Tag: Aquifer: The Florida Review Online

Two Poems on Love-Play

Roles

It was late, & you were

wearing your widow suit,

black of 1870s chic,

loaded with bustle.

I did my best Doc

Holliday—Val’s version, cock-

sure & half-goofy. You

laughed. I laughed. Val

would’ve laughed if he were here

watching me paw at your corset,

pull the strings to tighten it.

Moments like this,

we feel happiest,

field mice exploring

magnificent catacombs

of a dusty closet.

I act out in otherness;

you dress up the same:

not faces of whatever

force invented us,

but what we make

of ourselves

when we’re at play.

 

Let Me Be Your Dream Dunce

Bright-eyed desperado on a mission for disaster.

 

Snow-cap climber heading for the peak

 of Mt. Oh-no-one-goes-there-ever.

 

View-taker who topples over the railing of the boat

 into choppy waters you barely save me from.

 

Let me let go of rope, map, & stars—

 

I’ll walk into danger as a fawn

 not fast enough to flee the mountain lion,

 

tell you philosophies of nothing while we sit

 in your dream-Jacuzzi in our clothes.

 

Let me be clumsy, cuss, rant, & stub my toe

 on a jag in the earth,

 my forehead once more on the jeweled moon.

 

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An Introspective Journey

Beast: A Novel
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf, 2017, $16

Cover of Paul Kingsnorth's Beast.

We only need to look around ourselves and the world to know there are many things wrong with our society: How our comforts have made us lethargic, how our technology only divides us, and how the lack of empathy between different cultures has only deepened in recent years. This is the rabbit-hole that Beast invites us to plunge down, in a beautiful exercise of stream-of-thought and self-reflection. Paul Kingsnorth’s poetic prose takes us into the mind of Edward Buckmaster, who has fled his normal life to live in solitude, high in the English moors. While this is not a new concept, Kingsnorth’s novel is original in its form and offers a tilted perspective that gives the narrative a unique voice.

 

Beast is the second novel to a trilogy. The first novel, The Wake, published in 2014, was that same year longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Gordon Burn Prize. Both books stand entirely on their own, with no need to read one before the other. The Wake has been praised for its inventive language, as Kingsnorth merged his own form of Old and Modern English to write it. Beast, on the other hand, experiments with sentence structure, and you’ll find, as the narrative progresses, certain rules are either lost or forgotten. It’s notable, at first, then it becomes a part of the book, and then a part of the character.

 

Edward Buckmaster’s voice is both simple and dynamic in the constant questioning and reasoning between which he traps the reader. He has fled to the moors to find himself, to let nature overtake him, and eventually find enlightenment, as if it were that easy. We find Edward at the beginning of the novel already more than a year into his self-imposed exile, standing in a freezing river and letting the cold water numb his body. “The river sang and kept singing,” and Edward welcomes pain and challenge in the forms of nature and his own fasting. It’s not long before a powerful storm finds him and breaks his body. From this point on the core of the story begins. The sun stops setting, his food runs out, and it’s not long before a creature of some sort begins to stalk him. There are no other characters to be found, except in his memories. Even then, they appear as wisps and phantoms.

 

While there are only hints as to what Edward leaves behind in his earlier life, we rarely find ourselves caring about them. He is here now, high in the moors, alone with the rawness of nature and the creature. Besieged with hardships, fog, and visions, Edward must push himself forward. The sense of time becomes lost, as well as any firm sense of reality. That’s not to say that Edward is an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the effeteness of Kingsnorth’s prose wraps the fog around his readers as much as it does Edward. We get tangled in the “hot and muggy and still and the sky was a uniform white across the farmyard and over the top of the silent ash trees” sentences that go on and against each other, through Edward’s head and seemingly out into the moors.

 

While the strength of Beast lies in Kingsnorth’s unique prose, at times readers accustomed to plainer fare may find it difficult. The 164-page novel ends up feeling a bit longer, as it becomes necessary to put the book down at times to consider Edward’s thoughts or the surrounding circumstances he finds himself in. The prose insists that you digest each sentence properly, lest you miss some hidden meaning. It brings on a fascination at the level of language as opposed to plot and requires the reader to live inside the world of the novel and inside Edward’s head.

 

The search for meaning in life is as old and cliché as literature itself, but there is very little that is cliché here. The narration moves from one thought to the next in a translucent, stream-of-consciousness manner that conveys Edward’s thoughts as if they were your own, contemplating topics and issues that are very much prevalent in today’s world. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s elsewhere-stated love for nature, ecological advocacy, and warnings about global warming are underlining themes that come to life in his settings as well.

 

To read Beast is to make a journey of two sorts, as it may be impossible not to consider your own value as Edward considers his. That is the beauty of Beast—it captures that essence of self-doubt that haunts all of us. Though we may or may not find what we are looking for at the end, there is a sense that the answers have been looking for us as well. The third and final novel in this trilogy has been said to take place two thousand years after the story of Beast. One can only wonder what new form Kingsnorth’s imagination will take in that far future.

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The Whole Speaks

An experimental documentary about a modern-day blacksmith and wordsmith, Nelms Creekmur. A text excerpt from his novel, NERBO (from the Italian meaning vigor) provides the backbone for the placement of the moving images, which were shot in his workshop in Atlanta.

 

Video by Caroline Rumley

Text by Nelms Creekmur

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Inventory of a Black Girl & Gourmet Ars Poetica

Inventory of a Black Girl

Model Made: April 27, 1992

Quantity

 

 Item

 

 Details

 

 Value in USD

 
2 Lungs full of broken glass When I cough little bits come loose
And scrape against my teeth
I have learned to bleed quietly		 0

 
27 Bones (in right hand) Formed from statues and statistics
I vote on which ones to break		 0

 
4 Failed deaths Each more urgent than the last 0

 
1 Mouth full of matches Only sulfur passes through these lips
Only fire is respected
I am used to swallowed ash
And burned tongue		 0

 
2 Stolen songs The first, when I was born
The next, I haven’t been told		 0

 
0 Deeds done right (in the world’s eyes)

_____________

 

 Not Applicable

 

Gourmet Ars Poetica

My poems taste terrible, too many chewed up

Metaphors and overcooked analogies.

They need more salt, less narcissism.

More technicality, like practicing to how perfectly

Poach an egg, or be consistent with verb tenses.

 

I need a bigger pot with a sturdy lid

To contain this wild free verse.

Maybe throw it live in boiling water,

Like lobster.

Garnish it with pretty diction,

Say it’s modeled after the classics.

 

One day I’ll be the Gordon Ramsay of the page

Dragging syntax from hell into my notebook.

I’ll subvert entire stanzas into submission,

They’ll say: “Yes, poet” and “No, poet”

And “That’s not the way I’ve been taught, poet.”

 

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Poems of Water

Shark Valley

We ride through the sawgrass, the only humans for miles,

as evening glistens in the shallow water,

 and thousands of white birds

 and gray birds

 and black birds
 land in the mangroves

 to roost for the night.

We talk and stay silent at once as we ride

and imagine wading into the grass

 through knee-deep water
 until we were far enough

 that everyone we’d ever known, everyone we’d loved
had forgotten us. And if we sat down in the water

 until our clothes fell away, and we sang

 to each other like the breezes across the tall grass,

going nowhere, and the minnows nibbled our bodies

 so gently it felt like a new kind of love,

 what could we say to the shadows waiting for us,

arms crossed and scowling, as though they owned our darkness?

 

Love Poem

The names we’ve never spoken, that define us to ourselves

like the rhythm of a river caught inside a stone

smoothed by that river, as it falls toward the sea.

 

*

 

In some other life, I wove grasses and lay down.

In some other life I made a nest, and slept

dreaming like a river, as it slides toward the sea.

 

*

 

How many years did we search to find our lives?

How many years do we have before we leave?

The singing of a river as it falls toward the sea

 

*

 

is a mind without thoughts, pure being, like the breeze

that wakes in your attic, or underneath your bed

and stirs up the dust, while you’re thinking of the sea

 

*

 

and hugging your wife, who’s dreaming in a language

that doesn’t have words yet, and gleams in her eyes

when she wakes in your arms, smelling faintly of the sea

 

*

 

and sunlight in the breeze as it moves through the bedroom

then back out the window, like life itself must leave

the body that held it, or like a wave far out at sea . . .

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Two Poems of the Living Past

Anatomy

Today I eat lunch with the anatomy skeleton

hanging wired together in the art room.

We shake hands. I want to kiss her,

because the bones are real,

and maybe she would bloom out of her decay,

cicada-like and ancient.

 

A quick, perhaps forgivable glance at the pelvis

confirms, yes, it is a she, and I name her Charlotte

because I like the ring of it.

Leave her body to science?

No, never to science. But to art, maybe.

What color were her eyes, I wonder,

lurking like embers in a heap of bones?

 

So old, at least now she presides here,

mutely telling the charcoal-drenched artist,

This is all you are, so look.

And if I sit here often enough, insisting on Charlotte,

maybe the name will rattle something awake

in that bone cocoon, knit muscle and skin over that blank,

and she will blink in slow, lush approval.

 

Rain in Glastonbury

The abbey’s ruined arches jut from the ground

like giant ribs. From beneath them,

this fine mist seems just the thing

 

for atmosphere, camera perfect and on cue.

It mutes every sound—the tread of our rubber boots,

the tour guide’s practiced tones.

 

And the bronze plaque marking King Arthur’s grave,

where he is not buried,

stands quietly matter-of-fact in its lie.

 

We snap pictures. Sure,

with the mist, this could be Avalon.

It isn’t. Maybe that’s why somebody

 

tore down the abbey years ago and used the stone

to build that big, faceless house on the hill.

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Interview: Yrsa Daley-Ward

Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's The Terrible     Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's Bone     Cover of Yrsa Daley-Ward's On Snakes and Other Stories

 

Yrsa Daley-Ward was born to immigrant parents (Jamaican and Nigerian) in England, then lived in South Africa for several years as she pursued a career in modeling. It was in South Africa that she encountered the slam and spoken-word poetry community and began writing. She has now published three books—a collection of short stories, On Snakes and Other Stories (2013); a collection of poems, Bone (2014; 2017); and, most recently a memoir, The Terrible (2018). Daley-Ward considers herself an activist for feminist, LGBTQ+, and mental health issues, but expressed the hope that her writing is for everyone.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

It’s rare to find a fashion model who becomes a poet. I read that you had come across a slam poetry event, a spoken-word poetry event when you lived in South Africa. I thought that was a wonderful story. Did that inspire your frankness? It’s interesting to think about you as this very independent person who speaks about the fashion industry in this very honest way and yet still participates in the fashion industry. I just wonder how you combine these two worlds. Is it the sort of situation where you feel a little estranged from the fashion world? Do you have good friends that are thrilled that you are also writing? How do you combine these two cultures—one of which seems to be based on a certain kind of objectification of women, and yet your poetry is very strong and powerful and feminist and anti-objectification? How do you combine them?

 

Yrsa Daley-Ward:

I think it’s really important to remember—and that’s, I think, the beauty of doing lots of things that are seemingly contradictory—that we’re all multi-faceted human beings. There are models who write. There are people who are seen controversial and wild to our brilliant parents. There are teachers who are engaged in nefarious activities. We’re all like a composite of so many things, and to be in your fullness is really important. I think too much we’re defined by what we do [for a living] or what we look like, even like the gender binary, being super feminine or masculine, so to speak. I love to embrace all aspects of myself. I think that’s super important.

 

TFR:

I think a lot about the spotlight and how the spotlight is different for a model versus an author. Could you comment about how the spotlight is different?

 

Daley-Ward:

It is, and it really shouldn’t be, but it is! It’s sort of this weird Venn diagram that’s happening. I enjoy both because in both there’s an aspect of you and performance and rawness. As much as people don’t appreciate it, modeling is an art form like writing. I do think it is.

 

TFR:

I’m sure it is.

 

I’m just thinking about the spotlight. I think a lot of that performative act. Do you think it’s easier for you to perform as a writer because you have the modelling career?

 

Daley-Ward:

No.

 

TFR:

It’s a different kind of performance.

 

Daley-Ward:

It’s completely different.

 

TFR:

That’s what I was fascinated about. For some reason, I think it had to do with seeing those photographs of you, especially the ones that were with the Guardian article and they were extremely beautiful, but they were also severe and remote, distant. I felt a great deal of distance from you, so I was like, “I wonder what it’s like to be photographed in that context.” I’m sure you are performing that for the camera, yet there is something else that comes across in these poems that’s so powerful and human and down to earth. You had described that first spoken-word event where you read your poem and people applauded for you and loved it—you felt that close human connection. I was just interested in how those two things are different or similar if they tap into each other at all.

 

Daley-Ward:

First of all, that article was really odd because what I said was taken out of context in nearly every line, and I completely didn’t recognize myself in that or in the photos. If you look at any other photo, even in modelling, I just don’t look like that. It was strange. I think most photos capture my essence as it is, but I do think there’s a different spotlight. In modelling, I guess you’d be prepared for what’s happening, whereas you roll up to a writing event and then, all of a sudden, people are taking photographs and it’s just you. But both of them are just different aspects of the same thing. I love balance; I love being able to do the switch between the two. I write every day. I actually do a lot more writing than modelling at the moment, but I really enjoy both elements. I think they can bleed into each other. I think you can show humanity and softness, maybe not in the Guardian article [laughter], but humanity and softness in modelling in the same way.

 

TFR:

I am fascinated by how you developed such a strong sense of self coming out of the religious background that you describe in some of the poems, and in other interviews as well. It’s a very strict, very severe kind of upbringing that you’ve described. I guess the stereotype, especially of women, who come out of that kind of background is that they are very self-sacrificing and they’re very self-abnegating. They don’t have a lot of confidence, and yet you do. You exude strength. Where did that spark start for you that, “I’m me and I’m these complicated things and I’m going to be powerful”?

 

Daley-Ward:

I was lucky enough to have been introduced to literature and language at a really young age by a mom who was a single parent, a Jamaican immigrant, so the need for education and everything like that was impressed on me from an early age. So, I got this gift of opening books and learning about deep and complicated subjects and people who didn’t always say what they meant, people who were doing all kinds of things. I read everything when I was young. I read the Bible, I read the Kama Sutra, both of them very intently. There’s always been dichotomy and contradictions, but I think that allowed me to feel rich. And conflicted—yes—but conflict is very human, isn’t it?

 

The gift of religion helps you understand people because you go to church or wherever it is that you worship, and you see the way people struggle with religion and what they say versus what they do and everybody trying to chase this ideal. Of course, religion has its very difficult aspects, but it’s also really beautiful. Learning to appreciate and see the joy in a lot of different things is something that such a strict religion did for me because as much as I was nervous and I felt like I was not going to heaven, I also loved the ceremony of it and the fellowship of it as well. There are lots of different parts to it.

 

 

TFR:

How would you describe your own religious belief? I felt like Bone in a way moves back in time. I was really touched by getting to the poems in the latter part of the book where they seem to be very kind to your grandparents and your mother. I had formed this question early on which was like, What is your relationship with your grandparents now? What is your relationship with that? You’ve talked about it already a little bit, about the community that you found in the church and the beauty of the ritual and such. Maybe that’s a very personal question, but I’m really interested in that same issue that you brought up, which is about watching people in various religious traditions struggle with what they mean in their own lives. We have a lot of that going on in the U.S. public life right now.

 

Daley-Ward:

Oh, goodness! Yes, so much.

 

TFR:

If it’s not too personal a question, how do you relate to the religious world that you came from?

 

Daley-Ward:

I’m not a Seventh-day Adventist, which is the religion I was brought up in. It’s ever-changing. I’m attempting to fathom what that is. What do I believe still? There were a lot of things that were heavily ingrained, and they never really worked themselves out. Even though I live this life that is apparently the opposite of all of that, there are things in me that aren’t going to come out. I do catch myself on any given day wondering what the truth is. Of course, nobody knows for sure. We live on faith. Especially, Christians live on faith. I am constantly grappling with how I feel about religion and the idea of God versus my idea of the universe. I am spiritual, but religious, no.

 

TFR:

I think that’s really what I sensed in this book, and it comes across really well. Your poem “Poetry,” from Bone, but which you read in an online video, reminded me a lot of Tess Gallagher’s short essay, “Ode to My Father.” Do you know that essay?

 

Daley-Ward:

No, but I’m going to read it.

 

TFR:

I brought it to you.

 

Daley-Ward:

Oh, my God! Thank you!

 

TFR:

She has this wonderful line. She says, “If terror and fear are necessary to the psychic stamina of a poet, I had them in steady doses just as inevitably as I had the rain.” This is an essay and poem about her parents arguing and her father beating her and how she gradually came to forgive him. When I read your poem “Poetry,” I was very much reminded of that.

 

Daley-Ward:

I see the link.

 

TFR:

I wanted to ask what you see as the connection between difficulties in life and poetry.

 

Daley-Ward:

There is nothing that you can’t work up into art. Whether it’s poetry or whether you’re painting or making a piece of theater or anything, what happens to you is going to strengthen what you are doing. The thing I think is so beautiful about poetry is how we can succinctly reach into our hearts and the hearts of other people because we are all having the same experiences on this planet. These experiences transcend, for the most part, class, race, gender, all those things. I think it’s important to have those moments and—I wouldn’t say to document them or identify with them—but definitely reach out. If a poem can make somebody feel somewhat less isolated or that there is somebody else who understands what they are feeling or just put a voice to how they’re feeling, then the poem’s done its job or the piece of art has done its job. Of course, difficulty is gold.

