Category: Aquifer

Tell Your Mother

I grew up in a flash by your mother’s side.

 

Tell her I loved her deeply, like bells sounding in the distance, like the secret I had to rush to tell her. I loved your mother at the Lutheran summer camp where we got real with our Bibles, where we rehearsed on the Palace Theater stage in the wings while we murmured our parts and pantomimed our choreography before the curtain parted. As best friends, we made space for anything to happen to us, as long as it happened to us side by side, or was documented through letters that we posted in the mail that arrived steadily like ants creating a trail.

 

Tell your mother to tell you how we cut images of what you must be going to look like from magazine pages in the 1990s, how we clipped around your round face and big eyes from baby-food advertisements, certain it was  going to be you.

 

The first I saw of you was a roiling under her skin, kicking while she filmed her belly, feet stretched far before her.

 

Tell your mother to tell you the time, in the charged balm of adolescence, when we lay in a hammock on the fourth of July, watched neighbors tilt back in lawn chairs and for some reason, while we rocked  in the weave of the hammock, while sparklers crackled, and dry as a bone but intoxicated surely by the elation at simply being alive side by side, we laughed so hard at something that rocked us nearly over and to the ground, we peed our pants and tumbled down while fireworks shot up as the floodlight clicked on as the adults chatted, and I consider that place in the grass on the Clintonville lawn that exists with our imprint on it still, the sound of the dresser drawer opening for her to replace my clothes in the room she shared with her sister. We stayed up as late as the night would have us then paraded into the morning hours, just as we paraded from the hammock, our lack of shame like capes behind us.

 

Ask your mother if she remembers learning how to solve the problem of a house fire. The firemen brought a trailer filled with theatrical smoke to the library parking lot where we filed before the door like books to be shelved. There is a way out, we learned, if you crawl under the smoke, if you test the metal doorknob with the back of your hand. We crawled through the hallway, snickering always, toward the trailer exit where, successful, we’d hop out into the clear air having passed the test, and it was this way that we jumped from our tenth birthdays to our twelfth, and now years later we are here, the fire behind us, and you due in her arms in a matter of weeks.

 

When you arrive, she will feel your warm cheek with the back of her hand. Tell your mother that when you arrive, I will step back as she lights the firework fuse of your little life, that I will do my best to be a bellows to your flames.

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A Refusal of Despair

Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano

Etruscan Press, 2019

Paperback. 122 pages. $16.00

 

Cover of Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano.

 

Although published more than a year ago, Ill Angels, with its indomitable refusal of despair, may be one of those books we need to read in the year of escalating climate crises, social, political and cultural warfare, and the resurgence of and the promise of more biological pandemics. Ill Angels does not wince in the face of the terrible cruelties that haunt the world, but it also does not cede ground in its insistence on hope.

 

On the one hand, Dante Di Stefano’s second book of poetry is a neoromantic paean to possibility, to faith in a future embodied in children and teenagers (especially his students). On the other hand, a countervailing, or perhaps complementary, tendency in Ill Angels finds Di Stefano celebrating the present and presence, represented as much by the distant indifference of inanimate objects (“Jubilate Pluto”) as the proximate insouciance of wild animals (“The Porcupine Climbing the Apple Tree”). Because Di Stefano is all too aware of the cruelty that lies beyond his classrooms—see, for example, “Verruckt,” “45th,” and “O Trampling Empire”—he insists on a love that is the equivalent of ungrounded theological faith.

 

This means that at times Di Stefano echoes the passionate declamations of a Ross Gay, a Cyrus Cassells or an even earlier John Clare. But unlike Gay, Cassells and Clare, Di Stefano’s aestheticized fervor is more metaphysical than quotidian, his tender poems to his wife and his children notwithstanding. This unadulterated sincerity has its risks: many of these poems approach a too-sweet sentimentality, and a few, unfortunately, broach the border, weaving back and forth between good taste and self-indulgent rapture.

 

Fortunately, the balance of this book finds Di Stefano celebrating his good-faith fantasies— “I know all prayer is merely the patter / of little feet coming down the stairwell / in a daydream of a future household”—with well-crafted, often playful, metaphors and similes, bolstered by over-the-top alliteration and assonance that wink at pop culture icons like Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton, to say nothing of literary warhorses like Swift, Pope, and Hopkins. Still, Di Stefano’s unrestrained gaiety in the age of what he aptly names “Stump Speech” demands a robust defense, and while a poem like “And Why This Ridiculous Happiness?” takes a giant step in that direction—there’s no gainsaying the stunning transcendence of lines like “If you speak to eighth graders as angels / and to angels as eighth graders, already / you have become fluent in paradise”—I can’t help but wonder at this excessive faith in language, in poetry, that sidesteps—not overrides—doubt. For that faith seems to depend on delayed endorsement, on retroactive belief: one hopes for love and happiness, and when it happens one believes it appears, in hindsight, as predestined.

 

Di Stefano implicitly acknowledges this slippage between faith and imagination, which is why he also knows that joy can only be truly joy if it is utopian, literally nowhere, unchained from time and space. At the same time other slippages—between past and future, between presence and absence—enable a kind of manic happiness, a man inebriated on both the past and future. Di Stefano and his beloved wander among his “memories of imagined futures,” adrift between innocence and suspended disbelief: “for now we listen / and nothing can curb the sound of this band / as it plays ‘I Ate Up the Apple Tree.’” And if such a postlapsarian moment could last, the two would always be nearing “the Mardi Gras of / an Eden we’ll be forever leaving.” The traditional secular realm of this nowhere is, of course, art. Thus, we are to “imagine the string, / attached to a red balloon painted / in oil on muslin, a gentle tether / that holds us nowhere amidst the cosmos.”

 

To be fair, Di Stefano is not always this overweening and serious. Several poems find the poet in a comic, jocular mood, however much these light flourishes veil darker political and cultural realities. These modest reprimands are best captured in punchy lines like “I think I dated the national debt / on a dare for a week in middle school; / I didn’t like the way she chewed bubble gum.” Ill Angels is peppered with these kinds of tongue-in-cheek delights, and for this reader, sweet tooth aside, they leaven the saccharine confections. As a whole, Ill Angels suggests that Di Stefano is, in the end, an Omni-American, to use Albert Murray’s phrase, a true believer in the country’s destiny which, for Murray (as well as fellow travelers like Ralph Ellison and the recently deceased Stanley Crouch), redeems its past. One implication of this story of redemption is that racial, class, and gender differences evince democratic diversity more so than they do intractable hierarchies. For example, Di Stefano’s odes to jazz greats like Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins focus less on their aesthetic achievements than their populist implications. In practice, then, the Constitution is an open-ended document: “Anyone who opens her mouth to sing / erases and rewrites the preamble.” For Di Stefano, this is hope, and hope is only love in action (to paraphrase everybody from M.L.K to Cornel West). Ill Angels thus unites religious, political, cultural, and domestic faith under one flag—hope—and, like Jesse Jackson, who once proclaimed the same during his 1988 presidential run, Di Stefano wants to keep hope alive.

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Dispersion Series

 

This digital painting series, “Dispersion,” focuses on the influence of shape on both boundary and color. In all my works I have a “central shape”—an abstract form more or less centered in the composition. I always leave it to the viewer to determine how these shapes read; I don’t dictate meaning. In “Dispersion,” these central shapes are either transparent or teeter on transparency, which infuses them with the surrounding color. This surrounding color extends to the edges. The viewer is therefore invited to participate in a two-part experience; they’re simultaneously introduced to the central shape and the surrounding color, and through that pairing, “disperse” themselves—perceptually, spiritually, intellectually—out to the edges of the image (and maybe beyond them, into infinity). Whether that happens or whether everything stops abruptly depends on the viewer’s initial response to the central shape. In 2001: A Space Odyssey there’s a monolith that emits an ear-piercing tone. These pictures should suggest something similar. Whether they are considered infinite or finite, and despite their four edges and the very specific character of their colors, the viewer should be able to hear them in the mind in a private, interpretive spiritual harmony that Kandinsky called “audible to the soul.”

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Some Mornings

Some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

they are full of tiny battles, body pains, and aches

coffee grounds spilled in the crack of tile

egg shells crushed against your spine

 

Some mornings are not meant to be hopeful

the sun’s tyrant gaze slips in through the gaps

the ceiling fan is a switchblade to the ear

alley cats scream their war cries to the world

 

Some mornings are not meant to be calm

the throbbing skull of a night, water-deprived

echoes inside itself, a reminder that the body

desires equilibrium and safety in this storm

 

No, some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

yet the day moves on, mixing with the night

the truce made since the dawn of time

where worries unwind, where thought dissolves,

 

where the world is reminded that dreams live

beyond the body and the body is a dream.

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Evil Comes in Many Ways

Listen, don’t ever talk to strangers. If a stranger approaches you, run the other way and scream at the top of your lungs. Dios, I couldn’t live with myself if you were ever kidnapped. Sorry, Manuelito, no trick-or-treating this year. But Mom, we’ll have adults chaperoning and… I don’t care who’s doing what. You shouldn’t be outside at night, in the dark where it’s easier to kidnap someone. Look at poor Jimmy Ryce, the authorities still haven’t found him. He was walking home in broad daylight when he was taken. That could have been you. You’re both the same age. Oh, stop rolling your eyes at me. Forget about going to the movies—fasten yourself on the sofa and read those Goosebumps books you like so much. I don’t wanna read, Mom. I wanna go out and play hide-n-seek. You can’t. Armando, you’re his stepfather: tell Manuelito he can’t go to no sleepover. What am I gonna tell him that he doesn’t already know? There’s been talk of attempted kidnappings, the whole county is having a panic attack. Anyway, there’s no reason to go out. Oh, no, Dios. Armando, didn’t you hear? They found Jimmy; he was raped, his body mutilated with a bush hook, the parts buried inside planters, encased in cement. A Cuban balsero did it. I heard about it on La Cubanisima radio program. Do you know what this means, Armando? Yes, I do. Remember I’m a balsero, too. Now they’ll point a finger at us hardworking immigrants. They’ll tell us to go back from where we came. That we’re all rapists and murderers. That we don’t belong here. They’ve done it before. That man has left a scorch mark on us all. This never would have happened in Cuba, communism or no communism. Mom, that’ll never happen to me. But it can happen to you, Manuelito; you can be kidnapped and killed and buried inside planters. Mom, I need to go to school. I can homeschool you. What about my friends? You don’t need friends: they’re a distraction. Armando, tell him his friends are a distraction. Let the boy go out, willya? Ah! You’re no use. Manuelito, stay home and eat all the helado you want. Go on, read your little Goosebumps book—I’m never reading Goosebumps again! Jimmy Ryce never would have died if he was a character in a Goosebumps book. Stop screaming. Now, where is that boy hiding—? Oye, Armando! Where’s my son? I can’t find him. Call the police! He’s been kidnapped. Espera, wait, we don’t know that yet. Maybe he’s with un amigo? He’s dead, buried God knows where. Breathe, mija, breathe. Let’s look for him. Miralo, here he is, hiding under the kitchen cabinet. Manuelito, coño, why are you hiding? Stop crying. All I wanna do is play with my friends. Please, let me go! But there’s evil in every corner. Go out through the front door, and it smacks you like a strong gust of wind. Sit down on the sofa, stay home. You’re safe here, you’ll always be safe with me.

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Recipes That Aren’t Mine

Joe and I make refried beans on a Saturday morning while our four-month-old sits in a bouncer and gums his hands. We follow the recipe I’ve learned by watching my mom for years: heat oil in a deep pan, fold each white corn tortilla into four triangles, and toast them in the oil until they are brown and crisp. Joe always reminds me to flip the tortillas and remove them just when they are crispy, not a second later. I’ve burned dozens of tortillas in our two years of marriage, their pockmarked surfaces forming black bubbles. It’s always because I’m in a hurry, turning the heat up too high, or because I’m trying to get something else done at the same time—fry the rice, chop the cilantro. I return to smoking oil and charred chips. I’ve learned that the secret to this meal of refried beans, as with most Mexican food, is taking your time and giving it your attention.

 

—

 

When my parents were dating, my dad told my mom he had always wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom. They were sharing a meal my mom had made for him after a long day of work.

 

“You better be careful,” Mom said. “Someone might mistake that as a proposal.”

 

Dad, the story goes, blushed. “You never know—it might have been.”

 

Returning the jest, Mom smiled casually. “Well, you never know I might have said yes.”

 

Later that evening, he proposed to her on the San Antonio River Walk. He had no ring, no plan, really. I believe it was the only spur-of-the-moment decision he ever made in his adult life—my father the planner, the deliberator, the one I’m said to take after in my notorious cynicism.

 

I try to imagine what it was that overpowered him that day he proposed to Mom: love that disregarded fear and obstacles, a love effusive and daring, the kind of emotion I’ve rarely seen my practical, serious father express in words. A midwestern farm boy, he wasn’t raised to express feelings that way. Sometimes, when I think of Dad as a young man falling in love over food, I think also of the little boy finding comfort—love, safety, and home—in his mother’s cooking. I imagine meals were often my stoic grandmother’s only means of showing tenderness to her children. To say he wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom was to say he wanted a woman to share a home with.

 

On a Sunday morning, when I was having brunch at my parents’ house, Dad told me that beans and hot sauce have replaced mashed potatoes and gravy in his diet. I laughed, because I know how much Dad loves mashed potatoes and how much Mom hates them. She didn’t grow up with them and finds their texture unappetizing. I think of how Dad—born in Chicago, raised on a farm in Iowa—never ate a breakfast taco until he met Mom, born in Guadalajara and raised in San Antonio. Now he eats chorizo, eggs, beans, and jalapenos every morning for breakfast.

 

—

 

After I remove the tortilla chips, we let the oil cool a few minutes. I learned the need for this the hard way, too, from the time I poured an entire can of beans into the bubbling oil and ended up with a sprinkle of burns across my arm. When I told Mom, she scolded me in that strange way we get mad at people we love for hurting themselves.

 

“You have to wait,” she told me, a step I hadn’t remembered ever seeing her take. I simply assumed she’d learned the art of pouring beans into scalding oil without burning herself.

 

I’ve since made it Joe’s job to pour the beans into the pan, regardless of how cooled the oil is. This morning, we use a fifty-three-ounce can of Bush’s Pinto Beans, with their liquid. Joe and I joke that we have a problem, making too much for only two people.

 

“It was the smallest can I could find,” I say, but Joe is happy we’ll have leftovers for tacos later in the week.

 

—

 

Mom has used Bush’s for as long as I can remember, though she talks of a time she used to wash and boil her own beans.

 

“It takes too long,” she says now, “and Bush’s taste just as good.” On the rare occasions she makes frijoles borrachos, I’ve seen just how long it takes to prepare beans from scratch. She lays them out on a towel, their speckly, wiggly forms smooth as she runs her fingers over each one, feeling for bumps and sprouts. She throws out the misshapen ones, rearranges the remaining ones. Then she lets the beans soak in a cold-water bath overnight before boiling them until they’re soft, like butter, then adds tomatoes, cilantro, bacon, and a bottle of Corona beer to the broth. I asked her once if the bumpy beans are bad to eat.

 

“No,” she said. “I just want the pretty ones.”

 

She told me once that her dad, my Tito, used to carry out this bean ritual weekly, often recruiting her from backyard play or homework to help. She says there was always a pot of beans on the stove in her childhood home. Her family ate beans and rice almost every day.

 

“We were poor,” Mom says, which is a statement I realize I can’t understand, not the way she does. Beans and rice have never been the main dish at a family dinner I can remember. My grandparents both owned their own businesses, trades brought over from Mexico. My Tito was, and is, a shoe repairman; my Tita, a seamstress and a sculptor. But with five children, a language barrier, and dying trades, there were times when their hard work barely paid the bills. If they came to this country with the usual hopes of immigrants, their grandchildren even more than their children are the ones who have seen those hopes to fruition.

 

I think of the disparity between their lives and mine, of how much of who I am I’ve inherited from them and the world they came from. Some of those things are simple: the shape of my eyes, my ability to roll my “r’s,” my love for their simple, delicious food. Some of those things are more complex, specific to Mom’s family: a history of brokenness, abuse, and betrayal; a propensity for the dramatic, for storytelling. And yet, though I claim my Latina heritage, I only really know that world through Mom’s stories and recipes.

 

—

 

As Joe fries onions and corn tortillas for migas, another dish I’ve learned from Mom, I wait for the beans to heat back up. I watch as they turn frothy and bubbling, then take a potato masher and smash them into their broth. Once, Joe tried to mash them before they started to boil, and the masher made awkward chunks of the still too-hard beans. We learned that you have to wait until they’re soft, so that when you’re done smashing, the beans look almost like gravy.

 

I heat flour tortillas as I wait for the beans to cook. Joe laughs when I insist that the first tortilla, hot off the pan, go to testing the beans. It’s Mom’s tradition: standing in front of the hot stove, tortillas on a cast iron skillet, she’d rip the edge of one—her fingers moving quickly—and scoop the beans in their broth and hand it to me to taste. If it was too hot in my mouth, we knew they were ready. I do the same for Joe now, and he fits the whole piece of tortilla in his mouth in one bite.

 

“So good,” he says, and I smile, because he never ate refried beans for breakfast until he met me.

 

—

 

Mom tells me that, when I was born, she and Dad couldn’t afford to take pictures of me. With two children and Dad in grad school, film was an expense they couldn’t spare. Meanwhile, I scroll through the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken of my son on my iPhone, every snap as effortless and cheap as a can of beans.

 

I don’t remember those seasons of hardship, the years of hand-me-downs and one family car, when dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken counted as my parents’ date night. But I know their toll. I remember, even when we could afford new cars and a custom-built home, the nights when family dinners were disrupted by arguments so bitter they turned the food cold on our plates. Dad’s anger that Mom couldn’t keep to a budget. The stress of a job that kept him away on nights and weekends. The time his anger was so violent that he sent his fist into the drywall, and my brothers and I cried as a pot of Mexican rice sat untouched on the kitchen table. The time I asked Mom why they didn’t think their fighting hurt my brothers and me. If only I knew then how much she already knew that it did.

 

Years later, at my wedding, Dad whispered to me, “I pray Joseph is a better husband to you than I’ve been to your mom.” He was crying, that rare expressiveness surfacing, a vulnerability that told me that he knew, too, that my brothers and I felt the weight of his spousal mistakes, that we would carry them into our own marriages and families.

 

—

 

Joe asks if I want anything else with breakfast, and I add a handful of strawberries to the table of fried, Mexican food.

 

“Are you really going to eat those?” he asks, not because there’s anything wrong with the strawberries, but because I’m notorious for taking out strawberries and not eating them, leaving them to turn crusty and brown in a ceramic bowl all day.

