The Addition

Three Mrs. Smiths barreled into the Duane Reade on East 2nd Street. The younger Mrs. Smiths, married three months ago, and the elder Mrs. Smith, who resented the new Mrs. Smith and preferred her only daughter, Ellie, to remain a Ms. Smith as long as possible, considered the sugar-free breath mints together. A ruse for something, the eldest Mrs. Smith knew; the newest Smith had a jittery air about her, picking up the same nougat bar and returning it to the dusty shelf again and again. Mischievous. Though her daughter reminded her to please leave her bad energy in the domestic terminal at JFK, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt certain it was actually the newest Smith who carried something off about her. The way she handled that nougat bar—demonic? Not good, not good.

Anyway, the eldest Mrs. Smith wouldn’t want them to break up now, what with her being against divorce. Even gay divorce? her husband, Mr. Smith, asked the night before she flew from Virginia to New York to visit the new Mrs. Smiths. A girl’s weekend, her daughter insisted. She missed her mom, or at least wanted her company to brave the IKEA in Red Hook for the younger Smiths’ move. She had news, too, the promise of which she floated not on the phone but over text, a choice that did not evade Mrs. Smith’s notice; news three months into a marriage could only mean so many things, which Mrs. Smith knew damned well, being both married and a mother herself.

Mr. Smith looked so flummoxed the evening before Mrs. Smith left, holding his fork and knife straight up in front of himself at the table, considering the ethics of homosexual divorce. Their church wasn’t happy about divorce, sure. The Smiths had gotten that lecture from the lead pastor more than once. But they were not so thrilled about same-sex marriage, either. So, was gay divorce actually preferable? Mr. Smith stared at his wife, whom he’d known since they were college sophomores, three decades ago. He frowned. He opened and closed his mouth, releasing hot spit to his bare chin. He adored his only child. Finally, he asked only the third woman he had known biblically: A baby is better than a divorce, isn’t it?

Mrs. Smith told her husband, Obviously, it’s better than a divorce, and took his plate away, though he had hardly started in on his meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

—

In the Duane Reade, the eldest Mrs. Smith pulled her favorite forum up on her phone. She intended to stand in the incontinence aisle for more privacy, but the younger Mrs. Smiths would not let up their closeness. The pair of them held hands as they trailed around the store behind her, picking up dark chocolate bars, refrigerated Gatorades, travel-size toothbrushes. All were discarded in the wrong places.

From over her shoulder, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt stares coming from not just the duo, but a young man in a black puffer jacket and heavy-looking headphones whose face carried a fixed interest. In another life, the eldest Mrs. Smith could not help but think, this might be the person her daughter had married; a man with focused, curious eyes and trimmed stubble. The eldest Mrs. Smith felt a precarious pride at watching him watch her daughter; who doesn’t want their offspring to inspire some healthy desire, after all? She would ask the forum if this sensation was wrong, or perhaps a misguided value, if only the young Mrs. Smiths would give her a moment’s breath.

Maybe someone will think it’s fate, Mrs. Smith’s daughter offered, slipping a sports drink behind a box of jumbo tampons, having seen her mother’s glare. They wouldn’t have known they were craving a light blue Gatorade, and then, there it is!

Sure, the eldest Mrs. Smith said flatly. She made eye contact with the man behind her daughters as the newest Mrs. Smith gave her offspring a kiss on the cheek. He disappeared in a blink.

If we’re going to walk to dinner, I’d like to leave with enough time, Mrs. Smith said, keeping her voice clipped and kind. She felt exposed suddenly, and ashamed. On past trips, her daughter had hustled down cramped side streets, leaving her overstimulated and spooked. Only tourists actually took cabs, her daughter explained, to which Mrs. Smith quietly swallowed that she, herself, was a tourist.

The newest Mrs. Smith piped up: I need to buy something…private. She gave the two natural Smiths a plaintive look; Mrs. Smith thought of her third-graders, the search of affirmation in their eyes when they recited lines for a class play, vulnerable and uneasy with their memories. Teacher, their faces said, tell us you love us. Not: Give me a good grade. Not: Did I get an A? Only: Show me with your face, in front of everybody in this room, that I’ve done right. Mrs. Smith wanted to ask how many pregnancy tests they’d already purchased, had they been to a doctor yet for a blood test? She sucked the skin of her cheeks and bit, figuring they wanted just one more positive before telling her the obvious.

Her daughter nodded at her wife and said, Let’s share one outside, Mom, and flicked at her coat pocket. At the automated doors, the eldest Mrs. Smith looked back at the newest Mrs. Smith and fancied herself a soothsayer. There the newest addition went, legs going like crazy down the family planning aisle.

The mother fingered her phone in her pocket, even more eager, now, to update the forum. She imagined the title she would give the post: How to support lesbian moms (30s, F, NYC?), and then the follow ups: Are both lesbian moms “mom” without exception, as well as, Let’s be honest: What do I do when child of lesbian moms (now unborn fetus) asks the big D question? (ETA: D as in “dad”!!) She imagined getting lots of comments, most positive, some not so much; the thought of a bright, bright screen warmed her with a pride she did not often allow herself to access.

Outside, mother and daughter passed a clove cigarette between one another. It’s vanilla flavored, her daughter said.

Her mother replied: Nice.

The Smith women had been sharing cigarettes since the younger Mrs. Smith was in high school. Her mother, a sprinter in youth and later a casual jogger, drove her to field hockey games even when she was old enough to drive herself; she didn’t trust other drivers on the road, Mrs. Smith said, but what she really wanted was time to sit in quiet with her daughter. Her daughter became mysterious to her in those years, confident and stretched beyond the child-self her mother understood. She went to the mall with friends, stayed up late on the family desktop, typing away to people Mrs. Smith assumed were classmates, whispered on the landline in the kitchen. By her senior year, then-Miss Smith dawdled getting into the car, sneaking off to hover in the garage. Finally, Mrs. Smith caught her smoking. She looked so young in her high school sweatpants, with all that black eyeliner. Get in the car, she said, and they did. Mrs. Smith didn’t say anything when her daughter lit the next cigarette, hunched and scowled in the front seat. When her daughter handed the filtered cigarette to her, the eldest Mrs. Smith took a few puffs, and passed it back. For months, their little joy.

Mom, her only child said as they stood outside the fluorescent Duane Reade, January’s depression thick around them. This is so important to me. A few feet behind her, a straight couple took a selfie; the man’s arm stretched long, and the woman used her gloved hand to adjust the tilt of the screen.

Her daughter continued: I know you might not understand at first, but try to stay open minded. The eldest Mrs. Smith squinted at the asphalt but kept listening; her daughter never got on the phone anymore, so how could she pass up a chance to hear that voice? She could recognize rehearsal in it, that her Ellie had practiced this, whether to a mirror or to the new addition, the eldest Mrs. Smith did not know.

Families are changing, Mom, Ellie added, but it’s the same love.

Mrs. Smith ruffled; same love? Was her daughter quoting commercials now? Anyway. Mrs. Smith found it all to be just fine. A baby, sure. A grandmother. Fine, fine, fine. She did not appreciate all of the hullabaloo over hiding this pregnancy. Probably, the eldest Mrs. Smith bet, they were going to raise the baby all gender neutral; yellow and green onesies, sure, the eldest Mrs. Smith could do that. She had gotten pretty damn good at they as a default, at risk of patting herself on the back. Mrs. Smith took an extra drag of the cigarette, knowing her daughter was watching and wanting.

I know, was all the eldest Mrs. Smith said, believing that she did. I know

Mrs. Smith looked at Mrs. Smith. Their faces just the same: brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin, both still with acne scars. Red, red cheeks in the city’s cold. The younger Mrs. Smith stood taller, like her father. The eldest Mrs. Smith knew her daughter inherited her father’s long, thin feet as well. She imagined, briefly, the newest Mrs. Smith rubbing ointment on her daughter’s scabbed heels; they bruised in new shoes so easily, and her daughter had always been impatient to break in what was still stiff. Bandaids, bandaids. Would the newest Mrs. Smith massage her daughter’s callouses, or only rub disinfectant in her blood? Mrs. Smith’s desire to know this intimacy embarrassed her more than her refusal to ask.

Mrs. Smith tried to see hot life in her daughter but couldn’t. Both women were gaunt, still. She figured it was the newer Mrs. Smith who had gotten pregnant, but she hoped it was actually her daughter, her blood. From her forum, she knew not to ask questions of biology, because it implied one mother was more real than the other. Still, while the younger Mrs. Smiths checked directions to the restaurant, the eldest Mrs. Smith typed: How to celebrate lesbian moms (31F, 33F) having baby? No, she thought. She should not have to ask that. She deleted it and typed: How to celebrate lesbian pregnancy of daughter in law when baby isn’t blood? No, still wrong. She deleted again, then switched to her not-private browser and ordered more cotton briefs for her husband.

I’m glad you’re feeling up for dinner, right after your flight and all, the newest Mrs. Smith said when she came outside. Mrs. Smith nodded and said thank you, completing the circle of polite conversion the two of them had entertained for the last few years. When the Mrs. Smiths held hands and walked down the sidewalk, the eldest Mrs. Smith stared hard at the plastic bag. It had to be a pregnancy test, she thought. She hoped it would tear, drop, spill. She only wanted confirmation of a thing she might understand, an entry point. The newest Mrs. Smith held on, held on.

—

At the restaurant, a third gaunt woman joined them as Mrs. Smith’s daughter confirmed the reservation with the hostess. For four? the hostess asked dully, and to Mrs. Smith’s confusion, all three stretched smiles wide and agreed.

Oh, Mrs. Smith said. Could her daughter not pity her shyness? Some personalities aren’t outgrown. I’m so glad your friend can join us, she said, giving her daughter a brief look of reproach. In return, her daughter named her friend, voice full of a funny anxiety. The eldest Mrs. Smith told the new person hello and realized she had already forgotten their name.

The three women looked at Mrs. Smith with a terrible vulnerability, causing her to experience a swing into both fear and resentment. She was trying, wasn’t she? What to say to this strange addition. The trio appeared to her as three long coats. Three sets of eyes, for once not glued to phone screens. Three mouths that had all worn braces, she could tell. Mrs. Smith repeated herself, that she was very glad their friend could spend dinner with them, and something in all of the women’s eyes shriveled into an ache Mrs. Smith could not understand.

Once at their booth, Mrs. Smith considered the seating an unnecessary tangle. In the end, she sat beside her Ellie, and the new Mrs. Smith and their friend sat opposite them. The new Mrs. Smiths tended to hold hands and share plates, which Mrs. Smith found particularly saccharine and was privately relieved to not have to witness it tonight. Still, this new woman puzzled her. Was she a surrogate? An emotional support decoy? Their couples’ therapist? The eldest Mrs. Smith wished she had a Facebook account so she could slip into the bathroom and do some digging.

When their water glasses came, Mrs. Smith narrowed her eyes in on the new woman’s layered hemp bracelets. A birth doula, maybe. The message board made living seem easy. People followed group rules. Age, relationship, one-liner summary. Mrs. Smith read the TL;DRs first, then went back and reread all of the details; people don’t always know how to pull out what was really the main issue in their lives. Mrs. Smith did not comment or post, but she did read. Admittedly, she skimmed the ones with titles she did not understand: situationships, throuples, polyams, kinksters. Fine for them, she reasoned, though she felt they should have a sub-group, so as not to clog her main page. At this dinner, she felt betrayed; the forums had not prepared her for these queer circumstances. Especially not the raw menu in front of her.

With forced cheer, she asked, When it says it’s all plant-based and raw, that means it’ll come cold? Mrs. Smith resented having to ask these questions but had stopped asking her daughter to bring her to that cheesecake place she loved in Times Square; she could only be mocked so many times for being a tourist, what with her wanting of cabs and cooked meals.

It’s room temp, the newest Mrs. Smith said. The eldest Mrs. Smith hid her grimace behind the menu; it was involuntary, she told herself, this sharp reaction to the young woman’s hoarse voice. She had intended to ask her daughter, and thought her intent was obvious. The eldest Mrs. Smith soothed her inner beast by reminding herself that the crackling young woman was carrying her grandchild.

Still, her daughter stepped in to save her. It’s all vegan and focused around plants, so fruits and vegetables, but the dishes are really very Americana, explained her offspring, who spent childhood years dipping string cheese into bowls of shelf-stable shredded parmesan. I’m going to try the queso plate, she added with an excitement her mother sensed held no irony.

The meatloaf, the eldest Mrs. Smith said. The table felt clipped, tense; too quiet, too much attention on one another’s brief movements. Had her own pregnancy announcement been so bizarre? She could not quite remember the air around her parents’ living room, when she and her husband delivered the news to them; she’d been happy, or terrified, or resting on the fine line between those states, then, she was sure, but how she appeared to those around her, she could not place. Feeling three heads turned on her, she pushed out the words, What is the meat?

It’s a pea protein, Mom, but don’t focus on that. The dish is actually just like what you and Dad like. You know, with the spices. Her daughter gestured her hands in front of her hunched chest, as she had whenever she argued a theoretical point or on behalf of getting takeout, and the eldest Mrs. Smith wanted to lie down beneath the table and spoon her, as they had on the couch when she was young. The eldest Mrs. Smith knew she could not ask for such a thing; someone would call the manager, if not the police, and so she reminded her daughter that she cooked her meatloaf, and that the spices she used were ketchup.

—

All except for the newest Mrs. Smith ordered a glass of organic, vegan wine. When isn’t wine vegan? the oldest Mrs. Smith asked after the sommelier, a lean, frantic-looking man with studs in both nostrils, returned and placed the glasses on the table. She had wanted to ask when he was running through the list, but her daughter looked close to ill in her nerves, eyes shifting from face to face at their table, and she did not want to irritate her into snapping.