 

TFR:

It’s such an interesting thing about writing. It’s kind of a joke that we tend to say. Something terrible happens to you, and you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s material.”

 

Daley-Ward:

Yeah!

 

TFR:

I think it’s an odd juxtaposition for writers where sometimes they end up seeking it out.

 

Daley-Ward:

Yeah—that’s dangerous!

 

TFR:

Being destructive in their own lives in order to have material. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

 

Daley-Ward:

I guess too much of that could block you. Those difficulties are going to come up. You don’t need to make them happen. They’re part of life.

 

TFR:

Why do you think it’s so important for poetry to reach beyond the “elite,” to reach ordinary people, and what do you think that poetry can do to help ordinary people?

 

Daley-Ward:

We’re all ordinary. We all have feelings. Literature is for everyone, not a select group of people. That’s ludicrous! What can it do for ordinary people? It gives them voice, it helps people feel less alone, it brings us together and we all desperately need to be brought together because we’re so divided. We’re all connected in this world. It feels crazy to me. Poetry acts as a bridge. It brings us closer together, it helps us not feel so alone, it gives an outlook to something that’s inside. If I was not writing, God knows what mental state I would be in.

 

TFR:

Your poems are very, very, very personal, but they also feel to me that they have a social, political edge to them. They have implications beyond the self. I think for writers in particular, the current social state that we’re living through in this world can feel increasingly hostile. How we might work, all of us, writers, to bring people to poetry and to literature where I feel that there is this more complex understanding of other human beings?

 

Daley-Ward:

I think there are so many things. This is actually so exciting because this is starting to happen online—and I know people have a lot of mixed feelings about this—but even the poetry, almost a whole canon already, that has appeared on Instagram has made lots of young people, people who would never pick up a poetry book for fear that it might be boring, which a lot of poetry is . . .

 

TFR:

Sometimes it is!

 

Daley-Ward:

Things like that—poetry in dance, in films, poetry with music, going to prisons, teaching it in schools. Impromptu poetry performances on the street would bring so many people to it because they realize, “Oh, it’s not this closed shop. It’s just people talking about their feelings.” If more people knew that and didn’t think that it was this thing that is closed. Honestly, there is just so much poetry that I don’t understand. I know it’s so clever, but I don’t think I’m a strong enough reader of poetry yet. I buy poetry books by the bucket-load, but I’m still learning how to read it and how to access that super academic poetry. I love everything, but it’s important for that not to be the only thing.

 

TFR:

I agree. That’s one reason why I was so drawn to your book.

 

Daley-Ward:

Yes.

 

TFR:

Partly, it was that contrast with some of other poets. Just the contrast is a wonderful thing. We can have both of these things. We can have the world where someone is paying attention to every single syllable and creating some kind of sonnet or some kind of formal poem and yet, we can also have poetry that’s raw and down to earth.

 

I’m also really looking forward to your memoir [The Terrible]. I love that you said, “It will tell everything.”

 

Daley-Ward:

It pretty much does.

 

TFR:

What do you think is the relationship between truth-telling as an important kind of upstanding thing to do and rebellion for shock’s sake? What’s the relationship between those two things? How do you think about truth-telling?

 

Daley-Ward:

I think it’s a powerful tool in a world where there is not a lot of it, unfortunately. I never intended to write a memoir or tell anybody anything about myself, ever, but it’s just the way in which this has come to me. There were doses of fear that come along with that. When I started to examine what the reason for this was, the most important thing that came out of nowhere—and which gives me a reason to be here and sit down and be able to do all this, without turning me into a nervous wreck—is just the fact that I think to be here is to be in service to the world, in service for people for whom these experiences are completely normal. When I speak about marginalized communities, it’s not only people of color, queer people, sex workers, people who’ve been involved in what we call criminal activity. I’m a deeply private person, but something about making this kind of work is stronger. I was talking to my friend today on the phone and we were just talking. I get some lines sometimes when I’m just chatting and I said to her, “My destiny is louder than my comfort.” I was like, “Oh! I’m going to Tweet that!” It really is at this point. It’s become more important to do that.

 

TFR:

It’s gone beyond yourself and your expression. You feel a responsibility to other people.

 

Daley-Ward:

I do! Otherwise, how are we going to do this? Our sex workers are going to think that they can’t write the next bestseller. Children of color who live on council estates or in the hoods are going to think they can’t write a Pulitzer prize.

 

TFR:

Especially now, because we do seem to be in a time of shrinking opportunity where the rich get richer and everybody else is left behind. It’s scary sometimes, especially in terms of education. I understand that completely, that sense of responsibility for bringing that forward.

 

Could you comment on Instagram and other social media as a method of artistic expression? Do you see social media as the future of poetry and other literary forms? What are the limitations of that?

 

Daley-Ward:

Not completely the future, because where there is progress and wonderful work on Instagram, one of the issues with things happening on mass media is that, sometimes, it might lose its power. That’s a small price to pay because it’s making literature current. Literature has always been current, but now to reach everybody, because almost everyone has a smartphone. As much as people who have an attitude about this won’t like this, I think it’s wonderful because if you were never interested in poetry, now, these days, people will be engaging with poetry whether they know it or not, which I think is wonderful, especially for young people, the next generation.

 

TFR:

What’s next for you?

 

Daley-Ward:

Every day I ask myself that. It’s The Terrible next. I just finished my final edit of that which has been a really interesting process. I’ve just relocated to New York. I love to meet people and I love to read poetry, and I hope to do so much more of it live. Sometimes I do it with musicians. Just to be doing what I love and to create more work constantly. I hold myself accountable in that way—actually getting stuff done. So, writing and really documenting this time because it feels really special. It’s very important to me.

 

TFR:

Any last words of wisdom?

 

Daley-Ward:

I don’t know that I’m wise.

 

TFR:

Or last words of spirit?

 

Daley-Ward:

I would say that in this world, it’s more important than ever before for people to feel empowered to tell their stories because their stories are very valid, and if you are worried whether it’s strong enough or good enough or whether it’s compelling enough, always know that the thing that is the most raw and honest will be compelling to other people because we are all connected. If you have a story that you want to write, tell your story. We really do want to hear it.

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Puncture

Melissa’s mother was the first to spot Sonya in the ICU. She looked at Sonya like everyone back in Largo did, bouncing around her forehead and cheeks, connecting constellations instead of meeting her eyes. The older woman was more lined, fatter—a grandmother, for now—but still recognizable, standing guard outside the room. A whole room reserved for a baby the size of two cupped palms. Sonya remembered reading somewhere that they couldn’t rush new mothers out of the hospital, were legally required to let them stay, even for the stillborn.

 

Sonya’s skirt set stood out against the scrubs and denim-clad VA dwellers in the way she had always wanted to, but she felt garish amongst the multitude of reflective surfaces magnifying her face’s blistering peaks and craters. She tucked her pink nails into her palms.

 

“Sonya. I don’t know if you should have come,” Melissa’s mother said. “This is for family.”

Sonya privately agreed. She averted her eyes. There was a man in the hallway repeatedly ramming his wheelchair into the wall, humming to the tune of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Sonya shoved the terrible stuffed dog she had picked up for the baby into Melissa’s mother’s arms, wincing at its pinkness. “I’ll go.”

 

“Don’t be sorry,” a voice—sounding like sixteen, picking at garden salad in the lunchroom—said behind her as she turned to go, and boom, Sonya was back in high school. “You’re her Aunt Sonya. You should be here.”

 

—

 

Sonya heard the bad news about Melissa’s baby from her old high school’s secretary over a bin of Japanese sweet potatoes. The Whole Foods was new and out of place in Largo, both in budget and stature. Its skeleton loomed, folding over the Chicken Shack and DQ like some sort of brutalist God. She thought it would be safe to stop in, that no one she could have known from her childhood would be interested in green juices. She was wrong.

 

“Oh, honey, you’re home!”

 

The local high-school secretary, a bird-like woman with hair cut severely by the chin, dropped a pack of spiralized zucchini and pulled Sonya into an embrace. In the fluorescence of the vegetable section, her skin was cling wrap.

 

“I should have known,” she sniffed into Sonya’s collarbones. “You were always such a good friend to Melissa.”

 

Melissa was one of the neighborhood kids. Sonya had gone to school with her, grown up crawling under their desks during lockdown drills and pinning yellow ribbons to their spirit shirts. Melissa used to have two dogs and a brother in Iraq. Sonya was not in town to see Melissa. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Melissa for years.

 

Sonya was in town because her editor had sent her to do a piece on the opioid epidemic. Readers love a good tragedy, The Cincinnati Inquirer was rumored for a Pulitzer for its heroin article, and rural Florida provided a double whammy.

 

“Have you visited yet?” The secretary’s eyes were now leaking, and she attempted to wipe her dripping nose with her sleeve.

 

“No,” Sonya said, honestly. “I actually haven’t seen Melissa in . . .”

 

These encounters were always awful. She hated seeing people from home, hated the three-hour JetBlue flight, the drive to Largo in a rental car. Hated each cluster of mobile homes she passed, the lurch of pity upon seeing their dreadful names. Paradise Cove and Palm Valley and Dolphin’s Wave. The backs of the signs adorned with crude depictions of genitals and pentagrams and the number 666. The kids she grew up with: now strung-out cashiers and mothers and dealers-   how she would have to fix her face so as to not to wear her pity.

 

She rubbed at her eyes. The secretary seemed to take this as an expression of grief, and reached out to touch her, managing to snag her silk blouse.

 

“I know, honey. It’s just so terrible. For it to happen to your best friend.”

 

Sonya had no idea what the woman was referring to, but she agreed. She called her mother while waiting in line with a pack of organic blueberries.

 

“Ma,” she asked, in place of a greeting. “What’s wrong with Melissa?”

 

—

 

Motherhood had softened Melissa’s already round figure, made her ruddier. She was wearing an XXL Tampa Bay Buccaneers shirt from their 2002 Superbowl win. Somewhere, Sonya had a matching shirt. It went down to Melissa’s knees, swallowing her baby weight.

 

“You’re her Aunt Sonya,” Melissa repeated, her voice very full. “We want you here.”

 

Sonya had no brothers or sisters. She knew she wasn’t an aunt now, would never be one—she was just a girl who had no one else to sit with in high school— so instead of speaking, she stepped into Melissa’s arms.

 

Over her shoulder, Sonya saw it, and tried not to scream.

 

Under an assortment of tubes and blankets, partially shielded by a monitor and surrounded by well-wishers who looked carefully at the floor, was a red and purple smear. A tube, running under the slits where nostrils go, was the only indication that it was breathing.

 

A man quickly blocked it from her view. She knew without looking at her hand that she had drawn blood.

 

“This her?” he asked.

 

Melissa released her.

 

“Sonya, Craig. My husband.”

 

Sonya once did a story on self-flagellation, reporting on a radical church that encouraged sanctioned beatings in preparation for adult baptisms. She had thought the practice to be barbaric—perverted even—the shivery way the pastor talked of pain, the way it overtook his face.

 

Craig, quite simply, looked mad. He looked like the radical Christians, had the jumpy sort of depravity in his eyes that made cops slow down at traffic stops.

 

“I’ve heard a lot about you. Glad you could come by to see Jay.”

 

Jay, Sonya realized, was the swaddled lump.

 

Sonya had no doubt that Craig didn’t want her there, or any of them. Craig wanted to be taking pictures of a pink lump of blankets for his terrible Facebook page. Craig wanted to take his weapon from base and execute them all into an open ditch. Craig wanted to be in a two-bedroom, reheating a Lean Cuisine he had let go cold while enraptured by the sight of his poor, scarred baby inhaling into his wife’s breasts.

 

—

 

Melissa wasn’t Sonya’s best friend. Melissa was pale, with a quick smile and cowhide hair that she got cut, short and boyish, at Fantastic Sam’s. She sat with her doughy legs spread and was always eager to show her overlapping teeth. In high school this outweighed her fantastic empathy, so no one spoke to her much.

 

No one spoke to Sonya either, because of her acne: rippling under her dark skin, cystic and mean. A teacher told her once in Geometry class, Have you tried putting toothpaste on it? in front of everyone, and only Melissa hadn’t laughed.

 

“That was wrong of her,” she had told Sonya seriously, after class.

 

“She’s a bitch. I can’t wait to get out of this shithole state.”

 

“She did something wrong.” The repetition sounded solemn, like a prayer.

 

Melissa had a strict sense of justice ingrained in her. She wouldn’t let Sonya copy her math homework and couldn’t wait to join the Navy. That’s what her family did.

 

“I want to be a Marine,” Melissa would smartly tell any adult who enquired.

 

“Better than selling Mitsubishis,” Sonya said, unsupportive. “Or meth.” These were the career prospects of many of their companions.

 

“Bad market for foreign cars,” Melissa mused, missing the point in her round-faced, agreeable way.

 

Melissa was soft while Sonya was angled, forgiving while Sonya taped a slice of deli ham in the locker of a boy who called her pizza face. The only thing they had in common was a love for rap. Melissa, sweet, pasty Melissa could drop bars. She had a collection of CDs living in the cab of her truck. Eminem and Dr. Dre and Wu Tang Clan and Jay-Z.  They were a strict Pac family, didn’t own any Biggie. She knew every word on the Blueprint, could rap until the CD ejected. Sonya remembered that was the first time she admired Melissa for anything. Melissa kept them all in her truck’s glove box, along with her dad’s army knife, a birthday gift. For protection against perverts and coyotes, Melissa said seriously.

 

Their geometry teacher suffered from eight slashed tires that year, sixteen perfect puncture marks.

 

Melissa enlisted shortly after high school, and Sonya applied to Mizzou. There wasn’t really a need for each other, because Melissa had a new family and Sonya had an advice column, but every so often there would be a text or Facebook message, left to stagnate. A few years later, Sonya got a wedding announcement and a pregnancy announcement in the same stack of forwarded mail. That was just what you did in Largo.

 

Sonya couldn’t remember Melissa’s husband’s face, but knew he was also military. He had added Sonya on Facebook, where he inundated her timeline with racially-tinged articles from websites like “Truth for America,” all with headlines insisting that she should watch the liberal congressman get roasted by a ten-year-old boy-scout.

 

After the election, she blocked him, which was why she missed the Go Fund Me for their baby, and the message asking for her prayers.

 

—

 

“You should go pay your respects,” her mother had said, when Sonya returned with blueberries and unfounded guilt. “You’d be a comfort.”

 

Sonya’s mother belonged to the Advice Stitched on Pillows School of Thought. She wore her hair natural and made a big show of disapproving of Sonya’s silk press, reminded her how her oily hair would antagonize her skin. Wore her Walmart Greeter vest, McFlurry in one hand, always eager to spout the contents of a greeting card. She had loved earnest, ugly Melissa.

 

“I don’t know her anymore, Ma.”

 

“But she knows you, honey.”

 

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

 

Sonya scratched a scab. When she wasn’t writing or smoking, she was usually picking, collecting skin under her fingernails. Her mother would stare at the spots while she spoke to Sonya, would dart straight to her hands. Once, long ago, she had rubbed cayenne powder on them, in an attempt to stop Sonya from picking. It had sent her to the emergency room.

 

Her old bedroom was the front room of the trailer. It was originally a screened-in porch, but they had put up Plexiglas to mimic windows. You could hear coyotes at night.

 

She found her old cigar box, her hidey-hole, and smoked two ancient joints. Blew the smoke in the face of her mother’s terrier. Sonya refused to call it, to take it out, so that she wouldn’t have to say the name. She watched as the dog keeled over, tongue lolling, uncomfortably high.

 

The dog was called John, after Sonya’s father, who had left for another woman when Sonya was ten. Sonya’s mother, unfazed, went to the shelter, picked up the runt, named it after her ex-husband. Spent most of her days writing rambling letters to local judges and other semi-elected officials, demanding her husband pay his alimony.

 

Largo’s streets were laid out like an outstretched hand, mid-grasp. Sonya’s house rested on the tip of the pointer. The VA hospital sat on the thumb; to reach the drugstore you had to head toward the palm. She drove there, still baked, and found herself in the Hallmark aisle staring at the row of stuffed animals beseechingly, as if asking one to volunteer. She settled on the one with an unbearable face: a pink dog with cross eyes, one sewn lopsided, and drove to the hospital with it in her passenger seat, looking like a pitiful co-pilot.

 

—

 

Melissa spent the afternoon pointedly not looking at the mess of tubes, ignoring the padding of family members and stuffed animals, preferring to stare curiously at Sonya, as if she were the spectacle.

 

“How are you?” Melissa prodded, leading Sonya to a chair. Serene, like the pictures of Mary under the cross. Sonya stared at her, trying to detect fissures in her blankness. She found none.

 

“I’m so sorry, Melissa.”

 

“Working?”

 

Sonya wanted to hit her. Your baby, she wanted to scream. There’s something so wrong with your baby.

 

“Yeah. Can I get you a coffee or something?” Sonya asked wildly. “Let me bring you guys something. Craig?”

 

The baby mewled, and Craig recoiled as if she were a grease fire. There was a hitch in the beeping of the monitors, a collective wince.

 

“Can you get her something?” Melissa asked everyone and no one. “Something to make her sleep?”

 

Now, Sonya was beginning to understand better, beginning to crave a willow switch, the scarred backside. The self-flagellators had told her during the interview: The devil is inside you. He touched you, and they pointed at the scabs on her face. You need to beat him out.

“Little blue Jay,” Melissa’s mother said. Melissa jerked in response.

 

“Don’t call her that. That’s not her name. It’s Jay. Just Jay.”