 

“Yes,” I say, which will become a lie. The strawberries are there to make me feel healthy, though I will feel guilty later when I throw them away. Joe, who was not raised to calculate the cost of every item of wasted food, accepts my habit with patience.

 

Some weeks later, when he leaves a pot roast out overnight, forgetting to cover it and put it in the fridge, I’m the one who can’t contain her anger, refusing to speak to him for half the day. Because the roast was expensive, time consuming, the time and the money we don’t have now with a baby. It’s only the sight of him bouncing our son, making him laugh, that reminds me of all the times I wished my parents had weighed their marriage against their anger. A pot roast is pretty light in the scale.

 

—

 

When Mom got breast cancer six years ago, Dad blamed it on food, on the milk from cows treated with hormones, on the grill her parents didn’t scrape clean of charcoal carcinogens. He began to research with all the zeal of the academic he had been before three kids. Diet, he decided, was at the heart of health. He told Mom to buy organic, unprocessed food. He decided to turn the hobby farm he’d had since we were kids into a business, even though raising pigs and cows and chickens is exhausting in any climate, but especially in the heat of Texas summers.

 

Now, he sells farm-raised beef, pastured pork, and free-range eggs in an effort to teach people about sustainable farming and healthy living. But I know the deeper reason, even if he won’t say it, even if his fear for Mom turns into scolding when she doesn’t drink bone broth or cook with the right oils. I know there is love, duty, vigilance, even in his anger.

 

When I was pregnant, he told me I shouldn’t eat corn flakes because they might be tainted with Roundup. I started crying. Hormones aside, my tears were the realization of how deep his fear went. Food has become protection from cancer, from diseases without known cause. Food is how he can protect his family. When he and Mom tell us to read ingredients, to make baby food from scratch, Joe and I complain that they’re being paranoid. We remind them that we can’t afford to buy all organic food. But we also know that food has become their shelter against things beyond their control. We can’t blame them for wanting to build it over us.

 

—

 

Joe and I eat the entire pan of migas and nearly half of the beans; we serve them with a side of Herdez green salsa. I like to remind Joe that I know something about Mexican cuisine, especially when we go to his family’s house for dinners and they serve things like pre-packaged guacamole and cold tortillas. But there is always the part of me that feels like an imposter, like I’m trying to claim something that barely is mine. I use canned beans and store-bought tortillas. If Mom does the same, it’s because she’s trying to save time, and not because she doesn’t know how to make them from scratch. Still, there are dishes she won’t make because she says my Tito makes them better.

 

“Plus, they take way too long,” she says, and I can’t tell if that’s the real reason or the excuse for why I’ve never had her tamales or her menudo. I’ve never made salsa, or chile relleno, or mole from her recipes for the same reasons, and because of the part of me that feels those recipes aren’t mine to make. It is the same feeling that washes over me when I hear someone speaking in Spanish, those sounds and syllables that echoed through my childhood when Mom spoke over the phone to her parents or when she drilled me on conjugation and tense, lessons I can barely recall. I can’t speak Spanish, and yet its cadence feels like home. Like a home I’ve inherited, but I can’t find the key.

 

When people ask me why I can’t speak Spanish, I usually blame my parents: Mom didn’t speak it often enough at home because Dad couldn’t understand it. But if I’m honest, I know that I was the one who stopped practicing, who was too embarrassed by an accent that didn’t flow as smoothly as my mother’s. When it comes to my Mexican heritage, is it only half-known because Mom didn’t share enough with me, or because I am too afraid to enter the discomfort of my unknowing?

 

—

 

After our son was born, Mom drove the five hours to visit us twice over three weeks. She brought meat from Dad’s freezers and filled ours with meals from my childhood. Enchiladas, taco meat, Mexican rice. She spent all day cooking or holding our son while we napped or took short walks, tried to regain a semblance of normalcy in those first, volatile weeks.

 

I don’t remember very much from those sleep-deprived days, except for this feeling that everything was on the verge of breaking. My body. This tiny, hungry person who needed me constantly. Everything about life that Joe and I knew before he came. Everyone talks about the joy of newborns. Few talk about the fear—of failing, of death—that comes with them.

 

But when Mom was there, I felt my fears recede, a sense of reassurance in her cooking and her smile. The sense that the walls of our little apartment would hold up through all the sleepless nights and the strange, repetitive days filled with nothing and everything. Wrestling squirming legs into infant diapers, staring at the rise and fall of his chest as though all our lungs were encased by that tiny rib cage. And even when Mom left and we sat at our table with the reheated food she’d made for us, there was a wholeness created by a family dinner, a comfort in tastes we knew.

 

—

 

As we finish breakfast, our son begins to fuss, so Joe picks him up and sits him on his lap, lets him sit at the table and look at the empty plates and thickening beans.

 

“In a few months, you can try these,” I tell him as I scrape the spoon across the pan, because I know that beans were among my own first tries at solid foods. I wonder to myself if he’ll like them, because I know that both of my brothers aren’t fans of the dish. I wonder if doctors recommend feeding babies beans, or if it’s one of those things my parents did that experts now swear have a hundred health risks, like giving your baby a stuffed animal to sleep with or using baby sunblock. I decide I’ll follow Mom’s example with this one. Our son sticks his tongue out when he smiles, and I notice again that his eyes are Joe’s, but his nose is like mine.

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The Meaning of Home

Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri

Dzanc Books, 2019

Paperback, 197 pages, $17.00

 

Cover of Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri.

 

Nino Cipri’s debut story collection is a wonderful exploration of the meaning of home, and what it means when we find it, if we ever do. Throughout each of these stories, characters are asked to relate to a new and changing reality, whether that be finding new life after divorce or rumbling with a mother’s rejection after telling her about being transgender. Cipri, a queer and trans/non-binary writer, explores many LGBTQ+ narratives through wonderful, often magical, speculative stories. Each story ponders on what family and reality look like, especially when others have turned their back on you.

 

The speculative aspects of this collection are done so well that it doesn’t matter how weird the plot might become, the reader is ready to roll with the surreality. In “Let Down, Set Free,” Melissa finds a floating tree on her neighbor’s yard and rides it into her future. In “A Silly Love Story,” Jeremy has a nectarine-loving poltergeist in his closet. In “Presque Vu,” Clay is haunted by keys magically appearing in his throat. These elements, wonderfully executed, allow the narrative to speak on a deeper-than-just-weird level. The reader physically experiences Melissa being uprooted and lifted off to another reality. Jeremy learns about his love-interest only after they bond over the poltergeist. Clay, not knowing what the keys physically unlock, has to wait for the other haunts to find out his future. Each of these characters has a tangible element to help ground the narrative, even if all the trees aren’t similarly rooted.

 

Other stories find their strength in form. In “Which Super Little Dead Girl ™ Are You?” the reader takes a Buzzfeed style quiz to find out which murdered girl they are. Through this imaginative form, the story contemplates what it would be like to be one of these little dead girls—how you’d live on after death, how you’d stay the same age, how you’d be different. In this fun yet harrowing story, Cipri creates a superhero-like adventure for the strong, spunky, and doomed girls who met their end too soon.

 

“Dead Air” is another story with experimentation in form. The entire story is told through a translation of recorded material, which makes the story ninety-nine percent dialogue. Nita, the person with a recorder, crafts an art project by recording interviews with her lovers. Because of the form, we fall in love with Maddie along with Nita, and we feel just as confused when trying to understand Maddie’s past in her small hometown. The mystery that holds people in the town, that eventually kills them, is still hidden from Nita and the reader, but we believe Maddie when she says we have to get out before it’s too late.

 

The heartbreaking “The Shape of My Name” is a hallmark example of this collection’s theme of changing reality. The narrator, a transgender person, wrestles with their mother’s rejection after their coming out. This story, like the others, is speculative in nature. The family has the ability to time travel, though that travel is limited to the years 1905 to 2321. This story effectively bends the view of reality within the narrator. They’ve lived in multiple timelines, gone back in time to see their mother, to come out to her while she was still young. The most heartbreaking moment of the story happens when Heron, as the narrator has chosen to be called, shows up to their mother’s stoop and sees their younger self playing in the background. The mother questions having a son, and they tell her she already has one. She pushes her child away, so the child can’t see their future self, and closes the door on Heron. “The Shape of My Name” gives us a character who has not only lost their mother because of her rejection but has also lost her to time.

 

Whereas “The Shape of My Name” is about a family torn apart, “Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff” focuses on a family mending. This final story of the collection, the pivotal story, follows three ex-colleagues and ex-friends—Damian, Lin, and Ray—as they work on a documentary about their discovery of the ossicarminis, an extinct weasel-wolverine animal that had supposed sentience. This story plays with form by being in all three points of view and by having section breaks that are sound bites from their interviews with the documentary crew. These sections allow each character to have a voice and a perspective throughout this narrative. When you reach the end, there’s never a question about what each character thought or what they felt in the moment.

 

The close proximity of the documentary allows Damian, Lin, and Ray to hash out their past to help rebuild their future. Damian, who wrote a book on the ossicarminis, finds his friends resent him for not including them and taking all of the money for himself. Lin, a PhD candidate, has the bones of the creature in her apartment while writing her dissertation and is caught not protecting them the way she should. Ray questions the dig and wonders about the ethics of not only monetizing the destruction of a type of sentient being, but also removing them from their final resting place. The dig has previously torn apart the group’s work relationship, as well as their friendship, because of their difference in perspective on the same event. This story showcases the blending of personal and professional relationships and how even ones that have been cut off for years can be mended with a little digging. When we see this trio drive off happily into the distance, we hope that the other characters in this collection can someday do the same.

 

Homesick successfully confronts changing (and challenging) realities and gives hope that no matter what today looks like, there’s always hope that tomorrow will be better, and that there’s always a place for you out there—you just have to find it.

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The Little Engine: Four Takes

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Echolocation & Proof

Echolocation

I begin with near-silence,

the droning refrigerator,

a dog barking far off.

You’ve just fallen asleep

as morning splinters

through the blinds.

He kicks off his boots,

braces himself on the dresser,

pulls at the leg of his jeans.

Something wakes you—

a knocked over jar of change,

a picture frame falling flat.

You must miss the feeling

of waking in the night

knowing exactly where

you are, hearing only

your brothers’ muffled voices

through the wall. Years later,

nights when my friends and I

stay up until dawn,

you’ll wake this way again

to laughter resonating

down the hall. One night,

to meet our girlfriends,

J. T. and I will sneak

to Arroyo Vista Park.

You’ll wedge a drumstick

in the window-track and wait

for our knock at the door.

After sending J. T. home,

you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know

somethin’ aint right. Because

this all feels close enough

to the truth, and because I have

no evidence I was made

the usual way—not even a picture

of you and my father together—

I’ve made this:

In splinters of

morning, you pull me from

his open mouth while he sleeps,

piece me together from handfuls

of his running breath, the small

sound of whitewater.

 

Proof

The fact is I was made

from what Whitman called

“father-stuff,” from a current

of you and from being held.

This—the raw physiology of it—

may explain why most fathers

think only of pushing their sons

into the world and most mothers

only of keeping them from it.

But the facts only tell us

half of every story, and never

the half we need. I have

a photograph taken just weeks

after I was born. I was

sleeping on your bare chest.

You were slouched in an armchair

with your fingers laced like rivulets

under my feet. These are facts—

even if you forgot, and even if all

I remember from being with you

before Arizona is the smell of

shop grease and dipping tobacco,

you once held me the way

a riverbed wants to hold a river.

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Code Blue Theater

You were the one whiteboy who came over to visit a house where usually there were only blackfolk. You were friends with Kevin—my boyfriend—his former co-worker at the nursing home. You extended your hand not to give me dap, or to pull me into a bro hug, or even to change the shape of your hand for a fist bump, but to clasp my palm, as in a transaction.

 

You didn’t say wassup or what it do, but nice to meet you.

 

Your name was Riley, and you were tall with dirty blond hair, blue eyes, a chipped tooth, and some might say you were cute.

 

You drank Natural Light, smoked cigarettes, and weed if it was passed your way.

 

You were addicted to opioids, but you’d been trying to quit, especially after your girlfriend quit you; she was a CNA where you and Kevin worked, but after dating you a while and you wouldn’t let the pills go, she let you go. You left the nursing home not long after that.

 

One day, three years later, when I was home on spring break from graduate school in Iowa City, I watched you overdose.

 

It happened on a Friday afternoon, when you were supposed to be cutting the backyard, even though the sky was gray and steadily darkening with threats of a rainstorm.

 

I had plans to spend the day with Kevin on the couch binge-watching Netflix, but company kept arriving.

 

Benita was the first, announcing herself popping her Double Bubble gum.

 

You came in right after her, pulling a lawnmower behind you like a wagon, holding to the handle with one hand while jostling a can of Natural Light in the other. By the time you made it to the dining room—where Benita and I were sitting—you’d left a trail of beer that foamed on the hardwood floor.

 

You better clean that shit up before Kevin sees it, Benita said.

 

You looked back at the spillage and mouthed fuck.

 

Get the mop dude, she said when you stood there gaping at the mess you’d made. The way she exaggerated the u made it seem as if what she’d really said was: get the mop you dumb, triflin ass, muthafucka. Benita was harsh and, if you didn’t know it already, you got on her nerves. Why didn’t he just take the lawnmower around the side of the house? she said to me after you’d gone into the kitchen. But you didn’t go for a mop, you went for paper towels, which we could hear you tearing off in sheets. The mop, dude, get the mop, she yelled. You wasting paper towels.

 

You were shrug-shouldered with humiliation when you returned with a mop to clean up the mess. Did you wet it? You gotta wet it, Benita said and watched you slink off to the kitchen again.

 

At least you had the floor cleaned by the time Kevin came back inside.

 

You and I would often joke about Kevin’s idea of what constituted clean and orderly—how he liked his place mats arranged on the dining room table with the corners touching so the center of the table was a framed rectangle; how his condiment bottles on the countertop must be in rows by height with labels facing out; how the chairs should be tucked beneath the table when not in use so they weren’t in people’s way when they moved around the room.

 

Kevin didn’t comment on the wet streaks slowly fading away. He’d decided to put some meat on the grill and went into the spare bedroom where he kept a bag of charcoal in the closet and dragged it through the kitchen to take outdoors. I asked him if it might rain, which was my way of saying don’t cook out because it might rain. Kevin answered by asking me to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. I did not season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts.

 

Terry was the last to show up, talking on his cell phone. I told Kevin to ask him to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. Hearing his name, Terry waved me off then secluded himself in the living room, where blackout curtains created a dark alcove for him to hide in, but not to muffle the conversation he was having with his soon-to-be ex-wife, whom he’d recently begun to refer to as his baby mama.

 

I heard him pop the tab on a tall boy of Bud Ice (the only beer he and Kevin drank) and loudly slurp the spillover. Kevin had told me several times during our nightly, long-distance phone calls how Terry regretted that his marriage was breaking up and he didn’t care anymore that his wife had gotten pregnant with another man’s child. Of course, the fact that he, too, might father a child with another woman may have given him this perspective; he might have rationalized their mutual infidelities as a mutual cancelling out of wrongs: they’d both fucked up so couldn’t they just get past the drama to be parents to the one child they’d created together? He’d be by to pick her up later, I heard him say, and then his voice lowered in pitch, as if he’d cupped a hand around the mouthpiece. Come on, he said, crooning to her like an ’80s balladeer in what he could never deny wasn’t an attempt to please, baby, let me hit that, he said.

 

You’d taken the lawnmower to the backyard and returned to the dining room with another 12 oz. can of Natural Light. You popped the tab and set the can on the table beside Benita. Without taking a sip, you lingered briefly in the middle of the room and mumbled to yourself, or to Benita or to me, neither of us could tell, then took off again. You returned with a leaf blower, a gas can, which you carried beneath one arm, and another Natural Light. You opened it and placed it this time on the mantel and took the leaf blower and gas can to the backyard. Never once did you sip from either beer.

 

Benita looked up from a game she’d been playing on her cell phone to watch you leave the room and come back. Her hair, slicked down with grease, was pulled tight into a ponytail that lashed the air each time she whipped her head to follow you back and forth, a snarl stiffening her upper lip like a pinched fold of dough. Her expressiveness portrayed a three-dimensional annoyance that reminded me of the look on people’s faces after they’d made a petty comment about some petty thing.

 

When she heard Kevin in the kitchen, she went to him to ask what was wrong with you.

 

Kevin told her you were on one, entering the dining room seasoning a plate of boneless chicken breasts. He set the plate on the table to light a Black & Mild, then continued to lightly dust the meat with seasonings.

 

Benita asked what you were on.

 

Through an exhale of smoke, Kevin told her he didn’t know. Probably roxys, he said, two fifteens. He clenched the tip of the plastic filter between his teeth, his right eye cinched tight to avoid the smoke, and let the tip rest in the corner of his mouth.

 

Two fifteens my ass, Benita said.

 

As if on cue, you walked in tilting a can of Natural Light. You’d forgotten the other open, untouched cans still in their places on the table, the mantel. You tried to take a sip but missed your mouth when you stumbled, lifting your foot too high, as if you were prepared to step up and had come down thinking a landing was closer than it was, so gravity pulled you forward, which threw you off balance. You pretended to play it off with a bit of footwork you said you’d learned from watching Childish Gambino.

 

You need to sitdown, dude, Kevin said, laughing.

 

You fucked up, ain’t you? Benita said simultaneously.

 

I’m awright, you said, and as if to prove this you shook your arms and legs vigorously in the air. You seemed agitated. Your eyes were wet and tired, the rim of your lower lids puffy, pink like an albino rabbit’s eyes. Your eyes wanted sleep, but your body was fueled, apparently, by thirty milligrams of pills to keep you sleepless. When you disappeared outside again, Benita told Kevin that she heard that you crushed your pills. Kevin said yes, you did, and that you snorted the powder. Benita shook her head, her mouth pursed. She didn’t snort her pills, nor anything else for that matter. Unlike you, she took pills because she had sickle cell anemia. Yes, sometimes, she’d said many time before, when her sickle cell flared up and she could barely get out of bed, she had to call around to see if she could buy extra pills; she needed always to be in constant supply of pills to keep the symptoms of her sickle cell in check.

 

I gotta get this meat on the grill, Kevin said and grabbed the plate of boneless chicken breasts and headed outside. Terry came in just then and the two of them stopped just short of colliding. My bad, Terry said. He had been in the backyard and came to tell us you just fuckin threw up in the trash can.

 

Puttin shit up your nose. That’s what happens, Benita said.

 

Terry said you were outside sweaty and red in the face.