Her daughter said, It has to do with the bugs, or something. The eldest Mrs. Smith watched her daughter take a gulp and wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. The eldest Mrs. Smith watched the newest Mrs. Smith sip at her water, and glanced to their friend, who was sniffing and staring at her wine but not ingesting it.

You can drink up, the eldest Mrs. Smith said loudly, causing the unexpected addition to the group to startle. There are no bugs to check for; isn’t that right, dear? She turned on her daughter, who held the stem of a wine glass like a softball glove.

Her daughter looked at her wife and the friend nervously, then back at her mother. The eldest Mrs. Smith was surprised her daughter did not jab back in her friend’s honor; she found the eldest Mrs. Smith’s lighthearted teasing to be baiting and rude, when in fact, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt she only wanted to be a little less kind without losing affection. Mom, her daughter said instead. We have to tell you something.

With six eyes on her, Mrs. Smith suddenly felt very important. She was grateful for her bugless wine. It tasted light and fresh, she thought. Those words were only implants, really, because she preferred box wine, and also because she felt that she did not understand the world around her. Why was the friend here? How far along was her daughter-in-law? Was this friend the nanny? Was she a surrogate? Nothing quite made sense. She encouraged the sommelier, who filtered back in as though trained to pick on such delicate family rifts, to fill her glass a little extra. He obliged without question. She took a long drink, and said, Yes?

The younger women appeared baby faced, suddenly, without much makeup. Just the flick of winged eyeliner, a bright red lipstick. Their faces looked unbalanced, unfinished; she guessed intentionally. Mrs. Smith had worn her full face, including powder, as she had for years. In the tea lights, she worried she looked like a ghost.

Well, her daughter started. The women looked at one another again when she paused, letting the eldest Mrs. Smith simmer. The eldest Mrs. Smith was prepared to simmer, simmer, until the youngest Mrs. Smith, the newest Mrs. Smith, and their strange friend held hands. Quite ceremonious, the eldest Mrs. Smith thought before feeling she was being made a fool.

I’m very happy for you, she said unhappily. And I understand this probably feels like very big news to give me, but of course I understand.

The women looked at one another, then back at her.

The newest Mrs. Smith repeated her unsteadily: You understand?

The eldest Mrs. Smith finished her wine. She drank her water glass to the bottom. She felt her bladder seize, a reminder of her infallibility.. I’m very, very happy for you girls, she said, but I am a little offended that you’re having such a hard time telling me the truth.

Her one daughter spoke to her very slowly, as though she were a child with a dirty foot in its mouth: What exactly are you happy about, Mom?

The eldest Mrs. Smith felt regret before she said, The baby. After all, it was their news to give, not hers. But why had they made the night so difficult? Why this particularly odd restaurant? Why the awkward friend? Why draw out the reveal? The eldest Mrs. Smith worried why her own daughter thought her own mother would need such buttering up; was it those bad years, the hung up calls, the mentions of the sons of her friends who were so polite, and so single, the use of friend over and over and over? The eldest Mrs. Smith put her empty wine glass to her mouth. She did not want to think about those years and their bruising.

The newest Mrs. Smith looked at the other women, then said loudly and cheerfully, as though repeating her order at the counter of a loud cafe, There’s actually not a baby.

The eldest Mrs. Smith stopped herself from rolling her eyes. She said: Okay, the fetus.

Her daughter grabbed her hand when she said, Mom, no, you don’t understand what’s going on.

The eldest Mrs. Smith wondered where her meatloaf was; how could raw food take so long? It wasn’t even cooked! She wanted to kick the table up into the ceiling. She held her daughter’s hand back. She could not remember the last time they had grabbed for one another. Speaking each syllable fully, she said: Explain it in the simplest terms, will you?

The friend leaned forward and chirped, Oh, Mrs. Smith. We’re a trio.

A trio, the eldest Mrs. Smith repeated flatly. With her free hand, she held her wine in front of her face, as though it were a shield. She stared into the bottom of the glass and swore she saw her child self staring back at her, forlorn and meager, always steps behind, always left out, the haunting of a miserable only child. She placed the glass on the table. She said, What?

Like, instead of a couple, the newest Mrs. Smith cut in. We’re a trio. The three of them nodded at one another, then at the eldest Mrs. Smith.

Behind the eldest Mrs. Smith, the sommelier explained the wine pairings to a table that had just been seated. She listened to the string of happy voices; two couples, she guessed, one old, one young, enjoying a family meal. No trios. No sad old women. Tofu, perhaps. But not all of this. She repeated, What?

No one is having a baby, her daughter said, this time, her voice all shake. We’re not pregnant, or adopting, or anything like that. But our family is growing, and it’s important to me that you accept that.

What, she thought, incredulously. She asked, A fourth Mrs. Smith?

Mom, Jesus. We haven’t talked about that yet.

The eldest Mrs. Smith turned to the new addition. It’s your baby?

There’s no baby, Mom.

No baby, she repeated, feeling dumb.

Mom, we just need you to accept…all of it, us, and the um, the lack of a baby, too.

Accept it, the eldest Mrs. Smith repeated. She hesitated, then took the newest addition’s full glass and drank from hers.

Mom!

Mrs. Smith shrugged and held onto the stolen glass. She said: Accept it, and her daughter rolled her eyes.

I really appreciate you being so nice about this, the newest addition said, ignoring the pilfered wine. The eldest Mrs. Smith had gotten to know when younger people had prepared their words, irrespective of anything else that might happen before the envisioned moment became the present. I mean, the hemp-adorned woman continued, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you’re handling it a lot better than my mom did.

The eldest Mrs. Smith looked at the pilfered wine glass. Despite herself, she said, Really?

Really! And, besides, we don’t know what the future holds, any of us. The addition said this very wisely, and the eldest Mrs. Smith felt certain that this was the sort of woman her daughter was ceaselessly attracted to: lots of wisdoms, lots of organics, lots of mild emotional stressors in stimulating environments, like the IKEA she was now sure the addition would accompany them to.

Tell me more, Mrs. Smith said. Her face felt warm from the wine. She comforted herself: This is a fling, an exploration. A phase. She thought about the newest Mrs. Smiths; her daughter, just 31, and her wife, a reasonable 33. They had a few good years yet. She finished the wine and noticed her daughter drain her own glass.

You know, about having kids. I mean, who knows, none of us are parents right now, but we don’t know—

Babe, her daughter said loudly. The newest Mrs. Smith shook her head diplomatically and smiled with both rows of her teeth out. Definitely still wore her retainer, the eldest Mrs. Smith thought. Absolutely mother material.

When she did not add a just kidding, ha, ha, the three Mrs. Smiths eyed the addition curiously. The newest asked, What do you mean, the same time the daughter asked, Haven’t we talked about this, but probably no one heard them over the eldest Mrs. Smith, who simply asked: Turkey baster or IVF?

—

When the three Mrs. Smiths and their new addition—who her daughter pointedly clarified was named Alyssa, and wanted to be called it, instead of the friend—left the restaurant, the eldest Mrs. Smith could not help herself. She’d ordered two more glasses of wine. She’d polished off her meatloaf, which, she noted to the waiter with pleasure, was actually warmer than she’d expected. Her daughter was, in her mind, one step away from being a polygamist.

The pregnancy test, she said as they congregated on the narrow, smoky sidewalk, feeling dumb. You were so cagey in that store, she said, regarding her daughter-in-law face to face, emboldened by the wine.

The newest Mrs. Smith brought her pointer finger to her mouth and picked at her lips. Oh, she said. I’ve had some vaginal dryness.

The eldest Mrs. Smith was too focused (and too drunk) to be deterred. And you didn’t order wine, she continued.

I’m on an antibiotic, you know, she said, giving her wife a pleading look. For the dryness.

The eldest Mrs. Smith let this information settle on their walk back to her hotel in midtown, where the girls were leaving her for the night. As her daughter explained, the new addition—Alyssa, the eldest Mrs. Smith kept as a refrain, Alyssa—hadn’t moved in yet, but would when they moved to the new place.

We’re buying the furniture, the eldest Mrs. Smith said, pronouncing each word as though waiting for a stern correction. But her daughter offered none, and instead described the new home as she held her wife’s hand. An additional bedroom and a half-bathroom, a minuscule yard. A deck that could fit three adults and a tall plant. It had seemed to the eldest Mrs. Smith she had gotten one guess right: IKEA, the shopping, the anxiety.This ability to perceive a thing comforted her.

The four women stopped at a crosswalk. The wind was flat and empty, just cold air hanging steady as they walked through. The eldest Mrs. Smith longed for some city snow, but all around her feet, dirty remnants. A big, dark car slowed at the curb, and a man rushed up from behind them and launched into the backseat. The eldest Mrs. Smith had felt a presence up close behind her, and assumed it was the new one—Alyssa, Alyssa—lurking hard, but in orienting herself to the present moment, realized Alyssa had actually been holding her daughter’s other hand.

The car hovered. The man from the Duane Reade, the one who carried hot blood the eldest Mrs. Smith understood at first as a blessing, leaned his face out of the window. That hot blood looked so young, then, childish in its evil, in its disregard for empathy. Later, the eldest Mrs. Smith would understand it as worse than a lack of empathy; the intention was all cruelty, all power that was not a naive pushing of boundaries, but of choice and intent.

Her girls didn’t react when they heard the slur; it rang through all of them, no one had to ask to clarify it, or to repeat it, or to question if it was a trick of the city noise, but only the eldest Mrs. Smith reacted when the man yelled dykes from the backseat as the car merged into traffic.

The eldest Mrs. Smith ran. It came back easier than she thought, the rhythm. Feet on the ground like she controlled the pace of the present. The lungs, even, remember what it is to become mightier in expansion. When the car stilled at the traffic light, the eldest Mrs. Smith soared, vaulted, it felt like, to catch up. She kicked the trunk of the car. Her foot throbbed and she kicked again. She slammed her purse against the rear window. Inside, her Midol and chapsticks rattled.

The man put his head out of the window. Lady, he said, blank-eyed. What the fuck?

The eldest Mrs. Smith hit her purse against the backdoor of the car as he shouted at the driver to raise his window. He could not figure out how to get it up himself. Of course, she realized, this man had taken an Uber and not a cab. Of course. The eldest Mrs. Smith did not emit noise from her throat. The eldest Mrs. Smith heard noises, distantly; the driver, laughing loudly, the man in the backseat, yelling about customer service, the two new Mrs. Smiths, and, she reasoned, the perhaps soon-to-be Mrs. Smith, being loud in an emotional state the eldest Mrs. Smith could not, at the moment her purse smacked into the man’s face through his still-open window, parse out. She was beyond.

The eldest Mrs. Smith felt her bladder release a little urine; all of the momentum, all of the wine. A little urine is fine, she thought. A little urine detracts from almost nothing.

She heard herself yelling things like eat shit, motherfucker, and I’ll report you, and even, surreally, a promise that she would come for him. Come for him where? How? The eldest Mrs. Smith had no idea where such ideas entered her mind, but it did not matter. He laughed, as the driver finally turned his window up, but he looked nervous, too; the eldest Mrs. Smith taught sophomores biology one semester. She knew what nervous young people looked like. Sure, he was probably in his twenties, but young enough to feel intrinsic unease from the steady rage of an older person. Especially one that had slammed his face with the bottom of a faux leather handbag.

Fuck you, lady, he yelled as the window sealed him. Seconds later, the car merged back into traffic. The eldest Mrs. Smith yelled, The name’s Anne Marie, bitch, and believed the entire island heard her.

The Mrs. Smiths and their girlfriend shrieked around Mrs. Smith the whole walk back through the West Village, the only place in Manhattan the eldest Mrs. Smith felt she understood, a bit, though, as her daughter explained, it was also the only neighborhood not on the grid. Her daughter put a few crushed cigarettes in her hand and repeated, Mom, shit, Mom, holy shit! The eldest Mrs. Smith released a little more urine, from all of the commotion, and didn’t care at all if the odor permeated the night.

In the hotel lobby, Alyssa asked for the eldest Mrs. Smith’s phone number so she could text her the video. I recorded it, she said. In case he hit you. The eldest Mrs. Smith embraced each of the women with her eyes shut, face sucking in the scent of their shampoos: almond, summer rain, green mellow mango. Mothers know these things without asking. She mumbled, I love you, and they all murmured it, or something like it, back.

—

In her hotel room, Anne Marie changed into one of two hanging robes, leaving her pajamas folded in her suitcase. She left her underwear to soak in sudsy water in the wide-mouthed sink. She did not put on a new pair. She ignored the laminated No Smoking signs and hovered by the cracked window to light up. She watched the video over and over, admiring her bear self, her peculiar, cosmic domination. She opened a miniature bottle of tequila and sipped it, wincing at its punch. She opened her computer and went to the forum. She typed: I (56F) defended my daughters (31F, 33F, 27?F) against a bigot. Feedback?? Anne Marie attached the video and hit post, then closed her computer and fingered a second cigarette, victorious.

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Open Season

Like any good strategist, you keep an ethical

distance, stepping over milkweed and turning on

the radio. It’s hard to tell when you’re approaching—

everyone wears an orange vest over her coat.

Cooking without speaking, I feel like an actress

playing a wife—soft cheese with honey, pickled

cabbage, pale tomatoes from the roadside store.

The pond is frozen and the snow has no content.

I understand the animal only if it’s packed

in Styrofoam and thawing on the kitchen counter.

Even then, some parts are too much for me.

The bulbous head of the hydrangea hits the window.

You come in. We eat marrow and cartilage.

I wanted the snow to be like snow from television—

fat and legible. How rarely I feel I am anywhere.

I hate the animal when it looks like what it is.

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Review: H & G By Anna Maria Hong

Sidebrow Books, 2018.

Paperback, 59 pages, $15.00.