 

Sonya raised her eyes from the tile, skipping over Jay-Just-Jay, and scanned the room.

 

No one knew but her that Melissa hadn’t named her baby after the bird. This made Sonya too guilty to breathe, too guilty to be inside herself. She went out into the hallway and everyone left her be: the nurses, the doctors, the men in wheelchairs with skin like candle wax.

 

—

 

It had happened before Sonya went to Mizzou. They had been hanging off Melissa’s bed. Melissa was longer, less round, the faintest hint of a tan on her chapped skin. Her hair just brushed the carpet. She hadn’t had to cut it yet. It must have been around the time she started Basic Training. Her last visit home. She turned to Sonya, grinned.

 

“I missed you,” she said. “I don’t get to hang out with any girls anymore.”

 

Sonya was struck by how eye contact was the same upside down as it was right-side up.

 

“Would you do me a favor?” Sonya said, remembering the tires. Melissa nodded.

 

“Punch me in the stomach.”

 

They were both quiet, then did that exchange girls can do with their eyes—Are you sure? How far? You weren’t safe?— all at once. Sonya dug her long, piano fingers into her hand, palms cut with thick fault lines.

 

“Please,” she said.

 

Melissa stood up, dismounted. Gravity had done this thing to her eyes that nighttime did to the neighbors’ lawns. She grabbed her car keys.

 

“Come on,” she said. Sonya followed.

 

Melissa handled the whole transaction. Filled in the papers. Swatted away Sonya’s hand when she offered to pay. Got her a diet Dr. Pepper, too.

 

In the aisle of the drugstore, Sonya washed it down. She wasn’t sure if this sort of thing allowed grieving, but Melissa put on Tupac on the way home, mouthing along— I was raised to be strong— and pretended Sonya was only hiccupping from the soda.

—

Sonya sat on the floor smelling her knees, thinking of the raw pink thing in the incubator, like a peeled crawfish. Somewhere in the wing, a self-playing piano started a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

 

“Honey?”

 

The nurse had deep-set smile lines down her face, making canals to her chin. Her scrubs strained around her thighs as she squatted next to Sonya. They didn’t get many sick babies at the VA; the nurse must be used to men who demanded final cigarettes and asked for a peek of her panties.

 

“Honey, you’re gonna want to go back in.”

 

“No,” Sonya said. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

 

She wiped herself with the hem of her shirt, all too aware of the bacteria she was spreading around her face, of the deep-rooted cysts stirring, hungry, in her cheeks.

 

The nurse stared at her, looked straight into her acne.

 

“The family is going to say goodbye.”

 

Sonya just shook her head, like a child. She had to leave. There was a chrome strip across from her that magnified the crustacean on her forehead, just above her eyebrow, that had been throbbing earlier in the day. While in the room, it must have erupted. She touched it, prepared for pus, and came away dry.

 

The nurse left, her sneakers chirping down the hallway. Someone else slid down next to her in the hallway. The Buccaneers jersey.

 

“Why are you here?” Melissa said.

 

I’m sorry I never stayed in touch. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer growing up. I’m sorry my face looks like this. I’m sorry your baby looks like that. I’m mostly sorry because your baby looks like that.

 

“You took me to the clinic,” she said instead. “Summer after high school.”

 

She slumped a little, against Sonya. It was the first time she saw Melissa’s posture waver all day, saw her at sixteen again, pictured her fat and smiling.

 

“She was premature.”

 

Sonya knew a little about premature babies, assumed that the skin hadn’t developed for Melissa’s. That it was born raw. Without waiting for a response, Melissa rolled up her sleeve to the crook of her elbow.

 

“Look,” Melissa said. Sonya started.

 

“Fucking look.”

 

Under the baby weight and the buttermilk complexion, she hadn’t caught it. But in cloying hallway light she saw it: skin clinging to little bruises in the crease of her arm, veins thick and sagging, like telephone wires.

 

“Jesus,” Sonya breathed. “Melissa.”

 

Sonya raised her nails to her face on impulse.

 

“Don’t pick,” Melissa said absently. “It’ll scar.”

 

It wasn’t Craig that looked like the Evangelicals; no, that must have been a reflection. A strip of chrome. It was Melissa who was mad; Melissa who was rabid. Pupils tight and shiny, like the exoskeleton of a palmetto bug.

 

“Are you . . . now? In the hospital?”

 

“We’re going to do it,” Melissa said, as if that were an explanation. “Say goodbye.”

 

How could she have missed it? The eyes, the skin, all wrong. Not a pregnancy glow—a curtain of sweat. Withdrawal, sickly sweet. And guilt, guilt, guilt—whole body shaking like Plexiglas in a storm.

 

“Will you come?”

 

Did she have a choice?

 

—

 

Melissa’s mother took photos of it that would surely be posted on Facebook, all pink and shiny. It made Sonya want to hurl. Once, one of her mother’s dog had dragged in a squirrel, a plump thing, split at the seams, spilling maggots. It reminded her of that.

 

The nurse was posed in the corner, pressed up against the wall. You could only focus either slightly right or left of the carnage, most choosing to keep their brimming eyes on their sneakers.

 

Sonya stared at Melissa, noticed a tremor, a hand shaking like a screen door. An unfocus in her yellowed eyes. Craig clutched at his wife, and she became the space between his fingers. The nurse asked her a question, soft, and she bowed like a young birch. Sonya could have sworn the baby cracked what would have been an eye, stared at Sonya through the equipment, through the tubes: picking her out.

 

Sonya had collided her bike with a taxicab. She had passed kidney stones, watched her mother pass kidney stones. She had been slapped during sex. She remembered the big pad they had given her in the clinic for residual bleeding, like a diaper, the way she cramped for days after. Had seen pictures of children with legs blown off and women, branded, for their last names. But nothing like Melissa’s mother, thumb on the record button, as the parents each kissed the bundle on what would have been its forehead.

 

The nurse hummed. The beeping ceased. Craig drew away. Melissa didn’t remove her lips, stood hunched for a long time, over the gore, over the tubes, over what would have been the nose.

 

Sonya once saw a man jump in front of a train, saw him blast into pink mist—had to sit in the shower afterward for hours. She wondered all day, Had it hurt?— yes. This was worse.

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The Word of Several Million Years

A meditation on shifting ideas of being home: where it begins and ends. Of being right and wrong: how we lie about the difference.

 

Animation, music, and sound by Morgan Joseph Hamilton

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I Tell My Twin Sister if I Come Back after I Die,

 it sure as hell ain’t gonna be to visit

as a pesky fly, obsessively orbiting her head while

she kneels, nose-pinched, to de-poop the litter box.

 

Or a squirrel, like the one she calls Mom

whenever it pauses halfway up the maple

to stare through the kitchen window as she lights

a cigarette: I know, I know—I promise I’ll quit!

 

If we’re granted the power to return, to embody

some other kind of creature, why would it be

those two ducks who claim her pool every June?

 

Okay . . . so if they are Grandma and Grandpa, 

what do you think they’re trying to communicate

through the shit and feathers you skim out daily?

 

You remember how they loved to swim, she insists,

when I suggest it’s the endless supply of breadcrumbs

she scatters, not reincarnation, bringing them back.

 

Well, if I return, I assure her, it’ll be as a bear—

not at all native to her suburban town—a big one,

who claws a perfect M for Michael into the side

of her shed. So there’s no uncertainty it’s me.

 

Oh my god! Don’t you dare, she says. That shed cost

a fortune! But . . . feel free to carve it into the maple.

 

What makes you think I’m going first anyway? I ask.

Has that fly you call Pop been telling you something?

 

Clean the litter box for me, she says. And ask him yourself.

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Hidden Lives

Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Doire Press, 2017
72 pages, paper, $13.99

 

Cover of Annemarie Ni Churreain's Bloodroot

 

While the quote is often misattributed to William Butler Yeats, it was the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”: There is another world, but it is in this one. It does, however, sound like Yeats, as the quote reinforces the popular view of the grand Celtic poet, the one who celebrates the unseen faerie life, recovering the old stories of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Sidhe. Of course, for Irish poets of the twentieth century, it became a weighty thing, this deep register between the mythic, the landscape, the history, and the poetic voice. And for women Irish poets, an exclusionary thing.

 

So, to come across Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s first book of poetry, Bloodroot, published by Doire Press, I return to Éluard’s quote. Ní Churreáin is no surrealist, but she does look for the life and lives that have been hidden, removed, erased, lives that still are apparent in this world. She accomplishes this achievement with exquisite craft and unrelenting attention, poem by poem. To find the other world in this one, Ní Churreáin suspends her readers in a tight, liminal space, where we must take great time and care to become still and to reflect, so that we see our own belonging, our own alienation.

 

The poetry happens even before you open the book. First, the title and its sonic qualities: Just two syllables, each ending on a hard consonant, but then that slipknot of “oo,” the short vowel in the first syllable, a hard and ugly thud, and the long open version of it in the second syllable, an open and soaring cry that is clipped short with that stopped “t.” Such dexterous language will pervade each poem once the cover is opened. Second, the title and its possible references: a medicinal flower whose roots ooze a red sap; a single root that is the life force of a plant, like a taproot or a blood feather for a bird; or a root that feeds from blood, or has been drowned in blood. All those associations fill the book.

 

The book is separated into three, tight, distinct sections, thematically united: where the poet traverses familial terrain, and then into troubled (and for me recent) cultural histories of Ireland, and then sojourns into India and Florida. Annemarie Ní Churreáin, a native of the boglands of northwest Donegal, is very much the world citizen, evidenced in her receiving several international fellowships and residencies, including those from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Jack Kerouac House, and Hawthornden Castle. The thematic breadth of her poetry is thus hardly surprising. Yet, each poem is discretely fashioned, built on its own sharp and unforgiving terms, in language clear, unfiltered, and yet highly wrought. While I have seen some readers say how they glide through Bloodroot, reading it all in one sitting, I am stunned by the poems. I read one or two an evening, and they trouble me, stay with me. Another one would overwhelm me.

 

For instance, consider the way Ní Churreáin constructs a brief lyric in “The Warning,” a poem governed by such a strong, unyielding sequence of voices (just two lines each), but by a disciplined and harrowing parallel structure. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

 

Give us your child, the Pica bird said
or else you go to hell.

 

 Give me what I want, the child said
 or else I’ll tear this House down.

 

Obey house rules, the House said
or else this House will break your bones.

 

 Tell my story, the bone said
 or else we’re all going to burn.

 

Despite its tightly faceted structure, there are slight, slight fissures in the poem, where the “child” and the “bone” are not capitalized, and the brilliant shifting of pronouns in the second line of each couplet: second person, first person singular, third person, and first person plural. The poem’s brevity and simplicity and personified voices also suggest something of the nursery rhyme. And then at the heart of the poem is the urgent and necessary call for witnessing, to tell the story or else. I am left wondering about whether or not we’ll all burn anyway after the telling, after the witnessing.

 

This attention to language partly emanates from the fact that Ní Churreáin is bilingual, a product of a colonized history, and that she is from the hinter boglands of western Ireland. Weighted with the ghosts of her foremothers, to whom the book is dedicated, the simple, hard language is so piercingly employed to speak the truths of the hidden or shamed lives of Irish women, famously the cases of Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes, two young women in the 1980s who suffered unwanted pregnancies with one resulting in death and the other in pillorying. Ní Churreáin’s is an uncompromising and bold vision: told with a scalded clarity that makes me think of Joan Didion, with a necessity that makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser. But this is all Ní Churreáin, on her own terms.

 

I come back time and again to another brief lyric, “Cult,” as a grounding moment for the collection. In it, she investigates the double legend of Brigid, the pre-Christian Irish goddess of healing and inspiration who was later appropriated and canonized as St. Brigid. In County Cavan, a pagan cult continued to celebrate Brigid, worshipping a stone head capturing her three faces: one a smithy, one a herder, and one a healer. In the 1840s, a local priest was said to have “lost” the stone head in Roosky Lough. Ní Churreáin plainly notes:

 

This is what happens to women who brew medicine,
who bend iron, who drive cattle on their own land.

 

Such powerful women are not only appropriated, even canonized, but then thereafter must be erased. And the poem ends on defiance (and a string of hard “d” consonants), in lines that the place the poet among the original sisterhood, the resistant cult:

 

Dreamless now, I touch the water in the font,
cold as medals, streaked with my own blood.

 

Here, the poet unsentimentally faces the world as it is given, “[d]reamless,” while claiming her own agency and asserting her connection to her past, her real, elemental kin.

I am leaving out so much accomplishment that is evident in this remarkable book, both in terms of Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s craft and vision. There is much more for any reader to discover. This first book gives promise of a vital, important poet whose voice denudes our convenient illusions.

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

 

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

 

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

 

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

 

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

 

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

 

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

 

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

 

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

 

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

 

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

 

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

 

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Interview: Ha Jin

Jin, Ha - Cover of The Boat Rocker     Jin, Ha - cover of A Map of Betrayal     Jin, Ha - cover of Nanjing Requiem

Jin, Ha - cover of A Good Fall     Jin, Ha - cover of The Writer as Migrant     Jin, Ha - cover of Waiting

 

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

 

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

 

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

 

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

 

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

 

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

 

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

 

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

 

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

 

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

 

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

 

[Laughter]

 

Jin:
For two! From where?

 

TFR:
Canada.

 

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

 

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

 

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

 

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

 

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

 

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

 

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

 

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

 

Jin:
No!

 

[Laughter]

 

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

 

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

 

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

 

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

 

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

 

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

 

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

 

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

 

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

 

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

 

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

 

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

 

[Laughter]

 

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

 

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

 

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

 

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

 

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

 

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

 

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

 

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

 

TFR:
Which it was.

 

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

 

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

 

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

 

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

 

Jin:

Yes.

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Fantastic Voyage

My father’s silver Chevette pushes past refineries along the turnpike,
fields and farmland tucked back behind the Raritan River bridge.

 

I strain my neck to catch glimpses of skyline, growing larger
with each exit. I mouth exotic names on signs—Rahway, Weehawken.

 

We begin the long, slow, curving descent to the mouth of the tunnel,
an impatient caterpillar of cars with glowing red eyes, inching

 

towards a collective cocoon. At the entrance we pick up speed, my pulse
quickens in the half-light. Everything’s possible below the surface:

 

 The white-tiled walls are relics from an ancient civilization.
 The curve of the ceiling is the belly of a massive river-beast.
 We are passing through a half-world on the way to a new planet,
 the invisible NJ/NY line is a strobe-light stargate.

 

The road twists, slopes upward—leaning in, we slingshot forward,
there’s no turning back: the glow of the City is just around the bend.

 

The cocoon splits open and spits us all out: fresh butterflies, bright wings.
Drenched in golden light, the City’s an endless meadow to flit about.

 

We bury our faces in it, we drink its nectar.

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Standoff

It was February, mid-afternoon and sunny, but the wind was blowing, and the sun wasn’t doing enough of what I needed it to do: smother the chill, whisper something warm in my ear, something about spring and starting over. I was back in my hometown, about an hour’s drive west of Philly, after thirty years away—kids in college, a divorce in the offing. The world thinks Pottstown is the kind of place people go to, or get stuck in, when they have limited options, the kind of place abandoned once upon a time by Bethlehem Steel, Firestone Tires, Mrs. Smith’s Pies, me, and people like me, the ones who went to college and didn’t come back. Until they did.

 

I was across town at the local radio station when I first heard about the standoff a couple of blocks from my house, and I got into my car and headed toward it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run toward confrontation. I was the tomboy who picked fights with the older boys, and for as long as I can remember I’ve also needed to know what was going on around me, what I myself might be up against. As I approached the area, I squeezed into an open parking spot on the street. In the rear view mirror I saw people standing on the corners behind me, just one long block from the SWAT truck and police vehicles stationed in front of the three-story, brick apartment building where all this was going down. I heard a series of bangs then, and something inside me stiffened. They sounded like gunshots, a sound I’d heard throughout my childhood as my dad test-fired weapons in his gun shop in our backyard in a residential neighborhood not far from where I now sat; he was a full-time German teacher then and a part-time gunsmith. I waited a few seconds. It was quiet, and I figured it must have been tear gas or something like that. The cops wouldn’t let all these people get that close if they could get hit by a stray bullet, right? So, I got out of the car.

 

I went up to a man and woman on the closest corner and asked what was going on. The woman was young, maybe in her twenties; she looked like she might have Down syndrome. She let the young man do all the talking, and he told me what I already knew: there was an armed man holed up in the Logan Court apartments. He’d been in a standoff with the police since that morning. I got the impression that they themselves had been there for hours. They weren’t holding hands. I don’t think their arms were even touching, but there they were, together, like sentries. They turned away from me and continued their vigil, staring ahead. My eyes followed. A SWAT team was poised behind an armored truck, which began to move, slowly turning and facing the apartment building head-on. A police car was nearby with officers hunched over the hood, weapons trained on the building.

 

On our corner a man in a navy work jacket and thick glasses arrived, along with a woman with reddish hair and crow’s feet. At first I took her to be his wife, something about the way she corrected him several times, the implications of ownership, how we’re allowed to do that to those closest to us, or how we slide into it, one person doing it, the other person accepting it. He was wearing a cap, though, so it was hard to discern his age and, at some point, it occurred to me that they could also be mother and son. Apparently, they lived in the building that was under siege—Building B—and they knew the gunman. He was their neighbor, Albert. They put him at about seventy years old with an arsenal in there.

