Looking Both Ways

Demi-Gods, by Eliza Robertson
Bloomsbury, 2017
230 pages, paper, $26

I have been a fan of Canadian novelist Eliza Robertson’s work since reading her short story collection, Wallflowers, released in 2014. Her work shows the precision and intensity of her gaze coupled with an easy and skillful exploration of language that always makes her work a pleasure to read. In Demi-Gods, her first novel, Robertson shows us a deeper settling into character and consciousness often not possible in the short story form. Full of secret interiorities and occupied with the essential question of how we view ourselves and how this choice affects our life’s suite of movements, Demi-Gods pulses with the energy of inner and outer life. It is remarkably consistent in focus, poetic and lucid in its articulations about the human spirit.

The novel is divided into three main parts that take place over different time periods in the narrator, Willa’s, past, followed by a short fourth section set in what is roughly the narrative present. Predominantly set in the ’50s and early ’60s, Willa recounts parts of her late childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood, spent in Salt Spring Island (between Vancouver Island and mainland BC) and, later, California. The narrative crux focuses around Willa’s relationship with Patrick, a sort of half-brother: he is the younger son of her mother’s new boyfriend and arrives on the island with the disruptive energy of unhinged youth. Willa is nine and Patrick is eleven and their relationship is charged: already he ropes her into games of strangeness and degradation. The first game they play is so surprising and aberrant I felt shock and surety that I was in the hands of a capable, original voice: “The vulgarity of the action made me want to laugh—it excited me in a strange way. I could pass all of his tests, even the naughty ones.”

From the relationship springs the core tension of the novel, that is, the power in the act of viewing one another and how this is tethered to the motion of control. Willa’s act of writing, in seeking to rationalize her past, is itself an act of control—we see how the past she is trying to articulate moves and shifts, as do her relationships and her impressions of them. Her fate of being twinned to Patrick, of being reflected in his image, is itself susceptible to warps of movement, to slips and loosenings of focus: themes which transfer themselves to the characters and the drama as the novel develops. We end up on a roiling sea where everything is tilting and the characters are taking turns at being drugged. Robertson seeks to show that there is no archetypal relationship, and yet everything is archetypal. There is always the push-pull of motion, of attention. People make each other do things because they can. Rather than seeking to understand why, Robertson unfurls this type of relationship in its mottled and kaleidoscopic essence. It is inhabited, and not explained: “We sensed the other person, of course, if anything our sense of the other person had intensified, but we allowed each other that civility, to pretend not to know we were watched.”

Because the action takes place in one person’s memory, Robertson can give us the action in full, aesthetically beautiful prose. Her words have a tack—a corporeality that fits with the narration described: “Dad let us live like beach clams. We burrowed in the sand and sucked nutrients from the salt, sand fleas exploring our noses like luminous shrimp. We built clam gardens. We cleared the rock from our beach and constructed a wall. The clams stretched their tongues and spat water between our toes.” Robertson’s emphasis on reflection and vision is repeated throughout the work in instances of stillness and quiet beauty: “Luke’s gaze hung on the lake, which glittered beyond the horsetails and spirals of blackberry […] The water glinted sharply—at that moment, it seemed a lake reflected more light than the sea. The ocean absorbed light, held the sun. A lake spat the sun at you.” There shapes she forms with her sentences are visceral. The work shows a focus on the gestural, which makes words feel like they are touching their subjects: “It took an hour to reach home because I rode one-handed, cradling the jar of cream against my belly-button. […] I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide this cream under my bed, then tiptoe along the trunk of my arbutus tree and think about the boy who drove the dairy cart.”

As the plot develops, Willa’s impressions become more adult-like: she sees her sister marry and then the fallouts of an unhappy union; she knows what it is to have sex. Willa, like Robertson, is an observer and is not drawn to explicitness. It is as though conveying feelings plainly or clear openness would break a spell or not describe the true state of things sufficiently. There are implied understandings, and there is a sense of uncertainty and equivocality that comes with the awareness of not being entirely in control of fate: “I could feel the future encroach as a shadow encroaches on a day when you spend every hour outside and fail to notice the sun slipping below the horizon.”

