Famous Builder (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Lawnboy (Turtle Point Press, 1999, reissued by Graywolf Press, 2006). His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn where he is also the editor of StoryQuarterly. In Fall 2018, he will be the visiting writer at University of Texas-Austin. We are also happy to share his story “Refrigerator Girl” this week on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

 

His most recent book, The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf Press, 2016), has been named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Rumpus Book Club Selection, and one of Buzzfeed’s Most Exciting Books of 2016.

 

The Narrow Door tells the story of Lisicky’s long-term friendship with fellow writer Denise, alongside that of his relationship and marriage to a poet that ultimately unravels as his friend’s life is also ending from cancer. Lisicky unflinchingly, yet poetically, examines the ways in which both love and other emotional states—jealousy, competition, boredom, disaffection, distance—weave through our complicated personal lives within a fraught larger world. By including contemplative accounts of various world events from earthquakes and volcano eruptions to rocket experiments and oil spills, the book points out that both our relationships and our larger world are fragile and unpredictable.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I was so moved by this book. One of the things that has always impressed me about your work is its range and scope, and I enjoy seeing that your range and scope continues to enlarge. I still remember reading Famous Builder and just laughing out loud. In both Unbuilt Projects and now The Narrow Door, though there is still humor there, you have shifted to more somber tones. Do you think that’s just part of what happens as we mature and suffer losses in our lives, or might it also have to do with a growing acceptance of the complexity of gay authors?

 

Paul Lisicky:

I never wanted to be the funny gay guy, even though there’s a place for the funny gay guy. I think I can play that role around the dinner table when the occasion feels right, but I’ve always tried to work toward broadening the scope of my own sensibility in hopes that it encourages any reader, regardless of identity, to broaden his or her scope.

 

I might, however, be a little less afraid about putting darkness on the page than when I was first starting out. Maybe I felt some impulse or externally imposed directive to be charming, to be cheerful, to lure the reader in. I had to write harder to maintain a bright surface. I think there just came a point where I felt I don’t really have to do that anymore.

 

All that said I do miss a certain strain of humor in my work. Especially now in these dark times, I feel like dark gallows humor is really what we need. It can give a certain kind of dimension that that straight-ahead despair doesn’t. I’m hoping the next book, honestly, will be funnier. I want it to be sillier, but also really, really, really grave.

 

TFR:

Do you think we need a new era of satire right now?

 

Lisicky:

Yes. A kind of satire that is more personally directed. Sometimes when we think of satire we think of forms and shapes and voices that exist “out there,” but there are so many tones of satire that we might not have even explored. What is my satire? What is your satire? I don’t think my satire sounds like Jonathan Swift or George Saunders, even though those models are important to take in.

 

I don’t quite know what my own satire is yet, and I want to build that voice.

 

TFR:

The Narrow Door tells the story of a friendship and the death of that friend alongside the story of your long-term romantic relationship breaking up. One might expect a memoir about one or the other, but what made you also decide in this book to commit to telling them both at once?

 

Lisicky:

I started the book about six weeks after Denise died simply as a way to keep her in the world. I had very few artifacts of our friendship together—maybe three photographs, no written letters, just a handful of emails. Initially it was simply a project to keep her in the world, and I thought, well maybe this could be a book, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my consciousness. I had just finished reading Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb, which is a book that is about trying to be lost as a way toward new meaning, and the structure of that book gave me lots of permission to wander on the page. There was something about the associations holding that book together that I took direction from. I had just finished writing another book—Unbuilt Projects—at the time I started, so there wasn’t any internal or external pressure to start something new [for publication]. It just started in emotional necessity. I needed some kind of a vehicle to keep going, and it was something that I kept coming back to until it became a book.

 

TFR:

One of the things I really loved about it was this idea that it would weave together the story of a friendship with the story of a marriage. Very seldom do we see how they interact and how they affect each other. Was it a struggle to overcome the usual separation of those two kinds of subjects? Was anyone skeptical that you could combine them effectively? How did that dual focus, those perhaps opposing energies, work as the project developed?

 

Lisicky:

Honestly, I had two-thirds of the first draft of the book done and my relationship was in trouble. I literally folded that into the book, not knowing it was going to be there at first. I had written this kind of artifact of ongoing-ness so there was no way to keep it out even though I did not want to write that at all. It would have destroyed the book to keep it out. I was terrified. It still makes me nervous, but I learned so much from comparing, from holding those two relationships up against one another. It wasn’t a deliberate act—I couldn’t be so smart if I were trying to engineer something. It just made itself available to me and I kept with it. I just listened to what I needed to write.

 

TFR:

There were so many reverberations, like in the scene where Denise kind of loses it, and your partner is there. There’s this witnessing of something bad happening in the friendship, and he had more hostility toward it than you even had. I felt like it was insightful about how these relationships that we don’t usually think of as influencing each other in some ways actually do.

 

Lisicky:

I didn’t know it until I was writing the book. I was paying attention to repetitions, to patterns, to images, and those patterns and those repetitions were teaching me something. I didn’t know the echoes were there, so if the book has an energy it’s because discoveries were being made in the writing. I became aware that I was writing something that was much smarter emotionally than I was. We all, I think, want to write toward that place where our work knows more than we do.

 

I still feel—I hope this doesn’t sound grandiose—but I still feel that I’m learning things from this book. And maybe I always will be learning things from it. I think about that moment up against this other moment, and what instruction there is.

 

TFR:

One of the other brilliant strokes here is the use of world events to give both the texture of the times and to provide metaphors for the personal events going on. One of my favorites was the space dog.

 

Lisicky:

I’m so glad to hear that. People don’t talk about that space dog section much. Maybe it’s too painful—that dear dog.

 

TFR:

I was in tears. She never came back from space.

 

Lisicky:

She never came back, and nobody ever talks about that.

 

TFR:

And also the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Those are just two examples but how did that method arise and develop for you, and how is it perhaps different from the way you work in fiction, in which you say that you always work from an image or metaphor rather than character? There is that kind of method here, but obviously you were working from Denise’s death, so you started with the subject matter and character, yet that technique of having these images and these social metaphors still continued in this work. Was it different working with it this time around or did it evolve pretty similarly to how that works in your fiction?

 

Lisicky:

I knew that there was some solace in dredging up particular memories, but that I could only be inside those memories for so long before it felt unbearable. I thought, well, maybe there’s a way to channel this energy in other directions and we can go back and forth. I ended up metabolizing the structure of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, years after finishing it. I took permission from that. I became more attuned to all those disasters. I’ve said this before, but disasters are happening all the time, all around us, and I think that in that fresh scrubbed, raw state my antennae were out.

 

I felt them personally, so if I put one in I started feeling others. There is a progression in the book. The first image is of the volcano, and then we move to an earthquake. I think humans are increasingly culpable if we think of the progression, of moving from volcanoes to the oil spill. In the latter disasters humans are clearly culpable.

 

TFR:

It felt very much to me that there was this kind of acceptance that there are things beyond our individual control even when they are human-created things, and yet there’s always this question of our responsibility, and how we can engage with the larger sense of human culpability.

 

Lisicky:

Yes. How do we have sane and safe relationships when the world just outside the window is in chaos?

 

That’s a conversation stopper!

 

TFR:

Or an endless starter. So, change of subject—Joni Mitchell makes her way into yet another Paul Lisicky book. Can you tell me more about your psychic relationship to her and her music?

 

Lisicky:

I love the seventies. I love Blue, and I love The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and even Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

 

I first came upon that work when I was ten or eleven or twelve. I was really young, and she wasn’t the music that my peers were listening to. She was the music, the musician of people in the generation just a little ahead, and so she felt like she was mine, she felt private, she felt really idiosyncratic. I was aware on an intuitive level that those songs did not move like other songs in their deep structure, that she was making something new. She was making something her own. I’ve always been taught by and grateful for that example out there. One thing I’ve mentioned in the past is that her guitar re-tunings are based on the fact that she doesn’t have strength in her left hand. So because she couldn’t play the standard shapes, she decided to re-tune the guitar, and she ended up turning what some would consider a liability or limitation to an asset. That’s not a new or fresh idea, but I try to be attuned to my own limitations and turn them in my work into something that works.