 

Just the word—arsenal—made me think of the weapons that have always been a part of my dad’s life and our family’s life when I was young—his guns, his customers’ guns, the metal cases of ammo. All that firepower, all that just plain power, amassed to defend against “it,” my dad’s continued reference to some sort of anticipated invasion or revolution, the parameters of which seemed to change with the times. During my father’s childhood, the enemy was the German army, when all Americans were alert to the possibility of U-boats just off the coast. During my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s, the revolution might have involved black militants attempting to overthrow “decent” white society. During the Clinton administration, to my father “it” meant the U.S. government trying to take arms from its own citizens, in which case secret militias and individuals like him would have to fight it out in the streets against their own government. Or “it” might have meant the United Nations’ stripping sovereign nations of their military authority, forcing people like my father to defend themselves against an armed international agency. And in a post-9/11 world, “it” might be the “foreign” terrorists among us, or again, “lawless” black and Latino gangs, venturing from their cities to attack law-abiding citizens in the suburbs. I didn’t understand or agree with him on any of this—the fearsome “it” always haunting my father.

 

There at the standoff, a small amount of clear drool trickled from the left corner of the man’s mouth—the man in the navy work jacket—as he described some kind of metal framing around Albert’s doorway so no one could see inside his unit. I couldn’t really picture it, but I felt a sense of impingement, started to imagine Albert as a secretive, paranoid type who barely cracked his door open when anyone was in the hallway, and then I became aware of the way the bone cold of the pavement sent a chill all the way through me. I hadn’t planned on being outside for any length of time that afternoon. I hadn’t planned on being at a standoff. The man did not wipe away his drool, and I wondered if he was cold, too, or if his mouth was numb from dental work. He kind of talked like that. He mentioned that he had seen the police arrive that morning, but then he had to go to school. He would mention that again, a couple more times, while we’re all standing there—how he goes to school. At first, I assumed he meant college, but then I didn’t know. I mean, he never really said what kind of school.

 

Another neighbor joined us then. She was petite. Her hair was dark brown, dyed, and teased. Her teeth were bad. She was just a little thing, but she talked tough. She had a smoker’s voice and she was smoking as she talked. Every movement was quick and sharp. Inhale. Exhale. Her beady eyes darted here and there like a nervous bird’s. Puff. Puff. Apparently, Albert had had previous altercations with the building manager.

 

“That manager has got to go,” said Bird Woman. “This is ridiculous.”

 

It was implied, and the others murmured in agreement, that the building manager didn’t deal well with people, that things had been known to go missing from people’s apartments, that maybe he was partly responsible for Albert’s behavior. Not that anyone should ever shoot at someone else, but … still. The consensus of the group was that this was a waste of their tax dollars. Then, they turned on a dog. Apparently, a dog might have been at the root of it. Someone’s dog in their building. It would start barking early in the morning and it wouldn’t shut up. Albert got mad, complained to the manager, an argument ensued and escalated to the point where Albert shot a hole through his own door and the manager’s door across the hall. Supposedly, the shot through the doors did happen that morning, but it wasn’t clear to me if the dog’s barking was the actual inciting incident that morning, or if the current standoff was being conflated with other annoying, dog-barking episodes, arguments, and slammed doors.

 

It hit me then that I was in the midst of a self-selected society, or at least a subset of the self-selected society of the Logan Court Apartments, Building B, and they were letting me, a stranger, in on the particulars of their lives there, some of the comings and goings, the things they knew, or thought they knew, about Albert and the manager, the way a doorway was constructed, the way we can or can’t see inside people’s lives, the mystery of it all. This was what people did in times of crisis: huddle on the sidewalk and squint into a weak winter sun and try to make sense of it, worry about what might have been, the what-ifs. I definitely felt like an outsider. Or maybe I was dissociating in that moment. Maybe I was still too good at that, and that was why I felt this wasn’t really happening to me, except to the extent that I had grown up in this town and felt a kind of ownership of it; or to the extent that I had moved back in midlife and could see the back of Building B from the alley behind my rented house, where I parked my car; or to the extent that gun violence seemed to be a fact of life in these United States.

 

“It’s a yappy dog,” said Bird Woman. “A REAL yappy dog.” Puff. Puff.

 

Everyone nodded in agreement.

 

One of Bird Woman’s fingers was bleeding. When she swiped at her hair, she smeared blood across her right temple, a macabre kind of make-up. She was aware of the bleeding finger and periodically dabbed it against her coat, but none of us told her about the blood now on her face.

 

Down the street, the SWAT truck changed its position. The lid at the top lifted up and someone poked his head out. Men outside the truck moved as the truck moved, using it as a shield. The tank rolled slowly up over the curb and onto the grass, heading straight toward the building.  I couldn’t actually see the tank’s point of contact with the building, but it seemed to be backing up and going forward a few times, as though it were battering its way into the building. I wondered if everyone else was out of the building, and how the police could batter it without causing structural damage, and whether they were going to demolish the entire building just to get to Albert?

 

“How do they know if Albert is still in his unit?” I asked. “Could he move through the hallways, up the stairs, and shoot his way into another apartment?”

 

I was thinking he’d then have a sniper-perch from a second-floor window, in which case, we were all easy prey, just a couple hundred yards away. Just as I needed to be aware of my surroundings, I sometimes thought about the speed and paths and trajectories of bullets.

 

“Nah, there were cops in the stairwells this morning. He can’t move,” said the man who drooled and went to school.

 

It welled up in me then, unbidden, the memory of the mental fortress of my childhood, the feeling that someone was out to get us, our family, our dad, me, and it came to rest on Albert, the sense of his being trapped, pinned down by the police, a militia. Was this Albert’s “it?” Who did he think he was fighting right now? What did he think they were trying to take from him or do to him? If we could have looked out Albert’s window, through Albert’s eyes, what would we have seen? The police or someone else or some sort of monster? If he had, indeed, exchanged gunfire with police, then he must have had a death-wish. And I was struck again: He would not come out of there alive. When you got to that point, the point where Albert was at just then, how could you give up? How could you make it stop, the narrative running through your head, the one where the whole world is against you and right outside your window, pressing in, battering their way in? And let us be honest: Your manhood is at stake. Yours versus the guys’ in uniform, the ones who have rolled in their military vehicles to bring Albert to his knees.

 

Another woman joined the makeshift community on the corner, these partial witnesses, who lived up close to Albert, and me, the interloper, the eavesdropper. This woman’s elderly aunt lived in Building B and she didn’t know if she had been evacuated or where she was. She didn’t think her aunt would be able to handle this; it was too much.

 

At the radio station I’d just been interviewed about my new job as the executive director of a small, nonprofit, community land trust, albeit part-time, ten hours a week. I was between things then, without knowing what the next thing was, only the ones that were over: a long marriage, child-rearing, the silences, the words holed up in my head, trying to shoot their way out. The land trust’s first project was to build a community garden right in the middle of what was supposedly Pottstown’s most-troubled neighborhood—historically occupied by African-Americans in what was overwhelmingly rental housing, much of it subsidized, much of it rundown, in what had been the arena for a drug turf war during 2010 that had resulted in several shootings. Now here was this standoff taking place in the North End of town in 2012. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here, where the white people lived, and it became a repeated refrain of the standoff audience: “I moved to that apartment [or this part of town] because I thought it was safe.”

 

They seemed to have forgotten about the armed robbery four months earlier and, literally, two blocks from where we were standing. The cashier at the Turkey Hill Minit Market was robbed at gunpoint the prior fall just after midnight. The police were on a stakeout—there’d been a rash of late-night, armed robberies of area Turkey Hills and other all-night convenience stores—and the police saw this one unfold. An African-American male with a white t-shirt over his head pointed what looked to be a handgun at the clerk. As the robber left the store, they told him to stop and drop the gun. He turned toward them, and they fired. It sounded very Wild West to me. The robber was struck in the leg, but managed to get away, leaving behind what was actually a BB gun. The police couldn’t find him for several hours. They roped off the street in front of my house. Helicopters with searchlights hovered overhead around 5:00 a.m., when he was finally located, bleeding, in the Presbyterian church one block over. I slept through the whole thing; sleep has always been my release.

 

These neighbors didn’t mention the Turkey Hill shooting, and now we all stood, voluntarily and in broad daylight, as close to danger as we were allowed to get, to men in uniforms with guns drawn, to a man with a gun or guns, who had snapped. There was no getting away from it, no neighborhood you could live in and get away from it. Well, no, I take that back. I knew there were places where money still insulated their residents from poverty and the rumbling aftershocks of poverty. I had lived in those places for thirty years. Anyway, you couldn’t get away from guns and violence in a place like Pottstown, couldn’t pretend it didn’t concern you. And, after all, there was danger all around, everywhere, not all of it having to do with guns. Most people don’t want to admit that. If you really thought about it, if you really faced up to it, how could you even get out of bed? How could you leave your house? To go to work, say, if you’re a woman. To be a person of color or an immigrant or someone who wears a hijab or a turban. For that matter, in a lot of cases, how could you stay in your house? You know what I mean. You go to enough memoir workshops, you teach enough adolescents, you listen to enough people talk about their lives, their childhoods, their parents, their partners, you really listen, you allow for the possibility of violence, and you begin to see what I mean. You read the newspaper, you read between the lines, you think back, you remember—you have to remember—if you do not want to remember what it was like to be a child, to interpret the world for the first time—your parents, other adults, other kids, the systems at work. If you do not want to remember what it was like to not know how they worked, what it was like to not know the rules, and the moment you started making one assumption or another, one interpretation or another, then, of course, you are not going to begin to see what I mean. There’s not much this story, or any story, can do for a person like that. You have to allow for the possibility.

 

At first, I thought it was mainly girls and women who were in danger in the world, and maybe that’s true enough anyway. Now, though, when I think about someone like Albert, I think about my father. I think about a little boy who was once in danger. I didn’t know who put Albert there, in Building B, surrounded, guns trained on him on February 9, 2012. I didn’t know if it was someone inside his house, someone outside his house. I’m talking about when he was a boy. So, of course, we can’t always know, because they don’t always know—someone like Albert, in Albert’s position during that standoff—and they’re the only ones who could tell us, but only if they know and, then, only if they want to tell.

—

Here’s a story: A six- or seven-year-old boy has to go down the street along the railroad tracks and around the corner into the firehouse to tell his dad to stop drinking and playing cards; it’s time to come home. One time he watches as the ambulance takes his dad away; he’s had so much to drink, he’s got the DTs. That’s how my dad put it when he told me this story a few years ago, around the time of the standoff. So many times my father has erased the stories of his father’s sometimes violent alcoholism with one line: “He was a good man.” Yes, in some ways I’m sure he was. And he drank too much, and he hit you, and you stuttered, and you pointed a loaded gun at him when you were sixteen and he’d been drinking and was coming after you, and he left you alone after that. And you’ve surrounded yourself with guns ever since. He was a flawed man, like the rest of us, and you loved him, like I love you.

 

“So,” I said to him after he told this particular story, “Your mom sends you out to bring your drunk father home on a regular basis. You watch your dad seizing up. You were just a little kid. We call that trauma, Dad.”

 

The blank look, then a shift, something coming into his eyes. My dad is not stupid. He is a reader and a storyteller with a beautiful singing voice. He is friendly and generous; his former students, relatives, and customers seek his counsel. He is really quite perceptive, but I could tell this was a whole new way of seeing the world, himself: vulnerable, trusting, the child he was before he ever had to look at his father in that condition, before he had to start making calculations about his own safety. His father’s steps heavy on the staircase leading up to his attic bedroom. Where is Richard? Where is he? This is what I mean about remembering, about wanting to remember. But in the end, how much does he want me to know or tell? He has told his stories to me out of order, and since they didn’t happen to me, I can be something of an editor and put them back in order and draw my own conclusions. Your father. Coming at you. The enormity of it. The stated enemies may have changed over the decades, but I can’t help but believe that my dad has armed himself his whole life for a standoff with his father, the real ones and all of the imagined ones.

 

We already know that domestic violence begets domestic violence, like sexual abuse and substance abuse, cycling through generations until it is consciously broken. And we are now learning of the correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings. I understand that my attempt to understand someone like Albert—and my father—makes me susceptible to accusations of pandering to white males, to giving them special dispensation perhaps because of mental illness, to accounting for their fragility. But I am not saying that Albert, or anyone who takes up arms against fellow citizens or the police, should get any special treatment in the moment or after the fact. I am not talking about letting them off the hook for their actions as adults. I’m talking about preventing them from being harmed in the first place, from feeling the need to pick up a gun and aim it at innocents, as if that will avenge the original harm. Or from feeling the need to own an arsenal, as if that will prevent additional harm. My grandfather has been dead for more than fifty years; he’s not coming for my dad ever again. And so, I wondered, and still wonder: What about Albert? All the Alberts? All the white men with guns? What to do about them? And more specifically, what to do about them when they are boys? People are mysteries, will always be mysteries, every single one of them, but I can’t let go of the notion that there are clues. There are always clues.

—

Before I left the standoff—I didn’t see how my waiting there in the cold meant anything—I ran into the Borough Council president and his wife, who lived on the block where we had all gathered.

 

“Congratulations on the new job,” he said. “I caught the tail end of your interview.” And then he said something like, “Thanks for moving back. It’s good to have you here.” The way he said it made it sound like he was referring to right then, at the standoff. You know, like he was glad there was, perhaps, a kind of outsider to be a witness. He knew I’d been gone for thirty years, knew I’d become the town’s cheerleader on a town blog I’d created, knew I’d been volunteering in several capacities. What he could not have known was that these gigs were a limbo for me— my own standoff with the things closing in on me: middle age and the whole of my childhood, the need to make meaning, to make sense of the past before I could make some new future.

—

In the end Albert did give in. The paper said his full name was Albert J. Dudanowicz. He wasn’t seventy; he was fifty-six, not much older than I was at the time. He had shot through the manager’s door, but there was nothing about the yappy dog, nothing about Albert’s mental state. It turned out there was no arsenal either, although he had a .50-caliber Smith and Wesson five-shot pistol and a Remington .375 H & H bolt-action rifle, which was powerful enough to kill an elephant, according to the paper. It was reported that he was bleeding from one hand, where a sniper had hit him. The photo in the paper showed a burly white man, alive, walking, unshaven, his chest naked, massive spotlights shining on him, darkness around the edges.

 

Three weeks later, a local reporter pelted Albert with questions in an online video taken as he left a hearing.

 

“Albert, do you have anything to say?” she asked. “You want to apologize? Why’d you shoot at those police officers that day? You’re not sorry? Why wouldn’t you come out of your apartment? No apology? You’re not going to apologize?”

 

Rat-a-tat-tat. She sprayed him with questions.

 

Albert’s beard was full then. His right hand was heavily bandaged. He shuffled from the chains around his ankles. His eyes didn’t seem to see, and then he cast them downward. At first, he whimpered, and it was high-pitched, until all the whimpers started running together, animal-like and wounded.

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A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard

My brother has always had a knack for crafting memorable metaphors from complex ideas. He tells me this one about my mother’s Adult-onset Leukodystrophy—the disease then in its earliest, most unnoticeable stage—when I am young, maybe eight, and I remember it forever.

 

The myelin sheath is a greatly extended and modified plasma membrane wrapped around the nerve axon in a spiral fashion. Picture it as a hose.

 

A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard. Imagine the hose is green; the yard, too. At the crank of a wrist, fresh, clean water sprints up from the property’s subsystem, glides through the casing, and pours itself into place effortlessly. Prior to appearing at the spout, water is an unthought. The ground drinks up. Grass and flowers flourish.

 

But eventually, the hose begins to peel; its vibrant green wears. Yes, all hoses deteriorate over time, but this one specifically has a certain defect that makes it deteriorate faster.

 

Are you following?

 

Deterioration. A hundred holes leak fresh, clean water. There is nothing wrong with the water, it just doesn’t get to the spout and therefore the grass.

 

. . . so the myelin sheath is like the hose, right, and Mom’s neurotransmitters—or the messages from her brain—are like the water that’s supposed to flow through the hose and arrive at the grass, except it keeps leaking out. Does that make sense?

 

 

I remember this. I repeat it and relay it to a select few throughout my childhood: a best friend, a teammate, and once a grade-school teacher I shouldn’t have told. It spilled out how lies do, nervous and quick.

 

Signed proof by a parent that I had done my homework—that was the hurdle I was trying to clear when my tongue tripped me up and I went down a precocious-sounding rabbit hole on the intricacies of the Leukodystrophy and the function of the myelin sheath.  I was in fifth grade and had forged my mom’s signature, something I’d done tens of times before and never felt bad about. It was a ridiculous requirement. Of course I had done my homework, it was right there in my handwriting. Why all the extra red tape?

 

The overbearing administrative aspects of school irritated me and my mom both. When she first learned of the new nightly oath demanded from her, she flippantly filled four weeks of pages at once with her initials. My teacher, Mr. Smith, took notice of this when he looked through my assignment book the next day and sent a snarky note home explaining to her how that wasn’t the point of the exercise and if she could please just cooperate and sign nightly, that’d be great. Instead, my Mom, a teacher herself, and I, a rambunctious but nonetheless A-student, entered into a kind of low-key rebellion together: she taught me to forge her signature.

 

With practice, she coached me on the rounded curve of a capital n and taught me how to loop a lowercase y. She handed me an interest in untangling letters and an attraction for working them back together. Excavated from this experience were my first small associations of art with pen and of pen with protest. Why sign on the dotted line when you can sign through it? By now, I have written my mother’s name a thousand times; it is an act of love. Still, I practice it.

