Category: Literary Features

Mother Pass

The sensation starts on the red-eye, as we hover sleeplessly over the Atlantic: a faint flutter and then a pulse. The creature’s movements have been perceptible for weeks now, but this is different, diffuse and repetitive with no clear beginning or end.

 

Across the aisle, an older man struggles to breathe, and the flight attendants sweep toward the glow of his overhead light, fasten an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. One stays beside him, her voice a comforting murmur beneath the plane’s vibrations. His face calms, but the hushed aura of emergency will not dissipate.

 

My phone dings; it’s time to stand again. Zack leans across the seat to massage my calves. We’re vigilant against blood clots, which, I’ve been warned, could gather strength in the murk of my insides and detonate. Not unlike the creature itself.

 

Until recently, the pregnancy had been mostly an abstraction. I was thicker around the middle with beautiful, engorged boobs but otherwise physically unchanged. Then, over a few weeks, I’d swollen, expanded, inflamed. My hips became tender things, my legs rebellious, their faulty wiring tripping electric shocks of sciatica. For the first time in my life, my body is armed and dangerous.

 

“Birth is like the ocean,” a midwife friend said. “Don’t turn your back on it.”

 

—

 

The question of children had been the defining fight of my relationship with Zack. More than anything, he wanted to be a father. But I dreaded motherhood, which seemed like a kind of brainwashing. On social media, old friends changed profile pictures to their children’s faces, as if the women themselves no longer existed. In interviews, famous actors declared motherhood the greatest role they’d ever played, as if children obliterated all achievements, took precedence over all desires. Even my own mother, now an accomplished professor with stints in Siberia and Central Asia, had put off work and travel when my brother and I were young, staying behind while my photographer dad spent the month in Tibet or Bosnia.

 

I, on the other hand, cultivated an unsettled, underpaid life with myself at the center. I bounced from Oregon to Thailand to Western Mass to DC to Philly, following friends and boyfriends, spending whatever extra money I had on parties and clothes. And why shouldn’t I be the center of my own existence? Men have lived selfishly for millennia and been rewarded for it. From what I’d seen, motherhood was womanhood at its least fun and most societally sanctioned: the useful body, the selfless days, the life of service.

 

But then I met Zack, a steady partner with a wild, artist’s soul, an uncommon combination. We fell in love, moved in together, built a whole universe of jokes and routines. If I refused motherhood, I’d have to start over without him. The thought was unbearable. After nearly a year of arguments, I’d decided our shared world was worth the many risks of having a child. At least I hoped it was.

 

I was thirty-five, we were newly married, and I got pregnant the first time we tried, as they say. The months of pregnancy stretched ahead of me, birth looming at the end like a ritual sacrifice. And then motherhood, in which I would be eaten alive by hormones and sleeplessness, reduced to a mere zombie of my previous self.

 

Travel seemed the only possible answer, the way I’d sought escape since I was young: familiarity sloughed away so only my bright, receptive core remained. Adventure.

 

Or, in this case, a visit to my brother and his family in Berlin.

 

The midwives said I could fly up to the thirty-fourth week of pregnancy, and I wanted good weather, so I booked our vacation for early May, my thirtieth week.

 

“Let’s set up the baby’s room before we go,” Zack had said.

 

“If he comes that early,” I said, “we’ll have bigger problems than a baby room.”

 

And now this fluttering pulsing in my gut, unlike any sensation I’ve read about online.

 

—

 

At the top of five interminable flights of stairs, we arrive at our Airbnb. A flustered young woman waits for us. Her father has just died, she explains in English. She canceled her other rentals but forgot ours. She needs a minute to collect her things. Torn between empathy and exhaustion, we follow her inside. I’m not about to surrender our rental after all those stairs. Plus, we don’t have anywhere else to go.

 

Her nondescript apartment is still strewn with belongings: mail on the table, necklaces on hooks, a cardigan over the back of the Ikea couch. There’s a risqué glamour shot of our host above the kitchen table. But a balcony overlooks the German rooftops. We can see the rough, rebuilt streets we wandered on our only other visit to Berlin, almost exactly a year ago. The overgrown parks where we drank beers in the sun. We could live in this city, Zack and I said then. We talked about it all year.

 

Finally, our host hands over the keys, and the door shuts behind her. We curl up on the hard couch, my belly against Zack’s back, the relief of arrival a near-physical release. But an hour later, the pulses wake me, more insistent this time.

 

I slide away from Zack without disturbing him. There’s an early spring chill in the apartment, and he’s wearing his black hoodie and knit beanie. He started going bald as a teenager, and he’s had a shaved head and full beard as long as I’ve known him. Zack isn’t a big man—he likes to say he wears size “smedium”—but he’s broad-shouldered and solid. The sight of him sleeping heartens me; nothing bad can happen when he’s nearby.

 

I begin researching the pulses on my phone. Google points to harmless “false contractions,” otherwise known as Braxton Hicks. Practice contractions, I read. A tightening that comes and goes. Normal, especially in the second and third trimesters. I take a deep breath; this has to be what I’m experiencing. But how will I know the difference between false contractions and real ones?

 

Unlike labor contractions, Braxton Hicks are not painful, I read. They do not come at regular intervals and do not become more frequent.

 

I try to time the pulses to see if they’re coming at regular intervals, carefully noting the start of each on a scrap of paper. But they’re slippery. Where is the border between sensation and no sensation? Our host’s digital clock, in military time like all European clocks, won’t cooperate. My list of numbers doesn’t make sense, refuses to attach to the minutes in this unfamiliar room.

 

But the sensations aren’t painful, I don’t think, just unpleasant, and I don’t want to be one of those uptight pregnant women who rushes to the hospital at the slightest thing.

 

—

 

Representations of birth are everywhere in pop culture, but they rarely include a satisfactory explanation of what labor actually feels like. The real-life movie we’d watched at the midwifery practice where I planned to give birth was no help either. Naked from the waist down, a woman rocked and sighed while her partner massaged her hips and the midwives moved purposefully around her. But her eyes were closed, and she seemed completely oblivious to her surroundings. I was appalled that anyone would let themselves be filmed in such a state.

 

The mysteries of the body have always frightened me, its unknowable organs and breakable bones. A troublesome shadow self that operates within me, conducting its own secret, perilous business.

 

In a yoga training, years ago, the teacher instructed us to embody our endocrine system by lying fetus-like on the floor. Then we were to rise slowly, as if through amniotic fluid, exploring movement with the moist, heavy knowledge of our kidneys and adrenals. As the other women wriggled around me, I found myself frozen with anxiety. What were my kidneys doing in there? And what if they stopped doing it? I had no control over their function or disfunction, and that petrified me.

 

As a child, my blood pressure spiked for routine physicals, though I rarely suffered even minor illness or injury. My doctors, all women, were mostly kind, but I still hated their touch. Cold fingertips searching for something gone wrong inside me. Proof that my body could contain the ultimate betrayal.

 

But even more than the exam, I dreaded the ride home, when I’d be trapped in the car while my mother talked about serious things. Woman things. For years, I wished not to get my period until I was older, to put off adulthood just one more year. I must have sensed how once my body was a woman’s body, it would cease to be only mine. I would occupy it, but others would regularly lay claim. Sometimes as an object of adoration. Sometimes an orifice. Sometimes a receptacle for a child.

 

—

 

The Braxton Hicks, if that’s what they are, haven’t worsened by dinnertime, so Zack and I walk the few blocks to Caleb’s co-op, passing kebab shops and knick-knack stores, oases of green tucked between imposing post-war apartment buildings. Caleb lives in one of these, and we cross a ramshackle courtyard to find him waiting for us at the door. My little brother, who at six feet tall is much larger than I am. My brilliant, loving brother, who has known me every day since memories began.

 

This is the first time he’s seen me pregnant, and I’m self-conscious of my conspicuous femaleness, my body-ness. But he doesn’t comment on my belly, just wraps me in a hard hug.

 

Caleb’s wife, Michele, and their son are in the kitchen they share with eight anarchist-leaning twenty-somethings. A dirty, inviting space packed with mismatched chairs and sundry dishes, recycled jars with no clear use, labels on everything, a chore chart. The cozy chaos of communal life. Nothing can replicate it.

 

Michele is American, though she grew up in Germany, which is why they are here. She’s warm and self-possessed with a wide, genuine smile. She and Caleb have been together ten years, so she’s known me through multiple cities, jobs, relationships. I would trust her with my life.

 

Thirteen months old and small for his age, my nephew is all silky blond hair and blue eyes. The last time we were here, he was six weeks old, a compact bundle of incessant need. It was a few months before our wedding, after which I’d agreed to get pregnant. Finding a baby in such close proximity was a shock.

 

During that visit, Caleb had worn him on his chest in a complicated wrap that appeared to be just a very long piece of fabric. The baby was hot or he was hungry or he had pooped or he was crying, and Caleb was always taking him off or putting him back on, tying and untying the wrap with its ends trailing on the ground.

 

Love for my nephew was supposed to come naturally, the way loving my brother did, but I could only see an infant like any other. Except this one would not let Caleb finish his sentences. No conversation was satisfying. No excursion went smoothly. Our time together was chopped up by baby cries and baby needs, and my future flashed before my eyes. But the wedding invitations were sent, my committment to parenthood sealed.

 

—

 

Years ago, I spent a night babysitting a friend of a friend’s son. This wasn’t something I did much, not even as a teenager, and I was exquisitely bored while the evening crept by.

 

As I was taking the little boy up to bed, he ran to the open window and yelled “Mommmmmyyyyyyy” into the darkness. “I can’t stop thinking about my mommy,” he sobbed when I comforted him.

 

The intensity of his love repelled me. A burden to be on the other end of all that need. I planned to be a successful writer and a world traveler, a woman who lived by her own rules. How could I have the life I wanted while a child cried for me?

 

Still, when motherhood was a distant fantasy, I assumed I’d have children someday. I let that assumption drift alongside me for years, a hazy possibility that contained a child.

 

Then women my age began to have kids. The Facebook feed of baby photos. Friends swallowed whole by their love. I’d never liked children, but I started to hate mothers. They canceled plans for nap schedules. Their conversations revolved around breastfeeding and daycare. What had happened to the brilliant, complex women I’d admired, the ones who were the protagonists of their own stories?

 

—

 

Over dinner with Caleb and Michele, I describe the sensations, but Michele didn’t have Braxton Hicks during her pregnancy and doesn’t know what’s normal. No one seems very worried. My due date is ten weeks away. We’re supposed to be on vacation.

 

But it’s been hours, and the Braxton Hicks, or whatever they are, won’t go away.

 

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” I say at last.

 

—

 

Michele, Zack, and I take the U-Bahn to the nearest hospital. Caleb stays with the baby, since Michele’s German is better than his. Through three never-ending subway stops, Zack and Michele small talk while I sink into my body. The contractions are suddenly agonizing, and I can barely keep up as we climb the flights and flights of stairs to the exit. It’s past ten p.m. when we finally emerge at the dark hospital grounds, which are sprawling like a college campus. Michele locates the correct building, and a receptionist asks for my passport through a hole in the window.

 

At first I can’t find it—If they won’t see me, I will refuse to leave—but thankfully it’s still in my bag from the flight.

 

“And your Mother Pass.”

 

“What? I don’t have one of those.”

 

She frowns. “That is not possible.”

 

I look helplessly at Michele.

 

“Here pregnant women get a Mother Pass from their doctors,” she says. “It has all your medical history.” She speaks German into the hole.

 

The receptionist narrows her eyes but waves us past.

 

We come to a waiting area with a couch and chairs, glass bottles of sparkling and still water. The hospital is clean and quiet with a pervasive sense of order, more like an office building than an American emergency room. No one else is waiting.

 

Now that we’re here, the contractions seem further apart, like when your car won’t make that strange sound at the mechanic. After what feels like a long time, a nurse brings us to another room for an EKG.

 

“They’ll be able to monitor the baby and the contractions,” Michele translates.

 

On my back, with my belly bearing down on my spine, I hope for contractions, so the machine can record them, and soon they gather strength and roll through, beginning low in the bowels, like intense menstrual cramps and radiating outward, down my legs, up my back. I watch the clock, trying to keep track of them, but the minutes have detached from their numbers again.

 

Zack and Michele are beside me, but it’s like they’re in another room. Here, the world has shrunk to a pinpoint of panic. I don’t tell them about the contractions; they can’t save me.

 

—

 

In my twenties, I spent six months in Thailand, where I regularly rode helmetless on the back of a friend’s motorbike. With his girlfriend between us, we raced down the unlit highways outside Chiang Mai, late at night, after we’d been drinking. That New Year’s Eve, a different friend and I ordered magic mushroom tea at an island bar, then hitched a ride in the back of a stranger’s pick-up, careening over the dark, potholed roads. Airborne as he accelerated, we clutched each other with the grim clarity that this had been a very bad idea.

 

Another time, in the US, a boyfriend ordered a research drug from the internet, which arrived in a pile of white powder that we eyeballed into doses. We took the drug camping, where we lit a fire, then wandered into the wilderness until we were utterly lost. The hallucinations illuminated the woods, turning the trees brilliant orange. We hadn’t started a forest fire, but I genuinely couldn’t tell.

 

In those days, my body was co-conspirator, collaborator. A tool for attracting men and converting drugs and withstanding risk, even with fear humming alongside. What could I take, who could I touch, where could I go to get closer to the yearning, seeking, wanting aflame under my skin. A brush with death here and there felt like part of the deal I’d made to be a girl let loose on the world.

 

Before Zack and I were married, when motherhood seemed unimaginable, I envisioned myself as that girl again. I saw how my parents would grow old and die. I saw how my brother would be absorbed by his new family. And I would have nothing to which to anchor myself. I would float away. But a child could ensure my place in the sequence. I would take my spot in the human cycle of generations. Better to have that mooring than none at all.

 

Now my body itself is anchor and threat: soft, vulnerable, contracting.

 

—

 

Unhooked from the machine and back in the waiting area, I’m increasingly desperate. The deep, gut-sick feeling expands and obliterates. Like waves of terrible diarrhea combined with a kind of nausea. Only this nausea does not point up to the throat but down. Inside a contraction, stillness is ludicrous, and I squat, stand, squat again. Though movement does not bring relief, it is my only weapon against the roiling pain.

 

Michele is about to look for help when a woman calls us into an exam room. Her manner is brisk and dismissive, and she must be a decade younger than I am. I instantly dislike her. But she appears to be the doctor, and she speaks English.

 

“Where is your Mother Pass?” she asks.

 

“I don’t have one.”

 

She’s incredulous. “But you must have a Mother Pass.”

 

“We don’t in the US.”

 

“That is impossible. You cannot travel without a Mother Pass.”

 

“I just don’t have one.”

 

She eyes me suspiciously. “When is your due date?”

 

“July 9th.” Today is May 1st.

 

She doesn’t react, consults the EKG results. “The baby is fine,” she says. “He is not under stress.”

 

“What about the contractions?”

 

“They don’t mean anything.”

 

I stare at her, speechless. I will not leave this hospital.

 

She speaks to Michele in German, practically rolling her eyes, then instructs me to get on the table for an ultrasound. I do as I’m told, helpless and enraged.

 

On my back again, in exquisite discomfort, the doctor presses the ultrasound wand hard into my belly.

 

A second young woman has appeared, a nurse or another doctor, and she draws a curtain between us and Zack and Michele. They tell me to strip from the waist down, but do not offer a sheet or a hospital gown. I have no choice but to bare myself.

 

Instead of an exam table with stirrups, they direct me to a spread-eagle chair. My thighs rest on movable arms that spread up and apart, exposing and restraining me. Tears run down my cheeks into my ears. They poke and prod and swab indifferently, while I writhe in pain and embarrassment, muted by my sore, defenseless body.

 

“Stay still,” they say over and over.

 

“I can’t,” I say. “I’m having a contraction.”

 

At last, they check my cervix.

 

“You’re two centimeters dilated,” the first doctor says, surprised.

 

I could have told you that, I want to scream.

 

“You will stay here with us.” Her voice is gentler now.

 

I begin to sob uncontrollably, desperate to get out of the spread-eagle chair.

 

“Can I come over there?” Zack calls from the other side of the curtain.

 

His alarm is audible, but I don’t want him to see me in that chair.

 

The doctor explains what they will do. First, a steroid shot to develop the baby’s lungs. Then a magnesium drip to slow the contractions. “You may be here a couple weeks or more,” she says. “But you will eventually need a C-section because the baby is breech. Do you understand?”

 

“Yes.”

 

I’m allowed to move from the chair.

 

“You may not be able to have a vaginal birth in the future after a C-section,” the doctor says. “Do you understand?”

 

“Yes.” I almost laugh at how little this concerns me.

 

They pull back the curtain, and Zack rushes to the table where I’m curled with the magnesium IV in my arm. He hugs me, his face wet against mine, his worry and love pulsing through me. I matter to this person.

 

Then the worst contraction hits, and I’m pinned moaning beneath it. They say women don’t remember the pain of labor, but I will. I will replay the experience over and over, so I won’t forget, so I can tell people. But even though my memories will be clear, the words will never be right.

 

The doctors must be sufficiently alarmed, because they check my cervix again. I’ve gone from two to nine centimeters dilated in twenty minutes, a process that usually takes hours.

 

“The baby has to come out now,” the first doctor says.

 

—

 

I’m a body on a gurney, wearing only my T-shirt, rolling through hospital hallways. Strange faces speak above me.

 

“Can I have something to cover me?” I ask.

 

The faces seem startled. I’m given a sheet, but it’s folded in a tight square.

 

Soon we’re in the bright operating room.

 

“Stay still,” is all they say in English.

 

An impossible request as the contractions rage through me.

 

Everywhere hands are on me, swabbing, prepping, holding down my legs. These hands are an invasion, and they will save my life.

 

One of the faces removes its mask, leans close. “I’m the surgeon,” says a woman, calm and serious. “We strongly recommend a C-section, but if you want you can try to birth vaginally.”

 

I’m confused and horrified. “No. C-section!”

 

“So you agree?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Next the anesthesiologist materializes at my side. His eyes are kind. “We don’t have time for an epidural,” he says. “We will use general anesthesia.”

 

I know this means my situation must be very serious.

 

He asks questions that seem crucial. Do I have medication allergies? Are there heart conditions in my family?

 

I search my mind for the right answers. “Caffeine gives me heart palpitations.”

 

“Has it ever caused you to have a heart attack?”

 

“No, just anxiety.”

 

He laughs, a comforting, human noise.