 

TFR:

You were already talking about yourself as someone who wanted to continually expand your own horizons as a writer, and she’s a great model.

 

Lisicky:

Exactly. She’s so restless, never stayed static, was always reinventing herself, and probably not afraid to be an amateur in any form. I think that’s crucial to the ongoing life of any artist. You have to tear it down for the next project or else you’re repeating your old moves and it’s not terribly interesting.

 

TFR:

Speaking of different approaches, how do you balance your writing with the role of being editor of StoryQuarterly?

 

Lisicky:

The struggle balancing that with my other projects is a day-to-day thing. The exciting part of it is getting to publish work that’s risky and weird, to publish the kind of work that that I think others need to see. I grew up in a world at a literary time when it felt like everything had to conform. It didn’t feel like we could shake people up structurally or in terms of thinking.

 

It’s great to be able to get fun, weird, dark, rich work out there. That’s my favorite part of it, but I think it’s hard as hell yet people assume that it’s a sidelight. It’s hard as hell.

 

TFR:

You referred earlier to new directions your work is going in especially in light of recent political developments? What can we do as writers? What is our responsibility and how are you working with that?  You talked about developing a different kind of humor in your own writing, but are there other things that you think about, other challenges that you want to put out to other writers and readers?

 

Lisicky:

I do think it is possible to write political work that is experienced by the body, that’s interior, that feels cellular, that that gives a reader an experience that’s different from the experience one gets in journalism. I’m devoted, and I feel that we should all be devoted to getting rid of that dualism. Politics isn’t “out there”; it’s pointing right at my chest. We have to continue to break across those lines.

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Refrigerator Girl

Truck leaned in for the kiss. Nabi tried not to flinch, but how could she not when her principal stood ten feet away, her fourth graders running to the buses? It was 2:30 on a Wednesday, the air thick with humidity, the branches heavy with leaves. Truck had once again shown up at school, unannounced. On any other occasion Nabi would have thrown her arms around Truck, but her tight tank top and her leopard-spotted hair just screamed need, determined to provoke a reaction. Why was Truck always trying to test her?

 

“Well, hello to you, too,” Truck said. “So much for a little sweetness and light.”

 

“We’re at school, babe. I told you. I have to be careful.”

 

“You wouldn’t even know what love was if it smashed light into your mouth.”

 

“What?”

 

Truck was already storming off to the car. Now they’d spend the rest of the afternoon in silence, Truck slamming kitchen cabinets, seething, until Nabi gave in with a question. How was Nabi going to survive Truck? The truth was she’d never been attracted to most of her previous girlfriends. They had blonde hair while she was drawn to dark. They were earnest and sincere while she was excited by black humor, irreverence, the possibility of danger and surprise. The refusal of her deepest urges seemed to be the foundation of these relationships. She could have sex, yes, cozy, pleasant sex. And she could take delight in conversation, that gorgeous, underrated thing. But with Truck? In the six months since they’d been together, Nabi had lost sixteen pounds. She’d had to buy all new pants, toss out her old wardrobe, and though she was mesmerized by the sensation of getting to know her body—who knew that the back of her neck wanted to be probed with two fingers?—she honestly hadn’t slept well since the night they’d first fucked. People at school were worried about her. The hollow planes of her shoulder blades—they were always asking if she’d been eating, and what could she say? Oh, I spent the last eight hours fucking, and I should feel like a porn goddess but honestly I’m in this state where I could take four naps a day.

 

How had Nabi become this kind of person? She loved sex; she’d always loved sex. She could not walk by another beautiful woman without sending out a dart of focused intensity through her eyes before the performance of looking straight ahead. The other woman would do the same thing, as if she also knew that a body was trouble, too easy to lose. Occasionally someone pushed through that reserve, through grit and determination. Inevitably that someone turned out to be a person she couldn’t fight with, couldn’t even disagree with—though the two of them had great sex–at least for a while. People threw around words like boundaries. For some, that metaphor had physical, pictorial significance, but not for Nabi. All she knew was that whenever she attempted to fight with Truck, she had the awful suspicion that both of their souls were in danger of implosion, and that implosion would damage them down to their cells until they were done.

 

When Nabi was seven, she spent afternoons with Harris and Lily Carr, the brother and sister who lived just down the street. She did not exactly like Harris and Lily, their finicky taste in sweets, their hands sticky with jam, but their mothers were friends, and there was never any question they’d spend the days after school together. When the mothers were off to the swim club, the children shut the door in the bedroom, where brother and sister put Nabi through various tests. She didn’t know why she agreed to these tests but she was eager to be a good student. First they asked her to take off all her clothes. Then they held a struck match to her skin, not just to her face but down to her private parts—their words not hers. Over the course of an afternoon she took part in a series of tests that went from extension cords to light bulbs. These rituals did not faze her because she could at least see was impressing Harris and Lily—she could see the respect blazing in their hard little eyes. But when they started clearing the top shelves of the refrigerator, she knew it was time to get out of the house. They had already talked about shuttering her up between the bread and the milk, and that was definitely enough. She’d once heard of a girl who had almost suffocated in such a refrigerator, tumbling out on the floor when the door opened, her face ashy and blue.

 

Nabi walked straight out the Carrs’ front door.

 

She still thought of that girl twenty years later, though she wasn’t always sure why. The refrigerator girl was both talisman and warning, and when she looked at her lovers she still saw the faces of that brother and sister—she still knew she could escape them. No one, on the other hand, was better at taking a test than Nabi, and perhaps Truck had intuited this all along. She sensed too well that Nabi hungered too much to succeed and would never let you get a rise out of her as hard as you’d tried.

 

The beach was more crowded than usual, the tide line nearly reaching the lifeguard stand. Nabi and Truck unfolded their blanket up near the dunes. To their left was Maureen Keating, the mother of one of her fourth graders. Closer, to their right, were the Artmans, old friends of her parents. All around them were people she knew, people she had some connection to, either through school or yoga, and maybe that was why Truck stood up, started digging the hole close to the blanket. She looked so gorgeous and strong as she pitched the shovel into the sand, her arms striated, muscular, sleek, tan. Why had she brought along such a serious shovel, the kind you’d use to plant shrubs? The people around them were probably asking a similar question, but they appeared not to be distracted by it, as they ran back and forth to the water or tossed footballs. The hole before her deepened. Every time Nabi asked Truck why she wasn’t going into the ocean, Truck would not answer; she remained silent. Which might have been why Nabi’s stomach was in distress. She pictured herself running up into the dunes and throwing up a little, but when she thought of her fourth-grade class, the faces of her students attuned to her, depending upon her calm to make them feel safe, the feeling passed.

 

Truck stood before the hole in a posture of deep accomplishment. “Get in,” she said, in a voice of purest love. She was playing of course–Truck was always playing–but this time there was something darker beneath the theater.

 

“Truck?”

 

“Get in,” Truck said, more gently now. “It’s for you. I dug this big and beautiful hole for you.”

 

The hole was as wide as it was deep. Too close to people: What was Truck thinking? And how could she get back to the car, leave for home without Truck running after her, wrestling her to the beach, chafing her wrist? Nabi imagined herself on her back, Truck filling in the hole around her until she couldn’t move. She thought of her private parts packed with cool sand until the itch was unbearable, the blazing sun on her face parching her lips, making her woozy with heat. On the other side of the dune, not so very far away, a baby cried. They were over. And as if to prove that to herself, Nabi kicked Truck’s keys down into the hole and waited, just waited.