 

For months, the forging was a non-issue until suddenly it was. Mr. Smith was intimidating and I was ten. His voice boomed when he yelled, and I knew he just didn’t like me. I had a propensity for talking without raising my hand, shirking the rules, and just kind of being a high maintenance student in general. He must have been waiting for a reason to let me have it. So, one day in early spring when I routinely handed in my homework and showed him my assignment book that held an unusually messy—and of course forged—signature (I had fallen into the sloppy trap of comfort), he challenged its validity.  I froze.

 

He asked if it was my mom’s signature: Yes that’s it wasn’t enough to appease him. Then he asked again. And again, giving me that look that told me he just knew, and I, feeling as if I had nowhere else to go, mumbled down a path about my mom having Leukodystrophy, which made it so her handwriting was sometimes poor. At that, his voice and eyebrows rose and he said Leuko-what? There was no turning back. I picked up speed: Yeah it’s because of neurotransmitters and this thing the myelin sheath . . . We all have it, but hers is deteriorating . . . So it’s like a hose, right . . .

 

I went through the whole metaphor.

 

He was disarmed out of confusion and let the challenge go, but I held onto it for weeks, angry at myself in cycles for letting out secrets I knew not to under the slightest, most selfish pressure; for betraying my family’s trust. See, my mom worked as a teacher in the same school district, and while her condition was only just beginning to show in brief, elusive bouts, we were explicitly told to never, ever discuss it with anyone.

 

For weeks I waited nervously for the moment I’d be found out. I imagined my mom waiting for me when I arrived home, arms folded in disappointment, or maybe it would come through in the form of a call during dinnertime from Mr. Smith or an administrator to my father: Mr. Chen? Yes, we’re calling about Mrs. Chen’s Leukodystrophy. We know all about it.

 

And then what exactly would happen? I didn’t know for sure, I just worried about it happening at all. Later, I learned that my parents were concerned my mom wouldn’t get tenured if the district knew she had a neurodegenerative disease. We were all on her insurance.

 

The anxieties of secrecy root inward early and become near-impossible to purge. In fifth grade, I not only knew what the myelin sheath was, but I had been disappointed with myself for talking about it with the wrong person and worried about who might find out that I spilled the beans. Some grade-school gossip that was.

 

Weeks after the event, I would finally find relief. I arrived home on a Friday, hands full of dandelions.

 

Put your weeds down, will ya? Hurry up and come inside. It was my brother, waiting for me on the front steps. I couldn’t understand how a flower so perfectly bright could count as a weed, but before I could defend the wrongfully categorized, he ushered me inside quick.  Mom and Dad have big news!

 

Inside, the sun-filled kitchen felt as light as the outdoors actually was. There was a pitcher of lemonade on the table and an already-dug-into plate of cheese and crackers. The whole family sat down in our unofficial spots on the big white cornered couch in the living room where we always had important conversations. Usually it was where I was spoken to when in trouble. In that moment, despite the mounting anxiety of Mr. Smith and the myelin sheath, I knew I wasn’t. Finally, my dad spoke: he was quitting his job up in New York and taking a shot at starting his own business around town. This was huge news.

 

I now realize it was less about business, and more about being home for Mom—for us—as the Leukodystrophy progressed, but at the time, we were all elated nonetheless. To be home together as a family.

 

Oftentimes, the only way to rid oneself of a big anxiety is to occupy oneself with a bigger excitement. From that moment, I never worried about Mr. Smith again.

 

Life felt new. I forgot my mishaps and forgave myself. Summer arrived. All July and August that year, in the evenings, Mom and Dad drank wine on the deck—or in the garage if there was a thunderstorm on. Jesse and I indulged in endless cheese-and-cracker plates and got along. On the best days, we’d connect the garden hose to the sprinkler and run through over and over again, not once thinking about a disease of any kind. Sometimes, we’d chalk the entire driveway. Sunflowers, hopscotch, the usual. Once, I covered the entire front steps with my mother’s name, a hundred perfect signatures. When my masterpiece was finally complete, I called her to come see. Look, Mom, I can really write your name perfectly now.

 

It’s great, sweetheart, she replied, now let me see you write yours.

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Nomads

In the night sky, Arabs see al’awa’id,

the Mother Camels, a pattern of stars

that seem to gather around a calf

and protect her from hyenas.

 

In the life before this one, daughter,

I might have carried you for just over a year,

and delivered you to your first slow,

searing desert breaths.

 

The camel mare is the only mammal

who does not clean her infant

after birth, nor bite through the umbilical cord.

 

Another cord binds me to you;

it runs from brainstem

to lumbar region, with nerve roots,

dorsal roots, ventral roots,

 

the peripheral butterfly columns,

and the cauda equine (horse’s tail),

motor supply for the perineum

that brought you into light in late

September, a desert sunflower,

 

your eyes dolly-blue, to gift me

my happiest autumn.

 

A calf is born with eyes open.

Did you know camels always face the sun?

 

Their lovely long eyelashes

and their tears protect their eyes

from sand and grit and blindness.

 

We were nomads, in that other life;

maybe that is why I do not see you

as much as I would like, but we are bound

to each other nonetheless.

 

You’ll find me waiting in al’awa’id

even at the dawn of my next life.

 

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Two Views of Florida

Rita Ciresi is our 2017 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook contest winner
for her collection of micro-stories Second Wife,
published in cooperation with Burrow Press
and available for purchase here.

 

I. The first time I hear the thudding overhead—so loud the windowpanes vibrate—I think someone’s rooting around upstairs. Then I remember we’ve just moved to Florida, our house is one-story, and we don’t have an attic.

 

A squirrel must be trapped in the upper wall, or gutter, or one of those weird parts of the house I didn’t even know existed until the home inspector walked us through the property, speaking in what to me was a foreign language:  check throat, cricket, fascia, scuttle, scuncheon.   

 

Since moving to the Sunshine State, I’ve gotten myself into a heap of trouble calling 9-1-1:  after I spotted a long, slithery snake in our backyard (“This is Florida, ma’am,” the dispatcher told me, “and they live here too.”) and when I spotted black smoke belching in the distance (“This is Florida, ma’am, and that’s called a controlled burn.”)

 

What would the dispatcher tell me this time:  This is Florida, ma’am, where burglars are common as alligators or This is Florida, ma’am, and you better get used to raccoons burrowing in your soffit?

 

The thudding continues, finally becoming so insistent I could swear Santa and his reindeer are on the roof four months too early.  I slip on my sandals and walk into the blazing sunlight.

 

On the ridge of our roof sit half a dozen black birds.  Buzzards or vultures?  They weren’t included on the home inspection tour, so I’m not sure what to call them, except grim and ugly.  Each has a hooked nose.  Beady eyes.  And a glossy feathered body that must weigh forty pounds.

 

Why are they on our roof and not our neighbors’? Don’t they know I’m superstitious enough to take them as a warning sign?  But of what—a lightning storm?  a sinkhole?  hurricane?  death?

 

Shoo, I say.  Like they’re cats or rats.  Shoo.

 

When that doesn’t work, I wing one of the pebbles lining the pathway onto the roof.  The noise startles one bird into hopping onto our neighbors’ roof.

 

Five rocks later, and the rest have moved over.

 

I go back inside, satisfied I’ve chased those birds off.  But this is Florida, ma’am.  It doesn’t take long to find out that just like hail and lightning, sinkholes and hurricanes, the buzzards will keep coming back.

 

II. Every Sunday morning we hear them coming. First the neighborhood dogs herald their arrival with a volley of angry barking. Then comes a hiss of flames and a pneumatic rush, as if God were pumping a huge set of bellows overhead.

 

The fleet of hot air balloons flies over our suburban Florida development at sunrise, their bulging fabric envelopes gaudy against the muted swath of pink and blue sky. The first is Easter-egg purple and forsythia yellow. The second, a neon-orange tomato. The next is an emerald green worthy of Dorothy Gale’s fabled ride from Oz back to Kansas. The last is studded with red, white, and blue stars and stripes.

 

Our dogs are gun dogs—bred not to startle at the crack of a rifle—so while our neighbors’ poodles and Chihuahuas and dachshunds yap at the balloons, our golden retrievers keep on sleeping. But I always step outside and look up. Sometimes the balloons fly low enough so I can see miniature people standing in their baskets. Once a bride in a white dress and a groom in a tux toasted me with a glass of champagne.

 

In just a few moments, the balloons will descend to the empty field behind our house. The baskets will bump to the grass and the fabric slowly deflate into colorful puddles. Yet for these precious few moments, every Sunday morning, they glide overhead. And I too soar.

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Mournful Meditation

Letters to My Father by Bänoo Zan

Piquant Press, 2017

Paperback, $18.50

 

Cover of Banoo Zan's Letters to My Father

 

A mournful meditation, Bänoo Zan’s Letters to My Father is a collection of forty-one poems, each charged with the turmoil that’s birthed in the meeting of grief and memory. If taken in one long gulp, its power will sear through you. A few sips of Bänoo Zan’s poetry will disperse deep into your soul, relieve your aches, and balm your losses. Its collective experience is disarming.

 

Zan dedicates her second poetry collection to her father, Parviz Ghanbaralizadeh, who passed away in 2012 in Iran, while she was striving to build a new life in Canada. When news reached Zan, she chose not to visit the funeral or memorial services held in her father’s honor. Removed from the scenes of bereavement taking place in her hometown, Zan turned her pen to a flowing, emotional outpouring of verses that expressed what was left unsaid and explored their complex relationship.

 

The painful reality that strikes out possibilities to reconcile or reconnect with the one who has passed on is central to this collection. The persona’s anguish makes her wish for death and doom, in hopes that it’ll bring her the reconnection she desires, a reconnection that wouldn’t be possible in life:

 

If you ever loved me

wish me a death so final

it would rescue the heart

from separation

If you are still somewhere

waiting for me—

prophesy my doom

 

There’s an evocative quality to Zan’s uncluttered and orderly writing style. Stripped down to their ultimate simplicity, the poems aren’t titled, just numbered, focused on the central vision of the poems. The emotions and situations that she probes are accessible to the reader, though laced with deeper complexities, as in poem number 41:

 

The river

mourns the ocean

every time

memory

proves shallow

 

The brief and bare sentences tie up with clear and distinctive imagery to offer a profound view of some of the most disquieting situations in life.

 

There’s an intimacy that seeps into the imaginings of Zan’s poetry, creating a soulful and transcendent narrative. With grief as a catalyst, Zan explores the posthumous reconciliation of a father and daughter, and couples it with a spiritually charged, introspective layer.

 

Throughout the collection, the persona tries to connect life with death, both functioning as depictions of herself and her father. She traverses the realities of what death represents, linking everything back to herself. Her father’s death becomes a mirror that reflects the turmoil within her. The collection’s opening poem evokes a sense of longing that sets the tone:

 

I want you back

from the red of brown

to the blue of green

back from the phallus of death

to the womb of life

from unknown harmony

to known horrors

 

The poem circles back to the verse, “Leave me with you / as death with life,” an idea that the persona often reconstructs to portray an attachment that exists beyond death. She tries to search for her own emotional equilibrium in her father’s absence and recognizes in herself the reverberations of the bond they shared while he was alive. She tends to look for a rendering of herself in what existed of him. In poem 11, she writes:

 

You were

a ghazal

meeting qasidas

from

your blood-land

I am your epitaph

 

She sees herself as a final remnant of his beloved existence. In the consecutive poem, the persona confesses her regret, “I wish I had / shared you / with me.”

 

With its emotional depth comes a universal appeal; at a core level, people form connections and experience loss similarly. We’re all made up of stories, and in Zan’s poetry the essence of the story is in moments of being and existing. These moments are powerful enough to resonate with the reader, regardless what their personal worldview may be.

 

One thing that adds to the universal appeal and strength of Zan’s poetry is her alignment of Islamic and Arabian traditions and prophetic stories with the symbolism in western myths. In her poetry she invokes Narcissus, Agamemnon, and Ophelia with the same ease with which she imagines herself as her father’s prayer rug. In poem 30, Zan writes:

 

If I were your prayer rug

I would water

your desert hands

with golab

 

Religious and cultural notions become instrumental in her attempts to understand death.

 

Bänoo Zan’s previous poetry collection, Songs of Exile, was the first to be published in English (Guernica, 2016). Songs of Exile touched upon themes that erupt from becoming an immigrant and also addressed socio-political issues related to gender, ethnicity, and colonization. In comparison, Letters To My Father is a deeply personal poetry collection, one that must have required bravery on Zan’s part to share with the world. Zan’s poetry is a reminder that the discord caused by shifting ideologies does not have to license the irreparable rupture of our blood bonds. In this, Letters To My Father becomes a persona’s cathartic attempt to reconcile with another in death, through poetry infused with life.

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Vanity

Hairpins on the vanity—

I’ve lost count.

 

Fellow suburbanites,

the pedestrians outpace the growing

 

traffic, hair hovers above cul-de-sacs

like tentacles. Go out,

 

get stung. Letting the touching

do its work, I venture into

 

wires. I feel like a lover.

I feel sorry that sex

 

rarely happens in public.

Not that I’d be looking for it,

 

only stumble upon a couple

of fellow loners trying

 

to prove to their neighbors

they aren’t lonely.

 

No other way to convince

the jury, unless

 

a man grabs a gun

to blast billions of bullets,

 

and satisfies himself

that he can live without

 

Homo sapiens.

Nearby, imperious crows line up

 

on power lines. Momentary silence

before their firing squad of gazes—

 

spare me—I’ll return home—

the hair—accidental curios

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The Devil in Your Pants

Lying in my sleeping bag, I thought of three things: black eyes, round asses, and God. The boys from my youth group were stuffed in the storage room of a Protestant church. The girls were isolated down the hall. Sleep was impossible, but on the first night of our divine mission my restlessness was given a reprieve. Our leader, Geri, burst in screeching with an issue of Cosmo squashed in her fist.

 

Geri had to have been in her early twenties, but to us kids, she carried all the wisdom of the Lord. She routinely searched our belongings, and one of the girls had been cavalier enough to buy a secular—satanic—magazine at a pit stop on our bus ride from Sarasota to Miami. The girl cried outside in the hall.

 

“I want to send her home,” Geri said, “but it’s too late for that.” Her eyes welled up. “We’re here for a very important reason. We can’t let anything separate us from God. We’re here for Him.”

 

Geri had little breakdowns like that all the time. She’d shed tears for us kids whenever she smoked a cigarette: “I know with every puff Jesus suffers longer.”

 

I made sure I wasn’t exposing myself and walked over to her. “You would really send her back?”

 

She put her hand on my shoulder. This aroused me. As much as I was afraid of her, she gave me more attention than any of the girls in my middle school.

 

“Yes, Brett.” Her hair was messy and gold. “Don’t you realize the promise we made?”

 

Oh, I made a promise all right. I promised to give up everything for God: my possessions, dreams, thoughts—my goddamn identity. I was part of something larger than myself, or some bullshit like that. In order to finance the ugly school bus we took from Sarasota to Miami, I spent all summer mowing yards and raking leaves. I had entered a black hole for Jesus, and I was charged with saving pagan souls from it. That was our mission.

 

“I’ll pray this doesn’t happen again,” she said.

 

Everyone thanked her, not knowing what else to do, and then we returned to our polyester masturbation tombs. I wrapped up tight, touching my groin, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. The thick sleeping bag warmed my twig and acorns. Closing my eyes, I tugged my member and thought of Geri, but my rodeo was silent. I’d learned another kind of stealth at school. To prevent a fist from crashing into the back of my head, I studied my tormentors’ routines, let them walk down the hall before I did. I used the bathroom during class instead of on breaks to keep my head out of the toilet. I was a ninja at avoiding bullies, just not defending myself from them.

 

This was why I made my promise to Jesus. I would save souls in exchange for him saving me. Geri had seemed a strange instrument for his salvation, but I attempted not to question God. As long as the beatings stopped, the Lord could ferry Daffy Duck down from heaven to save me.

 

The next day we met the Miami pastor. He bounced in his chair and yanked tiny, green things from his beard. “I was a pimp,” he began. “I sold women. I sold myself. I worked as an enforcer sometimes.” He shook his head. “It’s not pleasant, hurting people.” After wrenching himself from the chair, he trudged back and forth and told us the tale of how he found Jesus.

“My wife and I were watching TV. The Preacher opened our hearts. Now I live for God.”

 

That’s right. A televangelist convinced him to love Jesus (and give up his money). This seemed completely normal to me at the time. God works in mysterious ways, they said. I worked all summer, so I could be shipped to Miami and sleep on the floor of a church whose pastor was a pimp.

 

This pimp was a hell of lot preferable to my best friend back home. A few months prior my best friend had punched me in the face during a laser light show. I disagreed with him about music, and so I lost the skin under my eyes. It was minor compared to what I was accustomed to, so I still slept over at his place that weekend. At least he didn’t beat me up all the time.

After the pastor finished, we handed out pamphlets in neighborhoods with windows shielded by iron bars. People either cussed us out or shared their mutual love of Jesus–ultimately accomplishing nothing. It was either A) “I love Jesus TOO” or B) “Fuck off, children.”

 

There was one miracle, however. Geri wore tiny little silk shorts that showed off her pumpkin-sized booty. It was that day I discovered my sexual orientation: big-booty-o-sexual. I wasn’t Catholic, but my personal Protestantism had its only holy trinity: the father, the son, and Sir-Mix-a-Lot.

 

Geri turned to me. “We’re saving a lot of lives today, Brett.”

 

“No one’s really changed their mind.”

 

She gripped my wrists. “God knows what he’s doing.”