It is appropriate to end on an excerpt, displaying the essence of the book, Willa’s ultimate solitude, and the turning trajectory of the novel as it is occurring:

When I reached the side, I leaned over the gunwale. A school of fish hung suspended in the water, the light glinting off their bodies before the fleet lifted and tilted into the tide. I could hear Joan and Kenneth fighting in the galley. I tried to block out the sound, inhaled the ocean’s salt on my skin, the tang of seagull shit dried onto the deck. Slowly, larger shadows overtook the shadows of the helm. Then these darknesses—spilled by masts, the boom—were overtaken by the largest shadow, of Earth turning away from the sun. I closed my eyes. The wind fingered the curl that had dropped from my braid, dangling down the nape of my neck.

Languid in feeling yet tautly controlled, Demi-Gods looks at the interiorities we can’t explain to ourselves: what we show and what remains hidden. The final image leaves us with a full tidal pool, suggesting the underbelly of the ringing surface of the world, a multiplicity of hidden movements: “a pool gathered in the lap of a rock with mossy bunches of anemones and gunnel fish and barnacles.” How can we contain what we see when we look backwards? What is uncovered by the action of doing so?

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My Abuela, the Puppet

I have been a fan of metaphor since I learned to read, first in English and then eventually in rusty, copper Spanish. This is not a metaphor. My grandma has become a puppet.

It would be a good metaphor if the circumstances were slightly different. Her body had started to change in the past few years and, though she stayed human, her physique lent itself to a description of her as a marionette. She had clunky, white orthopedic shoes that looked oversized and cartoonish when she took her small, concerted steps. Abuela’s back was permanently hunched over, appearing as if she were being suspended by invisible strings at the shoulders. She lost a lot of weight, and the lack of fat in her face combined with her wrinkled skin made her head look huge like a Muppet’s. But Abuela was still herself then, flesh and bones and dust.

Then she become a puppet and no one knew what to do about it. Papi wouldn’t admit it, but there were signs that her metamorphosis was coming, and it wasn’t just those dreadful orthopedic shoes.

For a long time, Abuela lived in an apartment by herself. Her relationship with my Abuelo had been another precious thing lost to migration, and she’d never bothered to date again. She had her children, who joined her in los Yunai Estais after she’d been cleaning houses, theaters, and embassies for nearly a decade, for nearly minimum wage. But, of course, Papi and his siblings had grown up and left Abuela in that musty-smelling apartment building.

We visited her one afternoon and couldn’t avoid the putrid smell that’d snuck into her home. The whole building smelt of old-person. In less kind words, the carpet and walls smelt of dying. But that morning Abuelita’s apartment did not smell just of dying, but already of death. In the fridge, there were rotten casseroles and the unquestionable stink of not-so-fresh queso fresco. Papi managed to save five slices from the loaf of bread, but everything else went into the trash.

Abuela claimed that she hadn’t smelt the food going bad. Her nose hardly worked anymore, she told us in an attempt to gain our pity. So, we went with her the the supermarket and bought a fridge full of groceries. Two weeks later, they sat in the fridge, largely untouched and mostly spoiled. My grandma had begun to lose weight, but she was still human.

Eventually, Mami convinced Papi to let Abuela move into our home in the suburbs. Abuela said they were being ridiculous, that she was fine in her apartment, that she was happy. But Mami was worried that she’d fall one day, and that no one would be there to help her. The weight loss also worried Mami.

Abuela had a large gut throughout my childhood, the kind that makes you wonder what would happen if you tipped her over and tried rolling her down the street. But by the time she moved into my old bedroom, her gut was gone. If you tipped her over, she’d plop onto the sidewalk like a plank of wood.