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I Want to Know You All

I was listening to this sort of ignorant blowhard
go on about how teaching is a dumb profession
and I did this thing I always do, which is feel smug
about how smart and sophisticated I am, but
my smugness is a little compromised lately
by how I do almost nothing all day besides have
an affair in my mind and then wring my brain
over what a divorce would do to my daughter,
who heretofore has been lucky to have a happy,
close family, not even too far off from how we
pretend to be in public. So I just kept listening
without my hackles up so much and also was
bemused about how alike we all are, admiring
some people, judging others, thinking we’re so
special, and this guy had some good stories.
One time a history professor in college told him
to go hang himself after he wrote 500 words
about pheasants in the French Revolution.
He said he must have mentioned those fired up
and pitchfork-wielding pheasants a dozen times
in that paper. That exasperated historian screaming
peasants in the margins always reminded him
of his dad, who does probate, which is basically
a ton of archival research into plat maps and deeds,
birth certificates and death wishes. There are no
secrets when someone contests a will. His dad
once told him, “You wouldn’t believe the number
of cross-dressing farmers there are in Missouri”
which made me laugh at first at the hypocrisy
of this place, but then realize it’s actually tragic
how alone those farmers must feel. It’s ruthless
out here, I know. All the longing we till under
and to let such a secret slip—probate means some
cousin or sister or brother described the dress
in front of a judge who considered it fit evidence
against a claim. I laughed because I can’t imagine
who you are—the man in coveralls who mocks
the foamy fern I like poured onto my latte,
the one who calls me “hon” that condescending
way? Could you be the man always with the sign
in front of my doctor’s office or the neighbor
who mows the waysides of our country road
down to stubble? Maybe you don’t come to town
if you can help it anymore either. I want you
to know, whoever you are, as someone hungry
for variety in the human condition, most especially
my own, cross-dressing farmers, you light up
the fields for me. I hope you walk into those
soybean rows some nights and your flowered skirt
swishes your legs in a way that feels like falling
in love when you didn’t think you ever could,
or maybe you feel rooted, belonging to this soil
that made you. I don’t know what’s better, but
I want for you such happiness and every last acre
your bigot of a father left behind to go with it.

 

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Two Poems on Florida

Hurricane

Naked, floating face down in the tv room
filled with seawater seeping from glass doors
he had duct-taped against the hurricane,
the room a dark aquarium, his white body, bobbing
—he must have been asleep on the couch, exhausted
after a day of battening down the house
when baysurge beached in a swarm of seaspouts
churning up the mangrove swamp, the great wave colliding,
breaching doors, collapsing walls, wallowing, then
tumbling back out as winds shrieked off treetops,
sea slosh sucking up drowned frogs, broken snakes,
skinned pelicans, dragging leaf muck, sparkles of
shattered glass, lawn chairs, rolling a dead manatee,
slopping back through tangles of trees, impaled boats,
to the seesaw bay sizzling with rain, leaving him
rocking in a kelp of curtains, arms outstretched
towards something in the green cloudy water.

 

A Miami Moment

Just home from work, he’s sitting
by the patio pond, watching the koi
write their slow signatures.

Beside him: The Miami Herald 
gathering humid air, a glass of wine,
and the cigar he left last night.

A flock of parrots mutters
in the seagrape tree. The ylang-ylang
has put on its evening perfume

and soon the yard will smell like Chanel.
Inside his daughter is baking cookies
and his wife is taking a pre-dinner snooze.

He jumps up screaming.
Inside, they yell “What? What!?”
and run out to see him pointing up

at maybe fifty vultures circling,
wings underlit by the setting sun
in a swirl of slow turning light.

The magic in the realism
never far away.

 

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Manpower

Abuelo was the picker. Apá was the packer. Alex and I took turns harvesting grape and carrying the heavy boxes of fruit down the row to our father. We had started out a group of seven, but the foreman said the group was too large. So tío Rafael, who was an exceptional packer, was asked to form his own group with tío Ramón and Juvenal, our cousin. That made sense since that was also how we split up between two cars to get to the fields. We came together as a family again during lunch hour but the rest of the day Alex and I had to stand opposite of Abuelo, who reprimanded us at every turn. We worked too slowly. We talked too much. We left the grape too shiny. Since his hearing wasn’t very good, we learned to whisper and to catch the words through the dusty leaves, over the sound of the squeaky hinges on three pairs of scissors.

 

“What are you going to do with your first check?” Alex asked. This was a question my father had asked us almost every day that first week on the job. It was his way of encouraging us since we were going to give up most of our summer to farm labor. Abuelo had already made it clear we were not going to be allowed to vegetate in front of the television when school was out. “Al fil,” he said. To the fields. Like every other kid who, at fourteen, was old enough to work.

 

When the task became tedious, when the heat became oppressive, we threw that question out as a way to keep going. No one was going to stop us from dreaming.

 

“I want to buy a pair of dress shoes that aren’t made of plastic,” I said.

 

“Plastic?” Alex said, pausing for a second.

 

“You know, fake. They make your feet sweaty and stinky. I hear that the ones made of leather keep your feet fresh.”

 

“Okay, but what do you want leather shoes for? You’re not going to the prom. You don’t go out on dates. You have no girlfriend. You don’t dance.”

 

“Neither do you,” I countered.

 

“So what do you want them for?”

 

I wanted to say that I wanted to feel like a man for once, but I didn’t really know what I meant by that. I had seen pictures of Abuelo in his youth, his mustache so black and preened to perfection, showing off the tattoos on his forearm. He was wearing dress pants and a pair of shoes that shone so clean and new they made him look respectable, despite the tattoos. During Apá’s days as a musician, he was also pictured with bright shiny patent leather shoes. All the glamour of their pasts was on display in the footwear. Their present was dirty sneakers and work boots. That was my present as well. I wanted to claim my moment of glamour.

 

“Take that box out,” Abuelo barked. He was only visible from the waist down, but I could see how he pointed to a full box with the ends of his scissors. I imagined his mustache punctuating his severe expression underneath that hat he always wore when he stepped out of the house.

 

It was Alex’s turn, so he crossed underneath the vines. The rustling reminded me of rain. An odd image to invoke in the near hundred-degree heat, the sand around my sneakers growing warmer by the hour. Another desert deception, like a mirage.

 

As soon as Alex was out of earshot, Abuelo began his griping. “I’m not sure what your brother is thinking, skipping school and running off with your good-for-nothing cousins. Without school he’s going to end up here, with us. He thinks this life is easy, well, he’s about to find out.”

 

I knew by now that Abuelo did not want a response, just a listener. I let his words dust each bunch in my hand as I inspected it and determined that it was ripe enough to pick and place in the box. One thing I did admire about Abuelo was how he dropped a bunch so fearlessly from as high as the vine, confident that it wouldn’t fall apart, grapes bouncing off in all directions. When I asked Apá about this he said that it was decades of skill. “And he doesn’t give a shit anymore,” he added. “He knows the packer has to clean it before it’s packed.”

 

Abuelo kept on: “And your father, running around with that woman, as if he were a teenager. Even you boys don’t bring us that kind of trouble.”

 

Trouble meant that Amelia, Apá’s soon-to-be wife, was pregnant. I didn’t particularly like her, but I liked Abuelo less, and I didn’t appreciate any poison coming from his mouth, no matter where it was going. He voiced these things to me, to Abuela, but to no one else. He was cowardly that way.

 

“I need to use the toilets,” I said, and walked away.

 

At the end of the row, Apá stood at the packing table, shifting his weight and shaking his leg. I knew how painful it was for him to stand all those hours from 6:00 a.m. to quitting time, sometimes as late as 2:00 p.m. He saw me coming and smiled. His dark skin looked even darker with that red shirt he was wearing.