 

I want to tell him not to let me die, but even saying those words feels like a curse. “Take good care of me.”

 

“I will,” he says.

 

Last, a woman grasps my hand. “I’m the midwife,” she says. “I’ll be looking after your baby.”

 

I had practically forgotten the baby; in this moment it is of no consequence to me.

 

The anesthesiologist puts the mask over my face. “You may feel warm.”

 

Instead, cold spreads down my throat, and the world blinks off.

 

—

 

This is when the body becomes just a body. It still wears my jewelry, has my face and unruly hair. They cut it open, take the creature out, sew it back up. The surgeon’s long hands tighten the skin, seal the body closed. Then they dress the body in mesh underwear, an oversized pad for the blood. At last they cover the body and wheel it away.

 

—

 

I wake up in the recovery room, delirious with drugs and gratitude. I’m alive alive alive.  Zack, Michele, and Caleb surround me, laughing; I’ve said something funny. My good fortune is overwhelming, life unbearably sweet. The creature is expelled, my body uninhabited, released from its sentence as vessel, repository, container. The sacrifice has been made and yet here I am, whole on the other side.

 

But above my pubic bone, a bright wound burns, the skin around it numb.

 

In a few days, I will leave this hospital, so exhausted that Zack will push me in a wheelchair for a week. But months later, scanning myself critically in the mirror, even I will see that this new body, once cut open and sewn shut, is nearly indistinguishable from the old body, the one that, barely tethered, pitched carelessly through the world. That white line above my pubic bone will seem a small price to pay for this body.

 

And my son? Red and little and too young to be angry, he’s taken to the NICU, attached to tubes and monitors. For four weeks he will drift there, mostly asleep, a tiny uncertain presence. In six weeks, he will be released from the hospital, and in ten weeks, he’ll be cleared for the long, long-awaited flight home. Will I love him? Slowly, yes. But this is not his story.

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We Regret to Inform You

We heard from Amanda in sales that a gurney had been sent up to the third floor this morning. We received the email from HR after lunch.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email stated, “that Mark Lawson, senior director of communications, passed away this morning. Mark has been with the company for 24 years. He will be missed. A grief therapist will be available tomorrow in the conference space next to the break room for anyone who would like her services.”

 

It looked just like the HR emails that reminded us of upcoming holidays and that skin cancer screenings were available on the top floor. Navy blue font, no orange exclamation point. It blended in with the rest of our inboxes. We could have missed it had we not been waiting for it.

 

We all went back to work. No one in the contracts department knew Mark that well. Ellison had only been at his position for three months. Yasmina had been here almost a year, the longest of us new hires. We were young and promising and ready to go over terms and clauses. The only time any of us had contacted Mark was when our boss told Julie to check with the communications department on a stipulation involving a client and a third party.

 

“That’s a marketing question,” Mark had replied via email.

 

For the rest of the day, we heard whispers about how this man we’d never met had collapsed at his desk. We gave our condolences whenever we passed anyone from the communications team in the hallways. We asked Amanda what she had seen, but she told us that she hadn’t gotten a good look at him as he was wheeled out of the building. There had been a wall of EMTs and HR representatives surrounding Mark as if he were the eye of a storm, as if they were shielding us from witnessing something unsightly.

 

We knew our morbid excitement over the email had marked us as immature and unprofessional to ourselves and to each other. We fidgeted at our desks and spoke in soft tones, worried that raising our voices would further our insensitivity. Amanda, meanwhile, had been with the company for seven years and was unphased by anything that happened in the office. Her heels made the same measured clack across the floor; her smile held the same welcoming broadness. At the end of the day, she told us how relieved she was to have completed a huge campaign.

 

She was older than us and yet young enough for us to feel comfortable inviting her to lunch, complaining to her about our department, and asking her for dating advice. Julie had taken to wearing her stringy blond hair into a top bun like Amanda’s, while Wes had adopted the same smirk Amanda used when someone asked for help on their projects.

 

John, in the accounts payable department next to ours, took the news harder than we did. He paced our floor and muttered to himself, his bald head sweating.

 

“Mark was three years from retirement,” John said. “I’m ten years younger than he was.”

 

“It’s so sad, John,” we said to him.

 

“Cardiovascular problems run in my family,” John said.

 

“Don’t worry, John,” we said.

 

“I should exercise more,” John continued. “My wife takes spin classes. We have a stability ball in storage.”

 

“Sounds good, John,” we said.

 

John replaced his chair with the stability ball the following day. When he left his cubicle to attend a meeting, we took the ball, formed a circle, and rolled it back and forth to each other.

 

It was a rare moment during which we had somehow scanned and duplicated each contract, updated the statuses of all our business deals, triple-checked for signatures on every line. Yasmina’s shoulders relaxed after so many months of them tense near her ears, and Randall had stopped sighing at the top of each hour. We talked about what hobbies we had, which home towns we had come from, whether we were using this job as a step toward a better company or grad school. As we let the ball travel across the floor, Axel heard us laughing and left his office to see what we were up to.

 

“So new here, all of you,” Axel said. He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his gelled hair. We smiled nervously. “And so strong as a team! You’ll all need each other to stick it through. It’s hard to find a workplace that really functions as a second home.”

 

He looked at us one by one before heading into the boss’s office to discuss some nonstandard client agreement. We returned to our desks. As soon as we emailed Amanda to joke about how Axel’s life lessons must contribute to the department’s high turnover rate, we received two more emails from HR, one after the other.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email started again.

 

“That Susan Shields passed away this morning.”

 

“That Chris Pall passed away earlier today.”

 

They were both in accounting. Julie asked if any of us knew the difference between accounting and accounts payable. Our boss walked by as she asked the question and frowned. None of us knew, and none of us asked John, either, when he returned from his meeting even sweatier and paler than usual.

 

“I’m taking the stairs now,” he said. “I’ve got to keep my health up.”

 

Amanda hadn’t heard how Susan or Chris died, but she did know them both and told us she wouldn’t be joining us for drinks after work that night. After our boss gave us each a new stack of assignments an hour before the end of the day, none of us went out for drinks either. We stayed until 7:30 and went home straight after.

 

We had moved to the city to work here, all of us young and promising contracts people. Wes’s fiancé had been living in the city two years prior to complete his master’s. Ellison’s family was on the other side of the country, and he planned to keep it that way. Sunny had an abuela in the suburbs. Our friends and mentors and older brothers had gushed about the city before the move.

 

“There’s energy in everything,” they had said. “So many people, so many things to do, so many adventures to have.”

Our bedrooms were the sizes of halal carts, and the rest of our apartments weren’t much larger. Our roommates were polite and out of the way, even if at night our walls were so thin we could hear each other typing on keyboards.

 

“Can they hear us?” we asked our partners after sex.

 

“Probably,” they answered. “We can hear them.”

 

They would go to sleep while we lay awake, listening to our roommates’ phone calls home, the foreign music of the restaurant on the ground floor, laughing groups leaving the movie theater down the block, food delivery boys flying past on their bicycles. We hoped the experience would feel less strange with time.

 

We tried inviting each other, us new hires, to the same clubs and festivals and parties that our friends and lovers would take us to, but we often found ourselves too tired to do much more than take the subway home and stay there.

 

When we arrived in the office the next day, HR had sent six more emails.

 

“We regret to inform you,” they began. Someone from the copywriting department, another from communications, three from production. The sixth was to let us know the elevator was under repair after its cord snapped. When we had walked in that morning, there was a single yellow band stretched across the elevator doors.

 

Randall complained that HR should switch up the emails a little, change the font color or add a picture or something, after he nearly forwarded one of the emails to a client awaiting approval on a rider. We nodded, as we had almost done the same thing.

 

A seventh email came: a memorial service would be held at the end of the month for everyone who had passed away, and a voluntary company-wide meeting would take place in the ground floor event space tomorrow morning for anyone concerned about the state of the office.

 

“I can’t work like this,” Mallory said. “Whatever is going on, I can’t deal with it.”

 

She told us she was taking a walk, but she never came back. We spent our lunch break that day waiting in line for the grief therapist.

 

“I don’t think it’s affecting my work, but is it bad that I’m bad at my work?” Ellison asked.

 

“Can we get more than ten minutes of time with you?” April asked.

 

“I know you’re here because you specialize in grief, but can we come to you for other non-grief-related problems?” Julie asked.

 

We saw Amanda in line for the therapist on our way back to our floor. Her face looked just as emotionless as ever, which we admired, and we told her we were excited to catch up with her soon. She grinned with a stiff precision that frightened us and said she wouldn’t be available for drinks again until the weekend.

 

While we ate lunch at our desks and filed our work, we asked each other about the loved ones we’d lost. Our lists were short, but we were young. And promising. The boss came by to ask how we were all doing, then walked back into his office. We watched him shut the door and heard him turn his lock.

 

“I sent my two weeks’ notice yesterday,” Victor said. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll even stay two weeks longer.”

 

Two of us nodded, having also sent our two weeks’ in. We thought about Mallory. Yasmina said she was ready to just quit with no notice, just like her. None of them had other positions lined up yet, but they were done with the company, done with the thankless work. The rest of us looked down, wondering whether what we were feeling for them was panic or jealousy.

 

At the company-wide meeting, we sat in a group at the back of the event space and tried not to think of how late we would have to stay that evening. Our phones buzzed with four more emails from HR. One in public outreach, three in sales. From our spot, we watched Amanda’s smooth, placid face from across the room as she checked her phone.

 

A row of chairs lined the right side of the stage. As the graying CEO asked the room to quiet down from his spot at the center of the stage, the chairs filled with small, nervous women in pale cardigans and paisley dresses. They introduced themselves as the HR department, saying their names down the line as if they were doing roll call in grade school. Somewhere near the front, we heard Axel let out a low whistle. After some brief remarks on the arrangements being made for the memorial service, the CEO asked if anyone wanted to voice their questions or concerns.

 

“Have the elevator shafts been checked? How about the fire alarms? The stairwells?”

 

“How does HR learn about these deaths before my department does?”

 

“Is it true that the building’s haunted?”

 

“Where do the bodies go?”

 

“Why do these deaths keep happening?”

 

As the room grew louder, the HR department stood up from their chairs quietly and filed out of the room. The last of the nervous women pulled her phone from her cardigan pocket and let out a sob as the door closed behind her. A second later, the room filled with various chimes and buzzes. Another email from communications. The room exploded with questions being shouted over those who were weeping.

 

“That’s it,” Yasmina said. “I quit.”

 

Wes, Sunny, and Adrian agreed. They walked out of the building, as did a few others from departments we’d never been in touch with. The rest of us went back up to the top floor to continue working.

 

The boss came by and asked if everything was alright, ignoring the empty desks. He didn’t wait for our replies, instead walking briskly into his office to lock himself in again. One by one, the HR emails began to appear in our inboxes by the hour, still bearing names of people we never met, hardly knew, and couldn’t find in ourselves to mourn. One by one, more of us got up from our desks and left, sliding letters of resignation under our boss’s door. We were down to a handful of people by the end of the day.

 

On our way out of the building, we ran into Amanda. She flashed a perfect smile at us and mentioned that she was on her way to celebrate another successful campaign.

 

“I can’t wrap my head around what’s going on,” Julie said. “How are we expected to handle this?”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, her eyes wide. “Everything is fine.”

 

“Everyone is dying,” we told her.

 

“I worked hard on this campaign,” she said. “I can’t focus on anything else.”

 

She turned her back on us and left, the clack of her heels echoing across the building floor. Except for Julie, who was crying, we did what Amanda had done and pretended nothing had gone wrong.

 

Once we had gone our separate ways, I loosened my tie. There was a park by the office that I would go to when it was a particularly nice day. It had a fountain, some men who played chess, a dog run. I sat on the lip of the fountain, watching other people file in and out of skyscrapers. I stayed there until the sun went down, looking at my office, wondering if the lights inside always stayed on or if there was ever a moment when the whole building went dark.

 

The next day, I was the only one who returned to the office. The boss’s door remained closed. Axel came by to ask how I was doing, what the team was up to, what it was like to be so young, so promising, with so much left to look forward to.

 

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How This Works

When Betsy gets back from the nondenominational church, she boils water for tea and slides open a kitchen drawer to find a teaspoon. But most of the teaspoons have disappeared. There is only one in the slot where eight should be nested in a thick pile. The single spoon left has been ravaged by the garbage disposal, the oval mouth of it chewed up and spit out.

 

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but Betsy jolts when she sees it. This used to be a safe neighborhood, the kind of place where children turned cartwheels in the front yards. But the past few months the neighborhood has been plagued by small thefts. A baseball bat left under a squat palm tree gone along with several low hanging fronds, a collar slipped off the neck of an outdoor cat, tulips cut with the precision of an exacto blade from a side yard.

 

And now this.

 

She will tell her husband about the spoons, and he will be pleased that she noticed. So many little thefts. They must be recorded. Greg is in charge of the recording and the neighborhood watch. He is the Captain. He is so busy with the neighborhood watch he calls in sick to work. He has been a mortgage broker for their entire marriage and, before this, has never used sick leave. He used to talk about rolling it over, cashing it out when he retires. But now, she hears him on the phone in the mornings faking a cough, lying about a fever. “I’ll work on that at home if I feel up to it,” her husband says. “No, no. I’ve got everything downloaded.”

 

Betsy’s husband is so busy as Captain of the neighborhood watch he has barely noticed that their 19-year-old daughter, Charlotte, left home in the middle of her spring break from college and disappeared, has been missing from their lives now for two months. Certainly she is back at college. Betsy has logged into the small amount of parent access she’s allowed online and watched Charlotte’s meal plan dollars continue to dwindle. But she doesn’t answer texts or phone calls or emails.

 

I should have been more patient, Betsy thinks. I should have taken her sadness over that boy in college more seriously. Every day Betsy thinks these same thoughts. Sometimes she adds new ones. I should have sent her to an all-girls college. I should have given her a sibling. I should have gotten her a Persian cat.

 

Betsy stirs her tea with the spoon upside down, so the gnawed-up mouth doesn’t rip open the tea bag. The string comes loose from the rim of the cup and loops around the spoon’s stem.

 

In truth, Betsy never liked this flatware. She would have preferred something plainer than the braided floral design. Something truly flat. She remembers registering for it quickly before she and Greg got married, when picking bath towels and a toaster oven and flatware were equal parts momentous and dull. When all they really wanted to do was go back to Greg’s apartment and pull shut the black-out blinds and sink deep into each other’s bodies, amazed at their single-minded good luck.

 

Now, two decades later, her husband’s body is as familiar and tuneless to Betsy as a dining room chair, a dishwasher, a potted plant. When she bumps into him, it is by accident, as she does now in the kitchen when he walks in and takes a beer out of the refrigerator.

 

“The teaspoons,” she says.

 

“I didn’t see you there,” he says.

 

“They’re gone.”

 

“Time to run the dishwasher maybe,” he says.

 

Betsy opens the dishwasher and stares at seven teaspoons draped across the cup rack. “Oh,” she says. “Of course.”

 

Her husband is carrying a clipboard in one hand, his beer in the other. “Making some notes,” he says. “It’s important to keep track.”

 

“I thought I was,” Betsy says, but he has already left the kitchen.

 

Greg is walking through the house and out the front door. His beer is balancing on his clipboard and he is pulling out a pen from behind his ear and walking down the block slowly, shuffling really, as if he might be older than he is, as if he might be his own father, stopping and inching his beer over on the clipboard where it is balanced, so he can write things down. So he can make notes.

 

Betsy boots up her computer. She has been lurking in an online group for parents of missing teen and young adult children. She haunts the edges of the conversations, not sure if she belongs here. The children are runaways and drug addicts, living on the streets, and their parents are sick with worry.

 

There are other groups where she definitely doesn’t belong, groups for children who have disappeared from bus stops, groups for children who have been kidnapped and taken to other countries in the middle of custody battles. And the groups for children who have died from cancer, car accidents, botched deliveries.

 

Many of the adult children—Betsy has learned from the forum this means eighteen or older—disappeared for no discernable reason at all, and these are the parents whose comments Betsy reads and avoids reading. I don’t know what I did wrong, the parents write. Tell me. What could I have done differently?

 

These parents are sleepless and oversleeping and they are breaking out in rashes and hives and their stomachs are twisted tight. They have developed ulcers and migraines and aches deep in their bones, aches that feel like some new kind of cancer. The parents in the online forum have hair that is thinning and falling out in clumps. Their children will not talk to them because the parents have failed in ways that are too countless to list.

 

The parents try to list them anyway, all the ways they have failed.

 

I worked too many hours. I was home too much. I didn’t let him breathe. I didn’t notice how sad she was. I shouldn’t have gotten divorced. I am a terrible mother. I was a lousy father. I should never have had children. I should have had more children. Her father was too strict. We should have moved from the suburbs. We should have been more consistent. I never really wanted children. I always wanted to be a mother, that’s all I ever wanted. We shouldn’t have moved to the suburbs. I shouldn’t have made him cut his hair. I shouldn’t have made her wear that dress. I should have let her get that piercing. We should have been more flexible. I should have made her stay in Sunday school. I should have volunteered in the classroom more when he was younger, when I could. I should have left her father. I should have pulled her from that school. I shouldn’t have gone back to work. Her father was too lenient. I should have made my son unlock that bedroom door. I shouldn’t have taken off the door. I should have let her lock her door. I thought it could have been worse. I didn’t know it was going to get worse.

 

I thought it was normal for teenagers.

 

I thought I was normal.

 

I thought she was normal.

 

I thought he was normal.

 

Is it normal to feel this way?

 

I thought this was normal.

 

Thanks for making me feel more normal.

 

Hello, is anyone out there today?

 

Betsy quickly logs off before she is spotted, although she doesn’t know if this is possible, how this works. She is new to online forums. She is not a joiner. For the past nineteen years of her life, she has been Charlotte’s mother. She knows she should have been something else, too, should do something else now, but she cannot remember what else she knows how to do.

 

Her phone is beeping on the desk, and she is afraid to look at it. She decides to let it beep a second time, the way it does when you miss a text. She makes a deal with herself that if she waits to look, it will be Charlotte texting. Her daughter will say she’s sorry. She’s been so busy. Come down to school and we can have lunch, Charlotte will say. Betsy will say, Of course. I’m on my way, pleased how smart she was to just hover around the edges of the online group, that this group of parents, of lost parents really, was not her group at all.