 

I nodded. Her words calmed me, and I really believed them. God was looking down on us, admiring his chosen instruments doing his work. And how could I not be spellbound by this delusion? It was a relief to be away from the kids back home dragging me across the baseball field by the legs. No one flicked my ears from the desk behind me. No one sucker-punched me for my lunch money. I didn’t have to endure a room full of kids laughing at my gym attire because someone broke into my locker during P.E. and stole my clothes. Sure, people slammed their doors in our faces, but it was heavenly compared to physical assault. If following Geri’s bouncing cinnamon buns under the light of God wasn’t deliverance, I didn’t know what was.

 

After wasting paper all day, our traveling circus lingered at a basketball court. Geri was still riled up like a crack fiend, but our other youth group leader, a self-important prick named Chuck, decided we needed a rest. Unlike Geri, Chuck had no redeeming qualities. Unless you count being old and rich as redeeming. He never let up on me. Every night, he barked at me about my untidy sleeping bag or lectured me about the evils of loose women and The Simpsons. His favorite topic of conversation was about how much money he donated to our church back home. “Kept it alive,” he said.

 

On the court, a boy rimmed out a shot and said, “Shit.” Chuck whispered “Shoot” to make sure our ears hadn’t been soiled, which made me want to shout “Eat a dick” into his tender lobes. Instead I read through the pamphlet for the twentieth time. The kid cursed again, and Chuck shook his head like he just heard about a baby getting run over by a truck.

 

On the way back to the labor camp, we passed a voodoo shop. Well, in retrospect it was probably just a store that sold bongs and Ouija boards, but Chuck and Geri steered us away from it like it was Satan’s private sex dungeon. I broke rank and ran over to it.

 

“Brett, stop. It’s too dangerous,” Chuck cried.

 

I didn’t look back. I’d made no progress knocking on doors, and if I could save just one soul from the fiery pits of hell, I’d march right into the heart of the devil’s ballsack, and all the schoolyard beatings would be worth it. Chuck could swallow his words along with his fluffy mustache for all I cared. I marched into the shop and tossed the pamphlet on the counter in front of the clerk.

 

The guy behind the counter eyeballed it, and then he winced at me for a few seconds before hissing, “Out… OUT.”

 

Back at the church, Geri, Chuck, and the pastor went at me three-on-one.

 

“You need to listen when we tell you not to do something,” said Chuck.

 

“This isn’t why we came here,” said Geri.

 

The pastor quivered, his face paling. “There are some places too dangerous to go, son. Demons stalk their walls.”

 

I looked at Geri. “Isn’t this what we came here for?”

 

She walked over to a table and sat down.

 

The pastor continued. “There is war between light and darkness. We can save some from the darkness, but we can’t enter it.”

 

I walked over to Geri. “Why shouldn’t we try to save everyone?”

 

She mumbled something and shook her head.

 

“This isn’t why we came here,” she repeated.

 

“Then why did we then?” I asked.

 

“Don’t talk back to adults,” said Chuck.

 

The pastor paced around. “Demons,” he said. “Darkness. War.”

 

I wouldn’t leave Geri. “Shouldn’t we try to save, you know, everybody?”

 

She stood up from the table and said, “We don’t know God’s plan,” before leaving the room.

 

“Brett, I told you—”

 

“Yes, Chuck. You’re right.” I whispered cock face under my breath.

 

As I walked back to my sleeping quarters, the pastor kept on. “Devil’s home. Can’t cross the line.”

 

This was the first time Geri had ever not known God’s plan. She was my constant in deciphering what the Almighty wanted from us.

 

My first memory of her was when I was twelve. She supervised children making crafts for a pageant at my church. As I cut through red construction paper, she asked me if I was going to heaven.

 

This struck me as a silly question. I hadn’t murdered anyone, and hell was for really bad people.

 

“Actually, real Christians ask Jesus to come into their hearts,” she told me.

 

“And ones that don’t go to hell?”

 

“You can’t enter God’s kingdom without asking Him to come into your heart.”

 

That a particular phrase must be uttered, like a password, to get into heaven short-circuited my radio to Jesus. I was an adolescent, and she spoke like someone who knew shit, so I bought it.

 

Jesus, please come into my heart.

 

I said the phrase. Jesus, please come into my heart. Jesus, please come into my heart. Jesus, please come into my heart. Was I glad to have that task scratched off my list! I imagined hell as a giant desert with people burning on stakes as a minotaur poked them with pitchforks. That I might fry there for all eternity for not saying the right phrase made my bladder hurt.

After I became accustomed to being in the saying-the-right-phrase club, I annoyed my friends into saying it too. Do you accept Jesus into your heart? You have to accept him into your heart.

 

But I didn’t really know what that meant. Not exactly.

 

With the beatings I took from other kids in school, day after day, year after year, the main thing that brought me any relief was biking over to the local comic book shop every month and reading the latest issue about the mutant team. I didn’t have many friends, especially ones I could count on, but I did have my comic books. One day, I snuck an X-Men comic in at youth group. Not wanting to be scolded, I hid it in my jeans under my t-shirt.

 

Spotting a lump in my jeans, Geri loomed over me.

 

“Brett, what did you bring into this holy place?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“It looks like you have something there. Hand it over.”

 

I didn’t budge.

 

Geri leaned close. “You got the devil in your pants. Don’t ya?” Her hot breath made the hairs on my arms rise.

 

“What?”

 

“The devil. You got the devil in your pants.” She glared at the lump in my pants as a smaller lump grew beside it.

 

I shook my head no.

 

“Give it over.” She extended a firm hand.

 

Taking a last look at Wolverine on the cover, I relinquished it. “It’s just a comic book,” I said.

 

She scanned the pages with fire in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have brought this here. I’m going to store it away for safekeeping.”

 

“You’re not going to give it back?” My neck tightened up.

 

“No. You don’t need things that take you away from God.”

 

“It doesn’t.”

 

She grinned. “Then why can’t you give it up?”

 

“Because. Because I love it.”

 

“Exactly,” she retorted and walked off with my comic book.

 

I followed her. “You can’t take that from me.”

 

“You lost it the second you brought it here.”

 

My body trembled. “You can’t take it.”

 

“If you won’t sacrifice all your earthly possessions to Jesus then you haven’t really taken him into your heart.”

 

“So, I’ll go to hell if I don’t stop reading comics?”

 

She became solemn. “Anyone who doesn’t fully give themselves to God will go to hell.”

 

All I had were those comics.

 

“Give it back or I’ll leave youth group forever.”

 

She laughed. “Don’t be silly, Brett.”

 

“I mean it.”

 

“We’ll see about that.”

 

When I left that night, I thought I’d never return. A few weeks later, however, my rebellious spirit broke, and I was back listening to diatribes about the evils of rap music and Bill Clinton. I read comics less often, and when I did allow myself to sin a little I couldn’t indulge my superhero thirst without pangs of guilt sullying the experience.

 

On our mission trip our main targets for convincing others to say the magical phrase ended up being the children of parents who couldn’t afford daycare. The little nuggets were left for us to attend to at the church. One boy in particular stood out to me. He had dark bruises on his arms and didn’t play with the other children. As I tried to get him to smile, an alarm blared inside me. When you’ve been through enough abuse, it’s easy to recognize it.

 

The other kids in the youth group either didn’t notice or didn’t care. They were happy preaching that Jesus was Lord and savior to kids, many who were Hispanic and could barely speak a lick of English. When it was clear I couldn’t save the bruised kid’s skin, I tried to save his soul. I had no such luck. He wouldn’t say a word. The other youth members managed to get their prospective clients to say the phrase. The kids had no idea what they were saying, but that didn’t stop the youth group from celebrating like heroes.

 

Later that night, we held hands in a prayer circle. Geri wasted no time lamenting our wickedness. “I’m so sorry, God,” she said. “I’m sorry for all of our sinning. We don’t deserve you, but we will be your instrument.” It wasn’t long before the tears were flowing.

 

Another teenager in the youth group, Damian, leaned over to me. “How broken is your instrument?” he asked.

 

I smothered laughter as Geri wailed on.

 

“Help us, Lord. Use these children,” she said with tears plopping down her face. “Now sing, everyone.” She started for us: “Our God—” she sang through her snivels, “is an awesome God—.” Snot poured down her chin. “He reigns”—I closed my eyes— “from Heaven above” —she crooned, “with wisdom, power, and love—.”

 

Damian snickered, but I kept my head down.

 

“Our God—is an awesome God.”

 

Damian patted me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes as she repeated the refrain, and a long thread of snot swung back and forth from her nose. It almost reached her legs, but the booger didn’t break.

 

She returned to prayer. “Jesus, help us. Guide us.” The snot swung even more precariously.

 

I bit my hand to keep myself from laughing, but when I looked over at Damian we both lost it. Our laughter didn’t stop her, though. She finished her prayer, snot dangling from her nose like a limp dick.

 

After waking from another night tickling my balls so quietly you’d think I was tunneling my way out of prison, Geri invited me to make crafts with her. She wanted to decorate the church. I agreed, but the forbidden nature of the voodoo shop still bothered me.

 

“I’m proud how much you’ve grown as a Christian,” she said.

 

“You think so?”

 

“You’ve come a long way.” She stared at me intensely.

 

“Have I?”

 

She put her hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s hard. Maybe when we get back to Sarasota you can come over and have a beer sometime.”

 

I didn’t know how to respond to this offer.

 

“We can talk about whatever you want,” she said.

 

A numbness spread through my chest. “What would you do if you were given proof that there was no God?”

 

Cocking her head to the side, she said, “But that’s impossible because God is real.”

 

“Yeah,” I said, “but what if there was proof that He didn’t exist?”

 

She gazed up at the ceiling and shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine my life without God. I guess if that happened, I’d just believe in Him anyway.”

 

I sleepwalked through the last two days of converting Miami’s doomed sinners into Christians. By that point we had all the children standing on a stage together and repeating the line in unison: I accept Jesus into my heart. I accept Jesus into my heart. I accept Jesus into my heart.

 

While the rest of the youth group beamed and said things like “It’s a miracle” and “Praise Jesus,” I just sat in silence watching the bruised boy. He remained silent. The image of him is still seared into my memory: dirty hair and bruised eyes. On the last day, I approached Geri.

 

“I know something bad is happening to him,” I told her.

 

“Just focus on saving him,” she said.

 

I couldn’t save him or Geri. I couldn’t even save myself.

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Imperfect Memory

Eating Moors and Christians, by Sandra M. Castillo

CavanKerry Press, 2016

90 pages, paperback, $16

Emerging Voices Series

 

Cover of Eating Moors and Christians by Sandra M. Castillo

 

Sandra M. Castillo’s bilingual poetry book, Eating Moors and Christians, begins with an acknowledgement of her intentions:

 

Here, memory stumbles, and we rewrite the past, float through the surface of history, what it must have surely been like, galleries of lies and obsessions, a piñata of subjectivity cón lenguaje de sentimentalismo.

 

Castillo promises an exploration of imperfect memory intersecting with the subjective and sentimental interpretation of history, and her book delivers. Told in three parts, this collection of poems reads as though the reader is flipping through a personal photo book from the Cuban speaker’s past. Ekphrastic descriptions and allusions to photographs from her childhood home in Cuba and her exiled adolescence in Miami are juxtaposed with stories of the roles her parents and grandparents and tías and tíos (aunts and uncles) played in the Revolution, as well as her own journey back to the homeland decades later as an adult. As a result, the whole collection reads as a series of vibrant snapshots, providing the reader with an intimate glimpse of Cuban life during this tumultuous time of transition.

 

Castillo confronts the conflict of Cubans’ dual identity throughout the collection. In a dream described in “Leavings,” the speaker remembers her aunt calls her to come to America:

 

 TíaVelia waves,

 signaling for us to come,

 

 her tall body wrapped in a blue and red

 airmail envelope, like a cloak.

 …

 but I hesitate…

 

The speaker is entranced by the idea of life in America, and though her family urges her toward safety in this new land, she hesitates: Part of her wishes to remain in Cuba, her home and an integral part of her identity. In “Unearthing the Remains,” the speaker has become accustomed to life in America, yet notes:

 

 Separated by the Caribbean, secret underwater mines,

 a revolution, ninety miles of nostalgia, a new language,

 I no longer remembered myself.

 I had become someone else, the Other,

 a stranger, a skeleton of whom I might have been.

 

She acknowledges that the trip to Florida and her settlement abroad has alienated her from her homeland, and forced her to grow into someone different than she may have been if she had stayed in Cuba. In yet another poem, when she goes back to visit Cuba, the speaker revisits this idea of nonbelonging, and notes how she and her family are greeted with suspicion, “Other, “aquí, / en nuestra tierra natal” [here, in our native land]. Both in the United States and in Cuba, Castillo’s speaker is “Other.” No matter where she resides, she does not belong.

 

Eating Moors and Christians explores the many ways Cubans may not belong, and how these varied circumstances often bring an undercurrent of fear. This fear often manifests in Castillo’s poems with a recurrent aversion to water and concern about not knowing how to swim, or of the violence of men. She uses vibrant similes like “an engine that exploded / like a violent husband” and “he grabs me, squeezes me, / as if picking tropical fruit” to illustrate the severity and nuance of the conflicts faced by Cubans, even in their own culture.

 

Braided within these intensely personal vignettes are snapshots of how Cubans made do with life on the island, as well as how claimed Cubans, those with relatives who sponsored them in the US, like the speaker, made it to America yet continued to look back toward the homeland. In the title poem Eating Moors and Christians, which is nestled in the third and final section of the book, Castillo’s speaker describes a reenactment of La Reconquista over a meal of white rice and black beans, noting that they (the rice and the beans) are “cooked together until the rice is brown, mestizo”—deliberately using the Spanish term for people of mixed heritage to draw the connection between black Moros and white Cristianos. Here is the heart of Cuban people and of the book: a mixture that creates something new.

 

When considering Cuba, Castillo’s speaker identifies: “This is where I come from, a place that exists in photographs I never owned.” But in addition to reminiscing about the memories brought up by the photographs she’s found, Castillo’s speaker also addresses the role of being the photographer with a questionable lens. When considering life in Cuba post-revolution in “La Lisa, Marianao 15, La Habana, Cuba,” the speaker states:

I photograph it all with Catholic grief, our mosaic of sin and guilt, this slow blur into the past, mourn the loss, todo lo perdido, in this, the city of my dreams where everything and nothing has changed.

Toward the end of the collection, the speaker confirms: “I am a camera, dedicated flash.” Indeed, she is. In this collection, Castillo has captured the Cuban people, cuerpo y alma, as they were, as they are, and as they will be.

 

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Interview: Sandra Castillo

Sandra M Castillo was born in Havana, Cuba, and moved to Miami, Florida, in 1970.  She received her MA in creative writing from Florida State University.  In 2002 she was awarded the White Pine Press award in poetry for her collection My Father Sings to My Embarrassment (2002).  Her work has appeared in publications including The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, The Florida Review, Little Havana Blues, and Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets.

 

Castillo’s poems are threaded with history, not just the history of the many family members and friends who take shape with her words, but with the history of Cuba and those living the exile experience.  But for all the broader issues her pieces touch on, they are never far from the deeply personal, never uncolored by her lyrical presence in the stories being told.

 

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

What made you choose the title Eating Moors and Christians for this work?

 

Sandra M. Castillo:

I’d never written about food, which is really funny because we always think about culture and the easiest way into cultures is through food. You think Cuban—you think Cuban food.  And I’d never really tried to write about food, and I wondered how I would do that. And some years back there was local poetry being paired up, poets being paired up with chefs, and somebody said to me, “Oh, do you want to participate?” And I was like, “No. I am not that cool. I wouldn’t even know how to write about food. No. Thank you though, but no.” And then I thought, subsequently, Why can’t I write about food? I should be able to write about food. I should be able to write about whatever else that I want. It took me a really long time to figure out that in writing about food you’re really writing about something else.

 

And so I was in Cuba in 2006, which was the last year that my mother and I were able to go because that’s the year that the George Bush administration changed the policy about who qualified to go to Cuba. I thought that was going to be our last year visiting in the summer. So we found ourselves there eating moros y cristianos, which is what they really call black beans and rice when you cook them together. And I thought, Wow, it’s a whole legacy of colonialism here. That’s the poem food. And there we were in Havana, after the revolution to post-exile-experience, eating moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. And there seemed to be a lot wrong with that. So I thought this was the way to do it.

 

TFR:

Now that there are more public flights leaving, how does that change the perspective of the exile experience, and how does that impact what you’re approaching as topical?

 

Castillo:

I think I’m still dealing with how you talk about the exile experience. How do you even talk about Cuba or what it means to be Cuban American? I was at work when I first heard that diplomatic relations had been restored, and I gotta tell you, I wept like an idiot. I was thinking, I never thought I would get to see that in my lifetime. I just didn’t think that was going to ever be possible. And for somebody who had not been able to go since 2006, by virtue of the change of policy, I thought, “Oh my gosh, the opening of US-Cuba relations. This is amazing! This is like having a front row seat to openness.” We’ve needed to be there for a long, long time. The embargo was a failure. It’s a crazy policy that goes back to the dark ages of the Cold War. I think this was a political blessing of sorts. Now I just need to talk my way into being brave enough to be able to go back since I haven’t been there since 2006.

 

TFR:

So you haven’t gone back since the change in policy?

 

Castillo:

No, my mother’s always my passport to Cuba. I always think I need a passport and that’s really my mother because the relatives that remain are relatives of hers, distant family. But it’s a way back into the past and I haven’t gone.  We’re talking now about going this summer. I’m really interested in seeing what’s going to happen, what feels different but there’s a sense of openness that I’m pretty happy with and thankful that the president who did this was Barack Obama.