There’s a purse that Abuela loves. It’s a knock-off Louis Vuitton that she picked up in MacArthur park a year or so before the rotting fridge fiasco. When she became a puppet, a version of the bag was stitched to her side, though it was made of felt and with less details than the original. But the purse sticks to her side, even as she lays tossed on the ground when there’s no one to hold up the wooden operating cross.

Before she was a puppet, Abuela swung that purse around and hit Papi straight across the cheek, leaving him with neck pains he’d complain about for weeks. She was accusing him of stealing money from her purse. Papi assured her that, no, he hadn’t taken anything from her, but she continued. She remembered putting a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the small pocket of her purse, and now she couldn’t find them. Papi had stolen them, she yelled, the ungrateful son of his father and then she pulled back her flabby arm and took aim.

In his shock, Abuela made a run for it. She pushed past me, with a strength that her limp marionette arms no longer possess. That the woman who sang me lullabies about baby chicks and coyotes would lay her hands on me without any of the tenderness I was used to nearly brought me to tears. It left me immobile as she opened the front door and ran out into the rain-soaked neighborhood with her Louis Vuitton fake.

Mami and Papi got into the minivan and went out searching for her. They spotted her through a sprinkled windshield, waiting at the wrong bus stop. Her plan, my parents would tell me after I’d wiped the bags under my ears dry, was to ride the bus back to her apartment. She had forgotten the bus route to get there, though she’d ridden it often for nearly a decade. It’d slipped her mind that she no longer had a lease on that musty pink apartment.

The home we moved Abuela into after the 75-year-old runaway situation didn’t smell of dying. It was sterile, and the hallways of doors where hers stood was fenced off from the rest of the living facility. A brass gate separated those who could remember and those who couldn’t. A nurse would press a four-number code into a small keypad, and the door would open up to let us through.

Abuela lived in the section for people whose memories were turning into small wisps, ready to float away from their temples and into the clouds. Each of the tenants had their own room, but they’d take all their meals in a large, open-floor dining area. The nurses would go knock on Abuela’s door when it was dinner time and she hadn’t arrived to eat. Her mind was a lost cause, but there was no reason her body had to be as well.

Every visit gave us a clue that we ignored, opting for silence the way Papi had taught Mami and Mami had taught me. One day, Papi asked her how she used to make Christmas tamales. Being the man’s man that he is, he’d never stepped in the kitchen to actually make the dish. But he knew the steps well enough to know that his mother had forgotten them completely.

A professor had assigned an oral history project, so I’d decided to interview Abuela about the war and the way it had affected her migration. She began telling me the story, and the most graphic of details were sharp and clear. She recounted how an army soldier took a machete to a pregnant woman’s stomach because they feared that her baby was a communist. She told me that the guerilleros befriended her favorite cow and three days later murdered it for the meat.

When I prompted her to tell me her immigration story, she’d have to correct herself. Papi, who was sitting just few feet away, eventually led her along, reminding her that she’d gone to Puerto Rico before moving to Miami. He’d stayed in El Salvador for the first two year she’d been in San Juan, he told her, the hurt reverberating in his voice.

Soon she didn’t know our names. She called us all “mijo” or “mija.” Eventually, she opted to simply use “linda,” regardless of the gender of the person she was speaking to. Slowly, we became nearly strangers to us. My grandmother treated us the way she’d treat the mail man or a friend’s relative she was meeting for the first time. There was a sense of trust, but nothing more.

In the months before her metamorphosis, she often repeated a single phrase, over and over. He jaw falling unhinged, then rising again, and then down again. It wasn’t a coherent phrase either, but rather a string of muffled noise. Now, I’m realizing that maybe Abuela was speaking a clandestine language puppets speak when a ventriloquist isn’t pulling at their lips.

Though Abuela was human on all of those trips, I pretended that she wasn’t. Like the other people in this caged home for the forgetful, she’d lost her stories. I’d smile a hollow smile at them, tell Abuela that I loved her even though I knew she didn’t recognize me, and then slink away to a corner of the room.