 

Would you put shit up your nose? Benita asked me.

 

Nah, I said, to imply hell no! as if I’d never dared to do something like that, ever, not ever had I smoked crack cocaine, nor did I once, when so fucked up, attempt to snort through the lit end of a cigarette. Obviously, Benita had forgotten I’d told her about my past drug use, about those very incidences. I searched her face for the recognition that told me she remembered, but her own eyes were glazed over with what could be either the weariness of being fed up with other people’s shit or this was the settling in of her own high. She tapped a cigarette out of her pack and proceeded to strike a series of sparks with her lighter. Your lighter’s out of fluid, Benita, I told her, but she kept trying.

 

Who knows why people do what they do, she said, her head beginning to loll.

 

When I finally went outside, the coals were lit and the grill was smoking. Kevin paced nervously as the skirt of his black bib apron fluttered in the slight breeze, clapping a pair of tongs together like pincers in one hand and taking frequent swigs from his beer with the other. Terry leaned against one of the posts on the small porch, giving me the side-eye when he saw me, shaking his head. It’s not looking too good, he said, nodding toward something past me. I followed his gaze to where you sat in a patio chair a few feet away from the grill. I hadn’t noticed you, but probably because I wasn’t expecting to see you sitting with your legs shoulder-width apart, each of your arms resting along the arms of the chair, your head hanging so your chin barely touched your chest, your mouth languishing partly open with drool stretching a silvery strand down into your lap.

 

Kevin and Terry alternated turns calling your name. Kevin tilted up your head, only for it to fall forward with a slight bob; he said you needed milk. Terry directed our attention to the dog, Kevin’s pit bull, who circled you in your chair then stopped to lie down. She whined, half-barked, then she was up again, letting loose a high-pitched squeal; she pawed at the dirt and grass, digging with her nails and sending a fretwork of dust into the air that formed a cloud around you.

 

Kevin came back without any milk but with Benita smoking her cigarette. Oh gawd, she said, her eyes now wide open when she saw you. She said she had to leave because you were fucked up. You were a whiteboy, she said, and if one of us had to call 911, she didn’t want any part in what happened when they got there.

 

I didn’t pay Benita any attention. I watched you, wondering how many sad clowns were packed inside that tiny car.

 

Kevin, too, paid Benita no mind because he thought you were just passing out, which was good, he said, because you needed to sleep it off.

 

I wasn’t so sure. I went inside.

 

I heard Benita’s thick-heeled boots not soon after, clomping into the dining room where I’d distracted myself on the computer.

 

Benita stuttered directions for me to look up on the internet the signs of an overdose. I did and listed a few symptoms to her: dilated pupils, severe difficulty or shallow breathing, gurgling sounds, blue lips or fingers, nausea or vomiting, unresponsiveness … a person didn’t need to exhibit all the symptoms to indicate an overdose. Benita rushed outside, yelling to Kevin and Terry: vomiting, something about the pupils, gurgling in the throat, breathing with blue lips …

 

It had been roughly thirty minutes since you unloaded your car with all the tools you needed to cut Kevin’s backyard, since you danced your way out of a stumble and Kevin and I laughed, since you popped open three cans of beer, two of which you abandoned untouched, and then you suddenly began vomiting in the garbage can and were placed in that chair. But, if you had done so, how long had it been since you snorted those pills?

 

Benita rushed back through the house gathering her purse and cellphone off the table, and waved goodbye. See ya. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. I’m going to get my nails done.

 

I set the laptop aside, feeling uneasy. I needed to see for myself how bad it had gotten for Benita to leave the way she did.

 

I felt as if I were about to open a door into a past that often haunted me, entering a room to lift a sheet covering a body that lay cold on a slab. Was it me?

 

I became a visitor in a place I hadn’t been to in a while. Even though I recognized those familiar surroundings, I felt like a stranger, and it was possible that you, too, felt like a stranger inside your own body.

 

I’m coming, I’m coming was the reluctant way I walked through the rooms to get outdoors.

 

I heard music that wasn’t playing before as I approached the backyard, smelled mesquite smoke mixed with charred chicken flesh and seasonings that didn’t waft on the subtle breeze before, and, through the window, I saw the opaque clouds billowing from the grill that before was a cloud of dust the dog had kicked up, but this new cloud blocked you from my view.

 

This was the moment I pretended that I didn’t wait too long to follow my intuition; that I didn’t need to suspect a bad situation even when your slack-jawed mouth drooled with so much silvery, silken strands of spit; that you weren’t propped up like a mannequin to model normalcy; that you weren’t trying to convince us that you were only having a bad trip (but nothing you couldn’t shake off); that this was you just playing possum.

 

Kevin used his cell phone to record you while he and Terry kept calling your name. But you couldn’t answer them.

 

Your arms had gone limp, no longer resting on the chair; your hands were likewise motionless between your thighs. You breathed, but your breathing was labored, shallow gasps as if the air inside was trapped so deep inside your chest that when it reached my ears it was the echo of your efforts to breathe that I heard, your lungs taking in breath but sending back the faint noise of rattling cans.

 

You were in tremors as if from shocks of low-voltage electricity, as if your body was a city of dimming lights from a series of rolling brownouts.

 

You were shutting down.

 

Your face was blue with the encroachment of more blue—your lips blue, your cheeks besieged with blue, an armada of blue storming toward the north theater of your face, capillaries carrying the blue until the totality of your face would be subsumed by blue, and Terry and Kevin acted as if they didn’t know whether to continue to barbeque, to wait and see what happened, or to do as I said and fucking call 911.

 

I couldn’t stop looking at you. I wouldn’t blink; if I didn’t blink, you’d be fine; you’d be fine because I was fine; because I was proof that rock bottom didn’t need to mean death.

 

I’d come down off the pipe once and struggled through the night shivering, and no amount of blanketing would qualm, and nothing could distract me from believing that as I lay in a bed demonized by crack cocaine, I felt elsewhere the heels of so many people walking back and forth across the future site of my grave.

 

I had to believe that Terry didn’t want to call 911 because he was a felon who didn’t want cops swarming with their detective work.

 

Kevin was afraid that he might be wrong about you having a bad trip, and that you were dying while he drank beer, recording you while he made sure the boneless chicken breasts were neither overcooked nor raw in the middle. He was afraid, the way we all were, that this wan’t the movies where the blue in your face was special effects makeup and magic.

 

We heard sirens coming from of St. Mary’s Hospital, a few blocks away. Within minutes, three paramedics in a fire truck climbed out and, together, walked casually to the backyard.

 

Back here? one said, pointing.

 

Yes, back here, I said, swinging my arm like a propeller to rush them.

 

The first paramedic knelt beside you, took his fist and rubbed circles over your heart. The second asked us your name. When we told him, he asked you if you could hear him. What’d you take today? he asked. Your response carried the same low gurgling you’d been making since Kevin dialed 911. Shaking his head, the paramedic repeated the question.

 

The third paramedic started an IV and gave your vitals to the second, who wrote them down on his gloved hand. The glove was blue, and I worried the ink wouldn’t show. I came closer when the first paramedic shone his tiny flashlight into your eyes to check your pupils. They were small as pinpoints. The whites of your eyes waxy.

 

Two cops arrived and immediately began gathering details. The first cop took information from one of the paramedics, while the second spoke with Kevin. He told the cop that you admitted taking two fifteens of roxys, but Kevin believed you took more than that, or you took something else with it. The first paramedic stopped rubbing your chest to interrupt their conversation. He agreed with Kevin, so the cop asked if you were ever in the house. First, Kevin said no, then he backtracked, and said instead that you had been unloading the lawnmower from your truck and started to bring it through the house before he stopped you and asked that you bring the lawnmower around the house to the backyard. I worried he was implicating himself too much because he was so desperate for you not to be in the house in his version of events. He didn’t want to give the cops probable cause to search the house.

 

Terry had been quiet, shrinking back, his eyes suspiciously watching the cops. He saw me looking for him and when our eyes locked, he mouthed that’s the cop. It took him a few times mouthing and gesturing at the cop for me to understand what he said, but then I understood. Terry had been in a minor car accident just around the corner from Kevin’s house a few weeks earlier. But Terry didn’t have a driver’s license. The cop wrote him a ticket and that seemed to be the end of it. But seeing him now, at the house, was too much of a coincidence. It incited a nervous fear within Terry that showed on his face.

 

I walked over to tell Terry I didn’t think the cop recognized him. He was too busy explaining to Kevin how people would sometimes ask to use the bathroom so they could take drugs. That’s why he wanted to know if you were in the house. He needed a timeline of events. But everyone’s conversations were put on hold when suddenly you leaned forward so abruptly in your chair you nearly fell out of it. Two of the paramedics had to catch you and press you back into the chair. Easy, easy Riley, they said.

 

You shook your head, looked around to familiarize yourself, and as if none of this ever happened, responding to a barrage of questions, you verified your name, spelled your last name that had earlier given Kevin trouble; you gave your address, and, finally, because you were cold you asked for a blanket.

 

In a minute, a paramedic said.

 

Curiously, though, no one asked you what you’d taken. They loaded you onto a gurney with a blue blanket. You wrapped it around yourself, including your head. Your muffled voice asked what hospital they were taking you to.

 

It’s wherever you want to go, a paramedic said.

 

You said St. Mary’s since it was closest to your house.

 

As they wheeled you away, Kevin closed the lid on the grill to suffocate the still red-hot coals. I took the chair you sat in and stacked it with the others. A smear of blood on the armrest had to be wiped away. Terry wanted to leave but was afraid to get in his car and drive home.  Across the street, where you’d parked your car, the two original police officers were joined by two more squad cars and a K-9 unit. It had grown dark by then. Flashlights lit the interior of your car while a German shepherd was taken by the leash to sniff around and eventually inside your vehicle. They had your car keys, I’d forgotten. After you were taken away, Kevin found them, which must have fallen from your pocket at some point, hidden in the high grass. One of the police officers asked to take them.

 

You came back to the house a few hours later. Kevin and I were playing a game of spades with some friends—the JJs, Jay and Jalisa—who arrived shortly after the cops had put away their flashlights and left. Kevin showed them the video he’d taken of you earlier in the chair. Jalisa had been rolling a blunt and Jay smoking a cigarette, and both of them watched with their mouths agape at the blue, drooling face gurgling ceaselessly before the camera.

 

As they watched the video, I replayed that sudden intake of breath that brought you back to seemingly full vitality. Narcan, I was told, was what the paramedic administered through the IV. They said it took about two minutes to revive you. Two more minutes without it, you might have been dead.

 

You had come back to ask Kevin to let you keep your lawn equipment in his backyard, to tell him privately that you’d taken heroin earlier that day, and to thank him for calling 911. Kevin must have told you I was the one who told him to. You said thank you, Darius, on your way out, avoiding my eyes, though you briefly squeezed my shoulder. Kevin walked you to the door and returned quickly to the table to deal the cards for another hand. We beat the JJs that night, but probably because they’d gotten too high smoking the blunt to pay attention.

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The Voices of Women

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade

Noctuary Press, 2019

Paperback, 270 pp., $16.00

 

Cover of The Unrhymables by Julie Marie Wade and Denise Duhamel.

 

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose brings together the voices of poets Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade whose harmonizing take the reader across a spectrum of topics—marriage, divorce, body image, motherhood, queerness, and womanhood.  Duhamel and Wade’s use of the lyric essay format, propelling the reader by associative leaps and thematic recurrence rather than causal narratives, allows them to zoom in on individual words and concepts in order to peel back their associations layer by layer.  This elasticity of the conversation between the two women pulls the reader into the conversation with them in a unique way.  The authors are writing from different perspectives, Duhamel almost a generation apart in age from Wade, yet their assemblage of experience blends in such a way that it becomes a kind of Everywoman experience. The sisterhood cadence throughout is undeniable and takes us places we might not expect to go.  One can imagine sitting on a sofa, late into the night, listening to an intimate conversation with two women as they compare their lives’ experiences and explore the challenges of womanhood from a generational standpoint—this is the intrinsic quality of The Unrhymables.

 

The book is constructed with thirteen thematically linked essays created by micro-memoirs, some of which are sub-titled, from both Duhamel and Wade, moving the conversation back and forth in a fluid motion within each essay. The most challenging aspect for the reader, but evidence of a discernible synergy between the two authors, is the fact that their voices are indistinguishable at times—only separated by inferences to their sexual orientation, coming of age experiences, and their childhood—which are filled with societal and cultural references that invariably reveal the particular author. In the essay “Pink,” Wade learns about the Nazi downward facing “pink triangle” used to identify homosexual Jews, and Duhamel responds with her experiences in New York City during the AIDS crisis and how the Silence=Death slogan’s logo “turned that pink triangle right-side-up.”  Both authors experience the same kind of emotions, only years apart in different contexts.  This kind of navigational point occurs frequently throughout the prose and directs the conversations.  Should the reader not know some of the more intimate details of the authors’ lives, nor have read other works by Duhamel and Wade, one could conceivably read the text without knowing exactly which one is speaking.

 

However, the hybrid nature of this collection is what takes The Unrhymables to new heights. From writing about colors—“White,” “Pink,” “Red,” “Blue,” “Green,” and “Black”—and exploring their personal, historical, and cultural associations, to constructing a Scrabble edition including tandem essays “N1E1A 1R1”  and  “E1 R1 A1 S1,”  both of which deal with homosexual acceptance in society, Duhamel and Wade take every opportunity to speak through other poets and writers or mention their work.  In fact, the book has no less than 188 references.  In an especially powerful and poignant moment, Wade recites Orlando poet Stephen Mills’s poem “The History of Blood” to weave into the narrative her fears about gay violence, “Another gay boy got bashed in Miami this week, nearly beaten / to death on his way home from a club. The man’s fist / smashed the boy’s glittered face, like my glittered face dancing / at the gay bar every weekend.”

 

The essay “S1A1L1T1” sings with Wade’s inattentional-blindness, referencing the poet Elizabeth Bishop without explanation to the audience. The reference is subtle to an average reader—probably missed by most—but familiar to poetry readers. Wade points out in the opening lines of the essay, “If this were chess, I’d choose the bishop and call her Elizabeth. I’d praise her for her smooth slants, her incomparable zigs and zags—never straightforward, never straight back. ‘Elizabeth is a queen’s name’ someone would say. Only poets would understand.”  She follows this with “For years I read ‘In the Waiting Room’ in waiting rooms.” Then, a paragraph later, she does it again as she talks about ordering an omelet for breakfast while in Colorado and how she is chastised by her order-taker for expecting the waitress to associate a Denver omelet with a Western omelet, “But when the fluffed eggs appeared, folded sideways and smothered with sharp cheese, it was ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’—another Bishop poem.” All of this to explain the “extra-textual juxtaposition” of bringing art and life together in a literal fashion. It’s this sideways slide found in Wade’s work that makes her such a joy to read.

 

Nonfiction prose is a departure from Duhamel’s award-winning poetry, but experimentation within her work is not. She is known for playing with pantoums, villanelles, and forms of her own invention such as “porn poetry.” And it’s not the first time she has paid homage to her women forebearers or engaged with feminism in her work. Readers will not find the whimsical poet of “Rated R” in the pages of this collection, but they will find Duhamel’s candid approach as she brings to life the times in our history when our mothers and grandmothers faced much tougher times in terms of equality, racism, and sexism. On occasion, the poet does emerge and takes the reader on a delicious ride, as in “Kaboom,” the sub-titled essay within “Word Problems,” where she writes about wonky words such as boondoggle and conundrum. She even thanks Edgar Allen Poe for tintinnabulation. Readers will appreciate her simple and subversive delivery as she tackles difficult subjects, bringing wisdom to the page. Her details of the sixties and seventies, where many of her experiences resonate with an older generation of readers, also offer deep insight as her gaze is juxtaposed against Wade’s younger perspective.

 

The final culmination of the dual voices—and the voices even beyond their own two—comes in a glossary at the end of the book akin to Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker’s Fabulas Feminae; Duhamel and Wade’s version includes more than a hundred women and girls from the authors’ personal lives as well as public figures, from past and present, literary figures, and fictional characters. It’s really an homage to the wonderful mixture of women—the scholars, the feminists, the divas, the poets, the victims, the comedians, the fashionistas, the heroines, the goddesses, the icons, the red-heads, the singers, the writers, the sirens, the childhood friends, the movie stars, the classmates, and yes, even the grandmas—who inspired or influenced Duhamel and Wade specifically, but all of us really, in some way.

 

The book feels like a fresh approach to collaboration. While the authors each take turns giving their thoughts on the same subjects, I didn’t find an established order as I read. In other words, I might read two essays written by Duhamel, followed by one of Wade’s. As in a conversation, one person might have more to say than the other, and this is what makes their collaboration so fluid and natural. By placing their voices side by side, they allow the reader to gain insight into what has or hasn’t changed from one generation to the next. More importantly, I believe the prose embodies the voices of all women, past and present, as influencers of Duhamel and Wade.

 

After reading The Unrhymables, I have to ponder the idea of the collaboration as a hybrid in addition to the body of work. It’s that sideways slide again: the idea of the offspring from two varieties, composed of different elements, produced through human manipulation for a specific genetic characteristic. The result is a consonant cluster of sorts—Dwade, I call it—each of their notes produced simultaneously to create a particularly savory tone.

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Two Lynchburg Poems

Riverside Park, Lynchburg

At Riverside Park off Rivermont Avenue,

Katy and I sit on a boulder viewing

the overcast valley where classmates

died leaping

from the 200-foot train trestle.

Every day my body betrays itself into

believing it’s dying, believing the pastor’s

words that homosexual boys

are destined for death.

Katy lights a cigarette as a canopy of leaves protects

us from the rain, says, “I wonder what it feels like to know

you’re going to die.” The train whistles

in the distance.

My mom pretended to die for attention

after she left me. For once I don’t feel her

absence in my body. For once

I feel kind of okay, like I won’t walk

up and down a foggy

Court Street at three a.m. in front of the Episcopal church,

crying and begging

God to make me straight so my father

doesn’t leave me too.

We walk back toward the car in the rain,

listening to the train chug pass in the distance

along the riverbank.

In the clearing between the path and the forest

a gathering of fireflies twinkles in the twilight, my prayers

burning in the trees.

My arms around Katy who, after smoking,

smells like my mom plummeting to earth

on a meteor.

A tear carves down the tracks of skin and leaps off

my jawline. My body simmers to smoke,

little fires,

this figure of ash.

 

[Driving away from Lynchburg]

Driving away from Lynchburg, realizing

the Blue Ridge is my home but not

where I’m meant to live,

a tiger swallowtail smears across

my windshield in powder yellow.