Winner, Clarissa Dalloway Prize, A Room of Her Own Foundation

Anna Maria Hong’s H & G is a darkly postmodern and feminist revisioning of the classic Brothers Grimm tale “Hansel and Gretel” that plumbs the depths of patricidal hatred, inherited misogyny, and the unsuccessful search for a family that is more than kin and less than kind. Intensely surrealist in its warped depictions of the traditional fantasy world in which the novella orients itself, while also exceedingly realist in the complexity of its main and supporting characters, Hong’s reification of the Brothers Grimm text is a meta-fictive trek into the dark recesses of the human psyche from which readers won’t want to return.

To call this novella a work of fabulist fiction is perhaps too simplistic a label, though the text wears its magical mundanity in quite an enchanting fashion. As great fabulist fictions—and to some extent, great fairy tales—do, Hong’s writing orients the reader in a fantastical situation or setting before propelling them into ever-deepening waters of ethics, philosophy, and cultural critique through the power of allegory and metaphor. As is the case with fairy tales, Hong’s work is instructive and has a motley cast of trope-like characters to fill archetypal roles: the father, the mother, the evil stepmothers, the witches, and the two children, Hansel and Gretel, referred to as H. and G., respectively. This, however, is where most of the similarities between the fairy tale and Hong’s work end. Hong stays true to fairy tale form inasmuch as it serves her greater purposes—she plays to the tropes in order to break them and keeps true to most of the particulars of “Hansel and Gretel” until intervening personal narratives and real-world elements interpose in the story and make it decidedly not a fairy tale, revisionist or otherwise. One-dimensional character types are rendered with human complexity and qualities, so much so that even the “villains” in H & G are given sympathetic backstories and motivations that impress upon the reader their humanness without absolving them of their flaws.

One scene with a markedly fabulist bent is in the chapter titled “H. Is Praying To The Great Eye.” In this section, H. makes a pilgrimage up the mountain each day to the New Witch’s hut to nurse from her breast—assuming the role of both the sacrificial offering and the one who proffers the sacrifice to this deity-like being—in order to save the world. Bizarre and grossly sexual, the conceit is a fascinating one, exploring the depravity of codependent relationships that stem from unhealthy obsessions and childhood fears of abandonment:

Someday the New Witch will tire of me too—prayer and fate of the world be

damned—or she will die and either way I’ll be abandoned again, surmises H.

Alone with nothing but this rocky, dirty peak to climb, and empty hut at the top.

By H. nursing from the New Witch and bringing a part of her into H.’s body, two things happen narratively: the New Witch’s face is restored to youth (though H. remarks that her body is still flat and shriveled as a hag’s), and H. is rewarded with the satisfaction of taking and not giving anything back but pleasure, which, he says, is incidental to the giver. H. is a supplicant—worshipful, dutiful—not from a wholly religious or sexual desire, or even to save the world as the New Witch remarks, but because in this H. has found what he believes is a sense of belonging. In a mere three pages, Hong builds a tiny world and fills this world with searching philosophical questions—what do we make of the reciprocal, if any, relationship between God and Believer? As Hong puts it,

If the Believer stopped believing, would the world cease to exist? H. thinks it

wiser to not risk it, so he prays every day, climbing the green and brown peaks,

until he reaches the New Witch’s hut where he will suck on the Witch’s cold

tits, ripe and smooth as the flesh of pale green fruit.

What of attention misplaced and masquerading as affection or as physical and emotional nurturing?: “The Witch strokes his golden hair as she suckles him, telling him how good he has been, how sturdy he is, how well he climbed the mountain, how good he is to save the world like this . . .”. What of the emotionally scarred person who can only take and take and in the process destroys what’s left of themselves?: “H. sucks like his life depends on it, because it is what he is good at—the only thing he has always been good at—eating, siphoning dominion and beauty from powerful women who want to save him and eat him.” In posing these questions, Hong conjures the familiar fairy tale into something fierce and dangerous, something so very heartbreaking that we want to look away, yet, enraptured by the story’s unfolding, cannot.

In H & G, the story becomes the stories, a twinning effect enhanced by the meta-fictive qualities of the writing. In this regard, H & G is intensely postmodern and feminist: experimental with its points of view (first-person plural, second-person, and third-person omniscient) and its many non-prose forms (bulleted lists, poems, blocks of prose that read as poetry, and, most interestingly, the inclusion of the alternate story endings that continuously pull the reader in and out of the text in order to hone in on story implications for our real and the story’s imagined worlds). Yet it also addresses real-life sexism and abuse of a hegemonic patriarchal society. Hong writes these fractured wholes as her own trail of leading breadcrumbs for the reader to follow, from context to context, from one rhetorical situation to the next, while bringing complexity and richness and a sense of wonder with her poignant and bittersweet tellings.

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Here in North, in Our Dorm, 3C

Who was going at it? Who had put out the word?

When the riots popped off in South, we heard the modules filled with burning mats and brawling, that CO had stormed in, flashing riot gear, shooting bean bags, rubber bullets, and gas. We could picture it happening, vividly. We’d read all about it on a kite snuck in, passed from hand to hand. We could smell the smoke on the paper.

The populations in South would be stripped, searched, sorted, and reprocessed. Soon the world would be changing. Its politics would be shifting—into what configurations we could only guess. What we knew was that there would be consequences. We would feel them too, here in North, in our dorm, 3C.

We waited for the word to come down, for the bloodshed to happen.

We had to make plans.

We held our meetings at night, while the others lay all around us, among slanting shadows, on racks too close by, trying to listen. We knew they were trying. We wanted them to hear. We wanted them to know we’d be ready.

We looked for hitches in the patterns, how they trooped into the dayroom, regimented in red, forming up between shifts in the kitchen and laundry. Who gathered with whom, who would whisper, shake hands. We watched the red shirts swirling through our dorm along currents, into telltale dispersions and groupings.

We had to stay vigilant.

We could sense things occurring in traded glances behind us, like during count-times, when we had to hold still, while CO dotted our distant heads with a pencil, as if trying to pin us more firmly back into place.

What did they know but clipboards and checklists?

It was happening out there. It would happen here too.

We could feel it the way we could feel the weather, or the touch of a loving hand on our skin, when we would daydream on our racks about clouds, lost in memory, while we watched the inner blacks of our eyelids. We would press our hands to the concrete walls of our lockup, to feel the cold and think, It’s raining.

We would become odder, with intentions impossible to fathom—more so than the others—for our own good.

We would knock on the darkened booth and, when the man had stepped away from his monitors, snap apart plastic razors to collect the thin blades. We would hold them in our mouths, like Communion, blessed, and smile, with no trace of silver, behind the walls of our teeth.

This was how we had to be, but who had decided? Were the riots really to blame?

Was it the paisas?

The Eses?

Was it the ‘Woods?

In fact, who’d started this shit in the first place?

When we asked what was happening, CO would tell us, Step back. When trustees from other modules rolled in carts for our books or dirty trays, we would nod at them. Wussup? They’d lift a chin at the cameras in the corners, look away.

We knew to imagine ourselves through those lenses, our lives all flattened into dull, droning video, on whole banks of glowing monitors, for those men in darkened booths. We were learning to live accordingly.

So what would be ours to keep?

We watched the work shifts go out. We watched the work shifts come in.

We were lining up and playing cards, sitting down and writing letters. To anyone watching, ourselves included, we were behaving the best we could.

We wanted to go home, despite our bracing for the violence to come, some of us more than others, but we did. And when we would, before it had, we’d wander back into the world, feeling our way along as though our vision had dimmed, and wonder where it might be hiding—if not in the thinness of a turning page, the lightness of the rain, nor in the steadiness of the passing days—and when it would be released.

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After Daddy

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

–Genesis 2:24

Every mornin I ask Mama,
Why do your eyes look like torn

screens? I say, Mama your flies

are gettin in the house again.
I swat at my ears, then
lift the toilet lid and find clear
wings floatin, black bellies pinned in
still water. Go on and pee, she says. Don’t
need to flush ‘em first.
When Mama scoops her coffee
grounds, she buries a family alive
while coughin antennae up onto
the shelf of her molars.
Says it tickles when she bites down.
The dog snaps at the air.
Each time he catches one, we three circle up

and howl. Our songs blanket the buzz through

the afternoon and shimmy the ash in the mantle

urn. By then we’re good and exercised,
arms quivering from reachin, palms gut sticky.

Mama, is this called slap-happy?
She tells me to go wash up for dinner.
She prays: God, bless this food to
our body. Bless those who cannot be
with us today. Amen.
I pinch a maggot outta my
pie and wonder how many get
past our lips unseen.
Every night, as she’s fallin asleep,
I lean in slow and close
and I tell my Mama,
Mama, I think we got ‘em all.

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Fish Run

We were an inch onto the Van Wyck Expressway when the boro taxi barreled past us down the left lane—going sixty, maybe sixty-five. I’m only guessing, since Jack Sr. braked so hard to dodge it that my head hit the dashboard with a smack like fireworks behind my eyes. I wasn’t much for thought afterwards. James, who was sitting in the back of the van with the dolly and the netting, let out a bark of a laugh that cracked the air. Jack Sr. swore, guiding us onto the shoulder, yelling—“For God’s sake, James, stop laughing, Ren, are you okay? Jesus Christ, can you hear me, Ren?”—while I tried desperately not to puke, as I had never been hit so hard in my life. In my mind, I was still thinking of first impressions. I’d only just met Jack Sr. and his grandson James, only just disembarked the red-eye from Seattle-Tacoma an hour ago and climbed into their van from the January night. If I puked all over Jack Sr.’s dash and windshield I’d be forgiven, probably, but not forgotten. Jack Jr. would never let me live it down. Fucking Jack Jr. It was his fault I was here, alone in a van with his father, in the first place. I reminded myself that I loved him or some shit.

We’d been stopped on the shoulder for a couple minutes. I opened my eyes, the top of my head pounding viciously under my fingers. “I’m okay,” I managed to say. Another taxi sped past, jamming its horn for four uninterrupted seconds to let us know we were motherfuckers. I tried to find my hands stretched out in front of me. The dizziness had mostly abated, not quite the pain. “Wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. My fault. I’m okay.”

“Oh, Jesus, fuck, oh, Jesus,” said Jack Sr. a couple more times, working through—I assumed—how to tell his absent son that his boyfriend had been hospitalized after only eighteen paltry minutes in wintertime Queens. We went on like this, not listening to each other, until gradually the road and the blue-black sky sat completely still and solid in my view. It was about to snow.

—

It had been Jack Jr.’s idea for us to visit his family. I would fly to JFK from Seattle; Jack Jr. would come straight from his work trip in Toronto. “Easy,” Jack Jr. called it on the phone as we bought our tickets. “Spend the weekend with my parents, go home together. This is what richies do, fly all over, compound their airtime.”

“Who the fuck says that?”

I had packed, made my way to the airport, called Jack Jr. one last time, boarded. My phone blared when I turned my cellular back on when we touched ground at three a.m. Five missed calls, two texts. Snowstorm. Blocked in. A slew of voicemails documenting an hour-long fight to get to the airport through the Canada snowdrift, after which a saga of delays and road closures had resulted in Jack Jr. being marooned at the hotel until at least the afternoon. Which led me, alone and palpitating, to baggage claim, then the Terminal 2 pick-up carpool where Jack Sr.—the sixty-five-year-old, shaved-headed Korean fishmonger—clapped me on the back, herded me into his refrigerated van, and gave me what was now feeling like a concussion. This was all very funny to James, who was recording a video of us with his phone.

“Don’t sleep.” Jack Sr.’s palm was cold as a pumice stone on my forehead. “Definitely don’t sleep. I heard that’s bad for you.”

Behind us, more cars swerved, screeching their horns. Jack Sr. appeared afraid to move us any farther. I didn’t know anything about New York. There were hospitals in the city, of course, but did I dare ask to be taken to one? Was I a pussy? Jack Jr. would say I was, I know he would.

“You know what?” Jack Sr. said suddenly, posing the question with a mischievous smile before he’d even asked. I saw it a mile away. He was about to ask me to come along for the deliveries. “Why don’t you come along with James and me this morning for the deliveries? Fish market’s only an hour from here. This way I can keep an eye on you, make sure you’re okay.”

Jack Jr.’s family owned a sushi restaurant in Fort Lee. He’d told me this on our first date the previous year. “Huge Korean population, Fort Lee.”

“But,” I remembered saying, “sushi is—”

“Sushi is whatever the white man says it is,” Jack Jr. said. “Haven’t you heard? They can’t tell us apart.”

Jack Jr. said things. This got him into trouble, but also made him one of the more memorable people I’d ever met. That’s what I ended up telling my friends about him. Meanwhile Jack Sr. still ran the place himself. Still made the trip across two rivers to the New Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point in the middle of the night twice a week to secure the fresh catch. “He loves talking about it,” Jack Jr. said to me. “Loves. I’m really sorry.”

Back in the van, Jack Sr. was still waiting for an answer. James was busy editing his footage. I forced a smile. Jack Sr. beamed as though I’d just asked to be adopted. He jerked the van back into gear, and as we rocketed off down the freeway, he started asking me where I’d grown up and did I speak Korean okay and were my parents still around. While I, jet-lagged, tried to keep my eyes open and wished that Jack Jr. had made his goddamn flight.

—

They made the fish run every Tuesday and Thursday, Jack Sr. told me over the van’s deafening engine. Always Tuesday and Thursday, around two or three in the morning before the best of the vendors sold out. He listed them off his fingers: sea bream, snapper, Scottish salmon, Spanish mackerel, sweet shrimp, king crab legs, trout roe, littleneck clams, razor clams, abalone. “Tuna, Jesus, the tuna,” Jack Sr. said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Fifty pounds of tuna a week. It’s all people want to eat. Can’t make it fast enough. You like spicy tuna, Ren? Nice sriracha mayonnaise, scallions—”

“Not my favorite,” I managed to say.

Jack Sr. got a twinkle in his eye. “You know, Jack and I did the fish run for eight years, up until he left for college. I think he got used to it by the end, maybe even liked it. That, or he lied better than his brothers.”