 

Even though Betsy counts to sixty before she looks, the text is not from her daughter. It’s from the lady at the little church one town over where Betsy helped clean the chairs that morning. When they were done working, the lady took her into the church kitchen and made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat across from Betsy in the middle of the day, at a thick, dented table and watched Betsy try to chew and swallow. When the lady asked, Betsy remembers now she had typed her name into the woman’s phone before she left.

 

Just checking to see if you made it home safely.

 

You are not my daughter, Betsy types back and then erases. She took valium earlier in the day, but the sweet, blurry effects have worn off.

 

Yes, she types. Here I am. Safely home.

 

Betsy wants to say there is nothing safe about home, that things have gone missing all over the neighborhood. Chimes have disappeared from side yard gates. Just yesterday, a neighbor reported spokes gone missing from the wheels of her daughter’s first two-wheeler. Betsy walks outside to find her husband. Maybe she can help him make notes, she thinks.

 

But she doesn’t see him when she looks down the block. Instead, she sees a little girl pushing a plastic shopping cart back and forth in front of a rental house. There are other rental houses on the block, but people have lived in those for years. This house has a regular turnover. Usually it’s young couples who start out with doormats that scream WELCOME TO OUR HOME before the letters fade to gray and hanging pots of begonias dry out on the front porch.  And then there’s a U-Haul truck or somebody’s brother’s pick-up or both because it’s over now, and they’re moving to separate places. And the garbage cans in front of the house overflow with soiled throw rugs and yellowed pillows as if they’ve lived there many years instead of just one year, or even less. And then they’re gone, and a few weeks later, after the painter spreads a new coat of paint over the bruised living room walls, it all starts again.

 

This time it’s a small family, a mother and father and preschooler. The little girl chalks the sidewalk in front of their house with pink hearts and yellow smiles. She draws a crooked hopscotch with angled squares that are not squares at all.

 

Today the little girl is pushing a plastic shopping cart. When Betsy gets closer, she sees the cart is full of baby dolls that once belonged to her own daughter. Betsy recognizes the matted hair and blurred eyes, the result of Charlotte playing with them in the bathtub despite the fact that the dolls were not made for water. Betsy remembers leaving them out on the curb at the end of a yard sale last summer before this family moved in.

 

Charlotte was home over the summer, and the yard sale had been her idea.  “I want to clean out my room,” she said. “Can I keep the money?”

 

The dolls that weren’t ruined were purchased for a dollar each by a woman from Leisure World who planned to make clothes for them and give them to the women who missed their own children and grandchildren who rarely visited. The woman stroked a doll’s dark hair and said, You’d be surprised what comfort a doll can bring.

 

Seeing her daughter’s ruined baby dolls being pushed in the plastic shopping cart brings Betsy no comfort. “Where did you get those?” she asks the little girl.

 

“They’re my babies,” the little girl says.

 

“No, they’re not,” Betsy says.

 

The little girl’s eyes have welled up, and she is grabbing the dolls from the cart and hugging them, but they are tumbling to the ground.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says as the front door of the rental house opens. “We were just chatting,” Betsy says to the woman who glares at her. “You have to be careful. There have been thefts here recently. It used to be safer.”

 

The woman is shooing her daughter inside, and the little girl is hiding behind her mother’s legs now.

 

“I live down the block.” Betsy points in the wrong direction and walks that way with purpose.

 

She walks all the way around the block and sneaks back into her own house. In the online support group some of the parents of missing children count absences in holidays: three Christmases, the fourth Thanksgiving, a sister’s bat mitzvah, a quinceanera. Others count in tangible losses: dogs and grandparents, a lemon tree gone to rot. A cat is eaten by a coyote that wandered down from the mountains through the public golf course.

 

They’ve missed so much, the parents write. It doesn’t make sense, they say. How can they stand it?

 

 We can’t stand it, they write

 

Betsy’s mother is planning an anniversary party for Betsy and Greg. She is full of questions Betsy doesn’t answer. We need to pin down the time, she says on a voicemail. We need to finalize the guest list.

 

Her husband is standing in the entranceway when Betsy sneaks back into her own house after accusing a preschooler of taking her daughter’s ruined dolls. He is holding up Betsy’s housekeys.

 

“You left the door unlocked,” he says.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says. She looks around for his clipboard and finds it on the stairs. The paper clipped onto the board is full of house numbers, check marks and asterisks, and notes written in tiny script, her husband’s empty beer can tilted-over on its side on top of it.

 

“A Mexican tile is missing from that front stoop,” Greg says. “You know the one. Down the block.”

 

“I was just saying hi to the new neighbors,” Betsy says.

 

“It’s important to keep track,” he says.

 

“The ones with the little girl. I think she’s about four. Maybe five. I can’t remember what four looks like exactly.”

 

“A reflector is missing from a child’s bike.”

 

“Was she always so sensitive?” Betsy asks.

 

“You can’t assume just because you’re down the block, things are safe here.”

 

“It’s been two months. How much longer, do you think? It’s like I’m holding my breath.”

 

“You’ve got to remember to lock up,” Greg says.

 

“I was just out for a minute.” Betsy wishes she had never agreed to the yard sale last summer, that she had made her daughter keep it all, every bright pink jacket, every framed poster of a kitten, every boy band key chain.

 

“That’s how it happens,” Greg says. Her husband is staring past her, his eyes flat and focused.

 

I’m right here, Betsy thinks but doesn’t say.

 

“That’s how fast,” he says. “That’s exactly how it happens.”

 

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Full Moon to Monday

College cracked the fantasy wide

open. All our Pretty​ Woman​ dreams

flatlining in the bottom of some frat guy’s

basement. Memories of the “talk” and how

she left out the part about surgery. The stitching

and staining and then, there’s recovery.

 

Came home for break still soaking through

the gauze of this girlhood and all our moms

could tell. But no one spoke the truth.

That you can be six shots in and his hands

won’t reek of meat. That his toothy grin won’t

be dripping with blood and shit. All the songs

he’ll play in the dark corner or the back seat

of his car will be foreshadowing. But you won’t

remember a thing. You won’t ever know it

 

happened. Cause molly is the new pick-up line

and he’s got those for days. Nothing mom said

about chivalry and not putting out on the first

date prepared you for date rape drugs and scalding

hot showers to rinse the blood off.

 

Vanishing after you texted and told him

you were pregnant, and the shame slut-walked

all over Facebook. That innocence we knew is gone

like hope the RA isn’t hooking up with freshmen.

 

Somewhere between t-ball and toga parties

the rules changed from checking yes, no,

maybe, to him marking his criminal territory.

At least then you had the right to choose

 

or feel like you had options. But here, now,

you’re left to break and mend, stitch the wounds

to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows

and be back before Monday’s 8 a.m. exam.

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Autumn Evening at the Laundromat

 

If you want to feel

like a winner for once

put a ten dollar bill

into the change machine,

hear the jackpot jingle

of cheering quarters

pouring into your

empty empty hands.

 

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Bug$ R Crawlinggg ↑ The Wall or iz That Me???

It’s not winter/it’s now spring/what is outside wants to come in/buds glow fuzzy like buckskin/
your classic pacifier your bottle of booze/cayenne anger/yellows the bruise
watch
me
sink
into the mattress/between my legs you’ll stroke the sadness/I black my eyes like Cleopatra/the
closer you get/I’m a charming disaster
shut
the
curtains
neighbors can see/you’re snorting white powder off your key/Cupid push the arrow
through/watch your lips strobe red to/blue/house/hardcore/trance/electro/6am put on early
techno/let sound pulse you away
never
let
the
beat
decay
days are melting into days/your life goes missing at the rave/go out searching for who you
were/recycled hipster/identity blur/sadness breaks the drug numb surface/your body now an
despair circus/stop/pill-pop/24-packs/Molly/cocaine/panic attacks/
newspaper
searching
my
zodiac
for
a
sign/consult the Ouija one last time/down on my knees/begging stars to align?/should I leave my
strung-out VALENTYNE???

 

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Mozzy

I can’t recall my childhood without thinking of Boy Meets World. I felt like I grew up with Cory, Shawn, and Topanga, and while all my girl friends wanted to be Topanga or Angela, I desperately wanted to be Shawn. I kept this information to myself, somehow knowing without explicitly knowing that there was something taboo about a girl wanting to be a boy. With his pouty lips, sensitive heart, and swoon-worthy hair, what wasn’t to love about Shawn Hunter? You could say I had an approximation of a crush on him—most days I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be him or be with him, although if I could manage to shed the layers of societal influence that told me I was supposed to like boys, I knew the true answer. I can clearly recall one episode in which Shawn stands in the middle of the school hallway and does his infamous hair flip, which makes girls come running. “I got a 30-foot range,” he brags. I, too, wanted that power.

 

Growing up, my neighbor, Kristine, had short, spiky hair. She wore baggy jeans and t-shirts and backwards hats. I didn’t really like her—she was mean to me and my friends—but occasionally we invited her to play football or baseball because she was big and tough. One day, we were playing touch football when Kristine, having gotten angry about a play, tackled our neighbor, Donald, a skinny, pretty boy who I was convinced I would one day marry. After we yelled at her for tackling in a no-tackle game, we took a break and drank Gatorade and ate cheese crackers under the sun. I think we were all hoping Kristine would go home, but she didn’t. She sidled up next to me and said, “I wish my name was Justin.” “Okay,” I said. I’d never heard of anyone changing their name before. I’m not sure I’d even known it was possible. Having always hated my name, I was intrigued. Marisa seemed too girly for me. I wanted a rough-and-tumble name, like Hunter, I wouldn’t have minded Hunter. A name that suited me.

 

On the surface, Shawn is a player or a heartbreaker—that’s the idea we’re fed for many seasons. He gets a reputation for being a great kisser, the type of guy who won’t commit, but in reality, he is sensitive and romantic and dreamily vulnerable. When he begins a relationship with a classmate, Angela, I fell for the idea of becoming Shawn in a whole new way. Not only did I want to attract girls, but eventually, I wanted to find one that I loved fiercely, one who would love me back. As a 10-year-old, this felt insurmountable.

 

I went home after the football game and thought about Kristine and what she’d meant when she said she wanted to change her name. Did she want to be a girl named Justin or did she want to be a boy? Was she unhappy as a girl? Had she shared her desire with anyone else? She’d been so forthcoming, proud, even. If she felt ashamed, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know how she could be so confident. I was scared of my desires, let alone how others would react if they ever learned of them.

 

As a young child, I role-played with myself in the basement. I pretended I was Shawn. Of course, my hair never did flip like his. The closest I came to mimicking his hair was in seventh grade when I started growing out my bangs, which had hidden my forehead acne. Once they were long enough, I’d part them down the middle so that they’d curl around my face like his. I’d stand in front of the mirror and pout my lips and run my hair through my bangs. I’d pose how the heartthrobs on my bedroom wall posed—one hand behind my head, the other lifting up my shirt to show off my stomach.

 

Thirteen-year-old me really, really wanted abs, along with that V hip cut the girls were always fawning over. Thirty-year-old me still does.

 

I wondered if everyone else felt as confused as I did by what they saw in the mirror every day.

 

Because my bedroom wall was covered in posters of ’90s heartthrobs, my parents probably assumed I was straight. And I’m certain it never occurred to them that I was anything other than a girl. People like my parents don’t think that way. They think in what they can see, in what information is available to them. What I never told them was that the Shawns and the Leos and the Brads and the Ryans and the Pauls and the JTTs of the world did nothing but provide me with a blueprint for how I wanted to be: beautiful, charming, and masculine, but not too masculine. Masculine in a soft, delicate way.

 

Of course, none of this—my sexuality or gender identity—was in the forefront of my mind at the time. It was more like an itch that I could never scratch. I knew something was there, but I didn’t understand its origin, what its presence meant for me and my life. I knew that Kristine’s very existence disturbed me but not for the usual bigoted reasons, no, these reasons were of the creepy-crawly type.

 

Kristine never mentioned her desire to change her name ever again, yet every time I saw her, I had only one thought: “Justin.” I was terrified of my obsession with this single detail. I was convinced everyone could sense my covert desires—so much so that I often shared other people’s secrets in order to divert attention away from mine. I remember telling my mom about how Kristine wanted to change her name. I’d thought it would shock her, but she hardly reacted. She said something along the lines of, “She’s a bit different, huh?” then changed the subject. Different than who? I wanted to ask.

 

Throughout middle school and high school, I’d log on to AIM and wait for girls I had crushes on to come online, although I didn’t think of them as crushes but rather, close friends—not best friends, I had those, and I didn’t think about kissing them or touching them in the dark, but close friends I’d made more recently, ones I’d sought out for one reason or another. I had a lot of buddy alerts set up. [Redacted] has just signed on, AIM would alert me, with the sound of a door opening. I’d spend all night talking to these girls, not understanding why my pulse quickened whenever they complimented me.

 

The older I got, the more ashamed I felt of desires I was convinced no one else shared. I didn’t understand how I would ever become like Shawn Hunter. The closest I could get was to try to make boys like Shawn Hunter like me, as if by becoming the object of their affection I could then transform into them. I didn’t like the boys, but I did like how powerful I felt when I gave them head and then ignored them. “You’re not like other girls,” they all said.

 

“Because I’m not a girl at all,” I would have said, if I’d had access to that part of myself.

 

One night, I slept over at the house of one of my “close friends.” She didn’t tell me she intended for us to sneak out and go to a bonfire, so I wore my usual: basketball shorts and a t-shirt, my hair rolled into a bun. It was how I felt more comfortable, yet I knew guys didn’t find this style particularly attractive. When I arrived, we drank some rum then snuck out to the woods. My friend ditched me for some guy, but luckily, a nice guy sat down next to me and flirted with me all night while I drank. At the end of the night, he asked me on a proper date. Still trying to convince myself that I was straight, I went out with him a few nights later. I made sure to wear my hair down and dress “feminine.” When I showed up to the golf course, he said, “Wow, you look amazing. See, I told the guys you didn’t always look how you did at the bonfire.” He seemed to think this was a compliment.

 

I’d always thought I identified with Shawn because I was gay—I liked girls, that made sense—but it wasn’t that easy, there was something else lurking beneath the surface. Shawn, in all his bad boy glory, was not that much of a bad boy. He wasn’t macho, he didn’t work out (except for that one episode when Cory convinced him it was “what men do”), he was comfortable showing his love for his best friend. He lived in that liminal space between feminine and masculine, the one I also lived in. Do live in. I didn’t want to be a girl, but I also didn’t want to be a boy. I just wanted to be me. I wanted to like what I like—sports and lions and dachshunds and books and Dr. Pepper and writing poetry and making home movies with my friends.

 

My best friends and I spent hours and hours filming music videos. I played Justin Timberlake and Eminem. I wore my friends’ brother’s clothes, stuffed my hair into a hat. When the music played and my friends danced around me in tube tops and Soffe shorts, I slouched my pants, held my crotch, walked around the room like I owned the place. And it’s not even that I demanded to play these roles—it was a deeper understanding among all of us that it was the role I filled best. It makes me wonder if my friends saw me better than I thought.

 

Some of my favorite episodes of Boy Meets World are when Shawn and Angela fall in love. Initially, they date for two weeks, and then Shawn breaks up with her because he has a two-week rule. He’s afraid of commitment. Not long after, he finds a purse containing a book of sonnets, a ticket stub to a Van Damme movie, kiwi lime lip balm, and a classical music CD. He becomes infatuated with “purse girl.” He listens to the CD, reads the book of sonnets, and carries the purse with him everywhere he goes. When Cory tells him he hung up a lost-and-found sign and someone called, Shawn is too scared to meet her. He says, “This feeling is so incredible. I just want to hold onto it for as long as possible.” He describes seeing the pain on his father’s face every time a woman walks out on him. He doesn’t want that to happen to him. If he continues life as it is, he can romanticize purse girl and never have to confront the actual person behind these items. Of course, he finally gets up the courage to meet with purse girl, and she has a boyfriend. Later, Cory and Topanga realize that Angela had been borrowing this girl’s purse, and the contents of the purse actually belonged to Angela—his dream girl turned out to be the girl he’d just dumped. Shawn is, as it turns out, a bit of a lesbian. Once he realizes purse girl is Angela, he’s too nervous to call her. He says he doesn’t know where he’d start. When Cory suggests he starts with, “Hello,” Shawn says, “That’s too risky, Cory, it would probably come out, I want to have your children!”

 

I know what Shawn means: the first rec league basketball game I showed up to, I laid eyes on my future-wife and knew I was a goner. I was afraid to speak to her for fear of giving myself away. She was sexy in an aloof way. I wanted to make her mine. I also wanted to make ten thousand babies with her.

 

Years later, my wife asked me, “What do you want Wilder to call you? Should we just be Mom and Mama?” “No,” I said. “I don’t want to be called any version of Mom.” I told her I have been researching nonbinary parenting terms, but I didn’t like any of them. “We can make up our own,” she said. Our Australian friend calls me Marzy, which I love, but children often struggle with their R sounds, so we decided Wilder will call me Mozzy. Mozzy fits. Mozzy feels warm and snuggly, not too masculine and not too feminine.

 

Today, for the first time, I hold my hand to my wife’s belly and feel Wilder’s soft kick. “Hi, my name is Mozzy,” I whisper. “Nice to meet you.”

 

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To answer

your question, Mr. Hughes

it explodes

 

flings its syrupy shrapnel

beyond the neighborhood walls

hot with the day’s oppression

 

But later

much later

it locates its fragments

to weight itself against the night

 

It becomes

Mr. Hughes

the promise of every dream dreamed

 

It becomes

in the blackness

its own shining sun

 

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Ink

 

It’s the beginning of the school year, raining hard. C’s parents never leave town, but tonight is sweet and swollen—their departure some kind of unconscious allowance for youthful dalliance. They’ve gone to see friends, will return tomorrow.

 

C is freshly sixteen, a sophomore, which means the evening possesses infinite potential for teenage ruckus, a chaos she would have gladly exploited, but is, instead, sitting cross-legged inside her bedroom closet. The choice to keep the fact of the empty house from friends is part of a new installment of withholding, not unlike two weekends ago when her friends tied themselves in corsets, legs crisscrossed in fishnets, eyes blackened and glittery, and couldn’t understand why C wouldn’t join them for Rocky Horror. To walk out like that at midnight, to indulge her bare skin to the end of summer air, was compelling, certainly, yet she’d refused, sat in a patio chair, half listening to CocoRosie, half expecting K not to show. That night, the odds were in her favor. K had shown up around 1 a.m., after her parents had fallen asleep, in that quiet, liminal hour that had, over the past three months, come to feel synonymous with him. Other nights, he wouldn’t show at all, leaving C alone with her writing and desire. If he comes tonight, C decides, she will give it to him if he asks—her body. Her virginity, a nagging, heavy thing she is ready to cast off. She pulses with nervousness.