I too have wished to feel the painless

end, but a windshield

nebula requires a life, brittle

as the swallowtail’s chitin wings,

one the mountains can’t afford to lose.

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Good Dog, Bad Girl

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

Oxford University Press, 2017/2019

Hardcover/Paperback, 368 pp., $27.95/$14.95

 

Cover of Kate Manne's Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.

 

“He is like a dog that barks around women,” my (male) colleague told me. He was referring to the irrational and apparently unaccountable behavior of our male, academic-department head, who had responded with strange aggression to some suggestions I had made at a department meeting. My colleague explained, plainly, that the aggressiveness I had witnessed—that I had withstood—was not atypical; other women had received similar treatment. But in his view, this “barking” at women was to be dismissed as a basically harmless peculiarity. To extend his analogy, the department head (an academic star) was a good, beloved, and valued dog, though a bit snappish, and just as you might keep small children away from a snappish dog, it was best to keep women colleagues away from him. Another male colleague offered a different sort of explanation: the barking department head was troubled by women because he was raised by a dominant mother, a professional woman, and this had somehow messed him up. More than one male colleague advised me to “soften” my speech, to be more casual and “less professional” in my email correspondence, not to “brag” about my publications, and not to act like I deserved the successes I had in fact achieved, lest I come across as uppity. (It is not incidental to observe here that analytic philosophers, my professional cohort, do not succeed by being soft, imprecise, modest, or deferential.)

 

It will be helpful to summarize and separate the components of the above incident like the analytical philosopher I am. According to my male colleagues, then,

1) I had been treated unprofessionally because I was a woman;

2) my mistreatment was due entirely to the personal idiosyncrasy of one man, the proverbial “bad apple” or, here, barking dog;

3) his difficulty with women was ultimately the fault of a woman, his mother;

4) the best response was for me to steer clear of him;

5) and insofar as I had to interact with him, I should present myself in ways that expressed feminine subservience even at the expense of giving the impression of lesser competence or attainment.

 

Thus, the whole incident could be characterized as an unfortunate interpersonal problem, and it was incumbent upon me to change in order to avoid future unpleasantness.

 

There are two remarkable facets to this small story (more on its smallness later). The first is that my colleagues were able to discern that I had been treated unprofessionally because I was a woman. So often, even this fact remains out of focus or inaccessible. And, indeed, as I continued to work among these men for many years, during which time various forms of hostility, exclusion, silencing, and devaluation multiplied, the idea that this was a pattern of mistreatment based on gender became less and less accessible to my colleagues. I also will return to this point later.

 

The second remarkable facet of this story is, paradoxically, just how unremarkable it is: Such experiences of misogyny are so commonplace that they are often taken to be normal operating procedure—just, you know, the way it is. It barely rises to the level of consideration. My story could be any woman’s story. Shrug.

 

It is the project of Kate Manne’s incisive book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny to get past that shrug. Chapter by chapter, she offers a compelling analysis of the concept of misogyny and its workings in Anglo-American society. This analytical work is conceptually connected to respected, mainline arguments in moral philosophy not known for addressing gender. Thus, one of Manne’s achievements is almost a side-effect: her work breathes new life and new potential into an area of philosophy that too often leads to dead-end abstractions. Yet, Manne’s style is open to readers completely unfamiliar with contemporary philosophical discourse. Though there are a few passages that may feel prickly to such readers, it would be a shame if that were a deterrent. Manne vigorously employs the first-person (often considered out-of-line in analytic philosophy) and humor, giving the book a sense of personality and wit in addition to intellect. Importantly, her analysis of misogyny is accompanied by compelling examples of national and international significance. She shares research and insights regarding the misogyny directed at political figures, including Hillary Clinton and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She examines the disputed misogyny of the 2014 killing spree undertaken by Elliot Rodger at the University of California Santa Barbara in Isla Vista, California. She dissects the speech of conservative radio rabble-rouser Rush Limbaugh. She scrutinizes the Gamergate imbroglio, in which a female video game creator was subject to online abuse, doxing, and death threats. She probes the terrible effect of threatened masculinity in the violence of family annihilators (men who kill their wives and children rather than allow them to witness their own bankruptcy or social demise). She offers examples drawn from the headlines of domestic violence and police brutality against black women. She also uses fictional examples (including Gone Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the TV adaptation of Fargo) to highlight cultural tropes and illustrate particular concepts. With so many points of application, Manne’s philosophical analysis never detaches from the real world; on every page, her analysis remains relevant and accessible to readers outside academic philosophy. In fact, Manne adduces so much evidence to support her analysis that the text risks subjecting the reader to emotional fatigue because misogyny is everywhere, and it’s worse than you think.

 

I imagine that some readers may feel overwhelmed by all the bad news, by the litany of ways in which women are routinely harmed, physically and sexually assaulted or killed, discredited, denounced, and defamed. (Some of Rebecca Solnit’s writing in The Mother of All Questions and Men Explain Things to Me is similarly freighted by the evidence of misogyny’s ubiquity.)  It is hard to read about these facts without feeling your stomach tighten into a knot. But Manne’s intelligence, clarity, and courage come through with such force that I found the reading exhilarating, and I suspect that many readers, if they venture into a book of (feminist) philosophy, will likewise feel that they have found a source of light and intellectual leadership. With Manne’s insights in hand, our pervasively gendered experience of the world makes more sense. And with so much confusion in public discourse, a book of philosophy that makes more sense of any aspect of social life provides a balm.

 

In case “logic” conjures up painful memories of college exams, it may be a welcome preventative to know that Manne’s subtitle The Logic of Misogyny refers to a cultural logic—a set of interlocking social phenomena that function to sustain certain social institutions, norms, and roles. A cultural logic is not a rational system, nor a structure designed to achieve certain ends, nor a deliberate policy enacted by those with authority (though some such ends and policies may in fact be fabricated in order to sustain the cultural logic). Rather, a cultural logic captures something about the kinds of attitudes, expectations, and norms that govern our social interactions even when we are not aware of them and which allow us to interpret the behaviors and events of social life. Thus, a logic of misogyny must take us beyond what Manne calls the “naïve conception,” according to which misogyny is “primarily a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally, simply because they are women.” Misogyny, on her analysis, is not reducible to the feelings or attitudes of individuals.

 

To see why this might be important, let’s return to my story, summarized in five points above. As I’ve said, it is remarkable that something like misogyny was volunteered by my male colleagues as an explanation for the department head’s behavior. They could see that gender was a salient factor. That takes us as far as (1). But in order for the charge of misogyny to stick, according to the naïve conception, we would have to be able to show that the department head had feelings of hatred or hostility toward me. Support for (2)—the idea that this misogyny rests in the individual’s psyche alone, that he is the bad apple in an otherwise non-misogynist social environment—would come in the form of psychological or biographical facts about this particular man. That might explain why one colleague resorted to (3) as evidence: there must be some personal, psychological explanation for his bad reaction to women, and perhaps it could be found in his relationship to his mother.  But the idea that the department head felt hatred or hostility toward me struck even me, the target of his bad behavior, as psychologically unrealistic. We simply had not had enough interaction (and none outside of the workplace) to engender strong feelings of any kind toward me. His barking wasn’t hatred per se.

 

To make matters even more challenging, in order to make the charge of misogyny stick—and I’m talking about getting it to stick as a matter of everyday explanation, not as a legal finding—we would have to be able to show that such feelings of hatred were directed at me simply because I am a woman, which would seem to imply that he would have such feelings of hatred toward all other women, or at least toward all those with whom he interacted, simply because they are women—and he did not. In fact, he seemed to express great affection for his wife and for at least one woman colleague. So, even though (2) casts the department head as a “barking dog,” who reacts with hostility to women, the naïve conception of misogyny would spare him the label misogynist. He didn’t hate me, let alone all women.

 

Since reacting so negatively to (some) women, on account of their being women, is plainly misogynist, the naïve conception of misogyny cannot be adequate. It also seems implausible on the face of it that any man could harbor feelings of hatred toward all women: it would be too exhausting for one thing, since half the human population is female. And even the most perverse psychopaths generally retain love for at least one woman, often their mothers. It looks like the naïve conception sets a standard for misogyny that has no real-life exemplars. Manne argues that we need to reconceptualize what misogyny is in order to be able to see it in operation. And we need to be able to see it in operation because it has tremendous explanatory value.

 

Manne argues persuasively that misogyny “should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology.” Misogyny can be recognized not by peering into the hidden depths of the individual psyches of men or probing their personal life histories for clues that would underpin a conscious or unconscious hatred of women, but by examining the kinds of hostility faced by women and girls in particular social environments. Attention shifts from the psyche of the alleged misogynist to the effects of certain behaviors on the women and girls who are the targets of misogyny. This shift allows that both men and women can perpetrate misogynist hostility and that misogyny is sustained by attitudes that extend well beyond hatred.

 

The logic here is actually pretty straightforward: The patriarchal order is sustained by an ideology of gender norms that mandates particular roles and social functions for men and different ones for women. Misogyny surfaces when women attempt to step outside of their appointed roles and functions in the patriarchal order. Manne argues that women who veer from the normative gender roles will be subject to “punitive, deterrent, or warning” measures that constitute misogyny’s mechanisms for keeping women in their place. Manne remarks on the varieties of misogynist hostility, which include “infantilizing and belittling” as well as “ridiculing, humiliating, mocking, slurring, vilifying, demonizing, as well as sexualizing, or alternatively desexualizing, silencing, shunning, shaming, blaming, patronizing, condescending,” and threatening, and violence. The particular tactics that comprise misogyny will vary with the circumstances, and often enough, multiple tactics will be deployed, especially if the targeted woman or girl does not quickly or readily step back into line and conform to her appointed gender role. Accordingly, the department head’s “barking” could be characterized as an attempt to humiliate or silence me precisely because my professional competence and assertiveness seemed threatening. Women colleagues can be tolerated, even welcomed, so long as they behave in ways that affirm masculine prerogatives to succeed and to lead.

 

Manne elaborates on the relative positions of men and women in our patriarchal society. Patriarchy, she argues, consists in the “uneven, gendered economy of giving and taking moral-cum-social goods and services.” Roughly, in this gendered economy, women owe (men) emotional and social labor, reproductive service, domestic service, sexual access, affection, love, and respect. Much of what women can provide are genuinely valuable social goods: it really is good to give and to receive love and respect, for example. But if women owe men these goods, then men must be entitled to them, and women who refuse to provide them will be the targets of misogynist attack. To take one of Manne’s most stark examples, Elliot Rodger decided to kill sorority women at UCSB, women with whom he had never even spoken, because he believed he was owed their sexual and romantic attention and had not gotten it. The same misogynist logic inspires the men who call themselves “involuntary celibates” and who see Rodger as a hero. Less gruesome examples of this logic abound. Women who do not volunteer to perform kinds of service traditionally associated with feminine roles—social planning, catering, making coffee, cleaning up, mentoring students—may be deemed uncooperative and receive lower job-performance evaluations, even as their male colleagues who likewise decline to volunteer for such tasks see no negative impact on their evaluations.

 

Men’s social goods consist in such things as “leadership, authority, influence, money, and other forms of power, as well as social status, prestige, [and] rank.” As Manne observes, the masculine goods tend to be in limited supply and acquired through competition. Women who attempt to partake of these masculine-coded goods constitute threats to the gendered order and will be subject, again, to misogynist backlash. Likewise, for women who challenge particular men’s claims to power, status, or authority. These challenges may be informal and low-stakes—such as questioning a boss’s decision or even just entering a conversation as if one were a peer—or very formal with high-stakes, such as a bid for the presidency. Patriarchy divvies up the social goods along gendered lines. Misogyny is the response when women refuse to give what’s expected of them or break rank and try to get what they are not culturally entitled to have.

 

Manne’s account of misogyny is superior to the naïve conception for several reasons. It avoids the need to scrutinize a man’s psyche; instead we can look to how a person’s behavior functions to keep women in their place in a social environment. It also allows us to look beyond a single emotional or motivational state, hatred, to acknowledge that misogyny wears many guises and that what it looks like will depend upon the specific gender norms in play in a particular social environment. Manne’s account explains why some women will be targeted (they step out of line) while others will be spared or even rewarded (they conform to the relevant gender norms). Further, Manne’s account allows us to see how misogyny, even when enacted by one person, gets its grip because of larger social dynamics. It reveals how misogyny is ultimately never a matter of purely individual attitudes or feelings, but always embedded in social norms and group responses.

 

To take up this last point, consider my male colleagues’ advice in (4) that I steer clear of the barking department head. It should be obvious that this was not actually a possible response for me. As department head, he was someone I would encounter at department meetings and committee meetings, and who would have authority over my annual performance reviews, determine my salary raises, and sit in judgment over my promotion. In numerous ways, he served as gatekeeper to my professional opportunities. Avoiding him could only be interpreted as non-collegial or uncooperative. Sensing, I guess, the necessity of my interacting with him, my colleagues suggested (5): cleave to postures of feminine subservience. I have to admit, this is a strategy that I, like many women, have had to resort to so many times that I have developed a scar from biting my tongue so often! (I have also come to loathe exclamation points, which must be used in every email to “soften” what might otherwise look too serious and severe, too masculine, without them: Good work! Great to see you! Thanks!!) But I also have to admit that I am by temperament not very good at playing the part of the docile woman. In fact, many of the skills that make me a good philosopher (argumentatively adroit, verbally adept, assertive, opinionated, perceptive, ambitious) make me a bad woman, which is to say, a woman who breaks with feminine gender norms. Regardless of my own temperament, or the actual strategic value of following my colleagues’ advice, the important point is that the advice itself recapitulates misogyny. In effect, my colleagues said to me, “down girl,” even though it was the department head who was the misbehaving dog. They participated in sustaining the very gender norms that make misogyny possible in this social context. An individual man’s behavior was a precipitating factor, but without reference to well-established gender norms, upheld by other men and women, his misogyny could not have had the effects it did. Misogyny begets more misogyny, as men (and sometimes women) coalesce in reinforcing the gendered expectations and penalizing deviance from them. To the extent that I failed to display the appropriate “down girl” behaviors—to the extent that I refused to heel, I exacerbated the misogynist climate. My defenses became more evidence of my being out of line. Good girls don’t resist their subjugation.

 

What my male colleagues might have done was challenge the department head, calling him out for his unprofessionalism and misogynistic hostility. They might have done it publicly or in private. They might have reported it to higher administration. They might have voted to remove him from his position of leadership. Or instead of drawing attention to the misogyny, they might have tried to compensate for it by making openings for me in conversations or meetings, recommending me for positions of leadership, publicly crediting my initiatives and ideas, or “bragging” for me about my professional accomplishments so as to sustain my value in the department. They did not. Their silence and reticence in the face of what they themselves acknowledged to be gender-based mistreatment constituted complicity in the patriarchal order. And this, too, is part of the logic of misogyny. Men who appear to be siding with women who are being subject to misogynist backlash may find themselves on the receiving end of the hostility; they risk losing status, that masculine-coded social good, if they break the alliance of men through their recognition of misogyny as an injustice. Over my many years of work among these men, this was perhaps the most painful realization for me—that men who spoke to me in private about the sexism and misogyny of the department would not defend this view publicly and, when push came to shove, even contributed to undermining my credibility. One senior man expressed to me his outrage over my mistreatment, but worried that if he spoke up, he’d lose his favored teaching schedule. Meanwhile, my entire career was on the line.

 

I said above that my story is a small story. And so it is. What I suffered, over many years, was small in comparison to the brutal violence and psychological abuse that many women experience in misogynistic environments. Small as it is, it is the story of a large stretch of my adult life that has ramified through my professional life and my personal life. Small as it is, it is a story that so many women attempting to succeed in a man’s world can relate to. Like many women, I have been loath to speak publicly about my experiences. I do not do so here out of a desire to aggrandize myself. Rather, it is the very ordinariness of my experience that drives me to insert it here for Manne’s book emphasizes misogyny as it is visible in the lives of public figures, like Clinton and Gillard, and in dramatic or tragic, headline-grabbing events. But the logic of misogyny writ large in these cases is also writ in the fine print of the lives of millions of ordinary women like me. Small as such stories are, the toll in the lives of women is large.

 

Though I have never met her, Manne is, like me, a professor of philosophy, a field that is approximately 80 percent male, a figure that hasn’t changed much in several decades. Manne’s book would have suffered an excess of scrutiny had she focused on her own experiences of misogyny (which have been expressed in interviews subsequent to publication of her book). Her conceptual acumen, careful research, and steady argumentation would no doubt have been eclipsed by the skepticism that accompanies any woman’s public representation of her experiences of misogyny. (Even as I write this, I am bracing for the possible backlash myself.) She was wise to focus on public examples in order to avoid this problem, and also because exposing the misogyny that operates at the highest reaches of politics and media reveals the extent to which our supposedly enlightened, gender-egalitarian society is still shaped by punitive attitudes toward women.

 

I observed above that while, initially, my male colleagues could perceive that I was being mistreated on account of being a woman, they seemed to be less able to perceive it as the years passed, even as the hostility increased and spread beyond the one bad apple. I’ve already suggested one reason this might happen: Over time, men may themselves become overtaxed by the risks associated with supporting a woman who is targeted by misogynist hostility. To ally oneself with a vulnerable party is to make oneself more vulnerable to attack. Another reason is that my redoubled efforts to prove my professionalism and competence only worked against me, when these were among the very things that proved threatening in the first place.

 

But Manne’s analysis supports another sort of explanation. When women lodge complaints against men in positions of power or authority, even when those men are widely acknowledged to be guilty, they often find themselves witness to a bizarre turn-around: the man guilty of abuse, or rape, or harassment becomes the recipient of empathy, while the woman victimized by his behavior is villainized. Manne calls the phenomenon “himpathy.” The accusatory question that women who speak up must face is, “Why do you want to ruin his life (or reputation)?” The questioner summons concern for the well-being of the guilty party rather than the well-being of the woman. The idea that women are entitled to justice, for themselves as well as on behalf of other actual or potential victims, seems to lie hidden behind another layer of misogyny—the assumption that women are devious, manipulative, untrustworthy, lying, or calculating whenever they challenge male power or status. Moreover, as Manne notes, misogynistic crimes against women are also, ipso facto, crimes against society. A just society would not question the legitimacy of calling to account a guilty man.

 

There is yet another reason why people may find it difficult to perceive the misogyny that limits and damages women in their midst: It is always (yes, always) possible to point to seemingly plausible alternative explanations of the social dynamics, which lay the blame on the woman. This is best known as “victim-blaming,” with the most well-known example being blaming a rape victim for her violent assault because she wore a short skirt, drank beer, or traveled unaccompanied to a nightclub. As Manne carefully explains, there is no such thing as a perfectly innocent victim, so it will always be possible to point to some aspect of her behavior and to suggest that she herself is the cause of her misogynistic treatment.