 

“Where’s Alex?” I asked.

 

“I told him to bring me some water. And I’m thinking why don’t you go get me some water too.”

 

I pursed my lips. I knew the code. It was my father’s way of letting us stretch our legs, and to give us a break from Abuelo.

 

As I walked out into the dirt avenue toward the water truck, my body ached just watching people bend, then stand still as they picked grape on the hot soil, the long sleeves of their flannel shirts covered in sulfur. My eyes became moist. I felt sorry for Abuelo and Apá and everyone else who had to do this an entire lifetime. I was not yet out of high school, but I was already certain this would not be my fate. All that talk about colleges in my homeroom got me excited, though I had not yet revealed to my family what my plans were for the near future. I didn’t want anyone—especially Abuelo—to get in the way. But I wasn’t too sure about Alex’s fate now that he had dropped out of school.

 

“Save me some,” I said to him as I approached.

 

“It tastes funny,” he said.

 

“Everything tastes funny here. Even saliva.” I poured water into the paper cone. In a few hours, when the cones were exhausted, there would be a single dirty cup sitting on top of the tank. At that point nobody cared about hygiene and passed the cup from mouth to mouth.

 

“And what are you going to do with your first check?” I said.

 

“I don’t know. Save for a car.”

 

“A car? With the little money we’re going to make? You’re going to start with a tire?”

 

“Or maybe a fucking bicycle, okay?”

 

I didn’t take his snapping at me too personally. The heat gave all of us short tempers.

 

We each filled a cone of water to take to our father. We already knew where his paycheck was going—to the new baby.

 

“What kind of car?” I said, as a way of assuaging Alex’s hurt feelings.

 

“A convertible. I want to ride with the top off.”

 

Alex with his baby mustache that would never grow beyond chicken scratches was only fifteen but he already knew how to drive. I wasn’t sure how this came to be since I was a year older and I had never even practiced getting behind the wheel of car. Driver’s ed was still a semester away.

 

“Where would you go?” I asked.

 

“I don’t know. I’d just go.”

 

And I realized that this was his way of dreaming about leaving. I had been plotting my escape as well.

 

My father took the cones and threw the water into his mouth. He crushed them and dropped them at his feet. They looked so out of place there, white crinkled paper over a small graveyard of discarded fruit not good enough to pack. He smiled. My father had a handsome smile but I resented it because he never got me braces and my crooked upper row embarrassed me. When I was younger I kept pleading until he finally shut me up by telling me that they would straighten themselves out naturally. “My teeth used to be uglier than yours, right Apá?” And Abuelo agreed from the couch, complicit in the deceit.

 

When we took our places at the grapevine again, Abuelo was gone. Our respite from his supervision was extended.

 

“He hates to work, doesn’t he?” I said.

 

“Yeah, and so he takes it out on all of us.”

 

Usually it was Abuela who worked in the fields and Abuelo stayed home to cook. But his younger brother, tío Justo, had come to visit from who knows where and he wouldn’t stop teasing his older brother about how he had become the woman in the marriage.

 

“You should lend him your aprons, María,” he called out, and no one dared laugh. Tío Justo cackled at his own jokes for all of us.

 

Even my grandmother wasn’t amused. She stood behind the stove, making faces, bothered that Abuelo had asked her to do the cooking, which she didn’t like to do. Nor was she much good at it. We couldn’t stand Abuelo, but we sure did appreciate his skills in the kitchen because Abuela’s dishes were usually inedible.

 

Tío Justo was the only person who could shame Abuelo. He ridiculed Abuelo’s belly, his bald spot, his lack of gold jewelry and flaccid muscles, and the fact that he didn’t pay attention to young women anymore. At the supermarket tío Justo would goad him, elbowing him whenever a pretty young girl walked past them. Abuelo looked so awkward trying to keep up with his brother’s ogling. The entire theater of masculinity was mortifying to all of us because my father never acted like that and neither did he expect us to.

 

And so here Abuelo was, trying to prove to his brother that he was still a man by coming to work and forcing Abuela to stay home, and I knew that neither of them was happy about the arrangement. It almost made me feel sorry for him, until I saw him walk back to his spot.

 

“Remember when someone we know bought exercise equipment to impress someone else we know?” I said to Alex. The mischief in my tone made me blush. We had reached that part of the day when we started making fun of Abuelo.

 

Alex giggled. “I certainly do. I still use it. All he did was remove the packaging.”

 

“If you’re ever that mean to me when we’re old, Alex, I promise you I’m going to kick my nice leather shoe up your ass.”

 

“And if you’re as ridiculous as they are when you get old, I’m going to run your ass over with my convertible.”

 

We couldn’t contain our giggling. And it wasn’t until Abuelo told us to cut it out that we slipped back into the coma of the hot weather.

 

At quitting time, we weren’t as relieved as everyone because our car was parked the farthest. This was one of Abuelo’s bright ideas: to show up before everyone else so that we could nab the best parking spot on the side of the road. Sometimes it paid off because the work route took us toward the road and we were the first to reach our car, but if the route took us away from the road, we had the longest trek to Apá’s precious blue Mustang.

 

Sure enough, we were the last to leave. And just as we settled into the hot vinyl seats, another heartbreak: the car wouldn’t start.

 

“Now what?” Abuelo said. He wiped a ring of sweat underneath his hat.

 

“I don’t know,” Apá said. “We have gas. Let me check under the hood.”

 

As my father went out to inspect the problem, Abuelo went at it: “What does your father know about cars? He’s always buying these useless pieces of junk. He never has any money to invest on something that’s not going to leave us all stranded in the middle of the desert. And now with another mouth to feed on the way, he’s going to be broke for the rest of his life.”

 

Wound up by his own anger, Abuelo got out of the car to join my father.

 

“And what the fuck does he know about cars?” Alex said.

 

We were getting too sweaty in the backseat so we got out as well, only to find Apá and Abuelo arguing as one pulled on this wire and the other yanked on that cable.

 

“This is a piece of shit car,” Abuelo said.

 

“You’re not being very helpful, Apá. Why don’t you go back inside?”

 

Abuelo grumbled but he did just that though not before calling the obvious: “And keep your eye out for anyone passing by, maybe all we need is a jump.”

 

“Do you want us to walk to the main road, Apá?” I said. And that’s when the tears started welling up in his eyes. So he smiled as he wiped them away.

 

“Dude,” Alex said.

 

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

 

But I had done something. I had reminded him of what was upon us: Alex wasn’t doing well in school, Apá was expecting another child with a woman I didn’t want to accept as my future stepmother, Abuelo was inflicting his insecurities on all of us, and I was about to leave forever, though no one but me knew that. Or maybe my father did know—a parental intuition that told him he was about to lose his son. But at the moment, here we all were, stuck because my father bought the cheapest car he could afford. We had worked close to nine hours and now he had to watch his sons beg for help from a stranger on the side of the road.

 

“This is not the kind of life I wanted for you,” he said, weeping with his hands flat on the car.

 

The raised hood kept us hidden from Abuelo’s sight, but neither Alex nor I knew how to comfort our father. We were not used to gestures of affection. That was not manly behavior. Alex kept knocking on my elbow with his fist, as if encouraging me to make the first move. But I didn’t know what that move should be.

 

“Stop crying, Apá,” I said. “Don’t let your father see you.” I couldn’t help but blurt out a phrase my own mother had said to me many times when I became too emotional when my father was nearby. It felt useful but not right. “Alex and I will get help,” I continued. “You wait here in case anyone passes by.”

 

Apá’s sniffling was the last sound we heard as we made our way to the main road. It was going to be a wait because these were the grape fields and it was past harvesting time. Even the stragglers had made it home by now. Our best hope was one of our kin, an undocumented alien taking the back roads for safety, or a driver who had made a wrong turn somewhere. The nearest payphone was miles away at the closest gas station.