He let out a booming, forceful laugh, which I didn’t doubt for its authenticity. Jack Sr. seemed like the kind of guy who laughed like that no matter the joke. He tapped the mesh behind us. “You okay, James?” James nodded silently, engrossed in a portable PlayStation. He was decked in black sweats, socks, the same slippers I’d worn to the shower in my college dorms. He had soundly ignored us after the initial hysteria of my head injury.

“My eldest boy’s son,” Jack Sr. indicated as quietly as he could over the engine. “He’s some kind of…whatever the fuck it’s called—Ticker Tocker. Right, James? How many page-hits on that video of Ren hitting his head?”

“That’s not what they’re called,” said James.

“You know, he gets stopped outside the mall for pictures,” Jack Sr. added. “He’ll take that video down if you want him to.”

“It’s really no trouble,” I said.

We hit a new patch of the highway that screamed against the wheels at regular intervals.

“Four boys, you know,” Jack Sr. said. “I’ve got hope one’ll come back to Jersey. But I suppose Jack loves Seattle.”

He said this while looking at me, waiting, I thought, for me to respond. I could give him only a placating nod, afraid to tell a lie. Fuck if I knew what Jack Jr. wanted.

—

Jack Sr. didn’t have an accent. He told me as we rounded the river how he’d come over when he was three and had only been back to Seoul twice in his life. He’d lived in and around the tri-state area for sixty years, furthest being Seneca Falls for a period in his teens. He unfolded a long-winded account of the all-white high school of his youth, and I gritted my teeth against an ache in my neck that hadn’t gone away since the plane. I guess it hadn’t been Jack Jr.’s fault about the snow. He’d been nervous about the work trip anyway. I hoped he was at least sleeping well, one of us ought to. We turned off the highway, coasted onto a sprawling flat of asphalt, miles wide. In the distance loomed the green-topped mile-long warehouse, serviced by slow-moving trucks that pulled away from the industrial loading bays on its side. We slowed to a stop across two parking spaces. Jack Sr. ordered me to sit tight while he and James opened up the van. With a wave he summoned me, put an arm around my shoulder and walked me up, leaving James to lug the dolly up the incline. I stamped my frozen feet against the ground. Our breaths dispersed chains of fog around our heads.

“Shit,” Jack Sr. said, looking at me. “You got a hat?”

He clicked his tongue, not waiting for an answer, and swiped his own. Over my protests he jammed it on me. After the roar of the van and the hollow din of the freeway, my ears rang as they adjusted to the silence. There were a couple others, guys working in pairs and groups of three. Several were already on their way back, dollies laden high with cellophane-wrapped iceboxes on wooden pallets. The market had moved from the Financial District in 2005 and was now twice the drive for them, Jack Sr. told me as they approached. “Worth it for the quality, you know,” he said—rubbed his pointer finger and thumb together in front of my face as he said this, illustrating for me. “You wouldn’t believe how many scam artists buy frozen,” he said. “Five-star restaurants in Manhattan! All frozen.”

He pointed up to the shadowy guys loading the trucks up front. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. Almost definitely mob guys. I mean, it’s the Bronx.”

James, tugging the dolly, batted Jack Sr.’s arm down before I could.

Inside, the warehouse swelled into view, colder than the chill outside. Down an open walkway in the middle lay hundreds of tables, stacked boxes packed with ice, tanks spilling water out onto the floor and into the drains. We were hit by the smell first, nothing like the supermarket: entrails, brine, chum. Scallops pulsing in saltwater vats. An octopus wholesaler, laying each tangle of white and purple tentacles out like cabbages. Away from the tables were teams of guys breaking up the larger catches. Gleaming portions of red tuna cut straight from the carcass by samurai sword. Grouper and Pacific halibut speared on hooks and hoisted into the air by chains. Every so often Jack Sr. stopped near one of the tables, engaging in hushed conversation, after which several sleepy-eyed men in rubber aprons and boots would load an icebox onto James’s dolly. Jack Sr. opened each one, taking a metal hook off the dolly’s handle and hoisting a fish out of the ice by the gills, examining it carefully before laying it back down. We moved further inward, beyond the traditional fare: the specialty guys cracking open sea urchins flown in from Hokkaido, Santa Barbara, orange flesh bared to the lights as we passed. Tanks of red frog crabs, flat fish carpeting the bottoms of the glass, snails in buckets on the floor, jellyfish, red-spined sea cucumber.

“Anything special you like? We’re doing a little dinner in the restaurant, when Jack gets in.”

I declined, politely, avoiding eye contact with a tank of conger eels. I could tell it disappointed him. We crossed to the other end of the hangar, by which time James’s dolly was full. I could hear him struggling to drag it alongside us. “He’s okay,” Jack Sr. assured me, when I stooped to help. “Kid doesn’t play any sports. Told his dad it was a mistake.”

I couldn’t remember if Jack Jr. had ever told me he had a nephew. More than one, I was sure. He was the youngest of his brothers. It was something of his that I’d envied, shut up in my room when I visited home, reminded of the quiet nights, my own parents in bed by nine, television to fill the silence. I had never even shared a beer with my father. Jack Sr., now, he could talk for days if somebody let him.

“You should hear him go on about you, Ren,” Jack Sr. said to me. We were out of the warehouse through the hangar doors. I caught James’s eye for a moment, mutual commiseration, pleased to think that for a split second we could be allies. We reached the van and started loading. It was nearing four in the morning.

“Jack’s never brought anybody home before,” Jack Sr. said, tossing James a bundle of bike cables to tie it all down. “We were worried for a while whether he ever wanted to…you know—”

Of course, we’d only been together a year. I hadn’t even realized his birthday was coming around until I’d looked it up myself. And here I was. It was fast but not unreasonable. I hoped. Anyway, Jack Jr. would surely not meet my own father until way, way further down the line, considering my parents barely spoke English. My father asked only occasionally if I was dating these days, wanting no more than a yes or a no, and—I’m sure—only because my mother had made him.

It had happened so quietly, the week after I’d come home after college and told them. I didn’t know the word in Korean. After several failed attempts I gave up. “Ho-mo-sex-u-al,” I said carefully, looking between them across the kitchen table. My mother made dinner that night, my father bloviated over the news. He was in high spirits that weekend as the South Korean president had recently been imprisoned. We said goodnight and the next morning continued on without interruption. A month later, while I looked for roommates in Seattle, my father said something about a sum of money they’d saved up for my wedding that they wanted me to use to pay rent. “Why now?” I’d said.

“It’s not like you’ll—” my father trailed off, realizing I was looking straight at him. After a minute or so, he shuffled away to the kitchen. It took him another week after I’d started working to call me again. “I didn’t mean,” he said in English, which is what he did to avoid long conversations.

“I know,” I told him. He hung up.

Jack Sr. laughed, nervously, as I hadn’t said anything.

“Hey, Ren,” he offered, timidly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” I told him, coming to. “No, it’s not that, it’s—”

We ran out of things to say. James shouted from the other side of the van.

—

The restaurant, still dark, was tucked behind a Chinese bakery. James, nodding off in the back with the fish, let me relieve him, and at six a.m., Jack Sr. and I hauled the pallets to the kitchen. A crew of sleepy young guys met us there, rubbing their eyes in with their forearms. They grunted in agreement with Jack Sr.’s observations, double-stock of the salmon this week for the white customers, dirt-cheap mackerel for the Asians. They set to work breaking it all down, filling the glass bar out in front with fresh cuts. It was almost five. The place was small, barely enough room for ten tables, but smelled warm and real. Jack Sr. had a few newspaper clippings up by the doors, reviews from their opening weekend, a feature in the local Fort Lee Times. A pot boiling on the stove. Jack Sr. pressed a bowl into my hands. Kimchi jjigae like my mother made, simmered a couple hours with tofu and pork belly. I brought breakfast out to James in the back of the van and sat with him, slurping the dregs and last grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl.

“I can’t believe you let him take you along today,” James said, after a while.

I shrugged. “I think I’d rather have the coma, in hindsight.”

James smiled, fleetingly. “He wants to give it to Jack, the restaurant,” he said.

“That’s good.”

“He really did like it,” James said. “That wasn’t a lie. Before he moved to Seattle they did all the runs together.”

The soup, scalding hot, felt good collecting in my stomach. My fingers, which had been numb for hours, were starting to regain their color.

“How many views on that video, by the way?”

James dug out his phone. “14K. Nobody’s awake.” He looked at me. “I really will take it down if you want.”

—

The van putted through the polished development by the river. I glanced up at the houses, wondering if anybody could hear, remembering that if Jack Sr. had been clanging and roaring through Bergen County in his demented fish van for twenty years already, he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. We let James off by a white house near a dense line of trees. They’d all be over for dinner: James’s father, Jack Jr.’s two older brothers. I felt relieved. There wasn’t much more I could do to embarrass myself. James said his goodbyes. Seized with a whoosh of hot blood through my ears I held my fist out through the open window. James considered it, then bumped his knuckles against mine. A fresh dust of snow had fallen over the green lawns as we pulled away. The sun peeked lazily up over the suburbs and their manufactured tree lines. Jack Sr. slowed us to a stop in front of the left side of a brick duplex along a massively inclined road. I felt the van’s weight redistribute as its brakes groaned their last whisper. I made a move to open the door.

“I hope I didn’t scare you back there, Ren.”

I glanced longingly up at the house, the beds inside. Jack Sr. made a couple motions in the air with his hands, starting and stopping to say what he wanted. My limbs felt filled with sand. I tried to let him know I understood.

“Your parents must be happy about you guys.”

I went to nod again, but looking across the seat divider at Jack Sr., staring fondly at me, stopped myself. I was speaking before I realized I was. I didn’t want to say it, too tired to stop myself. “They love me,” I said. “It’s just…I don’t get the feeling they understand, sometimes.”

It had come out of me in one breath. Shame bloomed up inside me. I wanted to be shown to a bed as fast as possible. Jack Sr. took his key out of the ignition. I realized that I was still wearing his hat and pulled it off me, handing it to him.

“You know,” Jack Sr. said, kneading the wool cap between his fingers, “Jack didn’t live with us for about three weeks after he came out to his mother and me. We never told him to go and he never said he was going to, but—” He tried to laugh. “We were different, things were different, which…well, you know.”

And I nodded, because I did know.

“He came back, we said we were sorry and he said he understood. Pretty soon after he started coming along for the fish runs again.” Jack Sr. smiled at me.

The van gave a click as he unlocked our doors and slid out to the ground. I followed him up to the front door where we left our shoes and tiptoed onto white prefab carpeting. Jack Sr. ushered me through the door closest to the kitchen, still dark, imbued all throughout with the cool blue light of the morning. Jack’s childhood room. A desk stood pushed to the corner, facing the window out to the street. Snow was starting to fall heavy outside, blanketing the van and the curb. The room looked sanitized, a space once made for four boys, dwindling as each left home, repurposed now for the erstwhile son home for a couple days at a time. Just one bed left. Still some books on the shelving above the bed. Plastic soccer trophy on the windowsill. Jack Sr. put his hand on my shoulder. One last time he felt my head, the back of my neck, and I let him.

“I’ll wake you if Jack calls.” The door shut behind him.

I stayed put, thinking Jack Jr., if he were here, might have put me on the sofa outside or at least might have swept the room before I’d come in. I’d seen only one picture of his from high school. A lanky kid cradling a basketball, T-shirt under the school jersey, gaps in his face and arms where he’d since filled out, grown to size. I wondered if this was the very same bed and suspected that it was if the soccer trophy—on further inspection, National Storytelling League trophy—was any indication. I lifted the covers, maneuvering myself inside. I didn’t fool myself thinking the pillow smelled like him, it couldn’t have. I lay still, looking up at the dark crease, the meeting of the wall and the ceiling above. I closed my eyes, turning my head to push my nose into the sheets, and thought about what I was going to tell him.

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Review: Bone Music by Joel Peckham

Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021.

Paperback, 90 pages, $18.00.

Joel Peckham’s latest collection of poetry, Bone Music, is his most daring yet, looking with utter honesty at the cartography of healing following substantial loss. Readers of his past work will recall that over a decade ago, the poet experienced a car accident overseas in which he lost his wife and eldest son. In Bone Music, Peckham continues his excavation of grief, sharing a full spectrum of emotions in which he maps the contours of love, joy, fear, sadness, loss, and abundance. These incantatory poems explore both sound and movement in their making of meaning, as readers become in many ways seated in a raft while wave after wave of ocean rocks and lulls and spins—just as any good music does.

Bone Music has a tight focus, concentrating on memory and healing, of rage and the numerous navigations en route to forgiveness, both of others and oneself. The collection has a strong theme of motion, with numerous poems that feature vehicles. In poems such as “Suffering Tape,” Peckham proves himself to be, once again, a god of sound and alliteration: “I could see myself spool out to blues and reds with golds of early evening sun and shadow as I shook and took the shape of starlings flocked or the flame of sunfish staring up at night from the windshield’s blue-black pond.” Here, readers are treated to a feast of momentum, a furious dance on the page.

Yet, this collection, is not intended as simply a quick read. It asks the reader to dwell in the poems, reading them again and again, steeping in the words as a cup of tea grows more potent over time—as memory also grows and fades and becomes in its potency, clearer and not in its being. The book contains two sections: the first, The Quantum Soul, seems to function as an exploration of the interior, of memory and soul-searching, our cosmic relationship to mortality and philosophy, and the second section, In Case of Emergency, as a deeper probe into the nature of life. The latter is an unabashed look at the poet’s own failings and guilt, how one seeks to repair damages, despite repeated trauma, with a will to better one’s self.