 

In workplace environments like mine, especially where one works among the same people for many years, there are bound to be substantive disputes and disagreements, minor failures, occasional screw-ups—on the part of all employees. There are also going to be the exigencies of life outside the office—relationship woes, family demands, illness, financial strain—that generate emotional twists and turns. And there is going to be the social fabric of friendships, romances, and sexual dalliances that forms a kind of unwieldy skein interlaced through the organizational hierarchy of the workplace. In other words, the social environment is exceedingly complex and each of the persons in it has a robust, distinctive personality and array of motives, feelings, and relationships. It will always be possible to point to the woman targeted by misogyny and say of her that she is the problem. “Personality conflict” is one euphemism that often substitutes for, and displaces, recognition of misogyny.  She is—I have heard said of so many women colleagues, including myself—crazy. Or, a bitch. Or, difficult. Or, a slut. Or, worthless. Or, stupid.

 

If a woman persists in her non-conforming behavior (not giving or taking the appropriate, gendered social goods, as described above), she will likely be subject to more misogynist retaliation. The more she leans in, the more men will push back. And as this dynamic persists, she will come to be seen, quite reasonably, as the common denominator. It is (only) when she is around that things seem difficult. Better to keep her away. (And, to be on the safe side, better not to hire any more women, or at least not any with strong personalities or ambitions.)

 

It is my observation that the more time one spends working in a misogynist social environment, the less likely one will be able to make the misogyny perspicuous to others because the more complicating social factors there are. Here, too, Manne’s framework for understanding misogyny proves helpful. She argues that misogyny does not deny women’s basic humanity. Rather, it depends upon recognizing it. Seeing women as fully human and enmeshed in complex social relationships, allows men (and sometimes women) to cast women in human social roles, including “rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer.” Women who step out of line become subject to the responses such labels inspire: they must be put in their place, destroyed, defeated, undermined, or punished. Thus, when women are accused of insubordination or betrayal, or reduced to epithets, we should not see such “explanations” for their being subject to attack as inconsistent with the logic of misogyny; often enough, these “personality conflicts” are simply a manifestation of misogyny. Part of what makes it so tricky to expose misogyny is that, as Manne astutely comments, it is a self-masking phenomenon.

 

Sadly, after nearly three-hundred pages of careful analysis, Manne observes that while researching and writing the book, she “became less optimistic about the prospects of getting people to take misogyny seriously [. . . .] The fact that misogyny is killing girls and women, literally and metaphorically, clearly isn’t enough to grip that many people.” Many people will shrug. Or, like people who are busily constructing their counterarguments rather than actually listening to what you have to say, many will simply reinvest in their denial of misogyny. As a society, we have a long way to go to position people to understand gender, equality, and respect. Manne’s efforts in this book are, to my mind, monumental, which makes her concluding observations especially heartbreaking. Heartbreak is a strange reaction to a book of moral philosophy, but one that proves the book’s importance.

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The Bright Forest

My beloved spoke, and said unto me:

‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

—from “The Song of Songs,” attributed to King Solomon, circa 950 BCE

 

This planet may host a thousand worlds, or maybe millions: worlds within worlds, each nation a deck of cards, each citizen a new deal. But as certain as Gregory might be that many worlds must exist, he knew that he had claims in only two. He could live in the world which contained Sylvie, or he could live in the world which did not. He had a secret name for the world with Sylvie. He called it the Bright Forest.

 

Sometimes she could draw him into that world merely by speaking his name on the telephone. “Gregory?” she would begin uncertainly, and then pause. The uncertainty itself seemed to undo the normal world. It was like a fairy-call, and in that brief silence Gregory would be drawn, sometimes against his will, into the forest ruled by the misrule of Sylvie: a fairy queen, dark, with the serious expression of a girl, not of a woman. In the forest, she was at times openly a child, but no less the author of the tale. Much later, when he lived in the other world full time, the world without Sylvie, the Big World as he called it, he liked to say that he once knew someone who had thought about growing up but had thought better of it. People would smile when they heard this kind of thing, would joke about Peter Pan, but later, privately, he felt bad. Privately, he said, “What if innocence matters?” And he admitted to himself that when young with Sylvie he had looked up into windy sunlit birch trees and they had both seen the leaves flash in great numbers. And only when together! This was tantamount to a confession of faith by a fallen child, and it tore at him so much that sometimes long later he would pick up his phone and call her, and begin, uncertainly: “Sylvie…” then pause for the fairy-call in return and say, again like a child himself: “Oh Sylvie, today I turned forty-one.”

 

As a boy, Gregory was pale, with pale eyes that you could look straight through without interest. Drive into the suburbs and you might see dozens like him—boys with bikes and the pettiest temptations. He had gone to college as a studious lad without a clue on how to make friends or find a lover. He wrote to his parents: “Dear Mom and Dad: All is well. It looks like I have made peace with my Econ 12 T.A. and have been to the beach three times. I should be able to make your check last until February.” When it rained outside his dormitory, however, he opened his window for the wet smell. And sometimes, like a premonition, he would walk out into a night of crickets and feel a largeness in the sky—but nothing much more than that until he met Sylvie.

 

They met as freshmen in English Lit 221: The Romantics, where they were in the same section, and Sylvie was the only one who really cared about Byron, who she called an elitist pig. He just thought Byron a bore, though there was something to some of that stuff by Keats. She loved Keats and Shelley, too, but hardly bothered to turn in assignments. Sylvie was no “college girl,” but merely “in college” the way an animal wanders into a serious place, an office or a classroom, sniffs, and wanders out again. She told him seriously that professors murdered all poetry. That poets were in fact real people who really cared about what they were writing, and not in the least what stupid college students or professors said about it. That poets had actually seen the magic in the world and tried to communicate it, and that he should try reading their stuff under a tree without looking for the fucking underlying themes. “Seriously, Gregory. Tonight.” And she took him out at ten p.m. with his book and a flashlight and a jar of peanut butter in case they got hungry.

 

Of course they kissed, and her hands roamed, and they fell in love.

 

 

—

 

 

In love! There came a day when he walked into a city park in the full knowledge of being in love—looking at the other people in wonder, as if they must know. Of sharing secret amazements in the eyes of other young people, who must be, like himself, in love. If only he had known that it was all true, all along, all of it. Neither Gregory nor Sylvie were handsome people, but love does not require physical beauty, it only requires an alliance with beauty. So the two of them forgot about literature and sought beauty together everywhere—parks, houses, restaurants, bed.

 

In the face of this alliance with beauty, other things fell away. And so there came another amazing day when Gregory walked down the main street of the college town in full knowledge of Sylvie failing in all her classes. Not just one, but all. This information overwhelmed his previous knowledge of how the world operated. He saw how provisional and fraudulent the Big World was, and he ran into a store to buy champagne and potato chips to bring them back to her for a celebration of freedom. In the right light, this was a magnificent act, the act of a prince to his princess—and of course, after that, there was nothing for it but to fail along with her. He wrote to his parents, announcing his decision to drop out of college: “Dear Mom and Dad, I am finally taking responsibility for my own life. I think I’m about to discover a great truth, but I’m not sure what it is.”

 

He was, of course, about to discover the deepest extents of the Bright Forest, a world where anything might become beautiful. In the Bright Forest were green bottles and mossy curbsides, wet iron railings, bits of colored paper caught in the trees. A world like a fine photograph. He could see roads leading to dilapidated gas stations, sudden rocky overhangs, rows of maple, the gathering places of strangers. In the Bright Forest no one read newspapers on trains; they ran their fingers across the cold windowpanes, drawing circles. Later, at the station, people did not speak of schedules, they huddled against each other on benches and whispered. Or played guitars. Sometimes these same men and women would walk into the alleyways behind restaurants or lie naked together behind the hedges in a public park. In the Bright Forest, goals did not matter, only each step mattered, each momentary act—each meal of crackers and cheese, each raindrop in wintertime, each glance, each motion of the hand before the eyes. Sylvie and Gregory rented a shabby room together, got low-paying jobs, and before long the Bright Forest was everywhere: painted on the vinyl cushions of diner booths and tall against the blank stares of cars in parking lots. Each object in the natural world was but a marker for a potent force in the Bright Forest, each work along its paths a work of gods. In the distance, somewhere, was a lazy conductor beating a slow baton: Now you will sleep, will sleep, now you will make love. They would listen and lie together on long afternoons, would lose jobs for lying together on long afternoons.

 

Months passed effortlessly and grandly. Gregory let his head grow foggy and warm for whole weeks at a time. Sunlight would cross dusty rooms, grow weak with winter, strong with summer. He was for a long time a kind of prince, and in these, which he considered his finest hours, he was capable of the most royal actions: a quarter to a bum, a long night holding Sylvie when her father died. Prince Gregory could open his eyes to the near and the far and see them both as his dominion. Up close was Sylvie, her face, her hands, her frequent illnesses, her fears. In the distance were palaces: deeper glens, sea cliffs. Each palace they must find, or each palace would never be found by humankind, for there seemed to be no sight but their own. One afternoon in the year he was twenty would remain with Gregory for the rest of his life, a moment of greatness few people in this world can claim: the two of them standing on a small, grassy hill in a public park. A breeze was blowing, and hand in hand, the whole earth was telescoped into the power of Sylvie and Gregory, young and in love and owning it, just owning it all. Looking out, Gregory felt benevolence toward the scene, felt benevolence and generosity of spirit, as would any great man.

 

 

—

 

 

Over the course of four years, however, Sylvie and Gregory changed from eighteen to twenty, and then to twenty-two. Despite the best efforts of the forest, Sylvie discovered that Gregory retained ambitions. He found that she could sometimes look strong and serious. One night he brought a lamp up close to her face and declared that she had become a woman.

 

“Really?” she asked.

 

“Really,” he said.

 

She had no secrets from him, of course, and they began to talk about children. Carelessly, but they talked. “Imagine me having a baby,” Sylvie would say, squatting and pretending to pull a baby from her womb. “It would just come out, like this.” She did not know his secret term for their relationship, the “Bright Forest,” but she knew that theirs would be the first baby of some amazing world. This baby would walk with them hand in hand among its trees. They would found a dynasty born in the poverty of the Bright Forest. A dynasty!

 

Nevertheless, talk of a child triggered an ancient male fear which lay dormant but deep inside Gregory. Time, he saw, was hotting up. Conversations such as the following began to occur:

 

Gregory (condescendingly): “I don’t understand how you could have lost your fucking keys again. Look, I keep mine on this nail by the door. They’re always there and I can always find them.”

 

Sylvie (in tears): “What does it matter, Gregory? What does it fucking matter?”

 

Though such scenes became common, a greater threat arose. For the Bright Forest had a determined enemy, and his name was “Morning.” All was well when they slept in and kept the shades drawn, but sometimes Gregory would awake early with a curious restlessness, and, leaving Sylvie in the humid bedroom, he would walk out into the Morning. At Morning he heard the brass of trucks and streetcars, the cries of work and doing, could smell the clean hard smell of dew evaporating from the Big World, see mailmen. Eventually, Morning became a kind of religion with him. “Sylvie just doesn’t understand this,” he told himself, observing the early people and secretly smiling at their purpose. “These people understand something she just does not understand at all.” And when he returned to find Sylvie still asleep, the bedclothes warm to the touch and the shades peeking pinpricks of sunlight, when he touched the damp shine of sleep on her forehead and smelled the smell of long untidy human habitation, he began to be repelled.

 

Frightened, he’d close the door and go into the kitchen to make coffee. Once, he even called his parents for advice.

 

 

—

 

 

Sylvie began to sense a change in Gregory, and it became an uncomfortable joke between them that he was never home when she awoke. “I want to wake up together,” she would say. “We can open our eyes at the very same instant and then just lie there for a while before going to work or whatever.” And often, after his new routine of newspaper and coffee, Gregory would return to the bedroom, and, consciously steeling himself against—what, he didn’t know—he would crawl back into bed, and awaken her with much charm and grace. But this effort became deception and acting.

 

Gregory began to ask: was the Bright Forest merely a stepping stone to another, even finer world? And once that question had been asked, Morning was no longer enough. The idea of a baby born in the Bright Forest became more and more a threat. The Big World seemed more and more a release.

 

One day, Gregory got a real job downtown, to which he went at the appointed hours and worked not just for cash, but advancement. Such joy he took in arriving at a cold office in a gray a.m. would be hard to describe, but there he’d be, beaming inwardly to himself as he wrote things in files and passed messages to people in well-chosen clothing. At lunchtime, he would walk into the hustle of the city with a serious smile, and he would rejoice in the wind that tunneled through the office buildings and set the pant legs of busy men to flapping. The wind! Puzzling movements! Men themselves! The Big World held less beauty than the Bright Forest, but he found it strangely satisfying. He began to look collegiate again, tall and thin, with round glasses and a preppie vest. In the office he became liked, for he had a way of fixing his eyes on a person with an innocent concentration which brought him much good will.

 

His parents rejoiced that he had finally made a job last more than a few months. Hey, maybe he’d go back to school.

 

When Gregory told Sylvie that he enjoyed “this cycle of coming and going each day, being away from you and then with you again,” she at first believed him. She was too naive, perhaps, to realize what was going on. After all, what could really threaten the beauty of the Bright Forest? When he came home each day, she would throw herself around his neck and try to drag him into bed, but he would demur, would say he was tired, and again she would believe him. She didn’t realize that he had brought the Big World in with him, and that she, in her old sweater and sneakers, and with all that undisguised love in her eyes, looked merely out of place. Little by little, Gregory grew impatient with “her” cheap restaurants and “her” back roads, and he began to be repelled by sex. Seriously: a certain American Puritanism rose up in him against a life of pleasure. Worse, he now saw not a determined “poetry-in-real-life,” but a kind of desperate quality to all his days with Sylvie, an excess of beauty which might well appear ugly to the outsider. To people, for example, from his office.

 

At night, lying awake by Sylvie’s side, keeping a precious inch between himself and her flesh, Gregory would actually wonder how he could have given himself to this woman who was like none of the women he knew in his other, Big World of men and ideas. She, for example, could not keep facts straight and ask the right questions when taking a message over the phone. Just now, she was, for heaven’s sake, working in an organic food collective. She had no shine of rapid plans in her eyes, she wore no masculine jackets, and touched no colored shadows to her eyes.

 

“You should throw out that shirt,” he’d say. “It’s falling apart.”

 

“You look like a college boy in that jacket,” she would reply, as a joke. “Do they laugh at you at work?”

 

But he did not smile.

 

Late at night, he could hear the wind curl around the edges of the apartment building like a kind of warning, and sometimes, rising noiselessly, he would walk out onto the balcony and feel a kind of tremendous and lonely power in the darkness. At such times, even though it was not Morning, he would let a strength come into his limbs which thrilled him, which reminded him that he was young and might do anything. For a short time, at least, young.

 

 

—

 

 

In such a manner, little by little, Gregory became utterly alone from Sylvie, and entirely left the Bright Forest for the Big World. This should be no surprise: a new world is all we ever ask, and for the second time in his life, counting the moment he quit college, he felt mighty and free.

 

The final separation came in the worst way, when Sylvie was out of town, visiting her mother. Indeed, a whole month passed without a visit to the Bright Forest. Under the circumstances, far too long for it to survive.

 

During that month, Gregory relaxed visibly and worked late hours. So little did he think about Sylvie that he imagined that she did not think of him either. When he finally wrote his letter, on actual paper with a pen, he was sure it would come as no real surprise: “Dearest Sylvie, I’m sorry to write you a letter, but it must be done in a letter, if it is to be done at all. If you would find your own true strength, I know that you must leave me for a time. I am holding you back every moment we are together. We once said that the present should never destroy the beauty of the past, and in that spirit, I say that it has all been so beautiful that I am brought only to joy in looking back. You know what you have taught me, and I only hope the world can teach you what I cannot as time goes by. Write to me. Gregory.”

 

Lying face down on her childhood bed, Sylvie could only think of that word “strength.” Strength? What did strength have to fucking do with it? Either you stick with someone or you don’t. The letter had come at a dark moment with her mother, when she was hoping for a word from Gregory to cheer her, and now she thought the world had come to an end. Who was this jerk masquerading as Gregory, who had signed such a letter? A letter so full of ugliness and distrust? She reviewed the few weeks before their parting and could not remember having met this other Gregory, though looking back, she could see the signs that he had been growing inside her true Gregory.

 

“Now I am alone,” she thought, correctly.

 

This other Gregory grew a moustache, moved halfway across the country, enrolled at a new university—and after a few months he was no longer a child in the Bright Forest, but an adult in the Big World. City streets began to lose their shine and glimmer. He completed a tax return. He graduated. He obtained a job in a sales statistics firm. He fixed his own lunch to bring to work, and he began looking at advertisements for cameras and stereo systems and folding couches. In time he forgot the smell of women, or rather the women around him were so clean that he could not smell them through their blouses and sinless colognes.

 

About a third of the way into the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there’s a curious moment when the chorus pauses for the orchestra to play a theme like a little brass band—a brief, bouncy military march, revving up for another grand entrance. Gregory whistled that little tune to himself almost every Morning. If he thought back to his time with Sylvie, he would say things like this to himself:

 

“Is it only the first moments of any new enterprise that set the whole image and beauty for what is to come? Surely everything that happened in that first moment beneath the oak when Sylvie’s hands roamed created everything that occurred in the next four years.”

 

Again and again he recalled specific moments of joy in the Bright Forest, but always he heard himself describing his former love to his new friends in disparaging terms: “Those were awful days after I left school, just floundering around. There was this girl who flunked out and took me with her. She, like, never grew up.”

 

But Gregory found no new woman in the Big World. And sure enough, six years further on, when he was nearing thirty, he began to dream again of making love to Sylvie. The dream of her would arise against his will around him in the night like a close and familiar room. He began to telephone her in Phoenix or Boulder or wherever she had moved that month and found himself talking to her in the small, childlike voice of his previous love.

 

“Sylvie?”

 

Sylvie was at first hesitant and kept her distance over the phone. Gregory took this as a sign of strength, and in his mind, judging by the new tone of her voice, his heart began to dress her in sleek, adult working jackets and straight slacks; he pictured her wearing makeup and staring him directly in the eye. Then she began to call, too. “Gregory,” would come the call. Each time, after they spoke, he would walk out into the city with new eyes and look briefly down graffiti-laden alleyways and into the beautiful shadows of the trees, revisiting the Bright Forest. But safely.