When she became a puppet, my resentment for her grew. Papi and Mami refused to bury her. She’s not dead, they’d insist, pointing to the place where fish-wire strings met her joints. Mami grabbed my hand and pressed it against Abuela’s skin. The new texture of felt was kinder than the soggy, old leather Abuela’s skin used to feel like, but I still pulled my hand away quickly.

Abuela the Puppet hung in my parent’s home for years. Not wanting to be disrespectful, she watched over us from a hook in our living room–hovering as we watched TV, ate dinner, got into loud arguments. Abuela was the only one who saw when when I snuck a man into the house when I was visiting one Christmas break.

Most days she just hung there, but one weekend, when I was visiting in my few free days from graduate school, she began to sing. Her voice was stronger and clearer than it had been for years before her transformation.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo los corazones.”

It was my favorite song as a little girl, so I knew she was singing it just for me. My parents stared at me with a concerned look when I told them. When I tugged at Abuela’s strings and moved her mouth up and down my hands, trying to prove to my parents what I’d heard, she didn’t budge. My grandmother remained limp and unmoving. My father placed a wrinkled hand on my shoulder and told me that it might be a sign that I had that memory-denigrating termite Abuela suffered from for so long. It usually skipped a generation.

Mami and Papi died a year-and-a-half apart, leaving me to deal with my grandmother. I hated her. I hated her so much for taking so much space for so long, for forgetting my name, for making a fool of me with her lullaby. I hated her for the termites she’d left in my brain, and for all the pain she was going to put my children through. At church serves, a very seldom occurrence in those days, I’d prayed for death. God, diosito lindo, please don’t make me a puppet.

Online, I found a company that stored family members in Abuela’s condition indefinitely. They’d bought out an old lot of storage units and repurposed them to accommodate rows and rows of human-sized puppets. Most of the puppets were of people who’d formerly fled countries ravaged by wars funded in part by the United States, so when I dropped Abuela off they placed her in the unit marked CENTRAL AMERICA, with the other shrunken caramel grandmothers displaced from the isthmus. As the door to the storage unit closed, Abuela’s jaw twitched. No sound came out. The shell of a woman disappeared into the dark, silent once more.

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The Doctor Laments

For our kidneys cratered

like the swollen moon

For the way time hangs

on our bones

For our confused lungs, blooming

white and yellow destruction

For our exhausted hearts, roused

to expansion by want and need

For the loss of the ancient stars

in our blood and marrow

For the mines of our bodies

that generate iridescent crystals and stones

For the dark shadows shifting

in our souls

And our inability to escape them

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Interview: Joy Harjo

In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?

Joy Harjo:

I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.

TFR:

Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .

Harjo:

Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.

TFR:

Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?

Harjo:

I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.

TFR:

I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?

Harjo:

I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.

TFR:

So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?

Harjo:

Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.

TFR:

How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?

Harjo:

I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.

TFR:

When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?

Harjo:

I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]

TFR:

Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?

[laughter]

Harjo:

Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.

TFR:

Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?

Harjo:

Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.

TFR:

There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?

Harjo:

History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.

TFR:

Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?

Harjo:

I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.

TFR:

Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?

Harjo:

I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.

TFR:

You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?

Harjo:

Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]

TFR:

Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?

Harjo:

Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]

TFR:

Yes, yes, yes.

Harjo:

But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.

TFR:

So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?

Harjo:

I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.

TFR:

Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?

Harjo:

I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .

TFR:

Yeah. [laughter]

Harjo:

Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.

TFR:

Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?

Harjo:

It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.

TFR:

Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?

Harjo:

I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.

[laughter]

We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.