 

—

 

Inside the closet she lights a small votive candle, enough for total luminescence. The closet in her room, her room inside the only house she’s ever lived in: suburban, old, creaky, wooden. The closet is barely a walk-in, tracks of carpet nails steal inches from the tight quarters, and there’s a wide wooden step separating the space into two tiers—the upper platform just large enough to sit on, which is where C is, tucked away behind a waterfall of clothes.

 

On her face, makeup. She’s dressed in a fitted shirt, tights—a stretchy black skirt lies outside on the bed, ready to slide into. She’d finished getting ready, sucking in, changing clothes, clamping the straightener over her hair until the entire room smelled of charred tissue paper. She’d paced, lit incense, opened the window to let the storm smell in and considered what she might do until K got there, if he even showed up at all. In the past she would take out her favorite book or a notebook, reading or writing until he arrived to find her that way: gripped, intellectual, withholding. “What are you doing?” he’d sometimes ask, and she’d smile coyly, close the book and say, “How are you, K?” This was in the summer when the nights were humid and the moon was always out.

 

Something urged her to the closet. The desire to feel contained, resume her waiting close to the womb of her consciousness, an innate teenage desire for dimness.

 

More books and papers than clothes. On the floor below her, a haphazard row of thrifted shoes and an old cardboard trunk. Inside, a matrix of journals, books, loose papers with black, blue, pencil writing, a beating drum of life. By the time she is a senior, there will be no room left inside the box, the material collapsed all over the floor, all angst and longing.

 

C’s phone vibrates: Walking. C and K’s houses are almost four miles apart; it will take him at least an hour to get here. The news of his distant travel on foot, in the rain no less, thrills her, proves something. She looks at the time: 8:36. She’ll wait until 8:40 to respond. From the depths of the trunk, C finds the clean manila folder, the one labeled C + K—a not-so-subtle attempt at encoding. Inside the folder is a thick packet of their online correspondence, so hefty it had taken all the printer ink. There are emails and Instant Message conversations going back three months, when K was bored one night and sent her a simple message, hello. She studies for clues to his inner workings, every utterance like a delicate poem worthy of dissection. She lets out a sigh. She flexes her muscles to release the anticipation running beneath the skin. She looks at her phone. 8:41. You must be getting soaked, she types and sends. A little wetness never hurt anyone, K replies. She reads into his words, smiles, buries her face into a jacket hanging above her head.

 

—

 

C is coming down from her first summer of men, John and Max interested in her at the same time—a sudden jolt of attention.

 

John’s main appeal resided in the fact that he is a year older and had a new obsession with C. “It’s lame,” he said when she asked him about his nickname, Coffee. “It’s just because I coughed a lot one time when we were all smoking. Now I’m stuck with it.”

 

“That is lame,” she agreed.

 

On their first hangout alone, Coffee took C to The Portal, a place she’d heard people talk about and which she discovered was nothing more than a family of shrubs, fucking bushes, alongside a neighborhood church. No one can see in, he emphasized, but from inside you can see out. He’d kissed her so hard, and she was so focused on doing it well, she didn’t feel her arm rubbing against the brick side of the church. When they came up for air, C’s arm was bleeding—it was bleeding a lot. “Oh shit,” he’d said. A few weeks later Coffee started confessing his love to C, and their hangouts consisted of him crying over her dating Max, her sweet, good-looking friend who would come over while her parents were at work. In broad daylight they’d watch movies in their entirety, not touching until the credits rolled and Max would get this boyish look on his face, lean in close and say, “I know what we can do now…” his dimples too cute, his tongue in her mouth like a torpedo.

 

Both wanted to be her boyfriend, but she was afraid of her own sexuality, too self-conscious, too in love with K, the one she knew she could never fully have, the fact of him like a sacred name embroidered in the skin, not fit for articulation. With K, she understood the urge of lovers to tattoo each other’s names onto the flesh. If asked, she would ink him into her, somewhere where it hurt, like down the long spindle of her spine.

 

She looks down to her body, to her hands smudged with ink. Yes, she says silently. Tonight is the night.

 

—

 

One might say C, barely a sophomore, is too young to reminisce over teendome, but she’d already completed one year, had accrued a rebellion, steadfast, miserable, thrilling. Her high school is large, the teachers terribly disengaged, sour. While most of her peers deal with the lack of care by erupting into violence, C and her friends opt to guzzle 40’s of High Life in the school’s basement, or ditch all together, go to the public library and read what’s useful—oh, the immaculate shelves, the books like dormant specimens, coming to life under C’s touch.

 

From the trunk, C pulls more paper, a wrinkled computer paper in her best friend’s large, masculine handwriting: Beauty has much more to do with an individual perception of something than any tangible or quantifiable quality, it begins. She doesn’t know how this private manifesto ended up in her box, although in the past she’d been guilty of stealing scraps of her friends. After two 40’s, the information strewn all over Naomi’s attic—cartoons depicting their own lives, paintings, journal entries—tantalized C in a drunken way and convinced her of their ability to reveal something subtle, yet remarkably true about this friend she loved. So she’d trace her hand over the floor—Naomi’s entire attic the equivalent of C’s closet, both always writing themselves out of something—and like a deck of cards, she would pull whatever felt smoothest under the pads of her fingers, slip the paper into her bag to open later, a piece of her friend to fold into the reservoir, Jung’s collective unconscious, a weak, murky attempt at reconciliation for her thievery. Her knowledge is my knowledge. Like most things, she didn’t think about getting caught, didn’t end up with anything that was, necessarily, personal, except the one that read: I am not very articulate, I am bad at math, I don’t consistently recycle, I steal alcohol from CVS, I’ve never had a boyfriend, I don’t play any sports, I think I know everything—a double-sided litany of self-loathing. C didn’t judge, liked the fact that she could read it impartially, fold it into the canon to dissolve with her own loopy thoughts.

 

The candlelight bobs, heat rises in the closet. A dark cherry smell grows, the smell of blunt papers kept hidden away in a shoebox above her head. She stands up, using the upper platform to peer over the top shelf that houses a typewriter, her grandma’s old hat rack, and in the very back, the box she’d painted gold. She removes the lid; inside it smells of bong water—papers, but no weed. She’ll have to wait for K.

 

Like Coffee, K has a street name, one that she would never use, but is there, sewn in, part of his identity, painted on the walls of their high school and the restaurant he worked at. He is two years older, their freshman-year drug dealer, that’s how it started. She loves what he does with words, the way he calls her Ma, as in, “Sup Ma,” as in, “I like how you think, Ma,” or can say, in all charm and seriousness, “Hello young love, the moon is bright and full, let’s make love on your roof beneath it,” perfectly delivered, astonishingly real. Yet the ins and outs of his everyday life are murky—he offers only snapshots—shards of parties, pieces of friends, shadowy nights alone making art—all of it so encrypted she’s left to design his hidden life for herself. Coffee had recently found out about the two of them, not that there was much to find out, and had messaged C a somber little message that read, You’re fucking K-Wil? You got yourself the player. She didn’t say anything. And they weren’t fucking.

 

K’s reputation is obsolete when he comes over, kisses C’s neck, plays whale songs on a small speaker. “This shit is real,” he’d say to the amniotic sounds. He’d say, “I want to be Rastafari, a poet, an artist; I want to leave my mom’s place, I want to take you for a drive.” He teaches C to drive down the slick streets of her childhood, and then sneaks away at sunrise. Addiction, obsession, crept up on her, slowly then all at once. Now she lied, gave up nights to see him on the flimsy chance he’d make it. How much time had she wasted waiting? She glances back to their folder, to the C and the K, finds an old pencil, and writes C + K, they make the same sound…but they are not interchangeable.

 

—

 

In the closet her palms sweat. He’s walking in the rain, four miles. She can hear the rain pounding down on the flat rooftop and wonders if the dining room ceiling has begun to leak. She thinks about getting up, but the thought of the house feels too big, too filled with her parents’ belongings—she wants to stay close to her things. Among the pile of books, Miranda July, Freud, zines, a dictionary whose pages she flutters between her fingers, the paper-wind wicking the candlelight. She closes her eyes, pretends she is on a train, the flicker practically audible on her eyelids. Then the fire goes out, and the darkness feels good too. You smell like a birthday cake, she can imagine him saying to her hair when he greets her. She gropes around for the lighter, lights the candle back up, lands her finger on a random word in the dictionary, on the word truncated, meaning shortened, sounding a lot like trunk, like the one in front of her housing her mess of thoughts, so dissimilar from abridged. For a moment C grows tired of her manic upheaval, her restless writing, her own obsession with his words and how he might use them on her tonight, all of it so cluttered. Had she a metal pail, she’d have all the tools to start burning, cleansed and ready for him. Blank, new, virginal. Instead she pulls from the trunk The Four Noble Truths, a packet from Political Philosophy, one of the few papers from last year that felt worth keeping.

 

…The truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. More simply put, suffering exists. The concept of pleasure is not denied, but acknowledged as fleeting. Pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. The same logic belies an understanding of happiness. In the end, only aging, sickness, and death are certain and unavoidable.

 

She’d written in the margins, and this marginalia makes her laugh, jolts her out of her own silence. Aside the truth of suffering she’d written school = imprisonment, and next to pleasure she’d drawn a pot leaf; unquenchable thirst, a simple heart. The predictability of her trope embarrasses her, brings heat to her cheeks. More intriguing, however, was what she’d written in a sloppy script barely recognizable at the bottom of the page: Every person, no matter how plain has one great erotic performance in her life; the second performance would only be a copy of the first. It was a quote from somewhere, a book or song lyrics. She scans her mind in search for a connection to The Truths, the two pools of ink like shadows of one another. She finally settles on the idea that they are related merely by the fact that knowledge builds on other knowledge—something else she’d heard and jotted down. Joined but unjoined. What would it feel like to finally let their bodies do the talking?

 

Her ass hurts. She grows restless, anxious. She won’t get up yet, afraid her thoughts will spread thinly over the furniture, like she’ll have nothing to say when he arrives. In the pocket-sized book, Freud has a lot to say about sexuality, dreams, the subconscious, and the points at which they intersect. Maybe this is something she can talk about. Plant the seed of seduction by talking psychology, quoting the dead. She yanks the jacket from the hanger, uses it as a cushion, crosses her legs again, and thinks of him walking in the rain. A lovely landscape of purple and blue erects in the hippocampus. This is how the night will build, like it always does. They’ll talk and talk and when their words have crescendoed themselves, after their speech draws into the folds of the long night, they will lie down, this time in her bed, this is that night.

 

—

 

Below her, she feels a light rumble, practically undetectable, then the sound of the kitchen door closing. Shit, she thinks. She’s still stocking-footed. She tiptoes out of the closet. Outside, the bedroom air is cool, humid, the spell broken. The rain comes on slower now. He doesn’t call out for her, but she can hear him making his way through the rooms downstairs. She quickly slides into her skirt. Lightning cracks the sky, illuminates two over-stuffed pillows on the bed so they look like storm clouds, or phantoms. The house is old, each stair with its own category of sound, so C can almost track K’s progression, his slow ascent.

 

“Hey!” she finally calls out, releasing her voice.

 

“Hello?” K slowly opens the bedroom door, where C stands still, shocked out of her solitude.

 

“Hey,” she says again, leaning in for a long, damp hug. More than how he looks, he smells so good—faintly vanilla, but more masculine, like figs and leather, brown sugar—a scent she believes was crafted for her own enjoyment. She could live off this smell. He carries an orange construction cone.

 

“For you. A gift from along the way.”

 

“Something I’ve always wanted.” She laughs. The cone is huge, streaked with traffic muck.

 

“So, what have you been up to, chica?” K’s eyes scan the room, land on the closet where candlelight dances softly and jagged corners of paper poke out. It must look like some strange séance, C thinks. She had wanted him to see the oddity of it all, to wonder about her as much as she wonders about him, but now she feels exposed, naked, wordless.

 

“I was just looking at stupid shit I’ve written,” she says, blowing the candle out and clicking on a lamp. “I can’t believe you walked here.” She waits for, it was worth it or, I’d walk longer to see you.

 

“The rain is my friend,” K says instead, setting the cone down.

 

“Do you want to head to the patio? I still have some of your beers from last time. They’re warm. I had to hide them.” C gestures toward the darkened closet, where two High Lifes lay nestled inside coat pockets.

 

“I actually can’t stay long, Ma. Zach needs me to hook him up with something tonight.”

 

“What?” The news is sharp, hits her like a frigid wind. “What do you mean? You just walked, like, four miles to get here.”

 

“Yeah, tell me about it. And it’s a beautiful night.” K lowers to the floor, sits at the closet’s threshold. “I’d much rather kick it with you. We’ll do this again.”

 

C grabs her bath towel off of the hook and hands it to him. She sits on her bed, tries to hide the sudden rush of disappointment, but it roils. Come here, she thinks, I’m ready.

 

“I’m still looking all into Rastafarianism. I want to write my own bible one day, write my own religion,” K says, patting himself dry. He goes on talking about things so abstractly she confuses it for his genius. She soaks him in, would be happy to skip the conversation for tonight if it means she could feel his mouth on hers, become absorbed in that smell. Instead she tells him about The Four Noble Truths and he tells her about the way he watches his mom suffer; she’s ill, an immigrant, divorced, and angry. No one else has heard this coming out of his mouth before, she thinks.

 

K points to the trunk. “Tell me what you’ve been writing,” he says again. From this angle, everything inside looks like nothing more than a messy pit, an unruly recycling bin.

 

“Oh, nothing. It’s stupid,” C says, cursing herself for leaving their folder out in plain sight. And how many of those documents were laced with his name? How many journal entries began in I need, or, I can’t stop, etc? Too many, probably.

 

“Nah, I bet your writing is dope,” K says. “I have a box, too, filled with photos of me as a little punk kid.” C tries to imagine K as an innocent, young boy, but nothing comes to mind. In front of her his arm muscles glisten from rain and his confidence spews like his own beautiful odor. “I think I see one of you right there.” K points to some gloss peeking out from behind the manila folder. Before C can protest, he reaches inside her closet and pulls a small deck of photos from the rubble, not seeing the folder. Missing it all together. Outside the storm resumes its pounding, shaking the wooden floorboards and lighting the room with its electricity. She cups her hands over his, over the photos.

 

“Come on, I bet you were cute,” K says. Together they peer down to the photo of C and her dad at the zoo; C lounging in a blue kiddie pool; C on her first bicycle; and she hopes, she prays the photo she doesn’t want to be there won’t be, and then K shuffles through and finds it: a young C, five or six years old, on her bed wearing white tights, a white turtle neck, and large, plush rabbit ears, lined in pink. Between her legs, a half-dozen rabbit stuffed animals: one sitting upright holding a small brush for grooming its long ears; another red-eyed, albino; two man and woman rabbits dressed in Victorian clothes, velcroed paw-to-paw—married rabbits. The image is innately sexual, of course taken innocently, a little girl dressed identical to her toys, on her dreamy, pastel bed. Outside a horn sounds off, K’s friend ready to take him away from her. But K is transfixed, doesn’t move. Please find this sexy, she thinks. Silence hangs between them, just the rain falls. He looks up at her.

 

“I liked my rabbits?” C says.

 

K reaches for her face, tugs at her hair a little, draws her close.

 

Kiss me, she thinks. But K doesn’t kiss her. He bypasses her lips, goes straight to her ear; the skin around the drum tightens.

 

“You look like. A little. Bunny. Porn star.” His words slide in. Explode. The car in waiting wails its horn, doesn’t let it up for several seconds. The two look at each other, and C cannot tell if it’s longing that she feels.

 

But still she says, “Stay.”

 

And still he says, “I have to go.”

 

“My parents will be gone all night.”

 

He gives her a hard kiss between the eyes before descending.

 

Downstairs, C watches the car rush away, making small waves in its hurry. The cavernous rooms and she alone among them. Isn’t that enough? But he is gone, and she is left with the same humid quiet, the same rain coming down in sheets, his words echoing in her ears. The dining room ceiling drips one drop at a time onto the floor. The rhythm has a numbing quality, but yearning has a way of jostling the body back to feeling. She meanders into her mom’s study, past the stacks of books that hold no interest to her. She grabs a fancy calligraphy pen off of the desk, then approaches the staircase and begins climbing, articulating her foot heel to toe, heel to toe, heel to toe, the way she’d read monks do in walking meditation. I am here, she thinks, I am here, but all the while her fist is tight around the pen, the nails carve red crescents in the flesh. The night is long ahead of her and there are words, she knows, that will make the time go by, but she’s not sure which ones or when they’ll find her.

 

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Another Day

—a found poem: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

 

I feel the bruised cry of birds in my body

when I wake.

 

Thinness rushes my pink imperfect heart

and I am cast down at another day—

 

hands and feet and body.

Here is idleness, brown water, disgrace.

 

The sun is yellow and laughing

leaves stir and patter across the lawn

 

and I long for darkness and sleep—

its brass thud, its pirouetting slam.

 

I lie here and watch the bedroom

harden into night.

 

 

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Metaphorical Ghosts

 

There are so many ways to describe

            the fact that we die and are reborn

 

countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,

            the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,

 

the box of hair dye and the scissors, the poets:

            dying is an art, like everything else.

 

I do it exceptionally well.

            I do it so it feels like hell.

 

But no one ever talks about the ghosts.

            The dead ones that that turn your bones

 

into a creaky, old haunted mansion.

            And no one talks about how frequently girls die

 

in a lifetime. Girl after girl after girl after girl.

            Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,

 

frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks

            everything will turn out all right.

 

Yet some of them are screaming.

            And when you hear the way she cried out,

 

again, it keeps you up at night. You don’t know

            how to escape her, banish her,

 

remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them

            you encounter in the night like lost strangers.

 

That girl that walked the pier barefoot

            in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,

 

that girl who hated herself so much

            she had no understanding of the power

 

of her body. But the water’s rhythm, hungrily

            tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:

 

the eros that promised it would erupt in waves

            within her body underneath a boy’s body.  So that

 

when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless

            in their glistening madness, and told the girls

 

to jump off the ledge, chanting, do it, just do it,

            don’t think about it, and the idea of drowning

 

passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,

            she leapt in. And the boys laughed, caught it all on film.