 

 

—

 

 

At last, one long holiday weekend, Gregory boarded a plane and met Sylvie in her latest town. Over the course of those six years, she had known many men and many jobs. Gregory had become the poet who was her first love, and her best, but who had abandoned her in some vague, artistic confusion. She lost her anger and told herself they had had to part in order to grow up. She could now speak in a more direct manner, dress in well-kept skirts (though not sleek adult jackets), own a car, make plans in advance, offend people less often, and generally pass as a citizen of the Big World.

 

When Gregory arrived, therefore, he was at first perfectly enchanted. He felt his fondest wish had come true. Sylvie had gained all the strength he had spoken of in his heartless letter! They went out to dinner without even holding hands, and Gregory was magnificent with charming talk and generous public behavior. He had learned how to smoke cigarettes, and he displayed this new talent with bravado, blowing smoke into a warm summer night. Sylvie, in her turn, acted witty, and she looked at him with the indulgence of a former lover, now grown mature, gently hinting at the secrets they had in the past, and laughing indulgently at the right moments.

 

Like in a movie made by the Big World.

 

No one in the restaurant looked at them oddly or suspected them to be refugees from another world altogether. And back at her apartment, they went about the business of getting ready for bed with coy efficiency. When the lights went out, Gregory crawled into Sylvie’s bed with confidence, eager to make love like men do to women in the Big World.

 

On the second day, however, Sylvie didn’t bother to comb her hair as carefully. Gregory overslept.

 

On the third day, spent idly at a beach, they didn’t walk as they’d both intended, with pants rolled and shoes held discreetly, but instead sprawled in the sand, making a mess with sandwich wrappers. Sylvie forgot to mention the plans she had for Gregory to meet her new friends—annoying and confusing him.

 

And by the end of the fourth day, when he awoke dreamy and lost, and looked deeply into the waxy magnolia leaves that rattled outside Sylvie’s window, he lost sight of Morning. He saw only that the Bright Forest had sprung up lush and fantastic from the ground all around them, once again. All day they slept and woke, slept and woke, missing the appointment to meet her friends. It wasn’t their fault, Gregory thought. When they got together, everything just went to hell.

 

As anyone will tell you, much is changed in one’s life merely by having a regular job. And so, even though he delayed his return flight until late into the night, Gregory did eventually drag himself to the airport.

 

For a time, as they sat together waiting for his flight to depart, it’s true that everyone else looked like a stranger.

 

Only after their final kiss, and when he found himself alone on the airplane, did Gregory begin to think about how to organize the next day. He checked his messages. His calendar. A few minutes later, he felt the vast cool relief of flying into the Big World forever.

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Insomnia

Night works a dark purple down the loom.

Again, I watch dawn unravel those rows,

 

a weaving and unweaving no less coy

than Penelope producing her burial shroud.

 

Please let today end. I am desperate to feel better

and know days will trudge past this point with me in tow.

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Two Poems

Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Café

His first job out of school was working

as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,

sat bedside with the dying

 

for a living, and he tells me what

it was like to wait for the joints

in their fingers to go loose like he

 

was letting the fish steal the hook to swim

back off into scripture with.

Out down the road

 

the early service releases and a ringing

tower sends off the congregation

with the old, irregular style bell

 

ringing that signifies to me an actual

human is somewhere down there tugging

one end of some rope that crashes

 

a lead tongue against the hollow insides

of cast iron. You hear that, I say,

pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,

 

and he says they’re an expression of joy

meant to help us forget our sadness

for a minute or so, and I say

 

it’s there though, pointing at my heart

with the bacon, the sadness, even

when we let ourselves forget it,

 

same as it’s always been,

the heartache and the thousand

natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

 

He says he prefers Blake

over Shakespeare any day of the week

when it comes to either sadness or joy,

 

To see a world in a grain of sand, he says

and a heaven in a wild flower.

When the ringing quits

 

I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which

is a damn lie, but I don’t tell him I actually

prefer my wife’s hair slinking down her back

 

though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night

for a cigar on the porch in early fall,

or that I’ll always prefer to bury the light

 

and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks

with a hole in one of the big toes

over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.

 

There are houses so broken

they aren’t worth fixing, and sometimes

that’s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned

 

to dryrot turned so useless you couldn’t

sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers

she loves me from the other room and all

 

I hear are bells. Other times, there’s only

a lonely wind passing through the storm door

whispering almost nothing at all.

 

Art Fair

I came to meander through open-air booths erected

in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends

who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn décor,

 

in the name of grade school art teachers

who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,

in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire

 

into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers

who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.

I came here because there exist people with second lives

 

that last longer than the first, and because we all

eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander

these grassy lanes like ghosts who’ve fallen

 

into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail

to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch

me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,

 

or that hand-twined chandelier, because there’s a price

in my head that’s incapable of change and all it takes

is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.

 

I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent

to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler

mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color

 

than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body

and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down

into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.

 

Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through

each one of my eye’s billion vessels, because color

and form, and because far from the Louvres

 

of the world artists still find ways to fashion

grief into the arcades of other people’s hearts.

Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises

 

from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere

there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player

slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough

 

the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each

one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes

where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder

 

level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang

an image upon the dining room wall

where before there was nothing, until now.

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Logos

The beginning of Virginia happened . . . when? That moment is lost in time. Early on, she was at the edge of my consciousness but still a writer whom, even as an English major, I had never read. Woolf wasn’t on the syllabus in any of my classes—not required reading in those days just before there were courses in feminist literature. After my graduation, I read Woolf with a vengeance. I liked the experimental novels well enough—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—but what intrigued me most was the gradual publication of her letters and diaries.

 

That wealth of material gave me a window on a life radically different from my own. For a period of years, I felt as if her friends were also my friends, and that the conversations she participated in were as important to me as they were for her. It was easy to achieve this intimacy. The diaries and letters are filled with minutiae, nuanced insights, deeply personal impressions, and remembered conversations. They offer more information than most people ever reveal about their lives. The details are so extensive. It would probably be possible to chronicle Woolf’s daily life for decades.

 

I learned about her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and about Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf, a Jewish writer, editor, liberal politician, and the man with whom she founded the revolutionary Hogarth Press. I was fascinated as her relationship with Vita Sackville-West unfolded, a love affair between two married women, flirtatious and communicative—resulting in the high humor and euphoria of Woolf’s novel Orlando—only to find a quieter resolution as they drifted apart.

 

What attracted me to Woolf? My life was completely unlike hers. I was not born into the London literati. I had my origins in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I had no famous father and no brothers at Cambridge. We definitely did not spend idyllic summers in Cornwall in a large house on the English seacoast waited on by servants, walking the beach, and playing games of cricket in the garden. My family took car trips across the American West, slogging along the interstates to see our country, camping out to save money, and eating macaroni and cheese out of a box.

 

I came from people whom Woolf might have dismissed or even despised and ridiculed—from farmers, mill workers, and civil servants, from those who were uneducated, at least by Woolf’s criteria. My people did not read books as a means of understanding the self, defining feelings, or interpreting the world. They worked. They were mostly just trying to survive and get by. I came from them, and yet I still wanted to be like Woolf. I wanted to write. Virginia became, at least for a decade, my higher power.

 

—

 

It’s 2006. My friend Nancy and I are touring London. I am here partly in pursuit of my mentor—Virginia Woolf. At this point, I’ve read everything she’s written. I’ve waltzed through that embarrassment of riches—the printed pages she left behind—her novels, letters, diaries, essays, and articles. Now I’m walking the streets she walked.

 

It’s dusk when we board the London Eye for a bird’s-eye view of the city beginning to turn on its lights. In our glass car, we rise and fall while feasting on this unparalleled view of London. Although it undoubtedly looked different in her time, this is Woolf’s city—a place she inhabited in all ways. After the ride, we choose to dine at the café in the crypt below St. Martin’s in the Fields. I order mushroom stroganoff with delicate new potatoes and a fennel salad. Nancy has a dish with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and Savoy cabbage. Our globed glasses of white wine fracture light into the vaulted space.

 

It’s wonderful, yes, and isn’t this a moment Woolf might have chosen to memorialize? It seems to me I should write about it. What are we saying to one another? What are my thoughts and impressions of this day? If I don’t get this down somehow, won’t it be lost forever? I wonder. Does that really matter? Isn’t it enough that Nancy and I are here sharing this moment?

 

Later, I lie awake with jet lag thinking about Woolf’s second novel, Jacob’s Room. After a galloping romp through a young man’s life at Cambridge, we learn that Jacob, the protagonist, has died as a soldier in World War I. The final scene of the novel has Jacob’s mother and one of his friends cleaning out his rooms. They find Jacob’s papers strewn across his desk as though he had left for a stroll in the park.

 

There’s a horror in this vision, a sense of futility and emptiness. A person—vital and rich with life—is suddenly gone. The novel poses the ultimate question. What is left of all that sensation, what remains of so much rich lived experience once the person has passed? It occurs to me that, in her novels, Woolf is almost always writing toward the same end game. Yes, this is happening—this vivid and incredibly complex life tapestry. Yet, it’s also disappearing. Suddenly, because of either time or death, a chunk of it is gone, lost forever.

 

Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, chronicles a family’s summer in Cornwall. But those moments are also lost. When they return to the house on the shore years later, the whole emotional tenor and tempo of their lives has changed. The mother has died, leaving them to struggle. The long-awaited trip to the lighthouse takes on a completely different meaning than it did on a day in the distant past when it was impossible to go because of bad weather.

 

At the novel’s end, Lily Briscoe, a peripheral character, takes center stage. She is a spinster and a Sunday painter, a woman not taken seriously by the male-dominated art world. Yet, she perseveres. Lily is at work painting the Cornwall scene when the family returns. Finally, almost giving up in frustration, unable to express the whole as she sees it, Lily declares a truce. The painting must be finished. There’s nothing more to be done. “I have had my vision,” she announces. And this seems the best we can hope for—to have that vision and attempt to record something about it even as the moment is passing.

 

Woolf tries to preserve those moments that don’t last, the globes of being and experience that simply disappear. She seems to be saying it’s important to celebrate the freshness, newness, and immediacy that make the world overflow. But the other side of this promise is the tragedy of time passing, the heartbreak of death and loss. I can clearly see this is Woolf’s vision. But is it mine?

 

After my trip to London, sick of the insistent need to turn every experience into copy, I stopped writing for five or six years. I told myself it was enough to have my experiences without constantly formulating words to describe them. It was an immense relief.  My mind felt free. And yet, there must have been something of a warring voice within me because I saved my notes—notes about that day in the city and the meal I shared with Nancy. I must have believed that, one day, I would need or want them, and I did.  But when I finally began to write again, it was with a different attitude. I knew I could live without writing, even without Virginia.

 

—

 

The Buddhists say that, to become enlightened, you must actually kill the Buddha, meaning you must destroy your idols. This comes from an old Zen koan attributed to the Zen Master Linji, a Chinese Zen Buddhist monk who founded the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism and who died in 866.

 

The saying says: If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha.

 

I guess I did this to Woolf after my trip to London. Not that I actually killed Virginia, but I doubted her. I saw her as a person, brilliant but limited, part of her own time, her class, and her culture. Woolf gave me a window on her world but not a passage into it. She had been my teacher, but perhaps I had learned what I needed to learn from her. She taught me to pay attention, to notice details, to hear my environment, and to listen to my own thoughts.  At this realization, there was disappointment and a sense of loss. It felt a bit like losing an old friend either to death or indifference. It’s all well and good to have idols, but suddenly, I knew I would never be this person who spent three weeks touring Greece with the painter and art critic Roger Fry.

 

Woolf’s festival of words took me somewhere. She got me to London and enriched my time there. But in the end, I returned home, leaving England for my own geographical and personal world. My physical and spiritual home for most of my life has been the northern boreal forest of North America. It’s a place where I walk on footpaths between towering trees, a place where I count my breaths while listening for the air rush of bird wings. This is where I belong.

 

This winter has been a hard one. Nearby, just off the footpath, several crows feed on the remains of unidentifiable dead animal. Busily tearing toward the center of the carcass for red meat, the two companionable black birds ignore this approaching human. Likewise, a soaring red-tailed hawk offers me no greeting as it flies overhead and beyond my field of vision. As I tread my forest path, I experience the spaciousness that exists outside and beyond words.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love words for their capacity to partially tame the world’s wildness. I adore them as they lean into metaphor and traverse distances. But I see their limitations. Words are temporary containment fields. I believe that, although words were her medium, Woolf understood this. She was always writing into the void, always using language to push toward the no-word zone. In novels that exist on the margins of human experience—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—Virginia has taken me to regions where there is simply nothing more to say.

 

What can we know of poor Jacob after he has passed? Lives and loves succumb to time. Individuals exist for a while and then they are gone. The waves roll toward the shore, relentlessly washing away all footsteps on the beach. Eventually, through her suicide, Woolf crossed the ultimate barrier. No one could follow her into that beyond. Still, during her lifetime, Virginia returned to the place of making again and again. She tried to hold her ground even as that ground was slipping out from underneath her. She had a faith I sometimes lose. When I tire of carefully wrought language, I leave my writing desk and head into the woods seeking the place of no-words.

 

Entering this wordless zone is another way of killing the Buddha. But I know he isn’t really dead. I’ll be back at my computer soon enough. Tall pine trees creak in the wind. It seems that, though it is incomprehensible to me, they speak in a language all their own. And suddenly I get it. Virginia is the hawk flying away from me. She was here but she’s moved beyond my field of vision. I can’t say where she is now or what she is like. I’m not even sure what I am like, but I am resolved. I turn back on the path that will take me home. My house isn’t far away, really no distance at all.

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Her Affective Labor

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles by Diane Raptosh

Etruscan Press, 2020

Paperback, 116 pp., $17.00

 

Cover of Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles by Diane Raptosh.

 

Diane Raptosh is the poet of the unlikely.

 

Of course, any creative act in itself is rather unlikely, whether it is the cosmic creation ex nihilo in which the universe is manifested out of an accident of strong and weak forces converging and dissipating, leaving some errant subatomic particles behind to crash together for the big bang, or the simple clapping of hands, a rhythm, a disruption, a repetition. A creative act is the convergence of everything, an impossibility, which only has to happen once, and there it is: the dreamy reverb by David Roback, the breath between H. D.’s lines, the abdominal contraction before Bill T. Jones’s turns.

 

Over her thirty-year career, Raptosh has produced wicked, loopy, political, surrealistic, and unforgettable poetry: experimental and wild, a free-roaming poet of the Idaho sagelands. Her work leaps madly into the mud-pools of language with a child’s abandon, but with an intelligence that is hard, uncompromising, and disturbing in its own playfulness.

 

Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles completes Raptosh’s verse trilogy, a project nobly supported by Etruscan Press. The first in the series is American Amnesiac (2013), a book-length, ghazal-sequenced monologue spoken by a former Goldman Sachs exec, who seeks to recover his identity, to reconstitute himself as an improbable and decent citizen. In the second book, Human Directional (2016), Raptosh leaves the individual to explore the collective and atomized human consciousness via a slapdash of prose poems, exploded catalogues, and single-line jokes. In her trilogy, we are stuck in the hell-scape of an American post-capitalistic society: racist, punitive, commodified, cruel, and degrading. Yet, multi-vocal and therefore hopeful, precisely because of the fissures and fractures that occur amid all the digital noise.

 

With Dear Z, Raptosh brilliantly answers this world with a set of letters addressed to our pre-embryotic, single-cell existence: a single fertilized ovum, a “love speck,” which drifts down the fallopian tubes. Perhaps finding purchase on the uterine wall and becoming, and perhaps just being flushed out of the system entirely and not becoming. We will find that in Raptosh’s poems this difference matters perhaps less than we’d think.

 

The voice is materternal, not that of the mother but of the aunt: intimate, loving, world-weary, and transgressive. It is a voice that is fully queered and unmoored, wholly original:

 

Dear Zero,

 

Most humans evolved only once—in what’s likely

East Africa, 200,000 years ago. So don’t freak

 

when I shout out We share the same mama:

Mitochondrial Eve. Unlike the one in the Garden

 

of Eden, mtEve was not the sole woman on Earth,

but the one who made her descent into everyone.

 

So pray tell, teeny homunculus, as the line

from “Time of the Season” by the Zombies,

 

that British Invasion band, goes: Who’s your daddy?

 

Please know that should you come be, Big Data

will quickly conceive you as processing stream,

 

a more or less numeral entity—lacking internal lyric:

that giddiest hymnal. That solemn bee. The think feeling

 

fist that is inwit. Queerest iota, does this kind of talk

smack of hokum-humanist seething on my part?

 

Our shared mother mtEve was mostly a kink of statistics,

a ringing quark of a person: a true lovely, who probably

 

knew to venerate horses.

 

Here is a whirlwind of what Raptosh does so singularly well: the careening slant rhymes and punning, the clack of assonant syllables against sharp end consonants, and the driving free associations that make perfect sense. But amid all this dazzle, Raptosh is in impressive control of her material.

 

In this passage, she isolates “inwit,” a word she introduces in Human Directional, and a word she parses out in her essay, “Poetry is Where the Action Is”:

 

. . . inwit suggests the inner senses and interior sensibility: that collection of inner faculties the poet sets store by. Inwit is, by my reckoning, the very womb in which the poet thrives.

 

It seems to me that the entirety of Dear Z is an exceptionally crafted articulation and enactment of inwit. Indeed, one suspects it is a quality deep in our mitochondrial DNA, somewhere in our circuitry, we just know we must somehow “venerate horses.” Our capacity to engage in affective labor—to love, to imagine, to be awed, to empathize, to connect—surely comes from that first “mama” that Raptosh names.

 

Throughout these letters to the zygote, the speaker faithfully accepts the binary of becoming and not becoming, and she celebrates this suspended (and free-falling) state. After all, even the zygote that does “not become” has “been,” a sack of genetic coding as ancient as the first evolution.

 

Dear Z,

 

in the presence

of your latency—

 

that vacant shoe,

those shades

 

of facelessness—

let’s say

 

I think I feel

the sound of dots moving.

 

Our ancestral connections, both to the past and future generations, are but Morse code taps on our own genetic coding. We have the same mother running through us, the sound of dots moving. An un-extraordinary miracle-mirror. A tapping. Let.us.be.k.i.n.d.

 

Diane Raptosh gives us a speaker who possesses that womb-wisdom, who is generous and critical in her advice, especially when the news is harrowing. We have a great poet among us with commitment and daring and craft, who teases us and indulges us with her unconditioned and unconditional wisdom.

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Santa Maria Novella

Florence, Italy

 

Outside the Santa Maria Novella basilica, I draw belief

in God for hours on a bench and local and foreign

visitors watch me watching faith. We all stare down

 

the church. Revisit and retrace an object

as if it can save the millennium, as if it can save me.