Bone Music opens with “Prologue,” in which the line breaks emphasize a kind of rhythm, where the ending line “and was lost” sets the stage for what is to come—a book about various kinds of loss. The five-part “The Wreckage That We Travel In” is particularly astounding, beginning with these lines: “The world must take us by surprise—in spite of all the warnings, all evidence. Even a man shaped by loss takes each new blow in bafflement.” The poem is the reader’s first glimpse of a fascinating form that Peckham echoes throughout the rest of the collection, wherein what seem like prose poems exhibit sudden line breaks in the middle of a sentence:

. . . a matter of perspective and a sheet of glass all that separates the one from the many, this life from the next—what could send us crashing, flying into it? As a boy hurtling

up 93 with my father to visit his father in the nursing home, I loved to stare directly at the trees until they blurred and I could feel that killing speed and imagine I was me and not me and me . . .

Here’s another example from “In Case of Emergency”:

. . . When everything is always at my earlobe breathing

and heavy and hot with lungs as full as any long distance runner’s, wild-

ness is just another kind of intimacy,

an intimacy of layering upon another and another: not one clock

but thousands—all ticking, all chiming . . .

The result of this style mimics a memory, somewhat corporeal, as one thought leads to another, at times without clear transition, yet always with a certain profoundness. Poetic form, even at times in a subversion of form, is exceptional in this collection, and Peckham caters to readers who might also be poets, giving overtures to craft in poems like “RE: Like a Box”: “And if a poem is not salvation it might just be its metaphor: it does what a metaphor does: sheds it skins and slides away….” As a result, many poems become a lesson in poetry writing without compromising the core messages of the collection. Bone Music aims to bring readers along, to help them in their own personal quests.

We glimpse Peckham’s searching in poems such as “Suffering Tape,” where Peckham proclaims: “I learned what breaking meant, how it was transformation; it was crackling; it was resonant.” Or in “Going Sideways,” where the lines acknowledge and reach for greater meaning beyond self:

I do not travel backwards

easily. I circle back in widening arcs

to the same songs, the same pictures floating from between the

covers of the same books, the same unfinished arguments,

to the same desert highway under the same stars reflected on the

same dead sea.

Bone Music intends to take readers off the deep end, to dive into the waters of what living means when grief has followed a person for so long.

Perhaps the most encapsulating poem of the collection can be found in its ending. “The Locomotive of the Lord” is the poem the whole collection builds toward, in that it moves the reader from constellation into a singular picture: “This life is a beautiful / accident made of accidents we try to shape.” Bone Music closes with a precious message of gratitude for what one has, this precious life, including all that is not in the same way anymore but evermore precious in its existence.

In closing Bone Music in this way, Peckham offers a path forward. The acknowledgment of pain, even of continued pain, becomes oddly a comfort—and a source of healing through which one may fully grasp and find joy. Bone Music, as a result, becomes a guidebook for the grief-stricken. By reaching for the grayer edges of human experience, Peckham turns readers toward honesty instead of simple answers, which makes for a lasting poetry collection.

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Scranton 1929/Pontelandolfo 1861

Of the many ways in which the old man is disappointed with his daughter-in-law, her cooking is actually the worst. So when he enters his son’s apartment and is greeted by Emilia—an Austrian!—who breezily announces, “I made something special for you, Pop,” it takes all his restraint to nod, to smile, to use his stilted control of English—the only language they share—to say, “Thank you. This makes me happy.”

His son’s apartment, however, is no disappointment. Wood paneling, open space, a mild improvement over their first place in Wilkes-Barre, his grandsons huddled around the Philco enjoying a ball game. The old man has never appreciated baseball, but he’s proud Tony and Frankie do, that they’re American in a way he never could be. He nods at them—he has never given affection to little boys—and shakes his son’s hand. Carlo’s grip is strong, and the old man reddens when his son pulls him in for a hug, how free he is with his emotions not only with his family, but with everyone he encounters as one of Scranton’s premier plumbers. Once a week during the old man’s visits to the Cataldo Club, he is annoyed when someone compliments his son’s handiwork and says how friendly he is. Friendly. It’s not an Italian word.

The old man joins his son at the table and wishes he didn’t have to smell whatever it is Emilia is cooking. The whole apartment reeks of garlic and tomatoes, and he knows exactly where this is headed. “It’s red sauce and meatballs,” Carlo says to confirm. How many times he’s been served red sauce and meatballs by smiling buffoons even though no one in Italy would ever serve red sauce with meatballs. “Yes,” the old man says, agreeing that red sauce and meatballs is indeed what his daughter-in-law is preparing, “red sauce and meatballs.”

“So,” his son says, leaning back, “the boys were asking about the old country today. Weren’t you, boys? Come here to Pop.”

“No, we weren’t,” Tony pleads in his singsong voice.

“The Yankees!” Frankie cries.

“Boys.” Carlo snaps his fingers, and they turn off the radio and fall in line around the table. At least Carlo isn’t friendly with his sons. The humiliation! “Tell them something, Pop. Come on. Anything.”

Emilia calls from the stove. “You ever run into my parents visiting from Austria?”

An Italian would only greet an Austrian with spit or gunfire, and the old man is astonished that the next generation can name all of the New York Yankees while understanding so little about where they came from. The old man knows he has to reveal something but finds himself drawing a blank. He doesn’t like remembering life in the before time. How to convey an entire sunken world through one single memory? He looks at his family, and the same image as always rises—chicken, not prepared by a family member, not served in a bar, but a freshly butchered bird roasting over open flames, the way the flesh popped, how it smelled beneath the stars among the camaraderie of other soldiers. The old man remembers not Favazzina, the southern village where he grew up, not his fisherman father or the stiff stench of his clothes, not his mother forever in a nightgown, making the sign of the cross no matter what news was delivered, not even the caresses of curly-haired Gianna, the girl he assumed he’d one day marry. No, the old man remembers being summoned from his parents’ home, conscripted by the northern government post-unification. He remembers Pontelandolfo, a village very much like his own, how the powers-that-be explained that revolts across the southern half of the peninsula had to be crushed, that the citizens of Pontelandolfo had banded together and murdered forty soldiers. A message must be delivered. Unification, no, the entire soul of newborn Italy depended upon it!

The old man observes his grandchildren and their occasional glances at the silent Philco. He looks at Carlo and Emilia, wondering what they picture when they hear words like “Italy” or “Austria,” perhaps some vague dream of a simpler life, holy soil they know they’ll never step foot in. How could any of them understand marching as a group of five hundred, entering Pontelandolfo armed and ordered to kill? How could they imagine the old man as a young man surrounded by his comrades, mostly teenagers unaware that they’d even been liberated, how they opened fire on the town’s clergy, men, women, and children? His family couldn’t feel the weight of the torches, how the old man and his giddy friends hurled them through the open windows of houses, the dissonance of screams, how the heat from the burning village coupled with the August sun made the old man feel like he’d tumbled outside of his body arriving somewhere that didn’t count, not really, where anything could happen and where everything would be forgiven. They burned Pontelandolfo to dust, and, as they listened to the gunfire and cries, they feasted. Chicken roasting on open flames just beyond the fighting and all the wine they could drink. Later, the old man wondered if the government had plied them with food and alcohol just in case the soldiers were considering joining up with the people of Pontelandolfo, who resembled their own families praying for their safe returns back home. But the truth was they would’ve followed orders no matter what, that they loved being told what to do, that at the end of the day none of these decisions were theirs. It was the north. Always the north.

The old man remembers the priest they hung outside the village, how for the rest of the evening he and his friends took turns shooting at the rope above his snapped neck, how they missed and missed, laughed and laughed. He looks at his moon-faced family and wonders what exactly to say about that.

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bye bye

—after “American Pie,” sung by Leslie Cheung, a Cantopop star who died jumping off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong

boys always

haunting the gas

stationed at

the kum & go

come around yelling

happy july, all

these lives you haven’t filled

in all these teeth

a faith so deep you can

die in it, like a boy so

high up he thought the

swimming pool was full

and god willing, he

dived in it. in a

preemptive strike, patriotic, partirons

and party on! miss 中国

in 中西部,

i dismiss

their existence, a flotilla

with more in common

with a root beer vanilla

concoction than the

spanish armada, though

that too was a whipped

cream loss. dq stands

for disqualification—three

strikes & the cup is half

mosh pit half military

campaign—god is in the

good fizz—& the bottom

(beyond the caffeine &

fresh sugarcane) is concrete.

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Review: The Clearing by Allison Adair

Milkweed Editions, 2020

Hardcover, $22.00, 88 pages

Allison Adair’s debut collection, The Clearing, is a tumble down a familiar hillside that leaves the reader giggling or stuck in a blackberry bush. It is the sting of antiseptic on a hundred bramble scratches, but it is also the kiss on a forehead covered in bandages. The Clearing is painful at times, since it is a catalog of victimhood, loss, and domestic violence—desperate circumstance that sometimes ends in tragedy.

“Mother of 2 Stabbed to Death in Silverton” begins, “The woman was overheard in the town hall saying she was afraid / to do it, once and for all, that he would, like he’s said, and he did.” Adair shows little interest in overly intellectualizing sentiments. Instead, the sharp truth—like a late-night phone call—is often delivered deadpan, and the poetics do not suffer in the least. In fact, the plainspoken portrayal of surgically precise metaphors either jars the reader or leaves them misty-eyed. This poem ends on the neighbor’s front porch, “It was an accident, he said, I never meant it. They stood there still / as newsprint.”

I fear I am fixating on the grotesque, perhaps because it is captured so extraordinarily, but in truth the poetic landscapes found in The Clearing are equally delightful—the voices often nurturing and celebratory, even when wrestling with fear and darkness. In “City Life,” the narrator and her daughter are learning to live in a city full of rats: “For her, death / is the longest nap imaginable, / maybe four hours. But we always wake / at the end.” And no matter where Adair leads us—toward a mining disaster, a recurring dream, or a historical reenactment—there will likely be animals there to keep us unnerved or entertained. “I thought I knew the sound of darkness, / the slow leather collapse of a bat’s wing / folding into itself, the swollen fucking of a cloud / of them wrestling for space on the cave’s drapery.” In Adair’s world, the creatures morph continually, and the lines are winding and tourniquet tight. “A ruined animal will drag itself miles only to become / a desiccated hutch, burrow of maggots, coyote trough.”

Adair’s phrases are rural incantations that swirl in the throat like heavy smoke, and each image is refreshing as a gulp from the backyard spigot—worth returning to again and again. And beneath each poem lies a meticulous sonic foundation. There is a rhythmic precision, too, that shifts in accordance with the whims of the poet. The reader is aware of their own slow breathing, for example, when an animal is trapped or desperate. At other moments, the rhythm almost mirrors the image, such as in the closing of “Gettysburg”: “The caterpillar inches along, lost / in its sad accordion hymn.” And while there are deeply personal poems in this collection, Adair is as—if not more—interested in writing about historical events and rural places, such as “Silverton, ”a town in Colorado with no more than seven hundred residents. These poems are not unlike blue whales with hearts as big as rental cars. Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing is a light show all its own, pungent and beautiful as a prairie fire. It is a collection one shouldn’t risk lending out, if they ever want to see it again.

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The Ballet Audition

She appeared in our Leningrad apartment one afternoon, at the start of my summer break, when I was ten years old. I was showing my self-made Mary Poppins costume to our next-door neighbor Nata, leaving the door into our apartment wide open. When I came back, she was sitting in our kitchen. My mother was fussing with the tea cups wearing her ancient blue sports pants with the material on the knees stretched out like two deflated balloons. Mom said, “Say hi to Galina Vasilievna.”

Galina Vasilievna came to borrow the 500+ page JCPenny catalogue; its cover showed a model in a white beret, white sweater and a white coat. It was 1985 in Leningrad and women loaned to each other fashion magazines from beyond the Soviet border: mostly Burda from Eastern Germany, or, more rarely: Bazaar, Vogue, Elle. The most coveted magazine was always the fat American catalogue because it allowed the fullest entry into the Western fairy tale. Catalogues showed beautifully proportioned tables, chairs, sofas, dolls, dog mats, and human beings built for ordinary lives and attainable for anyone in the US, for a price. That week was my mom’s turn to keep, for four long days, the catalogue that came to us from a friend of a friend of a friend. It was our last day to host it.

“I hear that everyone in France is into bold, large patterns and bright colors. Orange, black, yellow. Stripes! That kind of thing makes you look years younger,” my mom said.

Galina Vasilievna did not respond, but smiled politely. Her long neck and straight back made her look regal, even haughty, but her eyes displayed a restrained playfulness, the kind you see on the face of a kid waiting for her turn to use the swing on the playground. A large oval amber pin in her low bun pulled her entire physical presence together with precise dignified finality. She was not in a hurry at all and seemed to enjoy herself sitting on our too-low-for-the-dining-table sofa with a red brick replacing a missing leg. At the same time I was certain that she would never visit us again. This certainty felt vaguely connected to my feeling of shame because we had an old, stained oilcloth with lilacs on the dining table while she was wearing an ivory silk blouse with three pearl buttons on its cuffs. It was as if she flew into our kitchen straight from The Hermitage ballroom. Only a short moment ago she sat at a grand piano in a long, light blue dress and played a nocturne by Chopin, simultaneously reciting Pushkin’s poetry.

I thought my mother should feel envy sitting next to this woman who was about her age, but, observing my mother, I could tell that she didn’t feel it. It was a disappointing realization for it was proof that important things were beyond my mother. The thing beyond her, right in front of us, was the elegance of this woman. Of course I didn’t call it elegance then, and while I didn’t know the right word I did ask the right question.

“Are you a ballerina?”

I asked this question still wearing the Mary Poppins costume: my friend’s mom’s long brown dress, with a belt to keep it in place, and a large collar I made out of ivory linen napkins with lace trimmings. On my head I had a gray men’s hat that my neighbor Nadia let me borrow. Mom waved her hand behind Galina Vasilievna, signaling to me to take off the hat because it was not polite to talk with someone indoors wearing a hat. But I knew the real reason: she thought the hat looked ridiculous and now felt embarrassed on my behalf. I stubbornly pretended I didn’t see mom’s signals and kept the hat on. I kept it on because I loved it. I imagined it made me look sophisticated.