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Into the Sun

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Two Poems from “open pit”

These poems are from Villarán’s forthcoming collection open pit.

he likes to stare at walls

you were born in davis

in a small inflatable pool

in april

during those first weeks, you would often wake up crying

in the middle of the night. without really knowing how

i would pick you up from the crib and hold you tight against

my chest, until you calmed down, and fell asleep again

i liked staying like this for a while

staring at the darkness

that would become the wall

the world is waiting in line / at target

imagine us in the car a sunny day the windows down

driving to the beach 88.3 driving and all those cars next to us driving

always in movement the highway is always full because the more

lanes we build the more cars are attracted to the smell of concrete

and white arrows painted over seemingly endless black surfaces:

the original infrastructure of future battlefields

imagine thousands of small highways running inside of you

all those cars driving somewhere taking something someone like us

perhaps to the beach with your mother so we would have the cooler

and the tent the umbrellas and the surfboards imagine all those cars

going somewhere taking something driving someone imagine all that

movement all that continuous movement the displacement dislocation

bodies inside metal vehicles on black surfaces running

imagine thousands of small really really small

a huge conveyor belt a network of swollen arteries imagine an open pit

an open wound the skin rupturing imagine your leg imagine your arm

imagine my leg imagine my arm

a big bag of tendons and ligaments necrotic tissue a bundle of nerve

tissue imagine bags of plastic inside your stomach lining your

intestines and climbing up your esophagus through the larynx

the lack of oxygen

imagine these huge pond type structures with plastic geothermal

liners stretching across the mountains dissecting the mountains

becoming the new mountain the only landscape leaching ponds laid

out in endless geometrical patterns

imagine every single muscle every fiber every synapse every neuron

needed for you to type with your right index finger:

n. n. n.
the letter n

imagine thousands of small highways pulsating inside of you

imagine it never stopping

thousands of small highways and the cars and the people and the things

and the places they want to take those things to because that’s what we

do we go places with things and we use metal vehicles that travel on

seemingly endless black surfaces just imagine all of this happening all

the time all the time happening all the time always

this highway

there’s no outside

this open pit

this wound this rupture this crevice inside body this highway all the time

always

what i’m trying to say miqel is:

just imagine thousands of small highways always running inside of you

imagine everything that’s needed for this to happen

all the time

always

now imagine an open pit a large open pit in the middle of a valley

surrounded by fractured mountains

i think that’s how it works

we have that pit

we keep running: faster faster faster

birds die and their stomachs are filled with plastic

whales die and their stomachs are filled with plastic

the united states economy gets a billion-dollar daily shot in its arm

imagine your arm

i’m thinking of mine

we have that pit

and we fill it with these things

we keep running faster always faster

now imagine us at the beach, imagine it being sunny again but not

too hot, imagine the sky punctuated by a few curious clouds, your

mother would be smiling, she’s beautiful when she smiles

it’s still happening

i don’t know what it is

i’m not sure what to do about it either

but i know it’s happening, all the time, always, relentless

we have that pit, it’s open, really open

and things are exploding and people are breaking and burning and dying

and we’re distracted

because we love the sand

the salt in the water

the cool air

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A Warning

The water edges closer, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. Nowhere she and her daughters can go.

Once at the very rear of the property, fenced in by sedges and cypress trees, it has risen past its own borders and laps at the ground only a few feet away from the back porch. Funny how the pond itself reminds her of her daughters, neither girl held anymore by the boundaries of childhood, of dollhouses and that insatiable little-girl-need to nurture families of stuffed animals and generations of digital pets, and, yes, occasionally, an actual baby doll with a permanent marker black eye. Now they too have risen, both girls taller than her, their curved bodies full, overflowing jeans that were once baggy, spilling out of bra cups that were once collapsed. It’s time they knew.

On this overcast day of no wind and no fog, the earth has slowed its breakneck spinning to a crawl. Inside the house, the girls are silent as usual. Lately it seems only their bodies belie their presence—the shuffle of bare feet, the hiss of hair and fabric. She calls them now, leads them outside, shows them the water.

“See?” She points. For the first time the water, usually cloudy and a green so dark that it’s a color without a name, is perfectly clear. They can all see it. Past the snails that are close to the shore, past the reedy legs of the wood stork, past the coral rocks and sandy beds of the bluegills, they can all see the dark, see the place where the bottom has given way. It is there that two eyes shimmer at the edge of darkness and rows of teeth as wide as trees, as sharp as razor grass, open and close slowly, and yet the surface of the water is undisturbed, still as death.