I am drawing to you, Love, in straight black lines

 

as a spectator’s wrinkles deepen. Who is on the watch

for angels and Satan as millennials take self-portraits

filtered to Beautiful for hours in front of the church?

 

As if to follow as if to Like as if to Share as if to Friend

as if to Capture as if to Block as if to Leak. Is this social

media faith’s purgatory? Please believe in my selves.

 

Inside my real body, frescoes. Frescoes and sketches of

now dead little i’s and little u’s then purportedly loving.

Love™ – a façade as flat as the green and white lines

 

mapping the face of the Santa Maria Novella.

All one hundred people in this square freeze

to view order for seconds and minutes and hours

 

and the lovers kiss and hold it as if Love’s relics

as I wonder who will be discarded upon homecoming as

if trash blown up dew-slicked streets of East Walnut Hills.

 

u and i kissed and held it for years

in America to peel off the monochromatic

color scheme on Satan’s dividing palette yet

 

my image you displayed for no one. Unaffirmed,

unshared, you ghosted me. Our love—my grave.

 

Behind the basilica, the sinking sun births shadow-

twins, keeps loneliness company. Couples go silently

away. Nights, I pretend to be Loved™—paint God.

 

Where the tour

 

Where the auction

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Like Fireworks, Far Off

As if chrysanthemum fireworks flaring

gold, blue, red—brief, phosphorescent

amoebas throb, pulse. Next, a galaxy

of green stars spins out of existence.

Then, a flurry of supernovas

 

flare and fade. After, a comet-like

streaking ends in a white flash. All the while,

a far off chorus of oohs and ahs

mingles with some last applause.

Then, for a moment, it seems like dawn.

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’50s Movie Stars and Hong Kong Metro Stations

Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold by Dorothy Chan

Spork Press, 2018

Paperback, 103 pages, $18

 

Cover of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold by Dorothy Chan

 

Everyone deals with their own sense of identity. We’ve all experienced our own unique moments, and presenting these moments in a way that conveys the inherent emotions that lie therein can be a personal, soul-bearing thing. In Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, Dorothy Chan’s poetic protagonist talks about her life in snippets. Through tales of men the speaker has dated and meals she’s cooked with her family, we see how a Chinese-American identity was shaped, and how that affects the speaker’s everyday life in blunt, humorous poems that involve ’50s movie stars and Hong Kong metro stations.

 

The three sections in this book are divided by subject matter. Though everything connects because it all relates back to the narrator’s persona, the sections are split between overarching themes of family, culture, and experiences with dating and men in general. The reader is walked through these sections with a tone that feels half-sarcastic until it doesn’t. We get long lines, pop culture references in tow, that give the reader a chance to understand the speaker on a personal level. For example, when talking about attractive men, Chan writes, “… O, I don’t get wet for / the Hot Dads of US Weekly or the dad / bods of Star, but give me Frank Sinatra’s / voice crooning in a Hong Kong cab.”

 

The poems switch between multiple poetic forms that lean to  the side of the traditional, including odes and sonnets, and yet use blunt language and modern-day references, producing a delightful whiplash in the reader. The easy way in which these verses connect with a contemporary reader makes this book a pleasure, and the book holds a similar range emotionally as well. Despite the fun nature of a lot of these poems, Chan doesn’t shy away from presenting the reader with poignant moments, such as one in which the narrator notes, “my mom tells me spirits never leave / their homes, and that we believe our loved ones / visit us in dreams about a week after they pass away, to say I love you.” Chan simultaneously opens up to the reader without presenting her cultural identity as something grim, sorrowful, or alien.

 

This is Chan’s second book. Her first, Chinatown Sonnets, also tackles some of the same overarching themes. What comes through most is the consideration of belonging as a concept. Chan’s narrator speaks to her parents in a mix of Cantonese and English, both languages belonging to vastly different countries and cultures. The speaker eats traditional Chinese meals with her father, but is attracted to bleached-blonde, lithe, toned surfer boys. There is a feeling of belonging to each place, but that is juxtaposed with a feeling of otherness. What exactly dictates the need to belong—or do you ever really need to belong? Chan tackles these questions by presenting her unyielding and unapologetic opinion on the subject, while also showing a complex identity can be exactly what makes a person belong. Her speaker is a loving daughter. She feels a certain sense of kinship with movie stars and musicians of the ’50s and ’60s. She still misses her childhood dog. All of these things make her unique, and she is confident in that—she belongs within herself. This exploration of the concept speaks of a time when she was not confident in this. We can all fall short—we can all question our place in society, at home and among friends. She has ruminated on this topic, and presented in a style that makes this book not only a beautiful read, but an enlightening one.

 

Chan accomplishes the feat of speaking about identity and belonging, and how they relate to the place one feels like they’re from—and she more than succeeded. This quick read is a gorgeous display of experimentation with poetic form and voice. The message it sends—though the words are personal to Chinese-American life—leaves the reader feeling just a little more confident about themselves, justified in the individuality and peculiarity of their own experiences, too.

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Overhang

I slipped and nearly twisted my ankle getting out of bed and trying to look out the window—as if it made a difference what the weather was. The day would be wasted at work, where I would mostly sit on the edge of the toilet, zooming in to towns in Greenland and Mozambique and the Russian Far East on my phone. My boss sat in a glass-enclosed office and scrolled Reddit all day, and it was clear from the way he talked to me that he didn’t know my name. I had lost my job as a sommelier and ended up here. I used to joke that I would rather be a day laborer than one of the petty tyrants I had spent my life tiptoeing around; that way, at least, I could keep to myself. Now my wish was granted.

 

I didn’t really know what my job duties were, although I was able to intuit that breaking down tomato boxes, wrapping them with twine, and setting them in the lot behind the building for pickup fell to me. Around six everyone left for the day, and I would work alone in the big empty facility until my shift ended at ten. The vaulted ceilings and troweled floor magnified every tap of my feet like snare hits. I dithered, playing on my phone; now and then I broke down a box and leaned it against the wall with the others, finishing by evening’s end however many were going to get done in my dithering style. The boss probably assumed I was sweeping and mopping. What did I care?—they paid me hardly enough to live.

 

Improved weather lured me outside—I spent the last couple of hours of my shifts in the lot behind the facility. I dragged out however many boxes I might realistically take care of. One night I flipped one on its back and tore off its flaps. With a razor blade I’d found on a windowsill, I cut two windows and a door in the front. My shadow reached into the bath of kudzu behind the barbed-wire fence.

 

I tore apart several more boxes and taped them together into some sort of hut, big enough for, say, a few cats to lounge around in.

 

Over time, I built the structures more and more elaborately, adding lookouts and flourishes, always thinking of symmetry. I cut out crenellations. I drew out entrance halls. I realized I needed this, enjoyed this little something. One night I made what you might call a castle, with four lookouts and a full-on gatehouse. I assembled a drawbridge that didn’t quite work, and then it was already five past ten. I would have to start the whole thing over the next day. I didn’t know where the boxes actually disappeared to—some kind of processing facility, I assumed.

 

On Memorial Day I was one of two employees scheduled. A professional cleaning crew was brought in. Nobody told me how I should interact, so I avoided them. I hauled every box I could find outside and built a room big enough for two people to have coffee in. I brought in two folding chairs and sat and put my feet up. I wrote “Hotel Pomodoro” over the entrance with a Sharpie. I liked to think I was daring them, whoever they were, to take it away. The next day my little cafe was gone, the asphalt clean.

 

I was supposed to have begun getting ready for work by now. The day was bright—I stood on my balcony and came alive in the sun. I was taking the day off: I wasn’t going to show up.

 

—

 

I walked to the corner store for cigarettes. An orange tabby sat at attention beside the door, pretending not to see me. “What is this, Buckingham Palace?” I said, never having felt more unselfconscious about dishing out tepid one-liners.

 

I bought my pack, saluted the cashier, stripped off the plastic, and strolled out into the sunshine. The skyline soared in the foreground; it looked as if the buildings were receiving medals, the tallest in the middle taking gold. They seemed to smile at me. The possibilities of today were almost overwhelming. I could walk all the way downtown. Maybe take in a movie. Or I could buy a novel and gobble up the whole thing in the park.

 

I decided I would take myself out for lunch downtown at the famous place I knew only by sight where the ramen was of the highest caliber.

 

I had no desire to call in and invent some excuse—I didn’t owe them a thing.

 

Was I quitting? Was that what I was doing?

 

At the bus stop a man I’d never seen before was dancing joyfully, barefoot, hair swinging. He leaned out from under the overhang and held out cupped hands, still bouncing. I handed him a dollar, we dapped, and the shop cat skittered out from behind the bench and scampered up the street as if our knuckles touching had launched him.

 

The cat stopped at the next corner and glanced back, waiting for me.

 

We let a car pass and crossed the street together. I started running to see if he would follow along. He did. We jogged past the shady schoolyard; a group of kindergarteners heaved a red ball toward the heavens and squealed.

 

The next intersection marked with an X the “downtown” of the neighborhood, a cluster of markets and restaurants with funny names: Victory Cigarettes, Zen Tool & Hardware, and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Fruit.

 

Maybe I would buy myself something nice. Once a week I almost spent my entire savings on a giant television. If I were going to die on my feet, I might as well enjoy myself.

 

It was just now one o’clock, my in-time. If I snuck into the facility at two, when management had their daily meeting, maybe no one would see me come in late, and I could keep my paycheck after all.

 

The cat, who had gone ahead while I stopped to think, looked back at me expectantly. I caught up with him.

 

We reached the local ramen shop, the last shop on the last strip of this section of town. I had never eaten here. I assumed it was inferior to the fancy place, which I couldn’t imagine improving upon.

 

I looked at the menu, even though I knew it wouldn’t do. I wanted the real deal; I wanted something to look forward to.

 

The cat’s eyes blazed: he was fixated on something ahead, his heart thumping through his fur. He was staring into what I called the Zone, the fenced-off moonscape of wild grass and rubble between the inferior ramen shop and actual downtown. The road we stood on bisected the rocky terrain, rising up slightly before us and vanishing down. I knew it eventually led to the overpass I considered to be the border with actual downtown, only two blocks from the ramen mecca.

 

At the precipice of the Zone, the wind picked up. The cat paused, his body scrunched, the formerly linear stripes down his back now scrambled. He squinted nervously. I bent down to pet him goodbye and he shied away. I tried again, and he ran and hid behind a car.

 

The brightness of the chalky mass and the openness of the sky were paralyzing. I forged into the headwind, shifting my gaze to the sidewalk. The glaringly white concrete stung my eyes: there was nowhere to look.

 

I couldn’t walk straight; I slipped off the curb and veered into the road.

 

I was going to get hit by a car.

 

I stumbled back, blindly found the fence, grabbed on. I covered my face with my other arm, slid to the ground, and curled myself into a ball.

 

My eyes stayed shut for some time. I watched brain TV, avoiding myself. Maybe a few minutes passed, and I then heard the gentle crunch of slowing tires, and then an engine fan. I peeked through my knees—a taxi had stopped across the street. The window, opaque with reflective glare, came down, gradually revealing a woman’s impassive face, squinting at me.

 

In the car I asked if she could take me to the ramen place I’d just passed, the less exciting place. Taking the bus home from downtown didn’t sound pleasant, nor did I want to shell out for cab fare from there, which would approach the cost of lunch.

 

She asked if I meant the restaurant fifty feet behind us; I nodded. She searched my face.

 

—

 

The door chimed as it shut behind me. Someone—a waiter—emerged from a secret door in the wall and through the opening revealed the kitchen: immense steel cauldrons of bubbling broth, white-coated cooks. A woman stood at a steel table and portioned dry noodles into plastic bags, twisted them closed, and set them aside, staring vacantly ahead. The door closed and the scene ended.

 

I asked the waiter if I could sit at the bar. He led me through drawn curtains to an empty room—where was the bar? He set a menu on a table in the far corner, near the kitchen.

 

Although I already knew what I wanted, I picked up the menu and pretended to read him my order, envisioning the creamy, six-minute egg, the concentrated, nourishing broth, and the heap of soft yellow noodles from the other, better restaurant.

 

He nodded and took the menu. I waited.

 

Finally he came through the curtain holding my bowl, set it down, and left without saying anything. The ramen swayed—pork belly, seaweed, pickled mushrooms. This was not what I’d ordered.

 

The waiter burst through the curtains holding a jar of candies. I lifted my chin and writhed to get his attention.

 

He stomped his foot, acknowledging the mistake, set the candies on the table next to mine, and carried my bowl away.

 

I noticed my shoulders weren’t relaxed and dropped them. It’s only food.

 

A few minutes later an old man wearing chef’s whites limped into the room, holding a platter heaped with scallions and bean sprouts, clearly meant for a large party that was not there. He looked lost. Sweat streamed down his face.

 

The confusion on his face intensified when he saw me, as if he were just now realizing the restaurant was open.

 

He remained in his frightened stance, knees bent, five feet away, clutching the plate, staring past me. He seemed to be looking at my ear lobe. Then he glanced back toward the kitchen, maybe for guidance. I felt the urge to say something to him—I opened my mouth—and then the curtains flew back and the server rushed in, wove around the man as if he were a tree, and set before me something resembling what I’d ordered.

 

The broth was lukewarm and under-seasoned. The bewildered cook now held the heap of garnishes close to his knees, his arms tiring. He watched me eat.

 

He shuffled over and set it next to the candies on the table beside mine and returned to the kitchen.

 

—

 

The mizzling rain would have been refreshing on a certain kind of day. Not that it bothered me—it simply coated me, like a plant. My stomach growled; I had eaten three bites of ramen.

 

I walked in the general direction of home. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call in. Although now I would have to explain why I hadn’t contacted them earlier, in addition to lying about my absence. Lies on lies. I burst out laughing, which almost developed into weeping. I slowed to a halt, and stood, just stood there, water droplets quivering on my chin before leaping off like skydivers. At least that was how I imagined they appeared. A black SUV whooshed by, looking important.

 

On the bench at the bus stop sat the man to whom I had given a dollar, and sitting to his right was the cat, in loaf-of-bread position. A matching loaf—it was even the same color—of sandwich bread rested on the man’s lap. To his left were open jars of peanut butter and jelly.

 

He set one piece atop the loaf of bread, which he used as a table. Then he dunked his finger in the peanut butter and smeared it on the slice, and with deft, certain strokes he did the same with the jelly. He popped out another slice, slapped it on top of the filling, handed his creation to me without looking up, and went on producing sandwiches, piling them up between his legs. Now and then he glanced up at me. Maybe he was waiting for me to start eating. The window of time in which I could have plausibly said I was saving it—saving it for the first trash can once I was out of view—had passed.

 

I sat beside the cat. He didn’t acknowledge me. He knew I was there and accepted my presence, squinting and smiling, the way cats do. He was completely dry and smelled like fabric softener.

 

“Found him in a cardboard box,” the man said. “Taking a nap.”

 

“What did the box look like?” I said.

 

“What did it look like?” he said.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“It looked like a box.”

 

He stood, lifted the pile of sandwiches, opened a polyester knapsack, placed them inside, cinched the drawstring, set the bag of sandwiches on the concrete, sat back down, wiped his hands on his pants, and looked off into the distance.

 

“Anything unusual about the box?”

 

He looked over at me, and then at my sandwich, as if he hadn’t heard, or maybe he had and didn’t intend to respond.

 

I took a small bite. No granules, no razor blades. I nodded with approval, arching my eyebrows to make sure he got the message. He snorted and shook his head wildly, as if I had insulted his family and thrown the sandwich into the street.

 

“Crazy over there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the Zone. “Stadium is going to change everything. If they ever build it. Gonna wipe everything out. Gonna wipe out the whole neighborhood.”

 

Another SUV cruised by, looking official, its black-mirror windows reflecting the three of us like mangled dough.

 

“There’s gonna be a casino, too,” he said. “A goddamn casino. Can you believe they approved it?”

 

I had no idea what he was talking about. I caught myself starting to speak, emitting a truncated, guttural sound. “Ahp.”

 

He assessed me, first my sneakers, then my legs and shorts, working his way up to my face.

 

I had another bite of the sandwich. It was delicious. The jelly was exploding with strawberry sweetness. I tilted my head back and nestled it in the bend of the Plexiglas overhang. Hundreds of beads of water constellated above me, jiggling on their own, as if they were alive; every so often one broke away, streaked down the plastic, and disappeared. I got to thinking about the last restaurant I would ever work in; in the summer we served watermelon granita in crystal glasses, which either I or a runner would pass from a silver tray to guests waiting for tables. I was the sommelier.

 

And then I wasn’t.

 

“That’s why we like you—you stick up for yourself,” the manager, Jamie, had told me as I sat down to sign my termination notice.

 

At the time, I didn’t think it was the end of my career. The strange thing about being blackballed is nobody tells you—you gradually figure it out on your own, to the extent you can affirm it. Nothing was stopping me from trying to break back in, technically.

 

I remember standing in the parlor in the early evening before the rush, empty tray under my arm as I looked through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the sidewalk, watching the uneven stream of bodies, some hurrying by, some stalling; and then a woman stopped to let her dog pee on some impatiens fenced around a tree.

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The Doctor Looks at My Blood Work

Says: There are blacksmiths in your eyes.

Maybe this explains the forging.

The way I flatten heat. Bang

earth against answer until

I call it knife. Nodding to bellows

in their muddy howls. Told them

chemistry separates from slag.

I speak in gardens. Interrogate

the estrogen and her rising weeds.

From space this earth is more red

than any astronaut will speak.

In the dirt, the iron begs to be born.

I kneel before anvil and pray.

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Acknowledgment

You divorce. You remarry.

 

You are already a father; your new wife is already a mother. She has a blooming daughter that you come to love, a daughter to whom, in time, you begin to say I love you. A daughter who later begins to occasionally reply, with no discernible pattern: Love you, too.

 

You write a book for people just her age—that age we think of as between. A publisher buys the book, makes plans to release it, and over the course of many disorienting months these plans unfold as promised. Along the way, you encounter the moment when you must determine how to dedicate the book, when you will choose how to acknowledge the people you will elect to thank. The task is self-indulgently benevolent. You dedicate the book to your wife, first and last. You acknowledge your parents, your teachers, your friends, the people to whom you entrusted the book long before anyone wanted to pay you for it.

 

You acknowledge your son, of course, who is easily named. But when you try to acknowledge your wife’s daughter, who by now has been a part of your life for years, you hesitate. She is your child. Also she is not your child. The sentiment comes easy, but what to call her does not. You contemplate at length how you will identify her role in your life, the way you will declare—in print—what you are to each other. Eventually you end up with these words:

 

To my daughter, for being such an excellent human being to share the world with, and for teaching me so much about being a dad.