Galina Vasilievna asked me to sit next to her and then told me that she used to be a ballerina and danced in the corps de ballet of the Mariinsky Theater, and that now she taught ballet at the House of Culture Ballet School. She asked me about my costume and it turned out that she adored everything about it. “You have a good taste,” she told me. I could hardly breathe inside the fog of euphoria, and my voice sounded unnaturally high when I blurted to her that I wanted to be a ballerina too.

I went to the Mariinski Theater twice with my classmates, our school’s “culture outing” program. We saw The Sleeping Beauty in the first grade and The Swan Lake in the second grade. More recently, while visiting my friend Vera, I watched the TV ballet Anuta, based on a Chekhov short story “Anna on the Neck.” It was one of those ballet productions made for TV only; they were very popular back in the day and completely ignored in my own family. That night, every female member of Vera’s family—two sisters, her mother, aunt, two grandmothers—sat down to eat dinner in front of the TV to watch that ballet, but after the mushroom soup Vera was eager to make an escape back to my flat. I wanted to stay to watch Anuta to the end, but Vera said that ballet is the dumbest art form because dancers are mute. “Watching a Chekhov short story ballet is like watching an orchestra and not hearing a peep,” she concluded. I couldn’t get her cruel comment out of my head, and, later, when she offered to let me read her copy of Great Expectations, I told her that I no longer like Dickens because he is “stupidly judgmental and can’t enjoy things in the moment.”

That day, in our kitchen, Galina Vasilievna asked me to dance for her and point my feet, and do a split, and then a “bridge,” a deep bend backwards. I took off my hat and performed each request with a manic grin on my face. At one point my linen collar fell on the floor because it was not stitched to the dress. I was ready to do anything for her and was hoping for more requests or maybe even corrections, but suddenly she turned to my mom, and her tone of voice changed from a violin to a bass.

“Your daughter has remarkable feet and she is very flexible. Would you consider enrolling her at our school? We are auditioning girls her age in two weeks.”

That night I pulled the blanket over my head and entered the living room of the great Maurice Petipa, the choreographer behind The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and other classics. I saw his room on TV in the film about Anna Pavlova, who was born in 1881 and became one of the most famous ballerinas of all time. In the film, Petipa’s living room is exquisitely furnished in pastel colors, and the great man himself, in a white vest with a black bow, is elderly, bearded, and aristocratic. He presides over harmony, refinement, and culture. In this room, ten-year-old Anna Pavlova stands before Petipa, an enormous painting of Tzar Alexander III behind her. Petipa bows to Anna, and her audition for the Imperial School of Ballet commences. She shows him her flexibility, her eyes radiate pure deadly voltage of happiness, and she wears a long navy dress with a tiny white lace collar snugly wrapping her neck. Afterwards Petipa concludes that she is ready to be admitted into the ballet school.

Two days before my audition a very unpleasant thing happened to me. That day I was sent to my grandma’s for the weekend and accompanied her when she went to her hairdresser, located inside a supermarket, a ten-minute walk from her flat. Grandma, or babyshka, as I always called her, had weak, swollen feet, and it always took us forever to walk because she had to make frequent stops to rest. Our trail was muddy since that particular suburban housing area was relatively new, still under ongoing or abandoned construction, and it had rained recently. Every time I jumped over the mud puddle babyshka predicted that next time I would slip and fall. Babyshka’s weak legs could not jump over puddles and sometimes she ended up stepping right in the middle of them. As we walked she was telling me, again, about walking to the Neva River with a metal bucket for water in freezing cold during WWII when Leningrad was under the Siege.

On the way to the main artery Budapeshtksaya Street, where the hair salon was located, we took a short cut through an inner courtyard surrounded by Soviet-style block apartment buildings. When we passed through this courtyard we walked by a big, black rectangular bunker, a leftover relic from WWII. Being near that bunker made me feel cold horror every time. Babyshka often told me about the war, and the Leningrad Siege: about babies in tiny coffins on sleds, and how all the cats, dogs, and rats were eaten and all the furniture burned to stay warm. That bunker was once a place of safety, but it was jet black, had no windows, and its corners were rounded, making it look even creepier. I once saw a scary old man without a leg peeing into the lilac bush next to the bunker. He was wailing quietly, pitifully, like an abandoned, hurt animal.

At the hair salon it turned out that babyshka had arranged a haircut for me as well, free of charge. I rejected this plan because I was growing my hair out for a ballet bun. It was already difficult to do a bun with my shoulder-length hair. Babyshka and the hairdresser took turns trying to talk me into the haircut, “a little clean trim,” but I refused to budge from my decision. Our walk back was longer than eternity because babyshka did not utter a single word, stopped even more frequently, and sighed deeply.

When my mom arrived to pick me up she was furious. When will we have another opportunity to visit a hairdresser? Free of charge! And by the way, according to experts, trimming hair regularly helps hair grow fuller. And why did I have to upset babyshka, babyshka who wants me to look my best, babyshka with a weak heart, elevated blood pressure, and swollen feet. I pretended that I hadn’t been listening, but in fact I heard everything distinctly, saw each word in my mind’s eye as if it were written in large, red, throbbing neon letters. I began to worry about babyshka and watched her every move, half-expecting to see her collapse before my eyes. I knew I was a criminal and secretly feared that I would now suffer a punishment I deserved. Just in case God existed I prayed to him to punish me in absolutely any way he wanted, but not during the ballet audition. I then began to feel really ashamed of myself. How could I be so cold and heartless and think about my audition when babyshka’s health was more important than all of ballet and opera combined?

Back at our place, while my mom chatted on the phone with her best friend, I locked myself in the bathroom. I had a big scab on my knee from the time I fell from my friend’s tall bike. Earlier that day babyshka would strike my hand every time I wanted to remove even a tiny bit of that scab. So, while my mom was on the phone, I got to work and successfully removed the entire scab, and then enlarged the wound, removing healthy skin all around it. The area on my knee was large, red, and throbbing. I looked at it and imagined the audition committee, including Galina Vasilievna, looking at my knee with revulsion and pity. It was painful to bend the leg. I wanted to scream because—obviously—I was a complete idiot.

The day of the audition arrived and we exited Petrogradskaya subway station and then stood in a long line full of girls, ballet buns, tight-lipped moms spilling out of the building onto the street. Moms were checking out other girls to assess their thinness. Girls were checking out other moms to assess thinness of girls in the future. Looking around I thought that every mom in line was far inferior to my mom. My mom was beautiful and very thin. Natasha, my classmate, once told me that when she grows up she wants to look exactly like my mom. This memory made me feel a little better, but I was still amidst the sea of thin girls, many flexible like chewing gum because they took gymnastics at elite Soviet gymnastics studios, having been stretched by their parents for ballet and gymnastics in their infancy. Yet, I was certain that Maurice Petipa would never want a chewing gum.

House of Culture Ballet School was not the impossible-to-get-into Vaganova Ballet Academy, previously The Imperial Ballet School from which Anna Pavlova had graduated, but it was easily second best in Leningrad. Ballet was the USSR’s space program inside the Imperial Russia spacesuit, and only a handful of schools were allowed to carry out its mission. At these schools bodies were trained to fly for swan roles, training was free of charge, and the mission rested on a belief that ballet ought to be developed only in the right body. Those who got in were Chosen for the Future.

In the dressing room I got undressed down to my tank top and underwear, affixed a new Band-Aid to my knee, and entered the studio when my name was called. The judges presided over a long table. One of them was Galina Vasilievna. She wore the ivory blouse I remembered, and her head was lowered to her notebook, where she was making notes. My heart was jumping out through my throat, but I managed to do the plies, the tandus, I pointed my feet, arched my back, jumped up from the first position, then from the second, galloped across the room. When I lifted my right leg to the side, the woman who had measured my height, neck, and length of arms, held my leg by the ankle, slapping my knee hard, on the Band-Aid, to make me keep it straight and then lifted the leg as high as it could go. It went so high I could see my toes just by slightly turning my eyes to the upper right, but when she let go of my foot it did not want to stay in the high spot and fell to the floor with a forceful bang. In panic I looked at the judges, wanting to see Galina Vasilievna’s reaction, and saw that the ivory blouse was not Galina Vasilievna at all. Inside the blouse was an old woman with a skinny neck and a long, pointed nose.

Afterwards, in the foyer, I waited forever for the results to be posted. At last, the woman who had slapped me on the knee pinned the list to the wall next to the closed door of the studio. Girls and moms poured to the list, and most girls were crying. At first I couldn’t see anything, and then I could, and read the list again and again because my name wasn’t there. I kept re-reading, stubbornly, refusing to budge from my spot, and other girls were pushing me to make room for them.

My mother came up to me, held my hand, and we walked outside. We walked back to Petrogradskaya subway in silence. She then said, “You know, dear, these people are experts, they know best and they can tell if ballet is right for you. What about diving? I know you love it too. You can start with a diving group at a SKA pool in the fall. My friend Lusya knows someone who coaches the diving team and they can probably take you.”

Her words helped me enormously. I held onto what she said as if it were a rope I could use to climb out of a dark pit. I started thinking about Lake Kruglovskoe and imagined climbing to that secret high spot we discovered with Masha and Lera, the spot we called “insanity flight.” I pictured myself walking along the south side of the cliff, where an old bicycle could be seen sticking through the water because it was the shallow side of the lake, ankle-deep. I imagined walking to the highest point and then jumping into the lake, straight onto the rocks, feeling my legs break when I land. I lie on the rocks with my legs broken, no: one leg broken, shattered to pieces below the knee. I’m looking up at the sky, hearing someone call my name, searching for me, but I’m lying there completely still and silent, slowly slipping out of consciousness.

Interrupting my story my mom said, “Well, what did you expect, dear? It’s no use grieving so dramatically. Mary Poppins would never despair like that.”

“Mary Poppins graduated from the world-famous ballet school of Madame Corry,” I said.

I never read the book by Travers; my knowledge about Mary Poppins derived entirely from a popular Soviet film loosely based on that book. In that film Mary Poppins takes the children to her old ballet school and introduces them to her beloved ballet teacher Madame Corry, who never ages. The actress playing Madame Corry was a Bolshoi Ballet ballerina in real life.

I wanted to be left alone with my story and not talk, so I said, “It’s okay. The upside is that now I can get a haircut. A short bob with bangs, like on that model you liked.”

In my story my mom was rushing to the cliff looking for me and eventually she saw me from above. I was very small, very still, and way below. She saw that my leg had been totally shattered and thought that I might be dead. When I got to this point in my story I started to cry in real life. My whole face was wet, even my hands, even my dress.

When we reached Pionerskaya subway station I suddenly realized, with a satisfying jolt of insight, that the stone I land on after I jump is covered with slimy moss. When I land I slide off the stone with full force.

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Garbage Day

Out the window a squirrel’s noshing on a quesadilla,

paws clasped around a tortilla shard as if mid-prayer

its prayers were answered. I’m making dinner again:

salmon filets like flagstones made from moon,

a cube of butter in the skillet spreading its skirts

while on the cutting board an onion heretics the air.

The truth is sometimes I call your name because I need you

to come look at this, look at how alive I am,

and sometimes how alive I am can only be seen
by what’s happening around me: two people cheering

for a dumpster-diving tree rat, one’s hair

waterfalling onto the other’s shoulder, joy

like a school of minnows swimming overhead—

another glorious day where we have nothing to bury

besides our appetites. Listen:
the dishes in the sink aren’t going to elope

tonight. Let’s admire the sky’s tablecloth,

its chorus of spilled salt. Let’s clasp

our bodies like two hands praying

and crisp the edges of grace.

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The Night My Number Tripled

in my recent bloodwork chart, I saw it and I fled.

Panic ripped through me like sallow gas

and as an animal would,

I must have believed

I could hide from my own leaking math. Pregnancy

or tumor—those were the options

and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted

less. Around and around I went

in my apartment parking lot as if pursued

through carmine alleyways. Oh, my blood

and its mutable omens. My brain and its end

of days. It didn’t matter

that the dusk was beautiful in the early

rainy season when the sky takes

on the plush and tropical hues of stone

fruits so I could remember that I lived

in a place far but not too far

from the ocean. Magnolia flowers sat

primly in their teacups. Gray and white

birds shone where they flew like lights

off moving water. It started to get dark.

My parents couldn’t find me.

My boyfriend was asleep

halfway across the world. I walked as if to leave

behind my body, though I understood

I had to receive what it offered me.

So this is what it means

to be alone, I said inside myself

and to myself as a violet wind pushed through

the palm fronds above me, initiating a sound I recognized

like the rustle of dry grasses

before a storm, as the first

stars opened their eyes to nightfall

the way an apocalypse can mean

to reveal.

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Review: Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman

Black Sparrow Press, 2020

Paperback, $15.95, 224 pages

One of the few good things to come out of 2020 was Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by Wanda Coleman, skillfully edited by poet Terrance Hayes. Describing Coleman’s work is not an easy task. Her outspoken work stretches for miles and leaves shockwaves where it lands. Hayes describes her as a “grenade of brilliance, boasts, and braggadocio.” Having lived on the edges of the poetry elitists, her body of work often neglected, she was still referred to as the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles by those who valued her work. A native daughter of L.A., born in 1946 in the Watts neighborhood, Coleman also wrote novels, nonfiction, and short stories. Known mostly for her poetry, she left behind a large volume of work and a legion of fans.

Wicked Enchantment includes selected poems from eight of her published collections. The book opens with an illuminating section entitled “Wanda In Her Own Words” that includes quotes from her other writing and interviews. There, Coleman says, “My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I’ve become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled . . . I am glassed in by language as well as by the barriers of my dark skin and financial embarrassment.” Thus, the book is off and running, and delicious dilemmas of many kinds run through the entire collection.