 

And you know she made it to the surface again,

            gasping life more forcefully than ever,

 

and the water droplets on her body

            were proof of her glittering courage,

 

toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,

            and you know it was fine—it was, yes, it was fine—

 

she survived, she giggled, she gave the boys her number,

            so who then is this young girl that just coughed

 

salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?

 

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On Cocktail Parties

“Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.”    —T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

 

 

My parents met in a nightclub on Catalina Island. My mother was 28, my father 26. My father was on the island with a group of friends, childhood buddies from Ohio who had all moved to southern California together after WWII. My mother, born and raised in Los Angeles, was visiting with her best friend. The story goes that my dad begged her to dance. Later, when my mother refused to go back to his hotel with him, he called her a prude. She vowed that anyone who called her a prude would have to marry her, and six months later, that’s exactly what happened. Growing up, I never understood what one thing had to do with the other, and when I asked, they simply answered “Cocktails.”

 

—

 

It’s widely accepted that the creator of cocktail parties is Mrs. Julius Walsh of St. Louis, Missouri. In May 1917, The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Mrs. Walsh invited fifty guests to her house on a Sunday at high noon for a one-hour gathering. The event was an instant hit, and within weeks cocktail parties became a St. Louis institution. The first known cocktail party in England was held seven years later, in 1924. In T.S. Eliot’s dark comic play, The Cocktail Party, a wife leaves her husband just as they are about to host a cocktail party in their London home. The husband must devise an explanation for her absence to keep up with social appearances. The wife returns with a mysterious guest, a psychologist who counsels the couple individually. As the play progresses, husband and wife come to realize the ways they have been deceiving themselves. Two years later, and better adjusted, they host another cocktail party.

 

—

 

Things I hated growing up: My parents’ fights. Rain. The letdown after Christmas. Cocktail parties.

 

—

 

By 1960, my parents had traded the San Fernando Valley for the small town of Thousand Oaks, a place where everybody knew everybody. Our house sat on a small street with one house next door and three across the street. One end poured into a winding avenue with rounded cul-de-sacs full of one- and two-story houses with bikes and dolls and skateboards littering their yards. The other end opened to a main road with a round hills beyond it.

These were the years punctuated by my parents’ fights. Although I knew from the sitcoms we watched on television that this was not considered the normal behavior of a married couple, it was all I knew from my mother and father. After the move to Thousand Oaks, my dad had close to an hour drive to and from Los Angeles every day for work, and when he was late, it was easy to blame the traffic. My mother suspected otherwise. She resorted to all the stereotypical tricks of jealous women: scouring through his jacket pockets, demanding to know what happened to his missing cufflink, why it took him three goddamn hours to get home.

 

“And don’t tell me traffic. Your secretary said you haven’t been in the office all afternoon. Where were you? Who is she? I can smell her sleazy perfume all over you, you sonofabitch.”

 

My dad ignored her as best he could. Because of his easygoing nature, it seemed to the three of us kids that she was the one always picking a fight. Their arguments grew worse before a holiday, birthday party, or vacation, when it seemed like my mother held on to any insecurities or suspicions for as long as she could, erupting into a tirade threatening to disrupt even the most rock-solid plans. More than once my mother blamed my dad as she called off our plans. We’d go to bed, anxious and disappointed, only to be roused early in the morning with instructions to “Get up. Get dressed. We’re going.”

 

The morning of my tenth birthday party, after a particularly horrible argument broke out, my mother accusing my dad of yet another affair, she threw her hands in the air and said, “That’s it! Call your friends and tell them you’re not having a party because your father can’t keep it in his pants!”

 

My dad, trying his best to console me through my tears as well as reason with my mother, fought back. “Leave her and the kids out of it. Look what you’re doing!”

 

“You’re doing this! I’m not doing a thing!”

 

I had made most of the phone calls, claiming a sudden stomachache, when my mother, subdued and placated, told me to call my friends back. I was going to have my party, after all.

 

—

 

The cocktail parties began around the time I was in the third grade and ended by the time I finished sixth. My mother chose early January for their annual shindig, allowing for the Christmas rush to abate but for the tree and decorations to remain in full display.

 

My parents’ loud arguments intensified right before a cocktail party, tapering off just long enough to get through the night, only to resurface again the next day. My mother yelled at my dad for the attention he gave or that was given to him by their female guests. “I saw the way you looked at that hussy!” or “Joanna was hanging all over you!”

 

My dad’s friends were another source of aggravation. A tight-knit group, they were party regulars. My mother couldn’t stand them. An extrovert, my father became louder and sillier among his friends, their talk always revolving around wild teenage shenanigans, like when my dad was eighteen and followed an older married woman from Ohio to Texas, or the foray into a whorehouse at fifteen. There were so many of them, stories as well as friends. Jim, a dark-haired painter, and his wife Millie, a brassy blonde with a wide smile. Cat and Fat, twins with their respective spouses. Louie, a loud Italian with a big heart, accompanied by his current lady of the season. Bill with the ready laugh was on his second marriage to Carolyn, a younger, pretty brunette with aspirations of becoming a pilot. My mother liked Carolyn, and I did, too. She and Bill had no children together and would divorce before having any of their own, but not before Carolyn learned to fly.

 

Our neighbors came too, couples whose wives my mother met through work and parents of friends of mine and my siblings. This last group never ceased to amaze me, the eagerness with which they reached for their drinks, their voices rising with each glass. My best friend Lauren’s mother—glum Mrs. Stenson, who barely said a word when I was at their house—became radiant after a glass or two. Henry and Deidre Hand lived directly across the street. Henry was British with bad teeth, Deidre a feisty Irish redhead. She had a reputation in the neighborhood for watering her front yard wearing a one-piece bathing suit, bending over low to the ground as she maneuvered the hose over every crack in the driveway.

 

My parents paraded my brother and sister and me around to prove or disprove claims of inches grown or braces that worked wonders. I felt like the holiday lights or the rosebud-trimmed china: something brought out once a year. We always wore the new flannel pajamas we received at Christmas, Bobby in something boyish and blue, Kathy and I in pink and green flowers.

 

“Oh, aren’t you just the spitting image of your mother,” I heard over and over as I glanced at my mother, refusing to see any resemblance at all. My dad put his hands on my brother’s shoulders, steering him into the thick of his childhood buddies, where he was greeted by elbow nudges and “Hey, Bobbo!” Kathy worked the crowd with an innate flair, her long golden ponytail bouncing up and down. When the show was over, it was off to bed with orders to keep doors shut and no getting up for water. Shy and introverted, I welcomed our bedroom banishment. My stomach twisted with each ring of the doorbell, flip-flopped as I witnessed my parents shapeshift into characters I didn’t recognize. My outgoing dad upped his enthusiasm, greeted everyone exuberantly, entertained with dancing and jokes, and made sure everyone had a fresh drink in hand. My mother, naturally quieter, with just a few friends she considered close and always critical of everyone and everything, revamped into a chirpy, playful hostess: “Oh Bill, no one tells that story like you do” and “Louie, your spaghetti sauce is divine. I must have the recipe. Don’t go holding out on me now.”

 

It was impossible to reconcile these two revelers with my parents.

 

—

 

Once my sister and I had retreated into our room, I lay awake worried that someone would open the door by accident, thinking it was the bathroom. I worried that someone might stray where they didn’t belong.

 

It happened once. I was nine, ten, eleven; I don’t quite remember. After a few whispered minutes, my sister fell asleep, leaving me to listen to the muted sounds of the party slip under our closed bedroom door.

 

I heard the doorknob turn before I noticed its slow circular motion. A man, my dad, stood in the doorway, checking in on me and my sister. I sat up in bed, happy to see him.

 

“Daddy!”

 

Only he wasn’t my dad. My bedroom was dark. The only light came in from the hallway, dim from the lamps lit in the living room. His features were shadowed, the light at his back, becoming clearer as he stumbled into my room.

 

Things I noticed: The clock showing 11:20. Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” playing on the stereo. A woman’s raucous laughter from the living room, followed by male bellowing. My fear. Henry Hand approaching.

The overbearing smell of alcohol clung to him like a stale second skin. I glanced at my sister, asleep in her bed, hoping he wouldn’t see her.

 

I lay back in bed, clutching the blankets closer.

 

“Hullo. Still awake are you?” He walked farther into my room and softly laughed. “Oh, you thought I was your daddy?”

 

I may have nodded, may have said yes. I wanted to yell, wanted to call for my parents, wanted to tell him my dad would be right back, wanted my dad to be right back, wanted to be anything but a terrified girl.

 

He peered over the side of my bed. The smell of alcohol was sticky, clung to his speech, slurring his accent. “Do you like me? Are you afraid of me?”

 

I might have said yes. I might have stayed silent.

 

He sat down on the edge of my bed.

 

“Of course you like me. There’s nothing to be scared of, love.” He traced his fingers along my arm. “I like you, too.”

 

I shut my eyes as I began to feel outside of my body. I pulled the blankets over my head, scooting away from him as I felt his weight lean over the bed. He might have squeezed my leg before getting up from my bed, or he might have grazed his hand over my body, lingering toward my thighs before walking out, closing the door behind him.

 

The next morning I scanned the living room, noticing traces of the night before, from the half-empty glasses scattered across tables in the living room to the sleep deprivation in my mother’s green eyes. As she complained of the mess, I told her that Henry Hand had come into my bedroom.

 

She hesitated before answering, and I noticed the briefest flicker of alarm rise in her eyes. “You must have had a bad dream.”

 

“No, I was still awake. I couldn’t sleep with all the noise.”

 

“Oh, it wasn’t that loud. I’m sure it was just a dream.”

 

“No, it wasn’t a dream. I would know if it was a dream. He came into my room and—”

 

“You don’t need to worry, lots of dreams seem real.”

 

—

 

A handful of black-and-white Polaroid photographs remain as evidence of my parents’ cocktail parties. The women are adorned in their cocktail dresses and Colgate smiles, the men more casual in their attire but every bit as dazzling in their charm. Hemlines were longer than hairstyles, as women favored the short, bouffant style trendy at the time, except Carolyn, who was the first of the group to wear a miniskirt, and she wore it proud.

 

In one shot, my dad, Jim and Millie, Bill and Carolyn, and an unidentified couple sit scattered on our cream-colored sofa. Maybe my mother took the picture, as she’s nowhere in the frame. Everyone is smiling, some looking at the camera, others looking at each other. In another picture, Millie turns to Carolyn, Carolyn’s head thrown back in laughter. My mother sits off to the side, in conversation with a woman I don’t recognize. In another, my dad sits in the middle of our small sofa, Louie and Fat flanking either side. My dad’s blue eyes are closed, his hands outstretched and his mouth open, as if in the middle of a song. I’m struck by how young he looks, how young they all look, much younger than in my memories of them. All of them younger than I am now. It’s easy to see how things could get past them.

 

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Sun & Air

Sun

 

In Oregon once, the acolytes in saffron

sweatshirts and idolatrous medallions

made a vow to grow roots and change

address, to elect the man with the sunset

sport coat to serve as mayor and recast

community codes, to pull a nail here,

an ordinance there, the streets signs

of their Christian neighbors taken down

to make way for the Sanskrit of their master.

At last, the real estate of consciousness

was growing.  Less in communal rapture

and rage that climaxed in bewildered tears

than the watchful stillness that came after.

Surely there was nobility in this.

The lotus of their suffering flush, effulgent.

Somewhere a ribcage cools in a field,

stoned on love, that kind that lifts the fog

above its place on earth, but after that,

what?  The new human, the archetype

their teacher promised, what they were hoping

to become, what they feared the locals

in hunting gear and office would destroy?

And can you blame them.  Say a torch

broke the glass of your hotel in Portland

or a long sleeve poisoned the salad bars

of your town cafés.  Who would not feel

some shadow of their partisan nature fall

into the arms of your frightened kind.

I have been that child, that prideful victim

of my own outrage.  Call it the fitful

cleansing of a birthmark, the forever

failed extradition of histories of abuse.

Call it shell-shock; or war; or call it

what it is, salmonella and kerosene

and the scarlet seam of the unclean

lesion breaking, but do not call it new.

Puritans of permission raise their cries

as Christ does at the altar, disseminating

wine with a bitter summons to forgive.

Submission and refusal.  How better

to survive the next ice age or spiritual

contagion: a thicker coat, warmer meal,

a feast day between tribes; how better to live

and let live than deep inside a system

of guards to wave friends and family through.

The body of the chosen is a body

after all, and so in need of water, harbor,

seasonal fire and the couriers of sleep.

It shrouds itself in skin, as Bibles do,

and great redwoods, and the new human

laid beneath their limbs, a child of heaven

awakened from a scare to find herself,

transfixed, in a crystal of estrangement,

christened in the amber of dusk and dawn.

 

 

Air

 

The holier the stone the more like stone

the power and resolve that laid it, there,

in the heart of the contested common.

The last of the temple King Solomon built.

So say the faithful in their signature black

though doubtless they understand: to build

a wall is no king’s work, but that of servants

who will go nameless, and if another god

claims his prophet hitched here his horse

with wings, there is little to say to make

a god recant, revise, or otherwise move,

to abandon a place like that.  The prayer

whispered or tucked into a hole in stone

might be, in installments, one long prayer,

incanted under the breath, and if it helps,

it helps, it mortars, mends, transmogrifies

the dullness of loss that makes a stone a stone,

a holy land a calf whose gold is blood.

 

*

 

Every comic dies now and then, but then,

if called, they rise, and folks remember best

the deeply wounded ones who made them

laugh like friends.  I am thinking of you,

Greg Giraldo, who told Joan Rivers once,

You used to look your age, now you don’t

even look your species.  And then her face—

wounded, tightened, paralyzed, stitched,

healed and babied with the finest lotions—

gave way, and I saw a little white light in

her teeth, a bit of joy, however nervously

touched, beyond the scalpel of this affront

or that desire to be young, I saw her death

in the arms of your addiction, the one

that took you too damn soon, to sit in heaven

and roast God, as your best friend put it,

as if nothing were sacred where everything is,

and each cold mask crumbles into laughter.

 

*

 

When I think of idols that have died,

I think of the toy my father saved from

his childhood, how it reddened his shelf.

Beside his picture with the governor,

a small truck with no one in it.  It served

as proof of the boy I never met, never

understood.  He had so little child

in him, let alone the sentimental kind.

You should always keep one reminder,

he said.  I always did, always thought

he loved me better when I was small.

Look at me, said all the rusted places.

And when he left us, they said it again,

look, but what they revealed remained

an empty promise.  But I could see it,

touch it.  It had wheels.  Hollow places.

When I think of death, I think of this.

And it flew into walls and drove right through.

 

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A Hollyhock… + The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog…

A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz

Later that week      I found it in my right side

pocket. It had begun    to bloom, blue.      Tissuey soft.

To the bottle      of carbolic acid     went your father.

To brain plaque,        the weed      of forgetfulness,

went your mother.        Still you felt      a fondness

for the natural thing,      you loved      even the mulch,

and the flower          of the mallow family, hollyhock.

Come in, you said.    From one specimen     of the garden

you cut me     a sprig,        which I pocketed. Banished

from light,     from you, from      its princedom, a small

Gautama.         Then I forgot      it was there, down

there in the dark, doing          its precise work anyway.

 

The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog That Surrenders Is

The tongue hangs fat to lick the air,

gray and dry as a gag. Your whole life

you panted after whojustcameherenow,

 

a bone over there you could smell before

you could see, the wide patch of yard

and a figure of a hart darting in a feral

 

blur through trees. The joy when some

hand behind you lets go and sends you

running down the open snowy road,

 

and you are yourself again or for the first

time. Though now what use is there

to tense the metal leash. Now to learn

 

to work the new trick: one who waits.

It was long ago you learned to stand

off. You learned to stand for nothing.

 

That was the beginning of your training.

That was when the sky was your whole head.

Now to go on. And to go on. To become

 

the sick mule, the tagged skin, gnawed bone.

To learn the first art with more willingness,

and then to sit, lie down.

 

 

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The Future is Trashion

Erasure based on “The Future is Trashion” by Vanessa Friedman. New York Times. December 26, 2019.

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Act Now + more

 

Act Now

When I’m low, I hang out

with the slugs and sugar ants,

I ignore the emails, You will run out

of storage in the cloud.

The clouds

will always make space for me,
I already live in a fog

and there’s always room for more

photos, a virtual bookcase.

As much as I love

being able to type my sadness

to a stranger, my screen sometimes

reaches out and puts its hands

on my hips—stay here a little longer.

I know I’m brave

when I leave my earbuds on the table

next to my cat. And when my stomach

knots, it’s because I’ve hit reply all

and now Dick knows he’s living

out his name like a job description.

This is when I know

I need to stand up and stop

being another head without body, a mind

plus fingers typing. Sometimes

when I’m walking down the street

a neighbor runs up to me to tell me

how Crossfit is working for her,

I press Skip ad until I see the real-time video

of Max, the dog who lives three doors down

and is dealing with depression

because his owner just died.

This is when I reach down

and wipe the goo from Max’s eyes,

and realize how much happier I am

when I sit in the middle of empty road

under an unlimited sky

holding a dog who has no idea

why his owner isn’t coming home.

 

 

 

If We Had Better Lighting, Our World Would be a Soap Opera

Global warming is more than me leaving

the heat on 80 degrees in the guest room.

 

There’s a shadow on our planet’s lung

and the narrow road is what we drive now

because half of it has slid into the ocean.

 

We are living longer, but we’re doing it with less

sex and friends. The view from here is gorgeous,

 

but who to share it with? I am watching the world

turn, all my children becomes all my adults.

I try to count our steps to the grave—5, 100,

 

1000? More? I’m less than optimistic.

I’m the character who is drinking wine

 

at noon in her nightgown. The soap operas

are failed decisions and mistakes are real life

choices. Global warming makes my cheeks

 

flush. Climate change is another way

to introduce myself, to undress and dive

 

into the ocean that wants to swallow me.
Let me cry dramatically before the scene ends,

let the director drag me to the shore.

 

 

 

Sunflower, What Have You Gotten Yourself Into1

Tonight a neighbor told me how climate change

was a hoax as we stood under an orange sky

 

from the smoke of wildfires and when he coughed

because the air quality was not good enough

 

for his lungs I said, It hasn’t rained for years

and when the birds started falling from the sky

 

he said, That happens sometimes, it’s cyclical.

God bless the confused, I said to the waves

 

reaching over into our yards, to the oceans

so warm the icebergs are the ice cubes

 

the barista places into our lattes, this should

cool it. And at night when I walk home

 

in a tank top because what was once a winter

is a mild spring, I lean back and watch the bats

 

circle and eat up whatever insects we have

too many of and I think my god, we fucked this up

 

so quickly, as I admire the moon that almost winks

at me, as if it knows how many years we have left.  