 

You send these words to your editor.

 

The day comes when the publisher of your book prints advance copies. These copies are not final; they are still full of mistakes. You show the book to your wife’s daughter, and she thumbs swiftly through it toward the end. While you watch, she slows and reads the acknowledgments page. She sees the way you have phrased your gratitude, sees the title you have bestowed her. She says nothing. She is thirteen. You do not, at first, know what to think of her silence.

 

But weeks pass, the book due to be finalized any day, and you don’t forget what she didn’t say. You remember your words: my daughter, for teaching me so much about being a dad. You begin to suspect that she has said nothing not because she is thirteen, but because she is thirteen and already has a dad. Her dad is not you. And finally one night when you are already feeling melancholy, you hover at the entrance of her room before bedtime and tell her you have a question. A personal question that might feel awkward. She says, dubiously, Okay.

 

You ask her about the acknowledgment, if she remembers what it says. She does. You ask her if she would feel better if instead of daughter, you wrote step-daughter, because that’s what she is. You ask her if, instead of dad, you should write step-dad, because that’s what you are. She says, slowly—Maybe?—and in the weight of that word you feel a sick and swollen tide of regret: at having asked the question, at having phrased your gratitude the way you did in the first place, at taking space in this doorway at all. She tells you, because she is an excellent human being to share the world with, that what you said was sweet. But she also describes, because she is an excellent human being to share the world with, how there are competing piles of guilt whose weights she has to measure, whose burdens she must compare. If you do not make the change, she explains, there is this pile of guilt. If you do make the change, there is this other pile.

 

You understand her.

 

You understand her, and you think in that moment that maybe you will never again be asked to undertake anything so parental as this, to gift her this retraction, to express the truth not the way you want to, not the way you feel it, but rather the way she needs you to. And what she needs is to be called step-daughter.

 

She compromises with you, suggesting that you could at least still say Thank you for teaching me so much about being a dad. You don’t realize until later that she is doing that right now. Teaching you right this second.

 

Because right now she argues how important it is for people to hear the true story. They need to have things explained. They don’t like things to be unclear, and you have been unclear. Worse, you have been untruthful. You have used the word daughter.

 

You agree to change the word. She thanks you. And then she tells you—she is so young, she is trying so hard—that at least you will have this copy of the book, this version that still says daughter, this advance that is full of mistakes. At least you’ll have that. You agree with her, even though you have no true idea what she hopes to mean, offering you this consolation. You ache with the possibilities. You thank her for her honesty. You say I love you. She says love you too. You will say goodnight now. You will leave her to her thoughtful room. You will go and you will nurse the strange dear knife in your belly, and you will send an email to your editor with the necessary correction, and for a while you’ll be lost, already fumbling to imagine some story whose words you would never take back.

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The Haunting of Memory and History

Hard Damage by Aria Aber

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Paperback, 126 pp., $17.95

 

Cover of Hard Damage by Aria Aber.

 

The collage of memories that make up Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Winner, offers an opportunity to reckon with the undeniable fact that poetry offers a home for the past and an understanding of our relationship to history. Memory is integral to why poetry must exist. American poet Ira Sadoff tells us that “memory is required for poetry,” and what Aber does is showcase this truth along with the complexity of memory, while questioning whether “memory is a privilege.”

 

Hard Damage chronicles Aber’s understanding of the trauma ingrained within her familial lineage stemming from violence and suffering the family experienced in Afghanistan, as she grapples with the wounds inflicted by the political and personal remnants of history. In the poem “Family Portrait,” we get a glimpse of the microcosm of the family and how the uncovering of memory is ingrained within the familial unit. Aber writes:

 

Family, to me,

Is only the sweat of female secrecy

 

This discussion of family provides more nuance as we learn about the speaker’s mother’s political imprisonment in poems such as “Asylum” and “Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?” The aperture widens as the poems convey the inescapable reality of just how much the political is immersed in the personal or the generational:

 

. . . How much

of my yearly tax is spent to bomb

the dirt that birthed me?. . .

 

Aber challenges us to investigate a painful and violent history that begets a continued destructive present, and how these events shape the wounds that are passed down again and again through the generations. Hard Damage asks, with urgency, how living through—and with— trauma, violence, and war engages our understanding of the self, lineage, and survival. How does one live with the enveloping experience of violence? How does one access ancestral history and language? How can all of this be reclaimed?

 

By starting her collecting within the realm of the personal, Aber prepares us to journey into a series of enveloping worlds or sections of poetry interrogating the questions of access, history, language, and reclamation. Each world presents not only the opportunity to grapple with language but also to grapple with the reality of war. In the series of poems starting with “Rilke and I,” each poem elevates the conventions of the prose poem to discuss how we remember what has happened to us. Aber writes:

 

My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women’s Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me …

 

Within the poetic experience, the speaker is working to reconcile intergenerational trauma and the reality of being born after the original trauma occurred. How are we meant to grasp these memories? How do we accept that we are removed from specific traumas as individuals but are very much intertwined with the remnants of our family’s pain? Each of the worlds explored in Hard Damage offers a different understanding of the haunting nature of memory, of political violence, and the attempt to move forward. Aber’s chronicles of the historic realities of her mother’s political imprisonment, coupled with her awareness of her own privilege, creates a tapestry of the different ways that memories are consume us.

 

Aber’s voice is entirely her own within this collection, and yet it’s made possible by her intentions of honoring the resilience and death of her ancestors. Not only is Hard Damage a conversation with history, but it also presents a rich voice conversing with various aspects of history. From speaking to the German poet Rilke, using the etymology of German, English, and Arabic words and those of the speaker’s own family, Aber’s collection explores what we are left with when investigating the roots of our world today.

 

The profound attention Aber pays on the line-level to the crafting of her poems presents many opportunities to engage in the depth of moments recalled by the speaker and the intensity these moments have for the personal and the collective. In “Nostos,” the speaker notes:

 

In English the body is both dead

And alive, but I know the blight of grief

Has a heart and thus will love, and learn, and thusly

Learn to hate—

 

Ira Sadoff, in “Poetic Memory, Poetic Design,” does not simply claim that memory is needed for poetry. He asserts that “syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues line to line,” is needed for poetic expression. Alberto Ríos tells us that “lines are what distinguish poetry from all other art forms, and therefore they intrinsically mean something. They help us to see what makes a poem a poem.” Aber not only expresses a deep sense of care and attention on the line level but also a commitment in keeping the integrity of what a line must do in a poem.

 

On the line level, the poems in Hard Damage break and disrupt our own understanding In the poem, “At the Hospital, My Language,” for instance, Aber writes:

 

cousin with no empathy. But family

is family; the awkward shell

I harbor, crack—avian eyelids,

hospital, yolk—

 

These lines are not only enjambed, but media caesura allows for a break and redefinition of the language before them. Because of Aber’s syntactical construction, our understanding of family is reconstructed. It takes on multiple meanings. In Aber’s crafting of the line, she evokes multiple interpretations and provides a deepening of our understanding of the line itself and the poem as a whole. These moments of intentional meaning on the line level contribute to what I find most compelling about Aber’s collection. Hard Damage works to bridge the micro space of the line to the macro understanding of what makes poetry so altering to the reader. It is in the singular moments of surprise, redefinition, and nuance created within the line that lead us to unearth meaning.

 

This unearthing reveals the personal and political history that sits at the crux of the collection. Aber’s yearning to show the intricacies of the Afghanistan–US relationship, the Afghanistan–German relationship, and her own understanding of the traumas these political relationships have caused creates a collection intense in its ability to interrogate the political structures, while providing a deep sense of what it feels for a person to grieve the aftermath of violence, war, and imprisonment.

 

It is nearly impossible to not feel the haunting density of the memories Aber explores as we immerse ourselves further into the collection. The poems ask us to be consumed by the intricate experiences of the speaker, while also carrying the responsibility and gravity of the reality Aber exposes. An entire history cannot possibly be conveyed in a mere hundred pages, yet what Aber recounts is done with striking clarity and an acute awareness of the privilege writers have to tell a story. She says:

 

It is a terrible time

To be alive.

 

I say this with the privilege

Of being alive

 

We are born in the midst of past and ongoing violence. What does that mean as we reconcile our identities with the trauma rooted in our ancestry? What does it mean to be generations removed, and yet still contending with the inherited trauma of our ancestors? This collection reminds us of that undertaking. It urges us to wonder, reflect, and determine how to deal with the damage.

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Interview: Jim Ray Daniels

Cover of Rowing Inland by Jim Daniels.     Cover of The Middle Ages by Jim Daniels.     Cover of The Perp Walk by Jim Daniels.

 

Jim Raymond Daniels was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. His literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series, and he has won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University. Daniels also collaborates with director John Rice to create films of merged media. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or scriptwriter for forty-four books and films.

 

The following interview took place with Jim Ray Daniels on November 18, 2017, at the Miami Book Fair. Since that time, he has published an additional collection of poetry, The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and a collection of stories, The Perp Walk (Michigan State University Press, 2019), as well as co-editing Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2019). While this interview focuses on Rowing Inland, we hope it will illuminate Daniels’s prolific output and poetic sensibility more generally.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

Before we talk about your collection Rowing Inland I want to get you to speak a moment on imagery. I watched the trailer for one of your films, The End Of Blessings, based on your poem of the same name.

 

The camera follows an African American cyclist on his weekly Sunday ride, when he regularly passes an older Italian couple sitting on their porch after church. There’s no dialogue. You concentrate on imagery, sounds, and the breathing, and you’re taking the art of poetry and putting it into film. This may sound naïve, but I was blasted by the film. I mean, we don’t expect to see these kinds of crossovers of art forms.

 

Jim Ray Daniels:

We know when we make these short films that we can’t expect to make any money off them. There’s been other films made of poems, and typically you’ll see the text on the screen, or the voice-over, and we were like, yeah, we’re not going do to either of those things. We want to make a work of art and do something interesting and different with the medium of film, and so we focus in on sound and imagery, which are also huge parts of poetry writing. In that way, we hope we can get across the essence of the poem.

 

TFR:

I love that, because when you’re introducing someone to poetry, they can feel quite intimidated They may be too concerned they might not understand poetry. In my intro to poetry classes, I show students pictures of cave paintings to stress the importance of imagery and the ancient tie we have to images. When I watched the video this morning I thought, wow, I want to use it in the classroom.

 

Daniels:

I’ll give you the link to the full film.

 

TFR:

Thank you! A film like this will help the student move away from words and worrying about the words’ meanings, to a place where they see the images and hear the rhythms, and we don’t mean perfect end-rhymes. It might spark them to pay attention to sound as they move about their world.  So, tell, me, where did this idea came from? I read that you are an avid cyclist—

 

Daniels:

That’s correct.

 

TFR:

What sparked you to do this? To move from the poem to the film?

 

Daniels:

As a writer I try and find what’s going on beneath the surface—and in Rowing Inland, I think you see a lot of it, too, where on the surface it doesn’t seem as if you see a lot of things, or like nothing interesting is happening. So, a guy riding up a hill on his bicycle—on the surface you don’t think there’s anything going on, but there really is a lot layered in there.  And, I try to write a lot about my own experiences and enthusiasms. The director—he’s my partner in these films, his name is John Rice, he’s great, he’s also a big cyclist, and he said, “Have you ever written anything about cycling? Maybe we should make a movie about cycling.” And I said, “I got this poem, ‘The End of Blessings,’” and he said, “We can do this!” It’s a short film, and it and the poem each are in three parts: You rise up the hill, the old couple’s there, you rise up the hill, the old couple is not there, he rides up the hill, and the woman is there by herself.

 

I gave away the ending (laughs).

 

TFR:

I think it’s a wonderful medium to get people to see poetry as they walk down their street, go to the local store, to see images and hear rhythm all around. Anything to get people to appreciate poetry, but I don’t have to tell you that.

 

Daniels:

(Laughing) No, no.

 

TFR:

Rowing Inland is packed with imagery, imagery of Detroit in particular, and memories of adolescence, and parents and the grandfather, the yard, and mowing grass, there’s just so much here. When you’re writing, are you back there in your mind, where you are this past self again?

 

Daniels:

I get transported back to those places. And it’s really exciting as a writer—as a writer yourself I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—where suddenly the process of writing does take you back. One of things poetry does is preserves moments in time, like photographs, an emotional kind of photograph, and I like to keep track of things and go back and move forward and revisit things I’ve written about before and see them differently through the lens of the present. I guess I’ve always written a lot about Detroit, and first there was some concern I was repeating myself, but—I feel like I always bring this up, it’s my mantra—novelist Richard Price said that where you’re from is “like the zip code for your heart.” I just remind myself that no matter where I go that’s in me, that place is in me and those people are in me, and they help shape who I am today. There’s the mother lode of experiences when you’re growing up and adolescence too, though not the whole book is about that.

 

The other thing for me, with that book, is people say, where are you from?, and I say, well I’m, from Detroit, because it’s easy to say, and, yeah, I was born in Detroit. But we moved to Warren, Michigan, right outside Detroit when I was a young boy. And so here, in this book, I deal more with Warren, which is the city bordering Detroit, where I went to high school. People from Detroit know that Warren and Detroit are two very different places. And, it has to do with coming back to James Baldwin in a way, with race. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex, he has some scenes of the riots in Detroit in 1967 and he once said, “Detroit is always about race.” And I wanted to make that distinction, so the long section in the center is a series of poems that are connected called “Welcome to Warren.” I wanted to capture this place people would just drive through, because it’s so anonymous-seeming. It’s basically houses surrounded by car factories. I wanted to try to bring that place to life—even if all the houses on the street look the same, the people are all different.

 

TFR:

Often there’s a way you might enter a certain collection, maybe from an emotional place or a geographical place, some kind of familiarity, some commonalities, and there was so much for me to discover in this book that was familiar to me. I’m from Chicago. Chicago, Detroit—you and I grew up within a few years of each other, in the land and culture of the steel mill towns, so when I read this, I kept going “yes” and I’ve already marked, noted, and highlighted the heck out of it,

 

As I read, I was conscious of how you were returning “home” as poet, and I thought about how I return to Chicago in my writing, though I haven’t lived there in decades. It’s my haunt, my muse. So I’m reading about the Detroit area, I’ve been to Detroit several times, I have relatives close by, and I kept feeling how much this is a familiar place, yet it is so much more than just one place.

 

Daniels:

It’s funny you mention Chicago, because Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck was a huge influence on me as a writer. So Chicago was his town, and he really brought it to life in his poems and stories, he writes both, and was a influence on me as a young writer.

 

That’s the key to writing about place so that others beyond that place can appreciate it, and that’s where the imagery comes in. Even though somebody may not be interested in going in an auto factory, you’re going to pull them in and say, Hey! look around, There’s poetry here.

 

TFR:

There is, and you’ve sparked me, inspired me with images of empty factories, the steel factories, which might sound strange. Also, there were so many poems in your collection that talked about the basement, and most of us who grew up “up north” had basements—down here in Florida, we don’t have basements, but there are so many poems in Rowing Inland that refer to the basement—

 

Daniels:

I never thought about that! But, yeah, (laughing) the basement’s big!

 

TFR:

In my life, the basement was a place, is a place, that holds a lot of memories. I was so touched by these particular poems, and I think that you as poet sometimes don’t know how your work, your words, might reach a reader until the book’s been out a while and you start to hear from readers.

 

In writing about the basement, you also wrote “upstairs she kept the order”—speaking about your mother— and then, “Downstairs, he drove another nail in.” You bring us into this neighborhood, this home, so that much of Rowing Inland is clearly set not in the heart of the city, but in a suburb, that commonality of so many Americans. At least, that’s where the first section is; the book is organized into four sections—

 

You have a line in here, where you’re an adolescent where you don’t quite understand what’s going on in the adult world, and in the “eight mile,” where you have physical landscape a little removed from the city—and as a poet, you make the connections and, then it reaches me, who grew up in a different city. Do the connections surprise you? Or do you feel they’ve always been there and just sort of bubble up a little bit?

 

Daniels:

I like when the connections surprise me. Your subconscious mind keeps going back to things without your realizing it.

 

And it’s true that adolescence is a time, especially in the suburbs, where we often didn’t fully understand what was going on. Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and Warren where the rapper Eminem is from. He did a film called 8 Mile, because he’s from that area, and there’s this whole border mentality, and that’s why he called the movie 8 Mile, and it’s like ten lanes wide and in the Detroit area. This kind of border mentality has kind of a symbolic resonance. It was interesting growing up there as a kid—you didn’t quite understand what was going on, such as with the riots in 1967.

 

TFR:

I want to ask about a poem that haunted me, the one about the young woman who died, in the fire?

 

Daniels:

Marlene, in “Calling out Marlene Miller.”

 

 TFR:

You were in Warren then.

 

Daniels:

Yes. She haunts me. Basically, your first death growing up—one that’s not like a grandparent. It is huge. Your first love is huge, but especially when your first love is also your first death.

 

 TFR:

And having to put those two together—they don’t leave you. You’ve written about her before.

 

Daniels:

It keeps on, I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about her at various points.

 

TFR:

Some of us have one muse, some several, but we keep returning to them. I tell students to return to them. They’re bittersweet, those sorrows. Marlene Miller comes back again, in this book.

 

Daniels:

I think there’s three poems in here about her.

 

TFR:

I was surprised that she continues, yet there was a sense of satisfaction that she does. I start to feel like I know Marlene or I knew Marlene. There were Marlene’s in my life, and I believe many of us have such figures who haunt us.

 

Would you read a poem for me? “Weeding Out the Week”? Loved it. Took me back to the little brick row houses just south of Chicago, of Riverdale, where I grew up. The weeds, the brick, the rough brick.

 

Daniels:

Yes, sure, and it’s about trying to find your hiding places (laughs).

 

 

TFR:

Yes! Can young people even have hiding places anymore?

 

Daniels:

That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but in our current culture I think it’s harder. Behind the garage, between houses, little places where things were peaceful, and you could sort them out on your own. without the whole world watching

 

TFR:

To turn to your personal voice, there’s a poem where you were coming into a sort of self-realization. You say,  “I only faintly began to realize life is mostly a series of rhetorical questions.”  We all go through these self-discoveries, don’t we?

 

Daniels:

Yes, yes. These are things that happen: self-discoveries are necessary.

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Three Months Without Razor

or the scratch

calling from behind

without kiss of water to skin

without the graze of a finger

or palm to cradle a smile

but love—at times—

like winter

ends abruptly

and with a blade

the pores shocked

and opening

their wide mouths

once again—

without arrest—

dancing with the sun

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