Coleman’s voice as a Black woman fighting against gender and racial oppression is undeniably striking. Through poems like “Essay on Language,” Coleman gives the poetic middle finger to naysayers and cowards, “trying to be the / best i can spurred by blackness but they keep telling me the / best fashion in which to escape linguistic ghettoization / is to / ignore the actuality of blackness blah blah blah and it will / cease to / have factual power over my life. which doesn’t / make sense to me . . .” In those lines, she mocks the ivory tower advising her to take it easy and to be nice. Instead, she is “spurred by blackness” to sniff out racisms and other degradations, and she doesn’t hesitate to make them plain and clear. In “Essay on Language 6,” Coleman writes,

there are those who have no passion but who

are sensitive enough to sense the void within

and therefore must imagine passion. i often find

that among that kind, there are those who

detest the truly passionate out of an envious rage

that has always faced us passionate ones.

Sometimes the poems are surprising, laced with humor and irreverence. The title alone of “I Ain’t Yo Earthmama” suggests trouble, and then the first line throws down the gauntlet: “boogers are not my forte.” Exactly whose forte are boogers? Despite her claim, Coleman does quite well with boogers, at least as a jumping off point. From there, she goes on to combine Poseidon, experimental sex, and vomit in this juggernaut of a poem.

Coleman continually pushes into new territory, seeking poetic freedom. In “Dream 924,” the speaker drives a car, “and i’m flying as the speedometer / needle presses urgently against the edge. ah – the power. i / am looking for the answer. and i move forward . . .” In that speeding urgency toward freedom, Coleman has picked up descriptions like, as Hayes has described her, a “flesh-eating poet,” while others have described her as simply mean. Coleman’s intensity can be felt throughout Wicked Enchantments with lines such as “pseudo-intellectuals with suck-holes for brains” (from “American Sonnet 3”), but it’s the quiet moments in poems such as “The Saturday Afternoon Blues” where Coleman’s mastery is best experienced:

saturday afternoons are killers

when the air is brisk and warm

ol’ sun he steady whispers

soon the life you know will be done

This languid summer scene, which could feel invigorating, instead showcases Coleman’s adept ability to layer grief within quiet, even sunny, moments. To hark back to the speeding car from “Dream 924,” that same car that pushes the speed limit is perhaps most powerful when simply idling in the sun, all its inherent force just waiting beneath the hood.

An already strong collection, the book hits hyper-drive with the inclusion of work from Coleman’s last book, Mercurochrome. In “American Sonnet 94,” she writes:

weeper. this is your execution

weeper. this is your groveling stone

weeper. yours is the burst & burnings of a city

With each “weeper,” followed by those strangely indefinite almost percussive periods, Coleman hits a bass drum of sorrow, and the propulsive music continues throughout the book’s final section. The poems here jump as if alive, as if charged from within. “Thiefheart” is full of stunning one-liners—“i’d steal the t from the end of time”—and ends with a line that seems achingly prescient, given our current American moment of racial discord and political upheaval: “i’d steal the poison from this muthaland.”

Coleman’s poems are electric and profoundly inspiring. They make readers want to write poems, to read more poems, to have more faith in poetry—more faith in the difficult task of living—and to shove this book into as many hands as possible. If someone is disenchanted with poetry, or with the state of the world, I recommend reading Wicked Enchantment. Wanda Coleman’s poems turn on the lights. They set off sparks.

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Person of Interest + Sad Boy Public Relations

Person of Interest

山旮旯 or san ka la—a cantonese phrase meaning a place in the middle of nowhere

that’s where we met

千里眼 & 顺风耳 are two folkloric figures in china—together they’re unstoppable

顺风耳 can hear the subtlest of sounds, carried over great distances by the wind

i’ll be discreet, the coast is clear

千里眼 can see over great distances, span thousands of 里

confuse oresteia with osteria, smooth me over royal jelly

a 里 is a unit of measurement also found in korea & japan

conquer me royal navy, come here my possibility tuna

a metaphor for an impossible distance is 十万八千里 (108000里)

state college is an hour & a half from harrisburg. that’s the distance i would go for you. you drove 5

hours to see your ex

in mandarin, li (里) sounds like li you (理由)—or reason

a commie obsessed with me, commie eye candy, who wudda thought

给我一个理由忘记

hey, low sperm count

kiss me open mouth, swift like taylor

the critics have spoken: i’d rather be alone than settle for the bare minimum

rejecting you seems like the easiest thing in the world (you want to be discarded)

you play too much but seduction is a game for two

i hope one day , we are merit ,

young buck , home skillet ,

Sad Boy Public Relations

1. CONSISTENCY

u type immaculate to me—do u hate me

2. NONCHALANCE

untangle urself for a moment & cheer me up

3. CHARM

ur prodigious

a savant

ur gf’s so dumb she thinks contemporary music means the beatles

4. DRINKING

u obfuscate

cling onto flimsy girl

5. EFFORTLESSNESS

i kiss two fingers pinched together

pretend it is u

6. ATHLETICISM

the closest u got to sports was athlete’s foot

i feel u hard as pear

7. DISCIPLINE

hold me down

tell me u don’t like boy

8. PUBLIC SPIRITEDNESS

seel me like a hawk

i can be tame if u give me what i want

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That’s Often the Hardest + Diva

That’s Often the Hardest

Now and then I turn a corner in Brooklyn
and I see something lovely.
A cherry blossom, a blush-red brick,
children frolicking and finding something
to fight about. Unsuspecting, I’ll be
wearing my headphones, noise-canceling,
quite loud, listening to Donna Summer. A joy thunderous

will wake me from my wakesleep. A laugh,
a shout, a story told in excitation, coming
from one gleaming face or many with
the amber light of late day making the whole wide earth

look young.

When I see these stirring, affirming things

I cannot help but think you’d love them

were you here to see them, too.

Then I remember that you’re still alive

and all that I must do is call.

Diva

I’ve long dreamt of being Beyonce, waking up
to a view of the Alps in a pink silk robe.
I pick up the phone by my bed to let my
stylist know I’m awake to be draped in full glamor.

Traipse along marble floors to a kitchen filled with

peaches just ripe. My children would come greet me,

all smiles, having slept soundly. No radiator hissing

like a violent cat to keep them up at night.

I’ve long dreamt of the gas tank always full and
a driveway so that I never have to circle the block.
A pool when I need to cool off. A chef when I don’t want to cook.

But most of all, I want to sing
like someone beloved
in an outfit like a hymn.
To have people who love me
cheer just for standing before them.

To be celebrated. To be queen.

And after all that, I’d get to fall asleep
right when I lie down. That’s what I imagine it’s like.

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Interview: Annie Kim

Annie Kim’s second collection, Eros, Unbroken (2020), is the winner of the 2019 Washington Prize and follows her debut collection, Into the Cyclorama, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2016) and finalist for the Foreword INDIES Best Poetry Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Four Way Review, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Plume, and Pleiades, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service and teaches public interest lawyering. She is also a violinist, and as poet, she has collaborated with composer Aaron Stepp. This interview took place over email.

Rebecca Morgan Frank for The Florida Review:

In Eros, Unbroken, the preface poem, “Confession,” introduces us to two characters in this collection: Scarlatti and his friend Farinelli, a castrato. What drew you to these two figures as subjects?

Annie Kim:

One day I was listening to a Scarlatti album by pianist Anne Queffélec. I’d always thought of Scarlatti’s sonatas as these tiny, quick, chandelier-like things. But as I listened to the rollercoaster of emotions in the second piece on this album, the K.27 sonata, I was struck by how stormy and personal it felt. I was hooked.

As I Googled away, I learned that no one knows much about Scarlatti’s life. But I did find page after page about his friend, the singer Farinelli. Like a lot of promising young male singers at the time, Farinelli had been castrated as a boy to preserve the beauty of his voice. He went on to become the preeminent opera singer of his day. It’s hard to picture now, but castrati in 18th-century Italy were like K-Pop royalty. These boys were groomed for years to become the next big thing. Eventually, then, after a successful career on-stage, Farinelli met Scarlatti in the court of Philip V, where Scarlatti had been working as a music instructor to the princess. Farinelli was hired by the queen to sing each night to her mad husband as a form of musical therapy.

As you can tell, there’s plenty of drama here already! In a strange way, though, that drama seemed like the perfect counterpart to the story I was starting to write about my own life. I had been working on emotionally raw poems about my early relationship with my father. Writing about the body—my body—as the object of violence was something I’d never done before. Not fun. Locating an analogue of sorts in Farinelli made me feel better, more connected. The two “Castrato” poems in my book, then, emerged from my efforts to imagine Farinelli as a boy sacrificing his body for his music.

TFR:

In “Uses for Music,” you begin, “Because there is no soundtrack for the brain. / Because nothing has the beauty of a cage / you can enter when you want and leave behind.” This collection is steeped in music, from musical terms to musical forms and instruments (including the body.) What is your own background with music?

AK:

My musical background is pretty typical for an Asian American—I started playing violin in grade school, took lessons, did youth orchestras. Then, after a 13-year hiatus, I started playing again in a local chamber orchestra around the same time that I began my MFA writing program. Performing music has always given me a crucial emotional outlet. Now, those emotions are performed, as the quote from “Uses for Music” acknowledges. But those performances are still cathartic and restorative.

I think my musical experience also affects my everyday writing in subtle ways. It definitely informs how I think about progression or development. Playing Western classical music allows you to absorb musical structures like sonata form, theme and variation, preludes and fugues. These are all about creating patterns and then disrupting them. And, at the most basic level, you’re always moving between the poles of tension and release because you’re always driving toward resolution. Fast then slow, loud then soft. While I’m not consciously thinking about any of these musical strategies when I’m writing, they’re somewhere deep in my bones, in my inner ear.

Music also took on a major role in Eros, Unbroken. At a symbolic level, the body of the violin—my violin—became a metaphor for my own body. Both bodies can be violated, broken, and, fortunately, mended. In fact, I was practicing one day while writing this book when the soundpost inside my violin came loose from its upright position. Though the soundpost is just a tiny wooden stick, no bigger than a dowel, it’s essential to creating the violin’s voice. That dislodging felt terrible but revelatory—it was the necessary snapping that has to happen when you start grappling with old traumas, as I was.

I was also obsessed with trying to convey musical counterpoint—multiple notes, multiple voices—in words. It’s not really possible. But in the long sequences in the book (“Violins: Violence” and “A Hysteresis Loop”) and, most visibly, in “After Sonata Form,” I tried to suspend and juxtapose voices so that the reader could “hear” the first line still ringing a little even when the second line comes in.

TFR:

Your poem “Confession” even ends with the definition of counterpoint. Can you say more about engaging in this sort of poetic counterpoint with the collection’s larger narrative threads? Did this affect the overall shaping of this book?

AK:

Yes, and in every possible way! At its heart, counterpoint is about having your cake and eating it too. Two voices carry on simultaneously, going wherever they want but moving in ways that create productive tension and contrast. I was convinced I could find a way to counterpoint my autobiographical story with the Farinelli/Scarlatti one despite how crazy that seemed. I won’t lie—there was a lot of cursing.

Creating counterpoint with these two lines meant that I had to think hard about how to sequence the poems in the book. Certain material had to be introduced at particular points for narrative reasons. At the same time, I found that simply alternating story lines in an A/B/A/B fashion didn’t work. After a million different mash-ups and months of trial and error, I landed on a rough order that zigzagged between the two stories at moments that made emotional and dramatic sense. And, of course, a year after that first draft, I switched things around again!

Counterpoint also made me focus on how to make each story line stylistically distinctive. This was hard because the poems in the autobiographical strand ranged a lot in form. For instance, I had multi-page sequences composed primarily in short-lined, irregular stanzas, alongside a number of more traditional one-page poems. The Farinelli/Scarlatti pieces I decided to set as letters and dialogues. While I didn’t attempt writing in an archaic diction, I did use loose blank verse to give them a bit more cohesion.

TFR:

Can you talk a little bit about your path to becoming a poet? When and where did you first come to poetry?

AK:

Though I read poetry here and there throughout college, I didn’t try to write it until I was nearly thirty. I was practicing law. I was unhappy. I thought a lot about whether I wanted to have kids and decided that I didn’t. Late one night while I was having trouble falling asleep, I went downstairs and wrote a sonnet because that was the only poetic form I knew. It was a bad sonnet. But writing it felt so good! I started reading poems, writing poems, and then went to a few writers’ conferences where I met some wonderful teachers like David Baker. I eventually bit the bullet and applied to the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College which, miraculously, let me in. I was so new to writing that it hurt. After graduating, I still felt adrift and unsure of myself, as many people do.

Really, it wasn’t until I stopped practicing law and started working at my alma mater, the University of Virginia School of Law, that I finally had the mental space to write well. Working with students taught me how to be more open, vulnerable, and emotionally expressive—all of which helped my creative work.

TFR:

You not only have a background as a lawyer, but in fact also serve as a dean in the Law School at the University of Virginia. Do you find that this background, with your training and experience in legal rhetoric, influences your approach to poetry, particularly your poetic arguments and structures?

AK:

All law students go through a writing boot camp when they start school. In that boot camp, you’re drilled on how to structure your writing, sentence by sentence. There’s even an acronym for how to organize your paragraphs called IRAC or CRAC. It goes like this: Issue (or Conclusion) – Rule – Application – Conclusion. Legal writing forces you, then, to get to your point quickly, signal where you’re going, and build in explicit transitions.

So when you consider how much poetry relies on intuition, surprise, jump cuts and leaps, you can imagine what it’s like for lawyers to write poetry! At the same time, all that focus on structure and argument probably forced me to be more critical of my writing than I would otherwise have been. Does this statement make logical sense? If it doesn’t make sense, does it still belong here?

These days I’m much more interested in loose poetic structures than in arguments. Structures that progress and resolve, sometimes narratively, but not always in fully explicable ways. How does an extended image, for instance, complete the “argument” of a narrative passage, for instance? How do tonal shifts and modulations “argue” different stances of the speaker? I love to see how poems can quickly and stealthily open up the infinite gray space within any subject.