“This is here,” she tells them. “Even when the wind blows across the surface and makes glittering waves and swirling eddies and whips your hair across your face and rustles leaves so that all you hear is that seductive call to shhhhh. Even when the sky is bare of clouds, a blue so blue, it penetrates the murk, fools you into seeing some other color. Even when the water is so still and the sun is so bright, you can gaze down and see yourself and the sky together. Even when you are smiling down at your own pretty face and at your very own cloudless sky. Even then.”

She tells them, “Beware.” The girls nod solemnly, and they all go inside. But it’s much later, when the night has come and the winds returned and the earth has gone back to its delirious spin, that she hears them.

They are laughing, giggling, just as they once did and always seemed to do. And yet their laughter is different, and that difference stops her, hands suspended over the fish she has just fileted. She listens, her fingertips on the delicate feather of spine and ribs the knife has exposed.

“Now it’s my turn,” the younger of the two cries out. “You sit here, lie across the floor, and I’ll crawl to you.” And in a moment, there is a roar followed by a scream.

“I am caught, I am being pulled under, there’s no saving me.” The girls’ cries are filled not with terror or sadness but with ecstasy, pure delight.

She takes a deep breath, tries to calm down, tells herself there’s time before the water gets too close, before it sinks down into the earth, undermines the ground beneath them, swallows everything up in one satisfied gulp. But before she can stop herself, she is pounding on the door to the room the two girls share.

The girls go quiet, but she can’t help herself. She is shouting, telling them it’s much too late for screaming or laughing or playing of any sort, crying out that the time for all of that is over, and all that is left for them to do now is go to sleep, even though it is early still, even though she must still cook their dinner and watch them eat the fish she prepared, urging them with each bite to take care not to swallow any bones.

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Levitations

My father dies in the morning

& a candy jar

in the middle of the house

wants also to be empty

objects in our living room

float like hot flies,

blue couches clutch the ceiling

& the coffee table whispers into the wall

The people, the fallen people,

the loved ones, my loved ones

sitting in the patio

we still laugh at the joke

about the giraffe.

We may cry in our fluorescent rooms,

when no one is looking.

We may be strong, we may, we may

but first we will tear our own

skin from our own skin

first can we go find

the other side where he went

find that place is not empty too.

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Sunday

A long car trip to the desert in the outskirts of Juarez. A Tecate in a coozie between my dad’s legs and my mom’s arm outstretched, her hand caressing his neck.

Loud Mexican music plays on the car radio, either Pedro Infante or Luis Miguel. Depends on their mood.

My brother and I look out the window at the cotton fields and abandoned farmhouses.

My dad turns on to an unpaved road and keeps driving. Dirt hits our face in the back seat.

The car stops. The dust settles and reveals we are on the edge of a mesa. He gets out of the car and we follow.

As far as the eye can see: coarse sand, spirited tumbleweeds, a sunset like an erupting volcano.

My dad takes one last sip of beer and looks down at me. With one swift move, he launches the bottle into the virgin desert.

“Don’t litter, kids,” he says dryly.

I roll my eyes, and he erupts in laughter, loud and piercing in the open space.

It was the decade AquaNet was eating away the ozone layer and I, an impressionable pre-teen, had been very vocal about recycling. I thought he hadn’t been listening.

“Vamonos,” he says but I stand on the precipice a bit longer, the humiliation cementing itself into my consciousness.

In the car, he snaps open a fresh bottle of beer and my mom resumes her pose in the passenger side, playing with his hair. The drive back home is darker. Not even Luis Miguel can break the silence.

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Interview: Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Illinois, but has become a Southern transplant and is now the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, as well as teaching at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. She is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards. Her three collections of poetry are: Unmentionables: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (W. W. Nortion, 2004), and Open House: Poems (Zoo Press, 2002). More recently, she has focused her work in prose. She published Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (W. W. Norton, 2006), then co-authored the novel The Tilted World (Harper Collins, 2013) with her husband, Tom Franklin. Most recently, she published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2017).