 

“What do you think is going to happen?” Alex said.

 

“Oh, don’t worry, a truck will come by and give us all a lift to the gas station.”

 

“No, I meant, about Apá.”

 

“Oh,” I said. I looked behind us. Abuelo was looking our direction as if that could make us walk any faster. We were hungry and thirsty, and I knew Alex’s legs were as weak as mine at the moment.

 

“I think he feels bad he left us with our grandparents after our mom died. And now that Amelia is pregnant, that means he’s never coming back or even coming to get us.”

 

“So that’s it then.”

 

“Yes, that’s it. And Abuelo is pissed because he knows Apá will be asking for money from him and Abuela.”

 

“What a shitty father,” Alex said.

 

I didn’t want to ask if he meant Apá or Abuelo or both. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. I was sleepy suddenly and I began to fantasize about the college dormitory room I remembered from the brochure that awaited me in a year or so. It would be the first time I would have my own bed.

 

When we exited the blocks of grapevines we were met with a breeze. It was refreshing and liberating. But there was no movement as far as the eye could see. And not much sound, except for the vibrations of the telephone cables above us.

 

“So what are you doing with your first check?” I said.

 

Alex smiled. “Buying my dad a car so he can get our asses to work. You?”

 

“Same thing.”

 

“What about your fancy shoes?”

 

I shrugged. Fancy shoes seemed so useless all of a sudden. But a bicycle would have helped. I let out a laugh.

 

“What’s so funny?” Alex asked.

 

“Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe you weren’t wrong about the bicycle after all.”

 

“I told you, stupid. You and your fancy ass shoes. Where do you think you’re going?”

 

The answer was complicated: I was going to leave eventually. I was going to leave him. But that didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him. So I simply said, “Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere yet.”

 

“That’s right, Turrútut. Like it or not we’re stuck here together you and me.”

 

I had the strangest sensation that Alex was trying to tell me something, but I was too brain-dead. Or maybe I was reading too much into his words. Our father had abandoned us, but my leaving was not the same thing. And not for a few more years. Perhaps all he needed was reassurance. Especially after seeing my father break down in front of us.

 

“Hey, listen, Alex, it’s going to be okay. I’ll always be here for you. I promise.”

 

Alex looked at me intently. We had to try to read each other’s minds. Unlike Apá, he was not one to let his defenses down. We locked eyes for a few seconds and then he turned away. We slipped into silence again. That was all the sentimentality we were going to manage between us.

 

No car passed us by for an additional thirty minutes but we didn’t have to wait any longer because the blue Mustang came speeding out of the dirt avenue kicking up dust. My father honked the horn and our bodies jumped with excitement.

 

“We got a jump from the foreman,” Apá said. “He was making one last inspection and your grandfather spotted him.”

 

Abuelo raised his chin slightly, acting like the hero of the story.

 

I patted Abuelo on the shoulder in gratitude. “Good job, Abuelo!”

 

“And don’t you dare stop anywhere, Apá, in case the car won’t start again,” Alex said.

 

“Yeah,” I piled on.

 

“Listen to your sons. Listen to your sons,” Abuelo said.

 

Alex and I climbed in and we set off for home. I made eye contact with Apá through the rearview mirror for a fleeting moment. In the back seat, as we sat side by side, a glorious comfort came upon me and I might have held my brother’s hand if it weren’t the least manly gesture of affection I could imagine. So instead I joined the banter and laughter until we reached the freeway, where we blended into the traffic, just one more anonymous unit of Mexicans in the desert. It felt good to be in the company of these men. For once, I felt I belonged to this private world we called manhood, which wasn’t perfect, which was sometimes painful, but was my birthright.

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The Giant

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Two Love Poems

The View from Up Here

by Major Jackson

 

At sunset winter mountains reach
across the page long as a look of love.
Sometimes my hands want
all of your syllables.
I walk in kindness
when you’re around
which is to say I’m feeling Eastern.

I gather myself unto myself
because you hunger
for golden peaks.

Night gently offers its diamonds
which we stash in silent mumblings.

When you speak, I feel unburied
yet hear still the dead of my own house.
No one cares that I count your eyeblinks.
No one cares about all this hard water.
The hours are tall as polar caps,
and I quicken inside your name.

 

On Hawk Mountain, Vermont

by Didi Jackson

 

I am parting with the sun
that like a Greek oracle
descends the temple of mountains
before me. Their silhouette
darkens to Oxford blue,
elides the current of the sky
until I no longer see
crest or peak.  After moving up
from the South, how much should I know
of coniferous trees or of chickadees
who play their winter song of fee bee, fee bee,
the last note toppling an octave from the first
like a softly closing door.

The Northern sky stands so straight,
it uses the largest pines for crutches;
they bend under its weight.

We have a friend who isn’t happy
I’m white.  With him, though, the road
is just sampling the sound of the rain.
So my husband and I hold hands
as often as we can,
each finger erupting a new continent.

But in the early evening,
I worry that if pulled over,
when my husband lifts his empty hands
he is lifting only his blackness.
At this hour a chickadee cries
in staccato: dee dee dee, dee dee dee.
I wonder how it knows my name
before I look at our marriage
in the milky evening light.
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Interview: Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade is the author of the books Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014; Colgate University Press, 2010), the winner of the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2010), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014); and Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016). She is assistant professor of English at Florida International University. Her poem “Katabasis” appears in TFR 40.2 (Fall 2016).

 

Her most recent book, SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), was selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Prize in Poetry.

 

SIX: Poems is a surprising book, comprised of six interlinked yet solitary long poems.  The poems themselves fill the entirety of the page, not confined by traditional wide margins or a single form, in one stanza seeming to be prose-like in structure and in another a single line surrounded by whitespace.  A conversation about SIX lends itself to a discussion of craft, not just the ideas and evolution that built the poems, but their form and structure, and a poet grappling with the duality of poetry, the spoken and written form.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

We are here to talk about your new book SIX, and I thought we could start by discussing the format and structure which is related to the title of the work.

 

Julie Marie Wade:

The book began in my mind before it really began. About fifteen years ago, when I was taking one of my early poetry classes in grad school, there was a wonderful poet at Western Washington University, Bruce Beasley, and he made this declaration in class one day, “You’ll only write about six things in your life.” It seemed really profound and really scary, like will I have enough to write about, and he said “don’t worry, that’s not a curse that you won’t have enough, it’s more of a challenge.” You have to figure out how are you going to take the six things, which are really clusters of many things, how are you going to take those six big things, resident themes, resident questions that drive your whole life and figure out how you’re going to be formally innovative so you don’t get stuck writing the same poem over and over. Then he said, “Well in a way, every poem is the same poem over and over, but find a new way to get into that poem.”

 

So, I really mulled on that for a long time and a few years later I thought, I’ve got to try to write the six things. But I can’t just name six things, I don’t just know what those six things are.  So, the reason that this book is full of poems that are twenty-plus pages each is because I was trying to write through the poems to find the six things. I had ineffable feelings. I knew the kind of clusters of what those six things were, but I didn’t have any way to just name them, and, I guess, if I did I probably wouldn’t be a poet anyway. But they were the longest poems I ever wrote and some of them have embedded prose or have embedded other adopted forms so they are really, maybe, the most experimental work I’ve done in poetry. I hope I’m living up to Bruce’s mandate to do something bold and innovative with your resident six things, and it did help me clarify more about my six things.

 

TFR:

Did you go back to your previous work? I assume you were not conscious of those things as you were writing. Did you go back and see what keeps coming up over and over again to try and explore what those six things might be?