 

Now, I’m worrying about the Trump presidency and what this will mean for US-Cuba relations. But I can only hope that because he’s so pro-business, this is sort of like a mixed blessing of sorts, that he’ll see Cuba as an opportunity to maintain the openness of the relationship. But by the same token, I’m afraid that they’ll turn Cuba into what it used to be in the 1950s, and that’s not a good thing.

 

TFR:

It is hard to know.

 

Castillo:

I’m as weary of that and what’s going to happen with that restoration of diplomatic relations as I am about this impending presidency.

 

TFR:

So much of this work in particular is suffused with nostalgia.

 

Castillo:

Which is a disease.

 

TFR:

I was reading an interview with you where you mentioned Jack Kerouac, and I was thinking about how I hadn’t realized that he had written Dharma Bums in central Florida. Re-reading that novel and thinking of him being in Florida, it became totally different because then it has this sense of nostalgia I’d never realized it had before. Do you feel like where you are writing impacts what you write? Do you find yourself being more nostalgic when in Miami, or if you’re writing elsewhere, writing back towards where you came from?

 

Castillo:

I don’t think where you write is necessarily as important as what it is that you’re writing about. Because essentially whatever nostalgia exists in the work, you’re bringing into it by virtue of the fact that you’re recreating place and place is in your mind and so whatever place you’re creating, it’s already viewed with that sense of nostalgia. My fascination with Kerouac was that I think in a lot of ways he was an immigrant. He actually didn’t learn to speak English until I think he was six or eight years old. So, he had that sensibility about him. And I think much of what he wrote was really about where he was from, Lowell, Massachusetts. And he was trying to create place using language. And I think part of the exile experience is in the essence just that. You are trying to visit a place that no longer exists, so we create it. I think we just drag that nostalgia into it, and it’s not necessarily a positive thing. But I think it’s sort of inevitable because it goes with that sense of loss that Kerouac said, “I accept lostness forever.” Right? So there’s nothing else you can do. Just embrace it.  But, at the same time, much of what I wrote in the book is really about coming to that place of understanding that the past is gone. You’ll never get there.

 

TFR:

Do you feel nostalgia is a natural state for poets, always looking back at some loss of what could or could not be?

 

Castillo:

Inevitably. We were talking earlier about titles and getting drawn in by titles and I do this thing where I look at a poetry book, and I open it, and does it pull you in? And I think that the allure for me in people’s work, and it doesn’t matter what poet it is, is that commitment to place. And I think inevitably, that comes from that place of nostalgia. Even though it’s not sentimental because, sentimentality, I could do away with. The idea of that lure, which is what I think nostalgia is, a lure back into the past. And really, I think we all have it. Just poets try to recreate it, visit it over and over and over again. If you’re Cuban, I think you just can’t escape it.

 

TFR:

You often refer to photographs in this work.  Do you look at photographs as a doorway to explore?

 

Castillo:

My uncle lived with us when I was a child in Cuba, and he was a photographer. And he turned our bathroom into a darkroom. And so, as a kid, the photos were always hanging. He created this little clothesline. And I remember thinking about place as something that could be captured in these photos, these still lives of everything around us. And we always thought that our lives in Cuba were sort of transient because we always knew we were going to go. It’s like if you’re in exile, you always knew at some juncture you might leave the island. But in looking back, and even in living with those photographs, it’s almost like he was trying to freeze time, and that photography somehow enabled you to do that, to capture it, to hold it. And I think about memory like that, where it’s not moving pictures. It’s actually still images. So I find that, especially in this book, I think that’s what I’m doing. I think those are photos, and I’m using language to do what my uncle was doing when I was a kid.

 

TFR:

You’re doing it with words.

 

Castillo:

I think so.

 

TFR:

That’s lovely.

 

Castillo:

So there is that. But I’m also quite visual, and that’s how I think about things. So I’m always trying to frame it. And I think that’s what it is. I mean at its simplest.

 

TFR:

When I got to the back of the book, I was surprised to find that you had a glossary.

 

Castillo:

Oh yeah. [laughter]

 

TFR:

When writers have multiple languages to play with, I find language and word choice even more interesting.  This book has predominantly English peppered with Spanish.

 

Castillo:

Right.

 

TFR:

Did you start the poems in English when you wrote them?

 

Castillo:

I did. I do. Always.

 

TFR:

And the choice of when to use Spanish? The Spanish words just come out naturally?

 

Castillo:

They do. I think that there are some things that you can only really talk about in Spanish, particularly when you have all the baggage of the Cuban Revolution. It’s a complicated story because the political is personal, and the personal is political, and our lives are packed in with all of this history that had tremendous impact on our lives, sort of like being defined against your will. And so, I find that I need the Spanish to tell the story. So, even though I think in English, and I’ve spent more than half my life in the United States, that part of me that is Cuban, I need to access it in the language of home which is the Spanish. So I throw my Spanish around.

 

TFR:

Did you debate over having a glossary or not, just leaving the Spanish as is? Your glossary, it’s not just saying what the word means, but the context of the word.

 

Castillo:

I was trying to do that. I actually did a lot more than that, and the press said, “Nah, that one is self explanatory.” So they edited it down a little bit. I didn’t know if the title would make sense if you’re not Cuban, and I wanted to provide a larger context for talking about the exile experience. Because I think that while I am talking about being Cuban and an immigrant, I think that those experiences, those themes, that sense of loss and displacement, that’s not unique to me as a Cuban American. It is whoever had to move for political reasons, historical reasons, to some other place. But at the same time, the particulars I think needed to be qualified and quantified. And so I thought, “Well, okay so let me just kinda provide a context.” So, I don’t know if it’s helpful or not. Nobody’s given me any feedback on that.

 

TFR:

It was interesting reading not just the meaning, but kind of the context of it, because Spanish is very much a language that depends on the country, the place, or origin.

 

Castillo:

That is true. Yeah, absolutely.

 

TFR:

Do you have pieces that you do more fully in Spanish and pepper with English references?

 

Castillo:

Sometimes I worry that I did too much. I’m reading today, and I was thinking, Okay I don’t know what the makeup is going to be of the audience. Do I need to do more poems that don’t have that much Spanish? And that’s always kind of hard to gauge because you don’t know and you find yourself translating. I feel like I’m always trying to provide a context. And so, when I write in Spanish, I always feel like I have to kind of keep myself in check. Did I do too much? And there are several poems in there that I think maybe I did too much, but I don’t know. Nobody has complained yet.

 

TFR:

I think it comes across as very natural and your words are just as they should be.

 

Castillo:

Oh good, thank you [chuckle]. Thank you very much.

 

TFR:

You have a lot in here about your family. Do they participate at all in approving the pieces that feature them?

 

Castillo:

That’s really interesting. My sisters always worry about what I say about them, and they’re the only ones that say, “Please don’t read that poem about blah blah blah.” And so, they’ll kind of say, “So and so is coming. Don’t read that poem.” My mother is interesting in her response because I always say to her, “Listen I’m gonna tell this story.” And she’ll go, “Do you really have to?” And I always say, “Yes, so I’m just telling you.” And then she never asks me, “Well, what did you say?” And she doesn’t read it. I just give it to her. “Okay, I said this and I said this and I said that and I hope that’s okay.” And sometimes she’ll frown heavily, but she’ll never say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that.” She’s never said any of that. And I think my other relatives don’t know.

 

TFR:

Have you ever had a piece that you decided to leave out of a collection because of this?

 

Castillo:

There’s a poem in there I wondered if I should have included at all. And I’ve never read it out loud. I did a presentation at Tallahassee Community College two and a half weeks ago and I didn’t read it. I’ve never read it. And a student came up to me afterwards and said, “I want to talk to you about this poem.” And I thought, Wow. Wow really? And he was a young man, and he said, “I found it really curious that you wouldn’t have read it.”

 

And it’s the one called “Porn.” I don’t know if you had the chance to look at that. And no one knows that I wrote that poem. I was sexually molested when I was a kid. And it’s the kind of poem that I don’t think I need to ask anybody for permission to tell that story. It’s my story. It happened to me. That’s exactly what happened. And I think it’s one of those things that, had I said anything to anyone, I would have been told not to tell that story. But I think as writers, if the experience belongs to you and it did, you just have to claim it and then deal with the fall-out later. And that’s one of those poems. I don’t know if that answers your question.

 

TFR:

No, no it does. Do you feel that sometimes even asking someone about a poem is giving them permission to say, “No, don’t use it.”

 

Castillo:

Yes. And sometimes I tell them afterwards, “I wrote about this,” as opposed to, “I’m going to do it.” The first poem of the collection, “El Bayú”—this story I only found out about recently. My grandmother was somehow running some kind of bordello. I was like, What? Are you kidding me? I mean that’s just a crazy story that I verified. That’s indeed something that happened. And there was no way I was asking anybody for permission to tell that story. It was told to me, I verified it, and I told the story. I don’t think my father would be too happy that I told it either.

 

TFR:

So much of your poetry explores history. Do you feel that when you’re living in a time that feels like it’s more heavily creating significant history that there is a pressure to commit to writing about the present?

 

Castillo:

Speaking as a Cuban American who lived in a time when things were so volatile, I think that history isn’t something that’s separate from our daily lives. And I think that when you’re born in the “Third World,” you come to understand that historical events directly impact our lives. That you can’t say, “Oh well I’m not worried about that,” because you see the response immediately. This is going to impact my life in a way that I will never be able to get past. You think about exile, all the things that had to have happened historically for me to even be here, to be the person that I am. So that whole concept of history shapes and defines us against our will. You can’t escape that. And, as immigrants, I think because we grow up in it, you understand that. Americans don’t have that experience in the same way, because events seem further away and it takes longer for you to feel the impact.  You don’t get a revolution but you do get a presidency that we’re still grappling with. And so it’s gonna be interesting to see. I’m really interested in seeing how writers and poets respond to this presidency. What’s going to happen? And is this the beginning of another civil rights movement? There is already that move towards people mobilizing to express concerns about women minorities, etcetera. So this is new. And I’m looking forward to what writers have to say about that. This is one of those events that we’re gonna have to deal with.

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Poems about What We Call Things

First Name

My mother calls my name with three

short a‘s tangled in roots of dandelions.

 

Gold tufts that grow no matter who tries

to pull them up. These a‘s hide in the black

 

crescent of dirt under my nails and swallow

my s’s when my young tongue is learning

 

how to say my name. My grandmother calls me

to her kitchen stool with three glass-blown

 

a‘s perched on my vertebrae: all feather, royal

red stretching a thread the length of my spine,

 

drawing me up tall and narrow. These a’s

are helium on the roof of her mouth. She

 

inspects my nails and scrubs the moons clean.

 

 

Those ducks in the baseball field are plastics bags.

 

The caterpillar

on the window frame

is chipped paint.

 

That old maple tree

melting through chain link

is your neighbor’s

 

outstretched hand.

The alarmed flight

of sandhill cranes

 

is your window A/C unit.

The man thrown

into the street

 

is a stop sign

swept in headlights.

You are not waiting

 

alone at the bus stop

is an oak tree.

A raccoon curls

 

into the storm grate.

You uncross your arms.

The crow looks up

 

from his preening.

The man blossoms

in your chest

 

and before you shout

he does not step off the curb

into the green light.

 

 

Maiden Name

When I marry, I lose half the syllables

in my last name—a decision to sell

 

the dining table in a yard sale

because of who it reminds me of and not

 

because it isn’t sturdy. Unmoored

my signature sinks below the line

 

on my grocery store receipts

and cuts the paper dolls holding hands

 

at the wrist. None of us knew the West

Virginia tobacco farmer whose name

 

we’ve practiced. We hardly know each other,

but when I had all my syllables we appeared

 

like sisters. You can see we all have the same

square hands, are missing the same teeth.

 

I crowd documents with various combinations—

the given, sold, and stolen names—as if lifted

 

from the shelves of an airport gift shop.

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Surface Stress – Structure Strain: The Psychology of Architecture in Baltimore and Nagasaki

These paintings, which attempt to describe the complexity of structures, serve as  psychological portraits of the people of Baltimore, Maryland, and Nagasaki, Japan. Boarded up doors and windows trap the dark secrets of these poor dwellings. Degraded humans and distraught ghosts wander through these dark places. Inferences to the human psyche are enmeshed in each gash, hole, and sloppy patch.

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Redemption

This series of photographs examines the abandoned prison cells of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Penitentiary subscribed to a theory of rehabilitation that proscribed confinement and a lack of interaction with other inmates. This ran counter to the prevailing system in the United States at the time where harsh physical punishment was the norm. Ideas of church and religious experience are embodied in the building and served as a guide for how prisoners should be rehabilitated: hallways looked like that of a church; low doorways required one to bow and seek penance from a greater power; and a single small skylight, acting as the “eye of God” lit each cell.

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Three Poems

DROS

Ten days later, after the mandatory

state waiting period, I pick up my gun.

The dealer gives me shit, says I didn’t bring

the right kind of second i.d. “A gas bill,”

he says, as if I’m stupid, “an electric bill,”

or a “house cable bill. Nothing else.

Repeat it.” I repeat it like a jackass.

My wife emails me the cable bill and he

still won’t accept it. Ambles to the back

to ask the owner. At this point, I know

he has it in for me. Something he doesn’t

like—I’d bet it was my wife having to

help me. I sniffed the misogyny on him.

Finally, his boss says it’s a go and he

halfheartedly slides the sword-silver box

to me, my dummy rounds, my box of ammo.

I’m thinking people like the gun dealer

are the reason I’m walking out of the store

with my new gun, a Beretta PX4 Storm,

people, who for no reason gave me shit.

People who just knew they could and so

they did. But it’s mine now, and more,

my gun-hating wife helped me buy it.

I place the bag, as if it were groceries,

in my trunk, merge into traffic, relieved.

 

Lane Nine

I never shoot on weekends, always on weekday afternoons.

It’s too busy on Saturdays, and busy at the range means

danger—at least to me: the slim, pretty girl on a date

who has the “shakes,” the worker warning her, “I can’t let you shoot

unless you calm down, okay?” She says she’s okay, looks back

at me because I’m staring. I am staring because I’m evaluating.

She can’t stop laughing. Her date is a clueless hipster

who had asked the worker earlier if he could he plug in his cellphone.

The worker said no. The hipster was lucky he hadn’t asked

one of the meaner workers; “lucky bastard” I think. I’ve

faced down the mean ones before, who made you feel stupid

for asking something basic about guns. But this guy was young

and cool and his girl was hot, so I guess he can get away

with appearing detached. His date continues to laugh.

She’d laugh even in the range; I’d later hear her through

my earmuffs. But until then, I wait and watch the large

Filipino family come in and take a lane. I hear them plan

a pig-hunting trip and a visit to Arizona to buy more guns.

They’d also laugh really hard inside the range. I look at the boy

with his father, a blonde boy, like my own son. No more than

ten; the youngest they allow. I’m thinking of bringing my

own son in. So I watch the boy who seems very relaxed.

I want my son to stop playing video games. I don’t want him

to turn into a man who loves video games, a man who can’t

tell the difference between the screen and real life, a man

who needs to ask where he can plug his cellphone in

at a gun range. At last, I get my lane: #9. I shoot three

boxes of ammo. My hands feel unsteady. I am nervous around

so many flaky people, but if shooting teaches you one thing

it’s how to ignore the world, how to violently separate

yourself from others—not in the literal sense of course,

but in a spiritual plane. Number nine is my lane.

 

Virulence

Novices go hunting

in the lining of true pockets,

the airplanes that breathe air

like human beings, if you know

enough, the copier flies American,

instinctually like a big bear

in the sky. Imagine that. Silently,

the stars make acquaintances;

they’re also new to the job.

And I do remember 1980

as a child, a young child.

The smell of my aunt’s Gremlin,

that hot, plastic scent of the

interior and the exhaust,

the thin palm trees that swayed.

Even then, always ruminating.

The smallish plot already

developing. And why should

it bother me? The inch-like

presence? No moon-landing

for me. No moon-lander. I guess

with every gun there’s an assault.

But this isn’t turning violent,

I have my dog with me

tonight, the kids gone, so why

write about that? The people

down the street have good

skulls, the people further

down the street have ugly

hearts. You can sense that

type of thing. Maybe it’s their

big ass house with no one in it.

Maybe it’s the fact I once

saw two tie-wearing men

playing b-ball in their front yard.

That type of thing doesn’t

make for close neighbors.

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Aftermath

The holy place is here, crouched before the fan of white plastic. Morning coolness stirs the tiny hairs on your legs, the ones you forgot to shave in the shower last night. You can stand the heat of your hot coffee right now, you can almost stand the heat of your memories and the bruises they show.

 

You have a tiny house in a West Coast town. The name matters only a little. Your waist is still a small one; your body remembers the shapes of love. Your body may. Your mind cannot.

 

Once you thought of fame.

 

The thought has not penetrated your fog for years now.

 

Four years? Five?

 

How do you count the aftermath? In friends forgotten because you cannot bear their happiness? In jobs lost, opportunities floundered? Maybe in towns you tried and failed, or in classes you can’t attend, or in pancakes—tiny, or as wide as your face, stacked like fluffy amber coins with pools of copper syrup melting into the cresting waves of butter.

 

You do not think of violation. You do not think of it but it thinks of you. At night, before the coolness comes like a blessing, it thinks of you.

 

So now you crouch with the joy of morning on your face. You wonder how much longer, then you forget to wonder.

 

The holy place is here.