 

 

 

 1Title from a line by Kim Rashidi.

 

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Cooing & Longing

Cooing

A bird perched on the fence for a minute—

its cooing brought me out of the house.

There was so much color on its feathers.

 

Its beak didn’t jut forward but bent downward

like in most of birds of prey, but this one didn’t prey.

 

I couldn’t feed it so it left sooner

than it used to when you were here, no grains

to litter the compound with, but then

there was no kind of fodder in the house.

 

It was the kind of bird that knew its beauty—

perhaps a special thing for its species.

 

I had thought it would cut me some slack,

but, like you, it didn’t, fleeing on instinct;

like you, it left a trail of leaves in its wake.

 

Longing

I remember the first dry season I spent

in that house you lived in until you died.

Harmattan almost bent you double,

dragging in its dusty perfume across miles

and into every room, sparing nothing

so much so I never knew I would ever

be so expectant of rain; even the birds,

the animals were having a hard time

of all the charade that was the weather.

Even the wooden shelves cried as they cracked,

their grains warping into undulant hills.

I was addicted to the city life.

I tried to hide my feelings because

somehow the weather benefitted you.

You had never so stood at the window

with such longing, in your eyes, to be outside.

I looked into your clear brown eyes and tried

to will the young agile person I knew

who would walk miles with me merely to see

what the landscape was like at the moment

because, for you, no one stepped into

the same landscape twice, for you the wind

was always changing something, eroding

either the soil, or the trees of their leaves,

the rain would always wash something away;

even the cities could not escape this.

It was like a process of aging.

Sometimes the wind brought more than dust

and its empty smell: now a sweet smell

but one which you doubted: maybe it was

the smell of bodies carried over miles,

maybe the dust was part of their bodies.

I knew it couldn’t be real yet I let

myself to imagine it, as scary

as it was, for didn’t we hear about how

the rivers, though how dried up they were,

still vomited tumescent bodies

from their silvery bellies, about how

the beggars didn’t wake up in the streets,

their stiff bodies curled up like balls of wool?

I tried to find things to love in this place

but couldn’t, rather reasons to leave

were monthly stacking. Minna was almost

like this and each day the people I stayed with

tried to convince me to cut the place some slack,

I took a piece of my clothing and quietly

folded it and threw it in my traveling bag

until one night I realized it was full.

 

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Evolution Kit

According to the manual, the “Theistic-Science World Building Kit” contains the following:

 

1. One forty-gallon terrarium (48″ x 12″ x 16″)

2. One shaker of “Evolution Mix” biosphere food (red)

3. One prepackaged rock to make the core

4. One shaker of “Planetary/Ecosystem Dust” (blue)

5. Something called “Matter,” which has the exact color and consistency of chalk dust

6. The Evolution Manual, as yellow and glossy as a school bus

 

The manual tells Katie that she should expect all life in her biosphere to map onto the evolutionary trails of Earth species. She can expect fish to crawl up on land, sprout into dinosaurs and birds: an inherited morphology spread throughout the ages.

 

STEP ONE: Pour Matter into biosphere and add one to five shakes of Evolutionary Dust.

 

STEP TWO: Begin.

 

Katie pours the chalk dust into the terrarium. She sprinkles a heavy dose of blue dust and a bit of red. It looks as though she has dumped food coloring into milk. The blue gains dominance, takes the red and drowns it. Katie imagines hydrothermal vents blasting within the rifts of the biosphere’s surface like primordial, cosmic wounds.

 

She does not regret her drunken purchase. The kit was purchased whilst shitfaced the night she got laid off. The package arrived on May 21st, which Katie remembers only because it was an ex-boyfriend’s birthday. The return address listed the town of Gammelstad, Sweden, but the box claimed manufacture in Stockholm, and the postage stamps revealed a journey from Oslo to Reykjavik to Paris for some reason to Reykjavik again to Halifax to Denton, Texas, where it found Katie’s front door. The return label said Play God Theistic-Science Company in block blue lettering, followed by a clip-art icon of a FedEx truck, even though the shipping service was a third party called Ilmarinen, Inc.

 

Katie adds more Planetary/Ecosystem Dust and goes to bed.

 

When she wakes, fish have formed in the theistic-biosphere. The terrarium is an aquatic underworld: jellyfish sway near the surface; shadowy agnatha—jawless fish—swarm at the bottom. Small, armored sharks with little plated spines of cartilage that the manual calls acanthodii appear. In the tank’s center, there is a tiny quadrant of shore.

 

STEP 3: So, you think you’re beginning to see fish.

 

Titaalik roseae, a four-limbed Devonian vertebrate fossil found in Nunavit, Canada is thought to be one of the first creatures to have walked on land from the sea. Both fish and tetrapod, the Titaalik supported gills, fins, a pelvic girdle, and partial wrists. Keep watching. The next step is dinosaurs.

 

Katie looks back at her terrarium. She wonders if the tiny creatures she sees emerging onto the shore resemble Titaalik, their toothy mouths gaping, marble eyes glistening like new olives.

 

The world around her but for these little creatures feels ill with the lack of hope.

 

It is sunset by the time there are dinosaurs. Evening coats Katie’s window in shades of blue. The dinosaurs are small at first, but by the time Katie is getting ready for bed, wings break through their scales in the most beautiful colors: Jupiter red, asteroid brown, Neptune green. Katie falls asleep in front of the terrarium.

 

In her dream a great wind blows through the house, far too powerful for her tiny dinosaurs to fly. To protect them Katie must huddle over the biosphere with a blanket around her shoulders, arms spread out like a mother bat, to block the wind.

 

When she wakes, the dinosaurs are the size of bumblebees, flying and bumping into the glass. One of them belches a candlewick cough of flame.

 

STEP 4: After archaeopteryx, notice mammals.

 

But there are no mammals, and Katie recognizes the dinosaurs for what they are: dragons. They buzz like trapped flies, spurting flame at each other. It is impossibly cute.

 

If any cryptozoological creatures appear, immediately implement World Extinction Kit (sold separately at a 15% percent discount with purchase of a second Theistic-Science World Building Kit).

 

Online, Katie looks up the Extinction Kit. There is a tiny rock that looks like an asteroid and a shaker of something called “Anti-matter.” There is no explanation as to why the dragons must die. Why can’t Katie have dragons instead of dinosaurs? She watches the dragons play with each other. They keep bumping into the glass. Katie opens the top of the terrarium.

 

One immediately begins to nest in the rafters. Another begins hoarding loose grains of rice in her pantry. It sits atop the rice as if on a bed of gold. Katie chucks the Evolutionary Manual in the trash. There is no real plan to a world, she knows this. Only chaos.

 

The terrarium is a dead planet now. No more creatures will appear. Katie wonders if the dragons feel like astronauts, like explorers. She wonders if they are triumphant or afraid. If the sound of her microwaving ramen sends a message of doom throughout the apartment. If they heave a tiny sigh of relief at the “ding.” She wonders what it feels like to have left behind the world of false order and live in the stars.

 

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The Murder Hornet

can fly sixty miles in a day

& decapitate its prey

quicker than licking

honey off a thumb.

Size has its advantages.
& its costs. My mom
told me early I’d pay

for the size of my heart.

You feel too much, she said.
You want too much.

In the Love Addicts Anonymous

meeting, a white man in a gold ascot

said, I need to be devoured by love.

Devastated, I added, swallowed whole.

Murder hornets are efficient killers,

but is any torture more elegant

than chasing what you’ll never catch?

There was one time in my life

my heart felt right-sized,

quiet, & I was so at peace

I was invisible. The robin

thought I was a chair or tree

the easy way she cleaned

her feathers near my feet.

More often my feelings swarm,

a storm surge, how water alone

can warp metal, level a village.

When I keep feelings at bay

I appear okay, recalling

how Gulliver’s giant size

made him too dangerous

to keep.

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Tomorrowland & Man’s Dominion

Tomorrowland

I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.

—Wernher von Braun on humanity entering space, Los Angeles, 1955–1957

 

Some days after work, I’d rent a speedboat

from Long Beach and hop it out to Catalina

for an evening dive. What a thrill every

time, the chill of sliding through blue skin,

descending down the long teal folds of fulgid

kelp. A bright humming brain of gold baubles

lifting braids to the sky like a praising willow

swaying in the sugared light. I was almost lost,

weightless and wondering through the ocean

with no one following me but the moon as it

rose to look upon its navel. Omphaloskepsis: to

consider the divine inside the belly. When Jonah

was ankle-sunk in stomach acid, he was learning

the volcano’s wrath that gave birth to land. I could

spend hours floating in the whale constellation,

that dark, starry sea of seas. The umbilicus of space

that ties us to the womb of ocean. I wanted a rocket

to break through the egg with its tooth, dislocating

heaven and earth’s denotations. When we first

fumble around in the moon’s cratered belly, what will

we call our new lexis? How will we learn to be in

the universe but not of it once we leave behind our

world? The mystical isn’t in the ecstasy of floating

through space, our fragile bones eroding, but in

bearing the burden of our attachment toward a

center. Peter met Christ on the water because

he wanted to be like him. I designed Lunetta to churn

out gravity for the future to meet the cosmic Christ.

 

 

Man’s Dominion

And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there  [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and

he’ll  do plenty well when he gets there.

―Wernher von Braun, 1958

 

Standing at the edge of the Yucatan

jungle, I felt an urge to just run

blindly into it. The adrenaline was like a

timpani drum roll, paving the entrance

for the brass. I hired a guide, and as we

pushed through curling palms, ferns, and

snagging vines, I swear I could smell the jaguar’s

urine on the trees it had sprayed, hear

echoes of the animals that had fled before it.

I could hear a mosquito filled with a pyramid

of blood. When we saw the jaguar,

I became quiet as space, holding every

sound against the butt of my rifle.

Like when I held the liturgy candle,

planning each step so I wouldn’t spill the wax,

trying to pretend no one was watching.

His fur was glistening jet oil, his gaping mouth

a range of snowcapped teeth. The God who

framed his symmetry pitch-dark dared to

lock my limbs into their grooves

as well. He meandered through the lushness as a black

hole against a canopy of stars, his gold eyes

moving like jumpy flying saucers

in a child’s sloppy flipbook. I aligned

the crosshairs half a meter ahead of him

and pulled the trigger like a prophet

releasing a message before the people were ready.

My throat felt as if I had swallowed too

much water. I strode through the mist

toward my trophy, the graceful carcass already

hazy with flies. I had my guide put it in the jeep

and drive me into town to have it skinned.

 

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To the Elk

They were hanging it against the barn wall. The head limp to the side. With a snowmobile they had dragged the dead elk from wherever in the mountains the pile lay where it had been gutted. For this bloody spectacle.

 

“That’s a big fucking animal.”

 

The porch of the main cabin: Wyatt was there with her, and so was this man Dale from Seattle plus the three highballs in his veins. That’s a big fucking thing, Dale kept saying. This was at the ranch that was in Wyatt’s family. The Smith River was nearby. It was Thanksgiving night.

 

“They got one last year too,” said Wyatt.

 

“It’s bigger than a buffalo.”

 

Savannah was thinking of her father and brother and this same performance. They would return home to the triplex by the refinery, north-side Great Falls, with a carcass in the truck bed and blood dripping from the tailgate. And she was saying to herself, for this….

 

Up the porch steps came the hunters. They had been out all day and were covered in mud, and Savannah thought they smelled. Wyatt congratulated them and asked about the hunt. An uncle said they’d been lucky to shoot it from fifty yards. It ran a hundred and died, and a young cousin took the killing shot.

 

Wyatt’s uncles and cousins started applauding. They shook hands all around. Even in daytime she didn’t remember their names, and it was not daytime. The dark was long past gathering; it had mustered.

 

“Last year they got a bigger one,” Wyatt said.

 

By now the hunters had gone off to their different cabins to clean up.

 

“Bigger?” said Dale. “Bigger than that?”

 

“It’s missing half its rack.”

 

Savannah looked at the head again and saw only one antler.

 

“Do they spar?” asked Dale.

 

“I think they grind them against the trees,” said Wyatt.

 

“Not as impressive.”

 

“True.”

 

Speaking to her now, Dale said, “Let me ask. As a Western woman, does this arouse you? These men returning from the hunt?”

 

“I hope not,” said Wyatt. “I’m related to them.”

 

“I don’t mean the men. I mean the blood. I mean the sight of this big, beautiful dead thing.”

 

Savannah said, “I’m used to it.”

 

In fact by now—being from this region and educated in a different one (the opportunity belonging to so few from that refinery neighborhood)—she had a rule for herself: no dead animals or fresh-caught fish, not in real life and not in any photographs in any public medium, app or profile, or anything else. None of that spectacle would be permitted with regard to whatever partner or friend she kept. Wyatt’s pictures were full of other things: the neoclassical façade of the apartment building where he used to live in Missoula, an Old Fashioned in a bar in Chicago where his roommate from college played jazz guitar, a portrait in graduation robes and the sandstone arcade columns flanking him, that one now six years old and his hair (shorter back then) tousled from doffing the cap, the PBK cord helpfully around his neck in the foreground….

 

“Does it arouse you, Dale?” Wyatt asked.

 

“No, I’m so boring. No kinks for me. For me it’s all dollars and cents.”

 

“You’ve seen more blood than any of us.”

 

Seattle Dale was a political communications consultant. Fundraising was his higher function.

 

“Violence to me is writing a strongly worded email. But—I mean—you look at this, and you know these men can provide. I mean, this is vacation—it’s fun—for us. But—I mean—it’s something, something more.”

 

His tumbler was down to the ice melt.

 

“It doesn’t arouse me,” Savannah said.

 

A cone of light and warmth and festivity spiraled out like a dust devil when the door opened. A terrier called Sonny with long distinguished whiskers came out and trotted down the steps and went to piss on the snowy lawn. Inside, Wyatt’s aunts and mother, and his father also, were preparing the table. His father specialized in sweet potatoes.

When the little dog came back Dale went in for another drink and called the dog in using baby sounds. At last they were alone.

 

She watched Wyatt’s face. There was nothing there but anticipation for dinner and for his wine. She had looked at him before and had seen whole worlds where they would go together and more from which he’d come. A lick of dark hair came down out of the front of his cap. He put himself together well and tried to dress of his time, but it did not subsume him. Not too clean with the effort, his good shirt just a little too big. He liked big clothes. To have something fit perfectly—was that another of the things that would make him feel ashamed of his upbringing?

 

The glass against Wyatt’s lips now. Rare content passed through his eyes as he swallowed, the fire weeping in them. He made his deep voice go high and feminine. “Does it arouse you?”

 

“Ask me again,” Savannah said.

 

“As a Western woman?”

 

She moved to hit him, and his arm was around her.

 

“It’s cold.”

 

“I’ll get a fire going in our cabin.”

 

“That sounds nice.”

 

“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know it’s unbearable.”

 

“It’s not. It’s really not. I love them.”

 

There were many people she didn’t know. But at length you would know them. It was not being away from home, that wasn’t the difficult thing. Anyway you only had to get through dinner and then go to the little cabin and go to sleep. The drive had been beautiful, and they hadn’t argued.

 

She stood on toes to kiss the bottom of his neck.

 

“Do you really?” he asked.

 

Tears were in that question. Tears were good. And her rule was a good rule, a necessary rule to have for men. Education in history and politics had made her question whether it was for the better passage of life not to have relationships with men. That was a resounding theory up until graduation. Anyway, at minimum you had to have a rule you stuck with.

 

He went to wash his hands before dinner. When he was gone she admired for a while the dark mountain on the horizon above the ranch gate. The cold clean air touching her eyes, inflaming the veins. She didn’t look at the dead elk on the side of the barn. Then she went in for dinner.

 

—

 

The table was so crowded with people that her shoulders never relaxed. Her shirt went too low, she thought.

 

The food was very good. The green beans were perfectly seasoned. There were two turkeys; one was local and lean and the other was a butterball. They filled their glasses with red wine out of towering decanters. She was at the end of the table beside Wyatt. His father was at the head. She was across from his mother. It was a good meal. Everyone talked to each other.

 

“How come you didn’t want to hike,” the mother was saying.

 

“I thought I’d stay around and get something done,” said the father.

 

“Get what done?”

 

“Work. Caught up on emails.”

 

She watched Wyatt. He was drinking fast. She touched his knee under the table. His leg was vibrating under her hand. You could duck under these little breakers of talk like a child playing in the surf, but Wyatt was not possessed of that lightness. Later they would have to talk at length about it—whatever thing was said at the table that stood out to him as particularly abhorrent.

 

Things got formally quiet as everyone took turns saying gratefuls. The woodstove atmosphere and the gray iron of the gun barrels on the walls and the smell of the old rugs and leather furniture gave the quiet an oppressive quality like overwhelming heat, inescapable intimacy, absorbing silence into it.

 

From the other head of the table, “To the elk.”

 

“To the elk.”

 

“Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

 

“It’s special.”

 

“There are times you’re facing an animal and you’re not ready to take a life. It’s not an easy thing. To the elk. And to Harrison. He took the shot.”

 

She drank a little faster after the toast. When her turn finally came, she said, “Thank you for welcoming me. It’s a wonderful place.”

 

“To the ranch.”

 

“The ranch.”

 

They drank. All agreed—the ranch and the dead elk held all that was beautiful and dear. She didn’t look at any particular face; from having run meetings she understood how to look between people when addressing a table. She went on, “It’s been a good year. Better than I expected.”

 

Wyatt mugged for the crowd, and everyone laughed.

 

“Really, thank you for having me.”

 

Later they stood around the long kitchen island and ate the pie she had baked. She explained again to one of the aunts the decision they’d made to move in and what went into it. The uncle who had toasted the elk asked what she was doing for work and followed her answer with, “Do you work together?”

 

“No,” said Wyatt. “She works for a Dean. I work in Admissions. The worst office to be in right now.”

 

“It’s a good place to work,” she said. “I can do four tens in the summer when I want. The benefits are good. Campus jobs are nice.”

 

“When you add your union dues to the premiums you’re losing half a paycheck,” said Wyatt.

 

“But you can’t have one without the other,” she said.

 

“It’s beautiful how that works.”

 

“Can you run this up the flagpole?” the uncle went on. He had not listened. “Why the cuts to English? You can’t cut English. What’s the point of having a public college if you’re going to get rid of English?”