 

Wade:

I did do that, though, weirdly, with this book, though it just came out in September of 2016, there was this strange lag time. I didn’t know if this book would ever find a home. So, I finished it in the Fall of 2006 and it was circulating for eight years before it finally won a prize. The greatest honor of the prize was the person who picked it—C. D. Wright, who is someone I’ve admired for years as a practitioner of long experimental poems. So, during that eight-year period, I didn’t re-read the book, and when I was writing it I was thinking about What have I written so far? I hadn’t really written that much before SIX that I felt was world-worthy. I did an MA thesis [at Western Washington], but I didn’t send that out into the world. It didn’t feel quite ready. Then I went into an MFA program [at the University of Pittsburgh], and I started sending the poems of my MFA thesis out into the world, but this is the project that I was doing undercover. What is strange now is that re-reading the book a decade after I finished it, I’m finding that I better understand myself. Because this took so long to come into the world it’s like getting a letter from your old self, and then finding out your old self has a lot in common with your current self, and then it shines a light on everything else that I’ve been doing in the last decade.

 

TFR:

Did you make many changes? I would think that after eight years it must almost feel like someone else wrote it.

 

Wade:

It calcified in a certain way, for better or for worse. It’s like my students sometimes say, “Well, how long do you revise something?” You can take it as a sign from the universe, that the book isn’t getting taken, so you’ve got to go back and change something. I basically decided with this book that I wanted to leave it as an artifact, a record of me between 2004 and 2006 reckoning with those six things. But when I got everything exactly how I thought it should be on the page, one of the biggest challenges was the order of the six things. Once I had those six poems in place, I knew that there would be an obsessive impulse to keep refining it and another year would go by and, I was lucky that I sometimes got these really loving rejections or finalists’ nods, but I just didn’t get the big prize. So the temptation is to go back in and go, What is this book not doing that I could do to it to make it world worthy? but I realized that I had other work I wanted to do and other work might be easier in some ways for readers or might be somehow more on market or on point. So, I just kept writing that other work and leaving this alone and then, when it finally went into the world and I finally read it again in galleys, I actually didn’t change anything. The editor, the long-suffering very hard working editor at Red Hen Press, only went through and asked questions about spacing and little typos that I couldn’t believe were still there that I hadn’t caught. We didn’t actually overhaul any of the book and maybe part of that is because it was the book as C. D. Wright had seen it, so we didn’t change the order, we didn’t change any of the essential content of any of the poems. It really is a time capsule of something that was me then.

 

TFR:

That’s a very interesting journey from composition to publication.

 

Wade:

It’s a strange way for a book to evolve, but it evolved and then stopped and was frozen in time.

 

TFR:

Reading through it, I was wondering about the use of the whole page and the white space. I found myself wondering if, when you originally submitted it, you had the lines spaced so they went all the way to the margins.

 

Wade:

That is the amazing thing about Red Hen Press—this came in through A Room of Her Own Foundation through the To the Lighthouse Prize—that they honored the integrity of how it looked. That can also be part of the challenge. A press or a judge or reader could potentially like something but then they might think, How would we ever? We can’t make a book that would accommodate this work. That could also be a barrier to getting that work into the world. So, I knew that this was really risky because all my pages even in the 8½ by 11 form were completely folded this way. Then I was picturing how exciting it would be to have the double-sidedness of the book and have the pages so full, but I also knew it would have to be a press that would be willing to do that. I had actually seen Red Hen Press, a press I’ve loved for a long time–and they published Celeste Gainey’s book–and I noticed it was her debut and it was a really wide book, The Gaffer, and I love this book and I thought, okay, maybe then that’s what they’ll do for mine, and they told me that they would preserve the integrity of the lines.

 

TFR:

I actually found myself wondering if, when you had first written them, if they started out condensed and then you spread them out, or if you started out with that use of space as you were first composing.

 

Wade:

I did use all the space. I was using all the space because in that first MA program, Bruce Beasley plants the seed which to me was kind of like a riddle and a challenge What are your six things? Find them. Then I move on to my next grad program, and the first class I took in MFA school, this was the beginning of 2003, was this just amazing special topics class on the Black Mountain College Art Movement and the Projective Verse poets. I had never read Charles Olson, and I had never read Robert Duncan. I’d never read Hilda Morley. I had this class where I was completely immersed in writers who were using the whole page. Robert Creeley is part of that movement, but his poems have these much shorter lines, but there’s a lot of white space on the side like a cliff dropping off. I started reading these poets and I was This might be the form, that invitation to get really wide. And the projective verse poets also really believed in writing your way through the poem and letting what’s happening outside your window enter your writing, what’s happening if something falls off the shelf as you’re writing, let that be in the poem, don’t treat things that intrude on the poem as intrusions, but let them in and welcome them.

 

I had never read any poetical philosophy that was like that, and so I thought if I’m going to figure out the six things I’m going to need to have a lot of room to do that, and I’m going to need all the power of silence and all the power of How can prose be in here how can poems be in here, how can adopted speech be in here? How can all of my world, everything that’s going on in my head, how can it be here?  I thought the Projected Verse poets knew how to do that. They’re the poets that I was really reading when I started to write this, and I thought if they say that you can have pages, a prairie, I’m going in. So that that is how I composed it, with their permission. I guess that speaks to how many people are influencing everything we do as writers.

 

TFR:

It looks beautiful, but I was also then wondering if, when you read aloud, if you wish everyone had a copy to follow along.

 

Wade:

You understand. I just met you and you understand completely! This is the first time When I gave readings before, I never read any of these poems aloud because this book wasn’t out. I’m really new to reading it for an audience, and it feels like this is such an on-the-page kind of book. I’ve had to figure out, okay, there’s definitely a sonic quality and there are places, maybe, that are more conducive to listening than others, but how do you convey the sense of that space when you’re reading a poem aloud. You can put in pauses in your speech and then in the parts that are more prosey and condensed into blocks you can accelerate the reading and make it clear that they are more condensed.  If I were a technologically savvy person, I would somehow have a display or something behind me, because it feels like I can’t really do justice to it out loud. I’m still grappling with whether there are parts of this book that I just won’t ever read out loud because it will lose something if you can’t see it, or will I figure out a way to render those? I’ve only done a few readings so far, so we’ll see

 

TFR:

It’s very interesting, that duality of poetry that I think folks don’t always think of. One, that it’s very much an art form of the page and the visual but then also of the spoken. It must be very interesting to try to reconcile those two sides.

 

Wade:

Yes, yes. For so long, this book didn’t have a home so I didn’t have to think about those questions. Now this is going to be a new kind of experiment. How do I make it visual and verbal at the same time

 

TFR:

It’s a lovely exploration. I was having so much fun reading that I was Post-it noting lines I really like, but then I was putting them on every other page. So, I over post-it noted it. You had so many meaningful lines, particularly in the beginning when talking about poetry itself such as “I think a poem is a thought” and “the statement a dart, the mind a board.” and “I think a word is a room with a skylight.” I just loved all of these. I particularly wanted to ask about “I think a poem is pre-meditated like a crime.” Do you let the poems really simmer in the background for a long time before you put them on the page?

 

Wade:

I’m so glad that you mentioned that line. I was surprised by that line because obviously I hadn’t been with the book up close for so many years and that line jumped out at me and then I had to ask, Do I think that now? That first poem in the book, “Latchkey,” it is the ars poetica. I kept getting the assignment over and over when I was an MFA student: write an ars poetica. I never wrote one that I submitted to a class. But I kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and I think this is actually the last or the second-to-last of the poems that I wrote. It had been brewing so long–If I wrote an ars poetica, what would it look like?–and then I realized that poetry is probably one of my six things anyway, so I should probably try to write one.