We caught up with Beth Ann Fennelly at the Miami Book Fair in 2017 shortly after Heating & Cooling came out. Just this week, Heating & Cooling has been released in paperback, and so it’s a good time for us to finally get this interview published.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I want to start with question about the wider context of your evolution as a writer. I’ve worked with a number of people over the past year—Brenda Miller and her co-author, Lee Gulyas, and Monica McFawn and Darrell Nicholson—who have been writing together. They’ve talked about how much they enjoy the co-authoring process, although I’m sure it has its challenges as well. I think this is a little bit new. It’s not that people haven’t done it before, but it’s something that people are really paying attention to now. And I guess I wanted to ask about you and Tom Franklin co-authoring your previous book The Tilted World. I also want to ask about how you started off as a poet. Can you describe that evolution from writing primarily poetry to adding work in prose, and then doing a co-authored project. How did all of that happen?

Beth Ann Fennelly:

It seems that every writing project I’ve taken on is never with foresight or part of a career strategy.

[laughter]

Everything is an accident and serendipity. I thought I would only be a poet—that’s really all I ever wanted because I think it’s such a beautiful art form. At first, I accidentally wrote a non-fiction book called Great with Child. That was a collection of letters that I didn’t write thinking they would be collected into a book. And so that was happy and lucky.

Then I wrote another book of poems. Then the novel with Tommy came about in just this bizarre way. We had been thinking a lot about the flood of 1927 after Katrina happened, and how if that story hadn’t been written out of history maybe Katrina would’ve been handled differently. That’s the problem when things get written out of history—we can’t learn from them. We thought this was a big Southern story that needed to be told. We ended up writing a short story about it—really as a lark, without thinking too much about it, except then it got reprinted in Best American Mysteries and a couple of other big anthologies. And Tommy’s editor called up and said, “You didn’t tell me about this story.” And Tommy said, “Well, what’s to tell?” And the agent said, “It’s your next novel.”

Due to that, we suddenly found ourselves writing a novel, although it might have happened anyway because these characters were still in my head after the short story. The research I had done for us to write the short story was really compelling to me, and I was thinking how much more there was. So, we wrote the novel, and then after that, there was a period where I felt I wasn’t writing. I wanted to write another novel, actually. But I was going through this long, slightly terrifying period of “not writing.” I kept saying to Tommy, “I’m not writing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Every morning, I’d get my notebook and write down a couple of weird, little thoughts, and nothing was adding up to something. I would write about a little conversation I’d heard or a little memory. I’d been doing that for a long time when one morning I thought how excited I was to get back to my desk. I recognized the feeling of writing before I recognized the product because that feeling, that excitement is how I feel when the writing’s going well. That morning, I went back and started paging through my notebook of all these random little bits of conversations and memories that I kept waiting to add up to something.

For the first time, I thought, “What if I stop waiting for it to add up to something? What if it is something, just a really small something?” And then I thought of the term ‘micro-memoirs’, and in a weird way coming up with the term freed me to complete the project. None of this was done with great forethought. And in fact, if I were the type of person who had forethought, I wouldn’t have done any of this, because it’s not really what one wants from one’s career, in a way. Because your publicist wants to be able to say, “Oh, she writes sonnets about her cat.” The expectation is that you just do the one thing.

TFR:

Right, right, very specific.

Fennelly:

Yeah. And so just to confuse things, now I’m the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and I haven’t written a poem in three years. [laughter] Oh no.

TFR:

That’s hilarious.

Fennelly:

I know.

TFR:

That’s so funny. But you will. Do you doubt it?

Fennelly:

No, not really. For now, I’m just in love with the sentence, and I used to be in love with the line. I’m just waiting for the cycle to come back around to that.