TFR:

The longer poem “Violins: Violence” feels like the heart of this book—this is a poem that wrestles with difficult material in part by seeking ways to connect the words themselves, as well as through dialogue with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. What are the roots of this poem’s engagement with this particular text?

AK:

I was still working as a lawyer when I first read the Meditations. Though I liked my job, I got easily frustrated by people. It was comforting to read the inner musings of a man who had legitimate reasons to be stressed out (he was Emperor!). The form of the Meditations—serial, fragmented, often intimately voiced—reminded me why journal writing and, really, all forms of writing to yourself, can be powerful.

The text came to mind also because I was doing a lot of self-talk throughout the book, channeling the second-person voice. “Last night you dreamed again / about your father,” was one of the first fragments I wrote in the second person that eventually coalesced, with other bits, into “Violins: Violence.” And the Meditations, of course, are written mainly in the second person, including the passage at the start of Book Two quoted in this poem:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. . . .

That second-person pronoun creates such an interesting and productive distance between the speaker and the self. It doesn’t exist when we simply say, “When I wake up in the morning, I should tell myself…” It acknowledges a legacy self. A self that can be interrogated, grieved, and consoled.

TFR:

One of the highlights of this collection is the series of Eros poems strung throughout the book. The imagery in these poems, among others, appears almost painterly. What role, if any, does visual art play in your writing: where do you turn to for visual inspiration or connection?

AK:

Like a lot of poets, I love visual art—its freedom and wordlessness. And sometimes I even try to write poems about art in the ekphrastic tradition. These are mostly terrible. For instance, I think I’ve attempted once a year for the past ten years to write a poem about Bernini’s massive sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Ditto for some seaport paintings by Claude. These poems fail because there’s no way to turn a bridge into a tambourine—one art doesn’t translate into another.

But I’m always interested in the poem as a vehicle for seeing. Writing imagery, for me, is like sticking my head under the black cloth of an old-school camera. Relaxing and absorbing, all at once. Until you mentioned it, though, I hadn’t noticed how much the Eros poems grapple with seeing. How much they want to touch. Eros isn’t about having, after all; it’s about wanting. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has a beautiful essay, “Eye and Mind,” in which he says that seeing “is to have at a distance.” To enjoy a “strange possession.” The painter’s work, then, is to make visible what the eye sees but cannot hold. The poet does that, too, but also tries to make visible what can’t be seen. To suggest the fine tissue layers of memory, thought, and feeling.

As for the art I go to for inspiration, I’m a sucker for Byzantine and early Renaissance religious painting. I love busy triptychs. Goldleaf. Virgins wearing angular blue robes. The summer light of Claude Lorrain. The wintry light of Hendrick Avercamp. All of Velázquez, Lucas Cranach’s Judiths, Klimt’s landscapes, Courbet’s life-sized Burial at Ornans, the abstract paintings of Richter in which you can occasionally glimpse a stream in the woods.

TFR:

What poem or collection of poems do you find yourself returning to across your life as a poet?

AK:

Oh, so many books by Frank Bidart! Especially his chapbook Music Like Dirt, which is both searing (like all his work) but also enormously generous. I could name more collections, but I hate it when people cheat on questions like this. Okay, I’ll cheat just a little: every year I read a poem by John Donne called “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.” It’s about trying like hell to calm one’s fears about death. And it contains some of the most moving metaphors I’ve ever read: Donne surrendering his body as an instrument to be “tuned at the door” so he can become God’s “music.” Though I’m a staunch agnostic these days, I grew up in the evangelical tradition. Something about Donne’s struggles with faith in this poem and in the holy sonnets pierces me every time.

TFR:

If you were to build a poetic family tree, who are some of the writers you would be sure to include?

AK:

In addition to Bidart and Donne, I’d add my former teacher Rick Barot, Robert Hass, Anne Carson, Susan Stewart, and Tomas Tranströmer. From the twentieth century and earlier, Zbigniew Herbert has meant a lot to me (Mr. Cogito!), as has Elizabeth Bishop, Horace, and Rilke. On reflection, I see that this tree of mine is pretty old and overwhelmingly white. Sadly, it doesn’t include many wonderful poets—including many poets of color—whom I love and respect. But the poets I’ve named are the ones who nourished and challenged me when I was just starting to write and whose words continue to vibrate in my subconscious.

TFR:

Is there a third collection of poems in the works? What are you working on now?

AK:

Something is in the works, I hope! The pandemic unleashed a lot of prose in me, for whatever reason. Some of the new pieces I’ve written seem to fit squarely in the prose poem tradition. Others are more like short fables. In many of these I’ve been trying to foreground the artifice of poetry, the “so what?” of poetry. And letting humor come in. So maybe these pieces will pave the way for a hybrid collection at some point.

In a completely unrelated project, I’m toying with the idea of writing an opera libretto based on Eros, Unbroken. I’m taking a class offered by the Seattle Opera (one gift of the pandemic!) that’s sparked my interest, and I’ve been talking with my friend, composer Aaron Stepp, who has more experience with this than I do, about how we might write a chamber opera. Whether or not we’re able to actually do this, I just love thinking about the narrative and other creative challenges that would come with this project.

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Mother Pass

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

“And your Mother Pass.”

“What? I don’t have one of those.”

She frowns. “That is not possible.”

I look helplessly at Michele.

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

The receptionist narrows her eyes but waves us past.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

“Where is your Mother Pass?” she asks.

“I don’t have one.”

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

“We don’t in the US.”

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

“I just don’t have one.”

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

“July 9th.” Today is May 1st.

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

“What about the contractions?”

“They don’t mean anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Stay still,” they say over and over.

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

At last, they check my cervix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

I’m allowed to move from the chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

Soon we’re in the bright operating room.

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

An impossible request as the contractions rage through me.

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

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

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

“So you agree?”

“Yes.”

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

I know this means my situation must be very serious.

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

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

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

“No, just anxiety.”

He laughs, a comforting, human noise.

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

“I will,” he says.

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

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

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

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

—

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

—

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

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

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

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

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We Regret to Inform You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s so sad, John,” we said to him.

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

“Don’t worry, John,” we said.

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

“Sounds good, John,” we said.

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

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

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

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

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

“That Susan Shields passed away this morning.”

“That Chris Pall passed away earlier today.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where do the bodies go?”

“Why do these deaths keep happening?”

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

“That’s it,” Yasmina said. “I quit.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Everyone is dying,” we told her.

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

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

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

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

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How This Works

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

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

And now this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The teaspoons,” she says.

“I didn’t see you there,” he says.

“They’re gone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought it was normal for teenagers.

I thought I was normal.

I thought she was normal.

I thought he was normal.

Is it normal to feel this way?

I thought this was normal.

Thanks for making me feel more normal.

Hello, is anyone out there today?

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

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

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

Just checking to see if you made it home safely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, they’re not,” Betsy says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can’t stand it, they write

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

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

“You left the door unlocked,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was she always so sensitive?” Betsy asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Full Moon to Monday

College cracked the fantasy wide

open. All our Pretty Woman dreams

flatlining in the bottom of some frat guy’s

basement. Memories of the “talk” and how

she left out the part about surgery. The stitching

and staining and then, there’s recovery.

Came home for break still soaking through

the gauze of this girlhood and all our moms

could tell. But no one spoke the truth.

That you can be six shots in and his hands

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

be dripping with blood and shit. All the songs

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

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

remember a thing. You won’t ever know it

happened. Cause molly is the new pick-up line

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

about chivalry and not putting out on the first

date prepared you for date rape drugs and scalding

hot showers to rinse the blood off.

Vanishing after you texted and told him

you were pregnant, and the shame slut-walked

all over Facebook. That innocence we knew is gone

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

Somewhere between t-ball and toga parties

the rules changed from checking yes, no,

maybe, to him marking his criminal territory.

At least then you had the right to choose

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

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

to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows

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

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Dream Trash Journal

A stream of consciousness from a found journal entry.

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Review: Bosses of Light and Sound by Nickalus Rupert

Willow Springs Books, 2020

Paperback, 180 pages, $21.95

If short story collections had singles, the chart-topper in Nickalus Rupert’s debut collection, Bosses of Light and Sound, winner of the 2019 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, would be the deliciously irreverent “Aunt Job,” which depicts an alternate reality in which coming-of-age rituals like bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras have been replaced with aunts initiating their teenage nephews into manhood with a hand job. As the father of the story explains to his appalled pubescent son: “Aunts have become a kind of sexual starter kit . . . It’s the way of things.” And yet Rupert’s charm as a storyteller is that he’s never satisfied with one idea (however perverse that idea may be!). Instead, Rupert’s stories are jammed full of dazzling turns and inventive world-building. In this way, Rupert’s stories resemble Donald Barthelme’s self-described “slumgullions”—the narrative equivalent of well-stirred and savory stews.

The title story serves as the perfect aperitif to whet the reader’s appetite. In “Bosses of Light and Sound,” a nostalgic movie projectionist takes the reader through a director’s cut of his youthful pranks and lost love, recollecting summer nights spent editing and manipulating Hollywood films to the chagrin of unsuspecting moviegoers—splicing Daniel Day Lewis into Finding Nemo, inserting pirates into dystopian sci-fi films, etc.—all while struggling to translate this mastery of light and sound to life outside the projectionist’s booth. In “Hale in the Deep,” a prolifically divorced protagonist, haunted by his innumerable marital failures, is lured by the promise of a late-night infomercial that offers him an array of sci-fi gadgetry to “de-member” all the painful and awkward gaffes of his past. In “Oh, Harmonious,” a chain-smoking and exasperated Mother Nature descends to a local gymnasium to hold a press conference and announce her retirement. In “The Temptation of Saint Ravine,” a fame-flirting recluse—known for talking locals out of committing suicide in his plummet-friendly backyard—strikes up a friendship with a troubled teen, all while a rogue mountain lion stalks the premises.

Frankly, it’s Rupert’s brain-candy sentences that are the real treat of this collection. The pages of Bosses of Light and Sound resound with “combinatorial delight” (to borrow a phrase from Nabokov). Rupert’s language is adept at shifting tones and offering a double-barreled wallop. In the flash piece titled “If the River Drops,” the fatal rocks of a whitewater rafting resort are imbued with dental-mythic registers: “molars from the mouths of giants.” In a nostalgic ghost story titled “Deadman’s Island,” the sunset is staged as “a flashlight aimed through pink Jell-O.” It’s hard not to think of the linguistic felicity of a writer like Jim Shephard while reading through Rupert’s collection: both share a knack for defibrillating the world with a charged turn of phrase.

Throughout Bosses of Light and Sound, Rupert dramatizes the friction of hope rubbing against the bristles of reality. Underneath the comic and off-kilter veneer of many of these stories is the aching of lost souls and foreclosed hearts. As the disillusioned protagonist of the story “Jewels of Mt. Stanley” claims, “Hell of a thing, belief. Like spraying yourself with OFF! before entering sharky waters.” And yet, the prospect of certain doom never quite prevents Rupert’s characters from cannonballing into the ocean of belief, aspiring in spite of expiring.

There’s an admirable messiness to Rupert’s stories—characters botch epiphanies, flirt with gravity, taunt passersby to pelt them with tomatoes, and unleash their inner spirit animal (in this case, a howler monkey) to mixed avail. Each story encourages a redrawing of simple maps, a recharting of the twined territories of yearning and despair. In the world of Bosses of Light and Sound, relationships might end, but there’s always the possibility “the universe might cobble together a second chance—a redo”—to quote the story “Bonus Round.” And perhaps that is the secret charm of Rupert’s collection. The hearts in these stories are simultaneously spiking and flatlining, suspended in cardiac superposition. The closer we look through Rupert’s narrative microscope, the fuzzier and more fascinating our lives become.

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Autumn Evening at the Laundromat

If you want to feel

like a winner for once

put a ten dollar bill

into the change machine,

hear the jackpot jingle

of cheering quarters

pouring into your

empty empty hands.

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

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

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Mozzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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To answer

your question, Mr. Hughes

it explodes

flings its syrupy shrapnel

beyond the neighborhood walls

hot with the day’s oppression

But later

much later

it locates its fragments

to weight itself against the night

It becomes

Mr. Hughes

the promise of every dream dreamed

It becomes

in the blackness

its own shining sun

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Ink

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

“That is lame,” she agreed.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

“For you. A gift from along the way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I liked my rabbits?” C says.

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

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

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

But still she says, “Stay.”

And still he says, “I have to go.”

“My parents will be gone all night.”

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

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

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Another Day

—a found poem: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

I feel the bruised cry of birds in my body

when I wake.

Thinness rushes my pink imperfect heart

and I am cast down at another day—

hands and feet and body.

Here is idleness, brown water, disgrace.

The sun is yellow and laughing

leaves stir and patter across the lawn

and I long for darkness and sleep—

its brass thud, its pirouetting slam.

I lie here and watch the bedroom

harden into night.

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Metaphorical Ghosts

There are so many ways to describe

the fact that we die and are reborn

countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,

the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,

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

dying is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

But no one ever talks about the ghosts.

The dead ones that that turn your bones

into a creaky, old haunted mansion.

And no one talks about how frequently girls die

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

Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,

frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks

everything will turn out all right.

Yet some of them are screaming.

And when you hear the way she cried out,

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

how to escape her, banish her,

remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them

you encounter in the night like lost strangers.

That girl that walked the pier barefoot

in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,

that girl who hated herself so much

she had no understanding of the power

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

tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:

the eros that promised it would erupt in waves

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

when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless

in their glistening madness, and told the girls

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

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

passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,

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

And you know she made it to the surface again,

gasping life more forcefully than ever,

and the water droplets on her body

were proof of her glittering courage,

toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,

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

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

so who then is this young girl that just coughed

salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?

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