 

But I think that the trick with that premeditation is that there’s a part of me that took a year to think on the idea of the six things, what might those six things be, and, a year later taking this class on projective verse for the first time and thinking, oh that might be a method that I could use to get the six things. On the one hand, it’s super premeditated and moves at a glacial rate because I’m always adding another thing–this is what I might want to do and then this is the form I might want to use. And I have that process going on with lots of different projects. I have to have a lot of different pots on the stove. If I were only working on one project, all the way through from start to finish and then picking up a new project, I probably wouldn’t get anything done, and it’s kind of counterintuitive. I have to be able to jump around and say, Okay I’m going to go over here and see what’s happening with this one, but there is a lot of brewing.

 

And, then, when I actually sit down to write, the thing with projective verse, the gift is that invitation to just sit down and say, I’m setting aside x amount of time to start this poem, or maybe even set aside a whole day to do this, but then like I’m going to let things into the poem that are in no way premeditated. That’s the tricky part, the moment when I was reading the book and I feel like Surprise!, or I forgot that happened. Those are the things that were not premeditated at all so even setting up the time to write was premeditated but then wide open. In the poem “Layover”, the second part, there’s even a moment where there’s a streak of Qs and As and that happened because my cat jumped on the keyboard when I was writing that poem and hit those letters exactly in that place. I left it because that’s what a Projected Verse poet would do. Now, of course, I would not necessarily have left it if it hadn’t been as wonderful as Qs and As but I was like, This is fate. I don’t know, though, will they think I’m asleep?  Of course, you reserve the right to go in and take it out if it doesn’t work, but I realized, Oh maybe this has happened because I’ve allowed myself to get all the way to the premeditated day and hour, and now I’m writing and here’s typing on the keyboard. And so I just let it stay, and it works.

 

TFR:

I love that.  I would not have thought that was the origin.

 

Wade:

It feels organic and the Projective Verse poets would say it was because you were there and your cat was there and it was supposed to happen.

 

TFR:

I also wondered, because these pieces are longer and you also have shorter pieces, as poets we are so often used to having the whole piece there, and it’s on the page and we can play with it. How different was this as an editing process? When you were dealing with multiple pages, how did that impact your approach to the editing?

 

Wade:

It wasn’t like I sat down and worked on a draft of one and then immediately worked on a draft of the next one, because there was actually something really wonderful about that time of two years where I had a thesis and I had other responsibilities in grad school that were being examined by everyone, and this was my secret life where I would set aside these very particular hours. I mean, yes, they’re very long poems, but I would zero in on a poem and think This is an investigation of another one of those things, and I’m going to set aside some time, and I would sort of go down the rabbit hole of that poem and try not to edit anything while I was writing it. So just keep going and find a natural end, again all about the Projective Verse method and always the idea of writing through. Let anything into your poem, you can always take things out, but you can’t recreate the moment of writing the poem, and say like, Oh wait in the middle I think there was that bus that went by my window. You have to let the bus be there as it’s going by your window. And so I wrote all the way through what were really a lot of pages in a quick amount of time, and then I would print them out and really look at them and some of the poems didn’t feel like they needed as much tinkering, whereas other poems did feel like they needed more of that. But, I really kind of wrote them in isolation from each other. Then maybe two more months would go by working on the somewhat more traditional poems that comprise my thesis.

 

I would be doing these other activities and then come back and do another poem and what I didn’t really realize until the very end of assembling the whole book, when I had these six poems, was that they actually did speak to each other. I didn’t know that when I was writing them. It wasn’t a conscious thing. Then, I thought, Bruce, of course it’s the six things, so of course the six things are linked. I’m the one who’s linking them, and I’m not even conscious of it. Suddenly, something would turn up, an image or a word would be here and be there and I realized, I wrote those poems two years apart but they’re still speaking to each other and I’m the intermediary for them, and it was so cool.

 

Then it was just the challenge of, What’s the order in which I’m going to group these? I had not realized until I saw all six of them together all printed out and marked up by hand that I had two that started with L, two that started with M, and two that started with N, and it’s really strange that it’s three letters in order and two of each and that wasn’t planned. So then I decided L M N, okay I’m going to put them in that order and see what happens. And when I read them in that order I really liked it the best. It’s also weird, and I didn’t plan that, but the middle of the alphabet song, like LMNOP, you speed up there, so suddenly I felt like, Oh my goodness, that’s the order.

 

TFR:

It’s meant to be. It just naturally happened.

 

Wade:

It just came together at the end.

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Crepuscle

 

FOR SHANE

I won’t deny it any longer: the man I love
is a horse galloping through my chest.
Only in thunder may I whisper his name.
          *
I tell his mother I am the sort of man
she will never have to think about.
Shame—face of mulch, mouth of black snow.
          *
In another story, the body was a bloodless
moon and it was caught by trees.
Dying—moon inhabits like an animal.
          *
Someday there will be a night in which a boy
survives falling like light across skin.
Memory—small pocketknife tossed into ravine.
          *
I do not believe the world keeps us
rooted in its forest.
He moves through my body like a god.
          *
By crux of dawn I retreat every mile it takes
to let him live inside of me.
Him—my bloodless moon, my swollen bed of stones.

 

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The Double Under the Bed

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth A. I. Powell

Anhinga Press, 2016

108 pages, paper, $20.00

 

Elizabeth Powell’s Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter is a thoroughly entertaining work about sad things. For instance, in the prose prologue “Autocorrecting the Lyric I” that opens the book, we learn that the poet-narrator is an “Episcojew,” who, though she learned to “pass” according to the demands of the occasion, was once kicked by the Catholic boys on the playground for “killing Christ.” When she was 14 years old, her “cold borscht” father and “finger sandwiches on white” mother divorced, and she was raped by a drunken neighbor, Bill Gottlieb. Concurrent with these events, she discovers that she has a double “snoring and talking and laughing in her sleep” under the bed. She also learns that the source of her parents’ conflict is her father’s rampant philandering (“No more 42nd Street hookers, no more secretaries!” she hears her mother yelling).

 

Though this may sound like Too Much Information, Powell makes it entertaining by approaching it primarily through humor and irony. She writes, “It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the ‘I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage. I’m the debutante in the Pogrom.” That last sentence is simultaneously jarring, discomfiting, and hilarious.

 

Powell’s book is one long poem that explores the poet’s identity and past through concentrating on the figure of the double under the bed, her doppelgänger. This “alter” is called “stepsister, bitch bastard—the roofied one, erased from the storyline.” The double is also a dead twin brother who, as we learn in the prologue, has been literally absorbed by the poet in utero. The doppelgänger becomes the poet’s half-sister with whom the father’s new red-headed mistress is pregnant at his funeral (a fact that the poet learns later).

 

Metaphorically, Powell’s book itself finds its doppelgänger in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The famous play becomes a virtual template for Powell’s own life: like Willy Loman, her father was an adulterous salesman who died suddenly. In her prologue she says that, like Loman, her father “had eaten the dream and it had made him sick.”  In Miller’s character Biff, Powell sees the twin brother who was incorporated into her own body in the womb.

 

She also imagines that Willy Loman’s mistress gives birth to a girl whom she identifies with the half-sister that her father’s mistress carries. Powell’s alter merges with Powell’s half-sister and speaks as Willy Loman’s “reckless daughter” in the stunning six-act title poem which ends the book. This figure seems to signal catharsis and resolution, even wholeness, for the poet. She says, “Tell me, Willy, isn’t it true—//daughter sounds like slaughter,/son, the sun.” The doppelgänger is the finally emergent genius of the book.  The poet’s struggle with her is one of the book’s principle sources of vitality.

 

In many ways, the genre in which this book participates is theater. The book includes acting exercises, references to set design and to the Fourth Wall, soliloquies, and staging directions. Its hybrid of forms—prose, plays, a sonnet sequence, rhyming couplets, and various nonce forms—and its many different points of view are held together by an unforgettable and one-of-a-kind urbane, postmodern, humorous voice and then pulled apart, almost to the point of breaking, by a swirling, centrifugal energy. In “On the Way to the Theatre, Stuck in the Roundabout,” Powell says, “We surrender to the thrashing, thrust all at once to the left side. . . . We are imaginary people becoming real once again by the fever of this throttle[.]”