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Ruins of Suburbia

The house sits among a sea of crabgrass and dandelions gone to seed. Weeds choke beds once lined with neat rows of colorful tulips and daisies. Scarecrow fingers reach through cracks in concrete walkways. Everything browns, dying in the broil of the valley. It is what happens when the timed sprinklers shut down and the lawnmowers stop, when the regular applications of fertilizer and pesticides end. When the people leave.

 

Aaron knows he has arrived without checking the address. These neighborhoods are homogenous: white stucco ranches with red clay roofs, small trimmed lawns watered at 6 a.m. daily, boxwood shrubs under bay windows. They are the same house, pressed from a mold, the address numbers a sole identifying characteristic. The empty ones stand out, scabs on an otherwise flawless complexion.

 

He comes for the discarded. The foreclosed. This one, a ranch-style house with a patch of wilted rosebushes in its front yard, sits on a cul-de-sac wound deep into the suburban maze. Aaron parks on the street and climbs out of his pickup truck, a clipboard in his left hand. A man watering shrubs in front of the house on the right approaches as Aaron walks toward the front door. The man clutches the dripping nozzle of a green vinyl hose at his right side.

 

“Isn’t anybody there,” the man says as Aaron approaches. “They were long gone before the bank put up the notice.”

 

“I’m aware,” Aaron says. He hands the man one of the cards he keeps on his clipboard.  “I’m here to inspect the property. Mind if I ask a few questions?”

 

“Not at all.”

 

“How long have they been gone?”

 

“Six months. Nice people. Moving van just showed up one day.”

 

It always does, Aaron thinks. Nobody publicizes giving up the house. Some just can’t afford the payments, because they lost jobs or the rates on their mortgages ballooned. Others simply decide to walk away after years of watching the value of their homes plummet. Either way, it ends the same: the moving vans arrive and drive away. The only question is whether they wait for the foreclosure notice—for the Sheriff’s deputies to arrive and escort them from the property—or slink away before it is hammered to their doors.

 

The neighbor frowns. “Seems like more and more houses have those notices posted. It’s not good for the neighborhood.”

 

“I’d imagine not,” Aaron says.  “Does it seem like anybody’s messed with the property? Anything unusual?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Animals?”

 

“How do you mean?”

 

“Did they have any pets?”

 

The neighbor shakes his head. “No. No pets.”

 

Aaron thanks the man, turns and approaches the house. The front windows are covered by drapes. There is no lockbox on the door, meaning the locksmith hasn’t come. This isn’t a surprise. His employer, First Western Financial, is drowning in repossessed houses. There are usually problems coordinating all the contractors needed to handle the properties—the locksmiths and cleaners, haulers and handymen, painters and realtors.

 

Aaron’s job is to scout the homes, to inspect for property damage and itemize any furniture, appliances, or other debris left behind. He catalogues couches and televisions, washers and dryers, desks, tables and chairs. He finds bicycles, books, paintings, children’s toys and hundreds of other flotsam and jetsam that people see fit to leave behind. Today, inside the house on the cul-de-sac, there will likely be more to add to the list. He first needs to get in.

 

He tries the front door. Locked. The front windows and garage door do not budge. A tall wooden fence frames both sides of the house, blocking his view of the sides and rear. If there are any weak spots—a window left unlatched or a hidden key the owners forgot—they’ll be back there.

 

Aaron finds a gate along the fence on the left end of the house. He reaches over the top to dislodge the latch and peeks inside before moving further.

 

He knows to be cautious. Surprises lurk behind these fences.

 

The first window he tries after entering the yard is unlocked. He removes the screen and lifts himself in, stepping into an empty bedroom. Aaron finds nothing as he walks between rooms aside from empty picture hooks on the walls. There are vacuum marks in the carpet. Sometimes they clean, unable to leave behind an untidy home. Others abandon houses in shambles: holes in the walls, junk strewn across the floor and yard, stinking of cat urine and other odors. Aaron wonders whether these people live in such conditions or simply trash the place as a final insult toward the bank.

 

He’s always thankful for clean ones.

 

There is a dollhouse in a small pink bedroom. It is about five feet long and as tall as Aaron’s waist. Three levels of tiny white rooms sit below the house’s powder blue roof, each stripped as bare of furniture as the larger house in which it sits. He guesses it didn’t fit in the truck. He imagines a father kneeling next to a little girl, surrounded by boxes, both clearing the dollhouse of its contents. The father promises the girl they will come back for it or that he will build her a new one for her new bedroom.

 

He lifts the clipboard, clicks his pen. Writes dollhouse, large under Miscellaneous Items. Moves on to the garage.

 

—

 

One house is abandoned. Then another. Then two more, three, four. Each foreclosure devalues the neighborhood. Homeowners watch prices plummet, stare at the balances owed on their own mortgages, calculate how long it will take to break even. Whether it is worth paying anymore. Too many owe too much for properties that won’t fetch a fraction of what is needed to sell. Desperate sellers unload million-dollar homes for $500,000 or less. The panic spreads. The banks print more notices.

 

Before the crash, there is the boom. Stockton is a crumbling port in the middle of a wide, dry valley, sitting an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. The coast is flush with money from the Silicon Valley, but land is at a premium. People look inland, where acreage is available and housing inexpensive, to erect castles displaying their wealth. Builders descend upon the region, buying up land, drawing blueprints, planning subdivisions. Orchards and pastures disappear, paved over, covered with houses, houses, houses. Prices rise with every property sold. Home values double, triple. Owners borrow against this newfound wealth, put in pools, take vacations, buy luxury cars. Houses become investments, part of a portfolio.

 

Aaron works with granite, installing kitchen countertops in new and existing homes. Business is brisk. Once one owner has the stone installed, everyone in the neighborhood follows. The pitch is easy: Granite is nearly as strong as a diamond, is scratch- and stain-resistant, non-porous. Instant equity. It sells itself.

 

He buys a house and a new car. Goes on vacations. Gets married and has a child.

 

Then the economy turns. Construction ends. People stop buying. Aaron stays afloat as homeowners remodel their kitchens in desperate attempts to sell. Those calls then stop coming. Granite becomes a luxury most can no longer afford. The business folds.

 

He goes to work for First Western to pay the bills. In the evenings, he takes classes at the local community college in search of a new career. The books sit stacked on the passenger seat of his truck so he can study between jobs: Introductory Statistics, Accounting, Ancient Civilizations. It is the last text he can’t keep away from. He takes the course out of a fascination that began years earlier, during a day-trip to the Mayan ruins on a vacation to Mexico. It’s a great puzzle to him: Societies rise, erect spectacular cities, develop customs and innovations, only to disappear. There are those with which he is already familiar: The Aztecs and Incas, the Romans and Mesopotamians. But there are also dozens of others, like Clovis, Nabta Playa, the Minoans. He daydreams about visiting the remnants one day, when each paycheck isn’t necessary to keep the lights on at home.

 

His wife returns to work, waiting tables during lunch shifts at a local restaurant. Anna is still in uniform when he arrives home after today’s inspections, a large red stain spread across her white buttoned-down shirt. She has dark circles under her eyes. The gray shows beneath her blonde tied-back hair. It reminds him of his own age, the lines deepening on his face, his dark hair thinning, the way his knees ache in the morning.

 

“Have an accident?” he asks, pointing out the stain.

 

“Marinara. I was covered in spaghetti.”

 

“Nice.”

 

“I wore it all day.”

 

“Good for tips, right?”

 

Anna shakes her head, pulls out a small fold of cash. Forty-seven dollars. Aaron kisses her forehead, tells her to take a bath and relax, he’ll get ready for when Robert comes home from school. He doesn’t tell her about the dollhouse. She’ll want to take and sell it. It’s not stealing, she says. They’re not coming back for them. He knows she’s right, but can’t bring himself to do so.

 

It feels like going through the pockets of the dead.

 

Forty-seven dollars. He’ll have to pick up some inspections during the weekend. There are times when they fall behind, when the notices and phone calls begin. He worries the bank will take his house as well.

 

He enters the kitchen, pulls bread, mustard and lunchmeat from the refrigerator and begins making sandwiches—one for himself, one for his son. He cuts the crusts from Robert’s sandwich directly on the granite countertop. No need for a cutting board.

 

—

 

There is a passage in Aaron’s textbook about a culture dead five thousand years . The Cucuteni-Trypillian society’s settlements stretch across a wide expanse of Eastern Europe, with some growing as large as fifteen thousand people. They plant and harvest agriculture and raise livestock, make tools and pottery and clothing, hunt for food, and develop a religion. Yet every six or seven decades—once a lifetime?—these enormous villages are mysteriously burned to the ground and built new.  Is it a sacrifice to the gods? A ritual of renewal? Why build a home only destroy it?

 

—

 

The empty houses are an invitation to the lost, the addicted, the fugitive and forgotten. They break windows and nest, stripping the house of fixtures and anything else that can be sold. Liquor bottles and beer cans litter the floors, burn marks from cigarettes and crack pipes in the carpets. Remnants of meth labs: two-liter bottles, plastic buckets, and long tubes, countless emptied packets of Sudafed tablets.

 

Sometimes people are there when Aaron arrives. The first time this happens is in an impoverished neighborhood in city’s southern end. He enters the house and finds two men—ghosts, emaciated, covered in scabs—hastily disassembling a makeshift lab. One of the men pulls a knife and sneers. Aaron turns and runs.

 

There are others: Drunks who ask for change or offer Aaron a beer when he enters the home. Taggers who cover every inch of wall space, inside and out, with graffiti. In one neighborhood, a kid who goes by the tag SURGE! hits every vacant house—at least two dozen.

 

He now calls the police whenever he’s suspicious about a house. He now carries pepper spray. But they still sneak up from time to time. One day he finds a thin young man sitting with his back against the wall in the living room of an empty duplex. The man is unconscious, chin resting against chest, a syringe and blackened spoon lying at his side. The paramedics say he’ll be fine as they cart him away on a gurney. Aaron writes it up on his clipboard, itemizes the paraphernalia left on the floor.

 

—

 

The Harappan civilization has as many as five million people living in its cities and villages in what today is South Asia. Its borders are filled with complex brick-and-mortar buildings, its web of streets equipped with sophisticated drains that carry waste from homes to sewage disposal areas. It is a center of agriculture and astronomy, commerce and craftsmanship, pioneering technology that remains in use today.

 

It is all abandoned, nearly one thousand years before the founding of Rome. Only the streets and buildings remain.

 

—

 

He is called to an older neighborhood east of downtown. Aaron’s notes say sheriff’s deputies removed the owner a week before in anticipation of a foreclosure auction. He approaches the lock box at the front door. It is clear that someone is living there when he enters. A blanket and pillow lie on the carpet in the front room, along with a small radio. Empty soup cans neatly line the kitchen countertop. Aaron pulls the pepper spray from his belt and quietly walks from room to room.

 

She is in a closet in the back bedroom, an old woman, the tips of her short gray curls barely reaching Aaron’s chest. She winces when he opens the door, eyes on the pepper spray. He puts it away, helps her out.

 

Her name is Mrs. White. The home is hers—was hers, until the previous week, when the bank changed the locks and her daughter took her to a retirement home. The story is common: her son encourages her to take a loan on the home’s rising value, telling her she is sitting on a goldmine. She loses it when his investments fail and can no longer keep up with payments.

 

“I told the people at the home I was visiting a friend,” she says.

 

She’s hidden there for five days.

 

Aaron calls Mrs. White’s daughter. He tells her he won’t call the police on the condition that her mother does not return. He cleans up evidence of her stay, omits it from his report. He wonders how long the bank will sit on the place, how little they’ll eventually take to unload it on some investor looking to flip for a profit.

 

Whether it could have more value to anyone but the woman who has to be evicted twice.

 

—

 

The city of Petra is carved into the sides of desert cliffs in what today is Jordan. Its buildings are etchings, like sandcastles turned on their sides: columns, arches, friezes and pediments mirroring the architecture of ancient Greece, coupled with statues of various gods and beasts. These masterpieces are facades for a network of ventilated, underground tunnels and chambers. It is a city that takes lifetimes to build.

 

It is a work of art, a labor of love. Its people are gone.

 

—

 

The house is in a neighborhood where vacancies are a virus. Everybody’s gone. Entire streets in foreclosure, each house empty and abandoned, real estate signs advertising “Bank Owned” properties posted on browning lawns. This is most common in the new neighborhoods, the ones where investors buy up blocks of homes as rentals, or the developer can’t get rid of the properties once the market crashes. Aaron’s surprised at the lack of vandalism as he drives down the street—usually the taggers and squatters quickly claim such areas.

 

This house is at the end of the block. It is the white stucco-red tile design, the old standby. It appears to have been empty for months. No lock box. Of course.

 

He climbs a graying wood fence. The first thing he sees is the doghouse, sitting next to the side of the house near the backyard. It is wood with a black shingle roof. The name Buster is posted above the front door.

 

The moment his feet touch the other side of the fence he smells the decay, hears the buzz of the flies. To his right, in the corner between the fence and the house, lies a dog. Long dead. Picked apart by scavengers, leaving only dark brown fur and bones behind. That and a black collar, still around its neck, attached to a long chain leading from the doghouse.

 

Aaron presumes the tag he sees dangling from the collar also says Buster.

 

He turns away, covers his mouth and nose. Then he notices. The fence. The claw marks. The blood. They cover nearly the entire inner surface of the fence, cascading down from as high as five feet off the ground, some cuts as deep as half an inch. Inside one of the gashes, Aaron sees a single black claw, torn from Buster’s paw. He imagines the dog lunging at the fence, flailing, trying to climb or knock it down until his paws grow raw and bloody. Trying to rejoin his family. The chain tensing behind him, yanking him back with each attempt at escape. The dog’s eventual surrender, curling up in a corner, thirsty, hungry. Alone.

 

Aaron sinks to the ground, sitting with his back along the fence opposite the house, his eyes on the curled figure before him. There are bowls near the doghouse, presumably for food and water, long empty and dry. He wonders how long the dog lasted, how long Buster survived once he lapped up the water in those bowls. Days. A week. Longer. Howling prayers to an abandoned neighborhood. Dying steps from a doghouse built and personalized just for him.

 

The owners likely moved someplace that did not allow dogs—an apartment, perhaps, or a relative’s house. Aaron wants to find them, deliver their dog’s corpse to their doorstep, a housewarming gift for their new hearth. He wants to chain them to this doghouse in the summer heat, leave them with nothing but a fast-evaporating bowl of water. He wants them to see what they’ve done.

 

He contacts First Western about tracking down the former owners, pressing charges for animal cruelty. He takes pictures to the sheriff’s office, gives them whatever information he has. He is assured: We will do what we can. He knows what little that means.

 

—

 

The Olmec in Mexico build communities around massive pyramids, courts, monuments, and statues. The Aksumites in Ethiopia coin money and erect stone obelisks that stretch toward the sky. The Anasazi develop an agricultural society in the southwestern United States, chiseling their own settlements into the region’s red clay cliffs.

 

Empty. Empty. Empty.

 

—

 

The trip to Mexico often replays in Aaron’s mind when he lies in bed or drives from house to house, like a home video on a loop: There is the dusty gray bus, rumbling along a cratered dirt road running inland from the coast. He and Anna are younger, only just married, not yet parents. They sit near the front, taking pictures out of a cloudy side window. Eventually, the great stone ruins of Chichen Itza come into view.

 

Aaron walks in the shadow of the ancient gray structures, awed at their size and craftsmanship. He wanders through the Great Ball Court, once a gathering place for Mayan athletes and spectators. He examines the Temple of the Warriors, a tiered pyramid surrounded by long rows of carved columns honoring the bravest of the civilization’s people.  He inspects El Caracol, the domed stone observatory offering a view of the starry night sky.

 

At the center of the site sits El Castillo, a massive four-sided pyramid stretching nearly a hundred feet above the ground. Aaron climbs the tall stairs that run up all four sides like wide waterfalls. He turns at the peak and sits on the top step, staring out at the sunbaked ruins below. He imagines this place in its prime: A bustling square filled with cattle herders, traders, farmers with baskets of grain and produce. The shouts of merchants vying for customers and haggling over prices. People playing games, cheering, laughing. He wonders why they’ll leave, whether it is war, drought, famine, or disease that forces them to leave their kingdom behind.

 

He asks: Where did everyone go?

 

It is this that now gnaws at him. Each empty house reminds him of those Mayan ruins. The homes are abandoned, just like those of the Anasazi, and Harappa, and Petra and so many others. Left to crumble.

 

Aaron imagines the Mayan ruins beginning with one or two vacant houses. People watch neighbors go and follow, sparking an exodus, emptying more and more homes. Fewer stay to reap the harvest, bake bread, hunt game. Those who remain die off or fade away. Only the buildings survive.

 

Where did everyone go? Aaron can’t stop asking the question. The houses he inspects each day no longer have minivans in the driveway and bicycles on the front lawn. The smell of Sunday barbecues and fresh cut grass is gone. The people have vanished. He wonders if the houses will ever again be filled, if the foreclosures will continue until there is nobody left. One home becomes three, streets turn to blocks, blocks to communities. All of it empty. Landscape erodes, dust gathers, wildlife returns. Hundreds, thousands of years pass. Archaeologists delicately brush dirt from plastic big wheels, DVD players, picture frames. From giant, empty dollhouses. Tourists come with cameras, snapping photographs, buying T-shirts and key chains. Vacationing in the suburban ruins, the remnants of America.

 

Aaron pulls up to the first of seven houses on today’s schedule. The front door is locked. He approaches the fence, unlatches the gate and slips inside, unsure what he will find on the other side.

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