 

“English isn’t going anywhere,” she promised, wearily. Because she thought there was more than just the appreciation of literature in his concern for the survival of English.

 

“Well, run it up the pole if you can. It’s terrible what’s happening over there with the cuts. And Will Tunt retiring is a big loss.”

 

“It’ll get better,” she said.

 

“Enrollment always goes up when there’s a recession,” said Wyatt. “Folks would rather be in grad school.”

 

The uncle had taken several big bites of her pie. He told her how delicious it was and asked if she had made it herself, yes. After a long while the grown-ups were too drunk to stay awake and the teenage boy cousins had grown too weary for the world outside their heads and the girl cousins were sleeping in the corners cuddling with the dogs and it was over, she had survived it, and Wyatt was not saying anything else about the college where they worked and how it was a poor school serving poor students who were going to stay poor, and they were on their way out.

 

“Take Sonny with you,” said his father. Handed the terrier’s leash to his son. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good.”

 

Together they walked the little dog from the big cabin to the small cabin where they were staying.

 

While Sonny sniffed around at the base of the cabin steps, they sat on the porch, on top of a bench covered with a buffalo hide, and they looked across the lawn at the barn where the dead elk was hanging. Savannah wondered if it was going to start smelling.

 

“I wish I’d been out there to see,” said Wyatt.

 

“I don’t.”

 

“I mean to see it when it was alive.”

 

“I’m glad you weren’t there to see it get killed.”

 

They were holding each other. The wind moved over their faces, and they squeezed closer.

 

“Not that I want to hunt,” Wyatt was saying. “But you sort of wish that you knew what it was like.”

 

“I don’t. I don’t want you to be like,” she raised her voice and imitated Seattle Dale, “Harrison.”

 

“Me neither. I just wish I knew.”

 

“It was fun walking to the cliff,” she said.

 

The hike they’d done in the afternoon took them across the western expanse of the family’s great tract, past a tipi erected for ambience, to the edge of the river gorge. Fathoms down, you could see the frozen banks. In summertime you could swing from a hammock between two ponderosas with a cocktail in hand, maybe a book in your lap. This was how she imagined him.

 

Then she thought that the dead elk had moved, swung a little.

 

“It’s—” he started. “My dad didn’t know how to field dress an animal. His dad never taught him how to hunt. I’m not any better because I don’t do it.”

 

“It’s not about being better.”

 

“One feels somehow emasculated,” he said.

 

“Because you don’t know how to hunt?”

 

“Not exactly. I don’t think you’d get it. You remember Chuck asking what I do?”

 

“He didn’t ask you. He asked me.”

 

“But then he asked if we work together.”

 

“So.”

 

“I always have to prove my worth. That’s what I mean: I don’t think hunting is impressive. But doing something impressive is impressive. Knowing how to do things.”

 

“I don’t think that’s what Chuck meant.”

 

“I know my family.”

 

She didn’t want to argue. She said something about how it would be cold and unpleasant to have to go pee in the middle of the night, since the nearest outhouse was across the lawn, behind the barn with the dead elk. After that they went inside and got changed for bed; or, she did, and he started trying to make the fire.

 

The plush duvet cover was cold on her bare legs. The hairs stood up, and while she waited for the fire to start she was self-conscious of having prickly legs. Sonny was on the ground, sitting obediently and anxiously, watching her in bed. Wyatt was kneeling and using a hatchet to make kindling. Erratic banging shook the door when he wedged the blade into a crack and slammed a log against the stone base of the fireplace to split off flakes of pine. He built a pyre in the iron woodstove with newspaper and tinder and tried to get the flames started and took a long time to do it and tried opening and closing the flue and could not get it right.

 

“It’s so cold,” she said.

 

“Almost got it. I smothered it last time.”

 

“Maybe you could just get in with me.”

 

“No, I have to do this.”

 

She could fall asleep even when she was freezing, especially after enduring something. Enduring did make you tired, but it was alright to be tired because you could sleep easily. Her father had said to her once, do you sleep easy because you’re a princess?

 

She was almost in a dream and Wyatt was still working on the fire, and she felt Sonny climb up onto the bed and lay down on top of her feet, and her legs got warmer, and then she was all the way in the dream and almost asleep but still heard the newspaper flare up quickly and burn out each time he tried and tried, Wyatt still in the waking world.

 

—

 

Much later in the night she woke up because she had to pee. It was hot in the cabin. The fire was going, she did not know for how long, and the twin bed beside the queen was unmade but empty.

 

She pulled sweatpants on and went to the door and had to push it very hard till it flew open and slammed against the wall. No other noise out there. She saw the moonlight, bright on the snowy lawn, and the big cabin like an embalmed giant. She saw the elk, its fur matted and dark, and the tongue spilling out of its cracked mouth. Its open eye was black.

 

And Wyatt was sitting on the bench next to the cabin door. He was all in his winter gear, which he had formerly peeled off when he labored to make the fire, and his elbows were on his knees and his cheeks were in his hands, and he was undoubtedly facing to look at the elk.

 

“It’s cold,” she said.

 

“It’s not too bad.”

 

“Do you want to talk?”

 

“About what?”

 

He wasn’t wearing shoes. His bare feet were on the ground, his toes a few inches from the pastry-thin ice. He had taken off his thick wool socks and left them between his feet, inside out.

 

“What are you doing? Come to bed.”

 

“I can’t,” he said.

 

“Come on. Don’t do this.”

 

“I’ll be in later. I’m sorry.”

 

Savannah recalled that she had to pee. Without answering the apology she went down the cabin steps. The sudden reminder, the pressure in her stomach returning to the front of her conscience, was as heat coming back into a room after a door is shut against winter.

 

She walked out over the snow. The dead elk grew larger and larger in sight the closer she came to the barn. The texture of its fur was nauseating, more than the smell of the outhouse.

 

Sitting down, she hated herself for the lapse. It wasn’t useful to be bitter about anything, but it had gotten to you anyway. The transference: you’d caught it just as it was done.

 

When she returned he had already gone back in. The socks remained. She picked them up and shook a little ice from them. In the cabin he was lying flat on the twin mattress, with hands folded on his chest. She got on the queen and pushed all the bad air from her lungs.

 

“Come on up.”

 

“Just calming down.”

 

It was the same thing. Civilized men would kill something, civilized men would watch. In his pictures the elk was there. Strung up between the arcade columns, its outline and ghost.

 

“Get in with me.”

 

After a minute he said, “Alright.”

 

There was love too, that was true. He was the product of a rule, an algorithm that had narrowed so many variables to her preference. They resisted the same things. Like the logs and pine flakes and newspaper it would keep the fire going, but also they would be consumed and used up. There was no rule concerning what to feel.

 

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Pollarding & Animal Spirits

 

Pollarding

In this unwitting dawn. In the begonia
I put in the poem because of its incantatory

 

sound. In the vine I thought was a sweet

pea—to put a sweet pea in the poem—

 

but was actually a weed, common vetch.
In the still early summer heat like gentle

 

pressure on the forearms and wrists.

 

 

A trio of military planes screams overhead.

I squint into the glare and the leftover

 

cosmetic product on my hands flashes
in a type of dim recognition. Wash it off. Who

 

is going to read about botanical misprision.

There’s a war on and I am the yellowing

 

pages of Bishop’s National Geographic.

There’s always a war on and its location

 

is not a function of place but of people, plucked

for the vase or the oven, wilting or burning or

 

eaten as a delicacy. The word of the day

is upward. The word of the day is all cops

 

are bastards. Who am I to say what we should make

of the clay at our feet, minor gods with shovels

 

and grass seed, with kilns and molds, the joints of

our fingers curling around some texture, releasing

 

it in the checkout aisle or through the window

that backs the checkout aisle.

 

 

After adrenaline, a comedown just like any
other high. You’re sitting on the floor in a hoodie

 

and biting all the skin off your lips. Outside,

the day continues to mulch itself, there are

 

robins, someone is invoicing someone else

for another order of rubber bullets.

 

The symbolic vulture will not arrive

 

 

To hunch in the middle distance. Sorry,
I’m back now, I was on the patio this whole time,

 

my mouth is bleeding and the roar has faded
such that it might be mistaken for an air conditioner,

 

the mechanical hum of comfort
in deeply inhospitable environments,

 

a fueled and speedy monarchy, it’s coming,
I tell myself, get up, it’s well-rested and armed

 

to the teeth literally but also and importantly
for my purposes metaphorically, a giant blossoming

 

of dipshit noisemaking. It doesn’t have to go
to the office and it is responsible for the existence

 

of Phoenix, Arizona. I wobble on my feet

like a newborn anything. I am melancholic

 

about structures. Look: no matter what you grab

out of the kitchen drawer, it can be used

 

as a lever. In what follows, we’re on the side

of the ice, those tropical begonias be damned.

 

 

Animal Spirits

“If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.” —John Maynard Keynes

 

 

 

 

Enterprise withering on the vine. Enterprise left to rot in the sun.

Out of its carcass, a cooler wind—

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

If the world is bad to you, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, but you know about the world, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, and you do not know about the world, you will not be sad.
If the world was bad to you but it is no longer, it is easy to forget about the world, and easy to

forget you were ever sad.

 

O dripping globe. What we’ve blamed

on the elements. On the accident
of our cells rather than the rapidity

with which we turn water to cement.

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

The idea that the brain is the seat of the soul is older than most people think it is.

 

The history of naturalizing economic activity is exactly as long as you think it is.

 

We were made for money / / we were made of money

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

Falling through a substrate,
the gentle “u” of the body as it faces upward. The hands and feet like a dancer’s, directional.

 

On the curb, a man turns over shovelfuls of dampened sand in a wheelbarrow. The sound is like

stiff fabrics hung too close to one another on a line. A recursive intimacy.

 

A brief and wild optimism, and then the grinding sludge of machinery, its unmatchable

excitation.

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

A bull in the blood.
A bull made of blood, made of air, air carried in the blood air seated in the brain.

 

The brain a bull. The world a bull with its hooves on the world.

 

O beast that could be gentle. Asleep in the beige autumn of the shaken head, slow wading

through the pool of counter-liquefaction.

 

Abolish selling.
In the hand outstretched, these cool bristles
like a hand broom, a horned smoothness and the scent
of fields and a fire recently extinguished. This animal pause.

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

Frenzied acquisition of undergarments,

small vases, linens, soaps, followed by the hatred of stuff—

 

 

 

 

/ / /

 

 

 

 

The dog on the surface of the water, the dog on the silver of the coin.1

 

 

 

 

 

1See Robert Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, on rabidity: “That in Hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog still in their water” (222).

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Invasive

Then there was no more singing.

All the lights in their throats cut:

 

the protest of evening wolves & black

bears nuzzling a parched creek for any-

 

thing that might sustain them another

white-skinned winter, those foreign

 

birds we never learned the names for.

Invasive, my grandfather called them.

 

Like the silver carp haunting our

local river. Bullfrogs & possums.

 

He called us natives after living

three generations on the same

 

hard land it took so much blood

to own. At the end of the path

 

the bullet takes to meet the right

body, the right body drops like

 

nothing worth losing sleep over.

It’ll cost two men three hours

 

to drag it home in one piece.

That wilder silence lasts but

 

a brief eternity. Before the unseen

choir shakes the forest. Again,

 

the same damn wolves & starlings. Men

still dragging. The season closing.

 

Its wiry legs kick & quiver in our hands.

Like strings. Song. Our song now to sing.

 

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King Speaking

 

“King Speaking” is a sequence excerpted from the latter half of a book-length erasure, Her Read, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early editions of this text. In 1951, Barbara Hepworth becomes the sole female artist to be admitted.

 

I began this makeover summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat, when rage at the latest iterations of hate on the American political stage, in conjunction with erasures playing out in my own life, made other writing seem impossible. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.

 

The concept of “mastery” appears with frequency over the course of the book, issues of dominion—that is to say—control—over a medium of expression, over other humans, and of course, over the Earth. One may well ask, what is art but a pronunciation of mastery? One may ask, must it always be?

 

Though I call this erasure, collage is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—used canvases treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve to her fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.

 

Materials:  source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders glue, florist tissue, window shades, general purpose thread, embroidery floss.

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Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)

Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying

 

the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found

 

in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,

 

we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,

 

and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around

 

its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.

 

 

This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them

I.     CAGE ITEMS

 

This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.

A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.

 

II.     CLASSIFICATION

 

From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held

 

great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists

 

have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.

 

What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.

 

III.     AILMENTS

 

Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—

Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple

hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him

as you would a child—Useful Article—

 

as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of

Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-

 

ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human

 

being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed

out and plugged again is greedily devoured

 

IV.     CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

 

Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,

 

Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally

has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly

 

human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit

 

of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.

 

 

 

The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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Freebirds

My mother calls to tell me she cannot get on the plane. She has had a premonition.

 

“You’re going to crash?” I sit upright in bed, sheet clutched to my chest. When she says stuff like this, my skin gets crawly.

 

“Not exactly a premonition.” She sighs. “I can’t say what will happen. A foreboding. Emmy, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t zip up my suitcase. And I wanted to get out of here so badly.”

 

“Are you sure it’s the plane?” I look to my left where the baby is sleeping in her bassinet. I look to the right where my husband is sleeping in our bed. “Could you be foreboding something else?” I say as I tiptoe out of the room, which is not actually a room. We put up a wall in the studio after the baby was born.

 

No, says my mother, she’s sure it’s the plane, and of course, I could try to reason with her. I could tell her to go ahead and pack that suitcase, get in a taxi, buy a tea and sit at the airport, see if the foreboding recedes. Until she’s actually on the plane, she has not committed to anything. Instead, I say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Because really, what should I tell her to do? Get on the plane and then the plane crashes and then she’s gone and then it’s my fault? Because planes do crash. They do.

 

In the background, at my mother’s house, radio voices are murmuring. “I have to think,” she says. “I’ll call you back.”

 

—

 

As soon as I hang up the phone, the baby is up. By up, I mean that she’s screaming. She’s always screaming and we don’t know why. I don’t know why. My husband comes out of the bedroom and hands her to me. “I have to go,” he says.

 

“It’s six thirty in the morning.” I follow him into the bathroom. He’s a real estate broker, which means that he works on commission, which means that the more he works the more money he makes, at least in theory. I’m no longer sure I buy this direct correlation. He works seven days a week. Before we had a baby, this wasn’t a problem. But now we do have a baby.

 

I sit on the toilet, bouncing the baby in my lap, while my husband brushes his teeth. “My mother might not be coming,” I say.

 

He spits into the sink. “Is she sick?”

 

“Sick in the head!” I say. “You’d think she’d want to see Eva. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with this delightful creature?” I kiss the top of Eva’s head, which is covered in the silkiest hair, soft and ticklish on my lips. She smells like a baby, like white soap and milk. She likes to be bounced, likes the sound of the water and the echo of our voices in the tiny chamber of the bathroom. She and I spend a lot of time in this bathroom. On the rare occasions when she is content and awake, I adore her so much I want to stuff her whole hand in my mouth. Both hands at once.

 

My husband is sliding the stroller out of the way to get to the door when my mother calls me back. “I’m in line at security,” she says.

 

“What changed your mind?”

 

“I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I cannot live my life in fear.”

 

—

 

I spy her on my building’s doorstep, from four stories up. She is covered chin to foot in a camel-colored, fur-trimmed coat. Her bright blond hair spills over the collar. Since the divorce, she has made herself thin and sort of glamorous.

 

She is also late. More than two hours late. Thirty minutes ago she called from a taxi to say she was on her way but couldn’t talk. Before that, I was very worried. Fear gnawed my stomach from the inside out. I called the airline. The plane had landed safely, on time. So if something had happened, it had happened only to my mother. Baby in my arms, growing heavier by the minute, I paced the apartment. What had she been foreboding? A car accident? A fainting spell?

 

“I met the pilot,” she says, over coffee, at the cafe around the corner, Broadway and 100, where we have settled ourselves at a cozy table. The baby is asleep in her stroller and I am actually drinking my coffee, my guard down, more relaxed than I’ve felt in weeks. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother can stay with the baby. If the baby wakes unexpectedly, perhaps she can even hold the baby.

 

“He’s a very nice pilot.” She pauses. “He’s not actually a pilot.”

 

“What is he?”

 

“He’s a flight attendant.”

 

“How did you meet a flight attendant?” I say, pleased by the inanity, the frivolity of this conversation. Really, I am pleased to be having any conversation. I am so happy my mother is here and I am not sitting alone.

 

“It’s a long story,” she says. “But when I called you from a taxi, it wasn’t really a taxi.”

 

“What was it?” I say, stupidly, my brain dulled by motherhood, perhaps, which is what happens to you, they say.

 

“He keeps his car at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride.”

 

“If he gave you a ride, you should have been early. Or at least, not two hours late.” I pause, comprehension forming. “What did you do in his car? Mom?”

 

“Oh my goodness, nothing like that!” My mother flushes. “But he was very nice. We had a wonderful conversation.”

 

“That’s great,” I say and I mean it and I would ask for more details, such as whether she’s planning to see him again, but the baby is starting to stir. I watch her like I’m watching a bomb about to explode. Except, if a bomb were about to explode, I’d run. My mother is distracted. She hasn’t noticed yet. I stand from the table. “I’ll be right back. Could you watch her?” I don’t look back.

 

—

 

The last time my mother came to visit, I was very pregnant and my mother was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. She was on a mission. According to her surgeon, you were not supposed to touch your face until you had achieved your ideal weight. This was the reason she hadn’t gotten a mini-facelift years ago. For years, she was a slave to her daily pint of pecan ice cream, until, one day, she wasn’t. One day she realized she could live and thrive on little more than lettuce.

 

“Don’t lose any more weight,” I told her. “You’re thin enough.”

 

My mother patted my shoulder. “Don’t take this personally, honey, but your perspective might be a little skewed.” She was very concerned for me and how unwieldy I must feel, how uncomfortable I must be in my swollen body. But I thought I looked fine, maybe better than I’d ever looked. I’d asked her to wait a month before visiting so she could be in town for the birth, but she said she could not push off her trip because she needed to schedule her surgery before the doctor’s schedule was full and she really wanted to get my feedback before she made her final decision. There were so many options, she said—facelift, brow lift, botox. “We could Skype,” I said but she shot that down quickly. She needed me to see her in person, the texture of her skin, the full 360 degrees.

 

She had not been to the city in a while, since before the divorce. Like a flower, you could see her drinking in the energy; you could see her bloom. Smohio, Ohio, she said, she loved everything about the city, the noise and the streets and the interesting little apartments.