 

In this centrifuge of a book, she throws many bites of information at us simultaneously: other highlights include the narrator/poet’s lack of a belly button, fire that used to follow her “like a strange cat,” psychoanalysis, and a deep urge to connect with a God—“I love God this much (see my hands out as far as I can reach) and farther.” Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter has a frantic velocity that is thrilling and at all times under the control of the guiding intelligence of its maker.

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Mortal Words

Bukowski in a Sundress, by Kim Addonizio

Penguin, 2016

224 pages, paper, $16.00

 

Mortal Trash, by Kim Addonizio

W.W. Norton, 2016

112 pages, hardcover, $25.95

 

Dissatisfied with the label “confessional poet,” Kim Addonizio nonetheless owns up to it in the pages of Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin, 2016). “I hope you will forgive me,” she deadpans partway through this funny, lyrical, moving set of essays. “I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life.” Poetry, that “lineated memoir,” serves as but one topic here, from the satirical “How to Succeed in Po Biz” (“It is crucial not to win the major award, because then you might feel too great a sense of achievement. Be a finalist, but not a winner”) to the candid “How I Write.” “Each time, I’m lost,” she admits. “Each time, I wish I hadn’t started down this road.”

 

Other essays here similarly de-romanticize Addonizio’s writing life without diminishing its psychic and emotional rewards. She recalls a revelatory moment in childhood, being “hurled into tumultuous confusion about the true nature of reality” when she saw how the ordinary word bologna was spelled: “Clearly,” she writes, “there were deeper truths than I realized lurking beneath not only language, but existence itself”(“Best Words, Best Order”).

 

With characteristic humor, Addonizio goes on to credit another word, libido—part of a rhyme scrawled anonymously on a schoolyard wall—with inspiring her lifelong twin obsessions, eros and language. One of the sharpest essays here, “The Process,” begins as an anodyne craft talk to MFA writing students—the title itself a workshop shibboleth—but after nodding to such writing-program proprieties as “inspiration” and “revision” Addonizio throws down the gauntlet: “maybe what you really need to learn is something else, like how to write a decent English sentence.” Addonizio practices what she preaches. The writing throughout Bukowski in a Sundress is vivid and memorable, the sentences bristling or sinuous as the need arises, qualities readers of her poems have come to expect. Indeed, some passages here have the intensity as well as the verve and wit of Addonizio’s best poetry:

 

We shelled peanuts from a red plastic basket and sat together
through the late afternoon as the sun lowered itself gradually
over the docks and the boats like a shining woman lowering herself
into a very large, sparkling bathtub. Or maybe like a shooting star
on heroin. Or maybe the sun was more of a golden quaalude, slipping
down the darkening blue throat of the day.
(“Are You Insane?”)

 

As in her poems, Addonizio’s essay topics range from the quotidian to the tragic: not only flu shots, cocktails, and “How to Fall for a Younger Man,” but also emotionally disturbed family members, single parenthood, and her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Along the way we find plenty to laugh over as well as ponder, from the indignities of online dating to the smarminess of literary critics. (Her book’s title, originally a reviewer’s jibe, is a label Addonizio gleefully accepts.) Such acceptance is necessary to the confessional mode. “I confess to happiness,” she writes. “I confess to grief.” Far from mere rationalizing or hoping to atone for admitted missteps, and just as far from self-congratulation, Addonizio’s dispatches “from the writing life” make clear the emotional ballast such a life requires even as they distinguish one’s art from one’s lived experience: “I confess that a kelson of my creations is love. The poems are not the life.”

 

This kelson of love turns out to be a preoccupation in Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton, 2016), Addonizio’s latest collection of poems, published nearly simultaneously with Bukowski in a Sundress. More particularly, she is interested in the ways love has so often been poetically construed or codified: Addonizio devotes major sections of the book to revisions of, or responses to, poems by Shakespeare, John Donne, and others. Her tweaking of a famous image or line can honor the original love poem while also addressing the realities of contemporary relationships. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) looms dauntingly over the lover’s complaint in Addonizio’s poem: “I couldn’t compare this to anything / I’m not going to talk about it now.” The speaker laments the miles separating lovers, but just when we think she has achieved some aesthetic, ironic detachment with a joke about remedying the situation (“every airline fare sometimes declines”), Addonizio reminds us that—the Bard notwithstanding—poetry in fact is no match for Time: “Death still has bragging rights / this line has stopped breathing.” The omission of conventional punctuation from the poems in this section furthers the sense of dislocation, unmooring us from the Shakespearean original just far enough. We hear it echoed and renewed.

 

Mortal Trash trades in such re-workings and reappraisals of poetry’s means, its metaphors and imaginings. As in her prose “confessions,” Addonizio often satirizes her chosen art both to refresh it and to suggest its continuing relevance. “[L]et me not to the pediment of two minds / admit marriage,” a speaker quips in a tweaking of Sonnet 116, the line break here providing an extra satiric bite to the reversal of Shakespeare’s syntax.  The substitution of “pediment” for “impediment” is crucial, the barrier to love in the original reduced to what may be merely a façade of love in Addonizio’s version.

 

One of the pleasures of Addonizio’s verse is this kind of darkly comic turn, this jab of rueful insight. “Plastic” begins with a grim environmental fact that “trashes,” so to speak, the hackneyed language of love:

 

A bunch of it is floating somewhere
way out in the Pacific.
If your love is deeper than the ocean,
then the surface of your love is a swirl
of swill, toothbrushes and swizzle sticks
carried by the inevitable current…

 

Skeptical as they may be of conventional tropes, we shouldn’t overlook that these lines make for wonderful poetry themselves, the vivid image of consumer detritus washing in on the tide of those “s” sounds: surface, swirl, swill, swizzle… Likewise the lines that conclude “Elegy for Jon”:

 

I wish the sea would stop
swallowing his name, while it goes on
kissing the sand, laying
another cold wreath at my feet.

 

The swish of the sea is conveyed in those s’s, the low vowels (stop and swallow and on, goes and cold) competing with the high, bright e’s in sea and wreath and feet as if to mimic the internalized tones of grief, a shifting between dirge and keen.

 

Indeed, nearly every page in Mortal Trash yields its metaphorical and acoustic riches. In “Divine” we see “black trees / hung with sleeping bats / like ugly Christmas ornaments.” Another poem offers “the ROYGBIV” of damp bras laid out to dry. Elsewhere we watch “this slut of a river smear kisses all over / east Manhattan. “Charting the emotions, the “mortal trash” that is the heart, remains Addonizio’s primary concern throughout the volume, but this creative “kelson” of love in her work merges with her gimlet-eyed retooling of tradition at several key points. Perhaps the best example, “Here Be Dragons,” reads as both a map of love’s perils and a kind of ars poetica. “I’m not done with the compass / & I’m still puzzling over the chart,” her speaker begins, then admits to being drawn to the outlandish, even the dangerous. This holds true emotionally (sea monsters and sirens “were my lovers” and “what dragged me down”) as well as artistically, the poem concluding with the refreshing brashness we hear throughout both this collection and her book of essays:

 

I drank
in the taverns with pirates howler
monkeys my sea captain ancestors my
sozzled staggering fathers & returned
but not to any harbor only the curved
surface I sailed on

 

If “confessional,” these two books rise above both the typical memoir’s tendency to capitalize on addiction or dysfunction and much of contemporary poetry’s self-defeating rage against coherence. Bukowski in a Sundress treats with candor as well as mordant humor the travails of not only “the writing life” but life, period—this existence we nevertheless are stuck with, and which Addonizio’s poems renew our passion for, mortality in all its awkward, exasperating, despairing, and joyous “trash.”

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