 

“When you were a baby,” she said, “we lived in an apartment like this.” I knew this story. Living in that apartment as a hopeful young wife was a shining time for her. Dad was gone all day, a low-level administrator, not yet the boss. The days were just us, playing in the complex playground, walking to the mall next door. She loved to tell how there was a hole in the fence between the mall and the complex, two missing boards. The shortcut saved ten minutes walking, a lot in the winter. The geometry of it was tricky, but after many attempts, she figured out how to take me out and angle the stroller through just right.

 

On that trip, we were both waiting, preparing for a big change. In the mornings, I put on my one pair of dress pants with the stretchy panel and took the train to my boss’s office in midtown East, where I worked as an executive assistant. In the afternoons my mother and I wandered the city in the late September heat, shifting from one café to the next, where I would sit back with my hands on my belly, under which I could feel the baby moving, poking and pushing from inside of my body, and my mind was overtaken with the strangeness of this, I couldn’t really think about anything else, but my mother’s mind was somewhere else. When the waiters came to ask us if we wanted something to drink, she’d be pulling at her face, lifting the skin with her fingers, asking if this was too tight or not tight enough. I wanted to be able to tell her that she looked fine how she was, but the truth was, she looked so much better, younger and fresher, when she lifted up her face.

 

A week after the baby was born, she backed out of her facelift, paying a steep penalty for the cancellation. She spent her deposit on a peel and fillers instead. “I’d love to come see how you look,” I told her. “But I really can’t leave this baby.”

 

Now, in the bathroom mirror, I look at my own face, which would look better with a little makeup. I luxuriate in the ease of washing my hands and smoothing out my hair without a baby tucked under my arm. I feel so light and unencumbered I could fly straight up to the sky.

 

—

 

When I get back, the baby is screaming. I hear her before I see her. The sound of her cry is the sound of pure uncomprehending terror. She always sounds like this when she cries. Are these her authentic emotions, I wonder, or is she the girl who cries wolf all day long?

 

“Where were you?” says my mother, thrusting her into my arms.

 

People are looking at us. “Let’s go,” I say, as I bounce the baby up and down, bouncing her into oblivion. She quiets and falls asleep. I put her hat on her head and zip her into my coat, which is about three sizes too large for me, chosen because she and I will fit in it together.

 

On the street, I secure the baby to my body with one hand and push the empty stroller with the other. We trudge uphill and duck our heads against the blustery wind. Snowflakes swirl in the air.

 

“I think I’m finally ready,” my mother says, “to go back to work.” Now she is skinny and presentable; she has plans to expand her hypnotherapy business, to move from one-on-one sessions to larger seminars on stopping smoking and losing weight. She’s had to stop seeing most of her personal clients because they were getting too personal with her—they told her too much and made her worry at night, made her feel that she should help them in ways that went beyond the scope of hypnotherapy.

 

I also want to go back to work, but I am only an assistant. By the time we pay a babysitter, we don’t know if it makes any sense. I have the idea that my mother could do it. She could move to the city, watch the baby. In my mind, this is something she ought to do, should want to do, should be asking to do. But she hasn’t asked.

 

A couple blocks from my apartment, we are brought to a halt. Shouting, brakes screeching, a bicycle tipped over in the street, and a man in sleek spandex clothes standing by, helmet on this head, looking dazed. The driver gets out of the car, a young woman who looks terrified. Her blond hair is sleek and perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She is wearing razor-thin heels and short, wide pants that display her pale, delicate ankles. Her ankles must be freezing. Perhaps she is on her way to an interview? I feel certain that the interview was for the girl’s dream job and that she would have gotten it except that now she will not make the interview. Tears run down her face. “Did I actually hit you?” she says.

 

“You hit me,” says the man.

 

We cannot look away. We stay until the police arrive. I bounce to keep the baby asleep. The snow thickens and falls down on our heads and on the scene, obscuring the people and the street and the buildings, obscuring the man on the bicycle and the woman who ran into him, but none of this obscures what my mother and I have seen, by which I mean, the things we have seen in our minds, the more terrible things that could have happened.

 

—

 

We take the baby home. While I am feeding her, my mother dresses for dinner. She puts on a camel-colored dress and a big gold necklace. She looks wonderful. I’ve decided her face looks wonderful, too. The baby presses her soft skin into my skin. Very gently, she pets my shoulder with her chubby baby hand. When she’s done, I put her down on a blanket. I give my mother a hug, and her body feels strange to me, so thin, not at all like the mother I know, a woman who might eat half a cheesecake for dinner then go power-walking through her Ohio neighborhood, at any time of night, arms pumping away, a bullet in white tennis shoes, Walkman tuned to her motivational tape of the moment. She’d come back red-faced and full of ideas. The world is awakening, she might say. Get enlightened or get left behind.

 

My husband is supposed to be meeting us but he calls to say that he’s running late and we should go on ahead. I don’t have anything to wear and I mean that very literally. The only clothes that fit me are yoga pants, so I put on my nicest yoga pants, the ones that look the most like real pants. I tuck the baby into her stroller and by the time we’re out on the street she’s fallen asleep. My mother and I walk to dinner. We are shown to a table close to the door, presumably because we are saddled with a baby and might need to make a fast escape. Every time someone exits or leaves, we are hit with a blast of cold air, which makes this a terrible table for a baby.

 

We order a bottle of wine, something my mother and I have never done together. I can’t drink much because of the baby but I assume my husband will take most of my share. I am drinking wine with my mother, who looks like a glamour girl, and she is talking to me about men, how much she wants to meet a man. She orders a salad without any dressing. She takes one tiny sip of wine. I eat all the bread in the basket. I can’t stop drinking the wine or asking my mother questions. I am having a wonderful time. “What about the pilot?” I say. “I mean the flight attendant.”

 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s always traveling all over the place.”

 

“There’s no reason why you can’t travel,” I say. “Shouldn’t you travel? You’re so free. There’s no reason for you to stay in Ohio. You’re unencumbered. You could travel all the time.” I am getting excited. I keep drinking wine. “You could do your seminars like that,” I say. “You could just travel and give your seminars wherever you travel. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful life? Maybe you should marry the pilot.”

 

My mother puts down her fork. She is taking a break though she hasn’t eaten anything. “Mark hasn’t called me,” she says. “He said that he would call me but he hasn’t. So I think that we should forget about that.”

 

“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I say. “Maybe he’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

“I was hoping that he would meet us for dinner. I was hoping to have a date.”

 

“Well, I don’t have a date either,” I say. “So I guess we can be each other’s date.” Really, the baby is my date, and I’m worried that my date might be waking up. I watch her like I can hypnotize her with my will to go back to sleep.

“I’m tired,” my mother says.

 

“Move here!” I say. “There are men everywhere! You’ll get a place near me. You can help with the baby.” As soon as I say this out loud, I realize how badly I want it. “Wouldn’t you like to spend time with the baby? You can help me, I can help you.” I knock over my glass of wine, I am so overwhelmed with the perfection of this idea. As I mop up the mess, I think how this is what I need. This is what she needs. For the first time in many years, my mother and I will fulfill each other’s needs.

 

My mother shakes her head. “I can’t move here. I don’t like it here. All the people. That accident. I’d be afraid to cross the street.”

 

“I thought you loved it here,” I say.

 

“I want to work on my business. I want to work on myself. There are so many years—I really don’t know what I was doing. I need to make up for lost time.”

 

“The baby’s here,” I say. We both look at the baby, who is starting to stir in her stroller. Her face wrinkles and un-wrinkles. I turn to my mother and I can see that she is unmoved.

 

Before I can reach her, the baby escalates to a full-on scream. As quick as I can, I lift her out of the stroller, but the crying doesn’t stop. Everyone is looking at us. I bounce and bounce. I look for a nook. The bathroom is tiny. There’s nowhere to go. The screaming gets louder. I am starting to panic. The waiter is approaching. I was silly to bring a baby to this place. In a second, I will get kicked out.

 

“I’m going outside,” I say to my mother, zipping myself and the baby into my jacket, pulling our hats onto our heads. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

 

Outside, the snow is falling. It lands gently on our heads while the baby screams. “Don’t cry, baby,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel a little woozy, my cheeks flushed and warm from the wine. Despite the crying, I am glad to be outside, where the air is bracing and fresh, where the baby can scream to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone—anyone other than me. This is where we belong.

 

We walk to the end of the block and come back. The baby is starting to quiet but I can’t quite bring her inside. Through the window, I watch my mother, who is eating her salad, one leaf at a time. She does not touch the bread. She looks lonely to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wants to be lonely. Maybe being lonely is better than the alternatives.

 

After a couple minutes, my husband shows up with a camel scarf around his neck and ear clips on his ears, huffing from the cold. He is finally here. He is my most familiar person, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in weeks.

 

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing out here?” He puts an arm around my shoulder, kisses the top of my head. The baby lets out a sigh and relaxes her body into my body. I relax my body into his body. The snow falls and falls on all of our heads.

 

“Go in there,” I say. “I’ll be in in a minute. Just sit with her at table, okay?”

 

“Okay,” says my husband. He opens the door. Warm air rushes out. Cold air rushes in. He greets my mother. He gives her a hug. He takes off his coat and sits in the chair across from her, the chair where I was sitting before. The snow is melting in his dark hair. I can make out the faint sheen of wet. He talks to her, she shows him something in her notebook, and I feel calm, the baby’s body against my body makes me calm, but underneath I am bereft. She starts to smile. He takes a sip of my wine. She takes a bite of her salad.

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The Pageant

“Spain cannot be blamed for the crassness of the discoverers.”

      —William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

 

 

A man I love says, Why do you worry about where you come from? You’re here. Is that not enough?

 

—

 

Bananas ripen to a bloom like a black cloud.

 

—

 

Mestizo comes from the Latin mixticus. A mix a mix a mix. Say mixticus six times while looking in the mirror. If you have at least one foot in the Americas, you will conjure up un conquistador noble y su indio salvaje y inocente. White hand clasping brown hand.

 

—

 

The 16th century indigenous chieftain, Lempira, is today renowned for leading the (unsuccessful) rebellion against the conquistadors in Honduras.

 

—

 

In the language of the Lencas, Lempira means “Lord of the cows” or “Lord of the grass.”

 

—

 

In the 1980s, two Honduran lempiras were worth the equivalent of one US dollar; today the exchange rate is twenty-four HNL for one dollar.

 

—

 

Lempiras folded into tiny squares nestled in my tiny hand for a trip to the corner store. In the suburbs, the loamy smell creates a palimpsest.

 

—

 

Honduras is not a plantation. To be a plantation, one requires a crop, workers, and overseers. But if the workers were Black in a country that had no Blacks, if that thought rendered the worker invisible, well then, who were these people before our very eyes, ingloriously sweating their singing?

 

—

 

Alfonso Guillen Zelaya, my second cousin three times removed, is, according to Wikipedia, “the greatest Honduran poet and intellectual in history.” He was also a journalist, my family said, contra el imperialismo. I was told he was exiled to Mexico in 1933 by the tyrant Tiburcio Carias Andino. But the history books say Zelaya, with his American-born wife, left of his own accord.

 

—

 

Until 1931, the Honduran currency was the peso. At least twenty-two countries, past and present, have used the peso as currency. Peso, in Spanish, means “weight.”

 

—

 

During a several-months-long rebellion in 1537, in which Lempira led 30,000 men, he was lured out by the Spanish who were offering to negotiate a ceasefire. History says that Lempira was ambushed and shot by the Spanish, and it is this sequence—a request for peace, an ambush, and a murder—that the school children of Honduras act out year after year on July 20th, Lempira Day.

 

—

 

My dad—who reminded me of Harry Belafonte, of Sydney Poitier—fed his melancholic nostalgia during my childhood, wallpapering our atmosphere with Motown. He told me this after heart surgery. They picked me, he said laughing. One year, I was the Spaniard. The one who shot Lempira through the heart.

 

—

 

Memories stick like breadcrumbs in my throat.

 

—

 

Zelaya’s poetry in Spanish is melodic but also didactic and pastoral. Zelaya’s poetry idealizes nature as a way of simplifying and cleansing a land and its people of complexity.  The poems say, Honduras is not a plantation. The poems watch the land buckle under the weight of her masters.

 

In a poem translated by William Carlos Williams, the voice says:

 

Lord, I ask a garden in a quiet spot

Where there may be a brook with a good flow

A humble little house covered with bell-flowers

And a wife and a son who shall resemble Thee.

 

What does God look like?

 

—

 

My hair was straight once, inky blue-black strands, each a representation of logic and perfection. I looked more like Lempira then.

 

—

 

It is said that el indio Lempira died in an ambush. And it is this ambush and subsequent death that the children of Honduras have acted out every year in hundreds of schools across the country since the 1930s. One eyewitness account, written in 1558 by Rodrigo Ruiz, a Spanish national in service to the Crown, states that Lempira died in battle. This account was discovered in the 1980s, and yet the pageant continues. Lempira is tricked into this death. Lempira the guileless martyr, símbolo heroico de la patria.

 

—

 

You have a beautiful nose, my father would tell me, with thumb and index finger lightly rubbing then pinching his nostrils. It’s so narrow. I don’t understand what it is to love or not to love a nose.

 

—

 

In 1926, as the government debates naming the currency after Lempira, a leaflet is distributed among workers calling for the sons of the invincible Lempira to defend the “land of Columbus” against Yankees and Blacks.

 

The poet Zelaya and other Honduran intellectuals support the measure to raise Lempira’s symbolic profile. Prior to the mid-1920s, no image of Lempira existed.

 

—

 

The man hovers over the uncomprehending girl-child, lamenting his own features, like monstrous stamps—his nose, the unconscious touch of the lips to measure their fullness. “My woolly hair, my woolly hair.”

 

—

 

Someone said the word miscegenation today.

 

—

 

The last time I visited Lempira’s entry in Wikipedia, like an afterthought, in the description of circumstances behind his death, a line I’d never seen before: “The Spanish then ate his corpse in disrespect.” What a fitting symbol of el mestizaje in Honduras. Europe, like Saturn, devouring us like little children.

 

—

 

My baby doll diapered. Brown eyes that click shut when you lay her down. Hair so soft, so effortlessly curly. A dark cloud unseen in the sky.

 

—

 

No matter how many bananas were harvested, more were needed. Bunch after bunch into the cold bellies of ships ready to set sail for far-off places. The hunger was endless. The ships filled the small port of La Ceiba. The ships would leave, empty the port, only to be replaced by newer, larger, and emptier vessels. All this rotation, under the hum of workers, from sea to field, year after year.

 

—

 

Until one day, just like that, the replacement ships began to dwindle and then just stopped coming. The harvested bananas had nowhere to go. The field workers filled the wheelbarrows until there were no more barrows to fill. The fruit hung heavy, not just in the trees, but in the air.

 

—

 

There is such a thing as too much sweet.

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The Crypt of Civilization

“It’s the size of a swimming pool,” I said, “and locked in stainless steel. Locked for six thousand years, in fact.” I was telling my son about the Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule in Atlanta. We were in the basement, sorting his toys into piles. An overdue project, because now he used electric razors; he studied for the driving test. I picked up a tiny plastic mare and her tinier plastic foal. I asked, “Do you want them, your Horse and Baby Joe?”

 

He shook his head. “Sounds ambitious,” he said, “that thing in Atlanta.” He was burning through the matchbox cars and the doll that looked like a businessman, the Lincoln Logs and the book in which the bear is forever snoring on. Discard, discard, discard.

 

“These are in there,” I said, holding up a log the size of a finger. “In the Crypt of Civilization.”

 

“Why save a bunch of sticks?” he said.

 

I kept talking. Other items in the crypt: recorded birdsong, aluminum foil, ashtrays, the form of a woman’s breast, a “Negro doll,” a piece of soap in the shape of a bull.

 

“Jesus,” he said, taking a pterosaur from my hands and tossing it with the discards. “Are you kidding me with that list?”

 

I shrugged. “It was 1940,” I said. “Not a great year for time capsules.” I didn’t say: As if there have been so many other, better years. Our hopes and our hubris, the human experiment laid bare, thanks to the Crypt of Civilization.

 

His class did a time capsule once, back when he was in the first grade. A moment in time, or, as the principal said, a moment in conversation. “What will we choose?” she’d asked. We were gathered in the gym on parents’ night, the thick heat of September rolling in through the propped-open door. “Will we choose something that says how far our civilization has come, like light bulbs, or will we choose things from today, from here in 2010?”

 

Later, his dad and I joked. Let’s put in some guns. A bottle of DEET. A white guy billionaire, maybe Jeff Bezos. But our coal hearts burned away when our son chose to add his stuffed lion. Other kids picked the yearbook, mechanical pencils, a photo of Phillip Stanning, the third grader who’d died of leukemia the year before. His parents gave the school their permission.

 

“Why tell me this now?” my son asked when I reminded him. He glanced at the clock, wanting to go upstairs, but I was thinking of stories unearthed. Of conversations between a dreamed-of future and the best and the worst of our past.

 

And what of the forgotten capsules? Conversations never had, conversations still in the earth, magnolia roots pushing against old tin boxes, letters in bulldozed attics, bottles left floating eternally at sea, through storms and under scorching skies. A metal ball orbiting the earth, the silence of that, its secrets tucked in like a heart.

 

“Mom,” he said. “Let’s be done. Let’s give it all away.” It was like this more and more with us. He looked forward, to the car he’d soon drive and the girls he’d soon kiss and to more distant visions—college, roommates, drugs, maybe—while I held his Horse, his Baby Joe and said, let’s build ourselves a capsule.

 

I scooped the discard pile my way. “I’m saving these,” I said, the Legos and the frog blanket and the board book with a dollop of oatmeal on it, long hardened into milky cement. The toys that came later—the stacking robots, the sticker sheets. He knew it would end this way, and I did too. An hour used or wasted, depending on who you asked.

 

“Time,” he said, standing up. “You always talk about time.”

 

As if this was so boring. As if time didn’t start and stop and shift to the left, didn’t corrode and make you whole. Didn’t change little boys who cried as they buried their lions into bigger boys who thought that Lincoln Logs were sticks, discard who they were for who they would become again and again and again.

 

And what of Phillip Stanning’s parents? Sometimes I wondered, across the hurried years, as the elementary school collected artifacts from one class and then another, moved from one principal to the next. As the Crypt of Civilization sat in its deluded wait. What did time become for them that April afternoon when they put their boy into the ground, when they tucked away that last thing with him, that final conversation, that favorite plushy bird?

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