TFR:

One of the things I am also curious about is your embrace of Mississippi. You mentioned how The Tilted World was a Southern story that needed to be told. It’s often difficult for those who are raised and educated in other regions, as you have been, to find a happy home in the deep South. And yet you seem to have done it and have embraced it as an identity. And so how has that happened for you as a person and a writer? I grew up in the South, in Tennessee. I was gone for a long time, and then when I got the job in Orlando at UCF, I had friends who wouldn’t speak to me. They were like, “You’re going back to the South? How can you do that?” And I was like, “Well, it’s a great job where I get to teach creative writing all the time and no composition.” [chuckle] There were those kinds of things. But there’s so often that attitude of hostility from people who don’t know the South. I just wonder if there was a transition for you, if it was difficult for you, or if you’re just the kind of person who embraces where you are.

Fennelly:

I grew up, as you say, in the Midwest. And the Midwest landscape and architecture, I understood intellectually why they were beautiful, or why I was supposed to find them beautiful. But when I moved to the South for the first time—for graduate school at the University of Arkansas in 1994—I just loved it. It seemed to suit my personality in a weird way.

I come from an Irish background, and there’s a lot I love about being Irish that also seems to be very strong in the South. I love storytelling, I love music. I like emphasis on family. All those things are interesting to me. But there is the bigger question of how a place becomes a home or how we can choose a home, and I also think there’s an element of mystery to it, because the South shouldn’t have felt like home.

But it did. I met my husband the first day of graduate school. And now we have three children with Mississippi drawls. And we’ve bought five plots in the cemetery next to Faulkner.

TFR:

Has it ever been hard for you? Has there ever been a moment where you thought, “Ooh. Who are these people?”

Fennelly:

No, but I do obviously struggle with a lot of the things in the South.

Part of me accepting the role of Southerner—which wasn’t something I claimed for myself, but something people eventually honored me with—part of it is also remaining clear-eyed about the problems in the South. And in Oxford, Mississippi, it was just fifty years ago that James Meredith integrated the school. And there’s still a bullet hole where people were shooting during riots. So, it is something I think about a lot. What does it mean to be from this region and embrace this region, and yet just be determined to be part of the people who are working to change it for the better?

TFR:

That makes great sense.

Heating & Cooling is a tiny book that is nonetheless deeply rich, I found, and certainly poetic. You can definitely see your background as a poet. What do you see as the connection between poetry and memoir in this book, and more generally?

Fennelly:

When I came up with the term ‘micro-memoir’ and started thinking, “Okay, look, what are these things I’m writing?” what I realized was I wanted to take the things I loved most from the different genres. From poetry, what I love is that extreme compression and abbreviation and that lyrical explosion of the release. And from fiction, I love narrative tension. I love a page-turner quality. I like the storytelling. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. And from nonfiction, I love truth-telling. I love facts. And right now, because we are in an era of alternative facts, and truth is so malleable to some, I found my own insistence on the facts as maybe a weird reaction to that. My facts are just coming from my life, but—after spending four years writing a novel in the heads of characters—my own life seemed interesting to me again.

TFR:

One of my favorite qualities of this book and your work as a whole is how humane it is. There’s an appealing humility but without obsequiousness, if you know what I mean. There’s humor balanced with poignancy. Reading Beth Ann Fennelly is like reading someone you would really like to know.

Fennelly:

Oh, how nice.

TFR:

I just really feel that way. I think people can over-claim that they know you when they read a book. We all know that when you write, it’s not all of us that’s in the . . .

Fennelly:

I do that sometimes. I read a book and feel like I know the author.

TFR:

Sometimes, that can be really obnoxious. [laughter] I don’t mean to be weird about it, but I just think that over the years, having read a variety of your work, I feel like there’s a friendly quality. How do you feel like you achieve the balance between different tonalities that you work with? And how does that come out of your approach to drafting and revising? You’ve talked about that a little bit already with this book in particular.

Fennelly:

I love that you found it a humane book—that’s really flattering to me. I would say one of the things I wanted was for it to be the me-est book possible, and to bring in all the parts of me, and even the ugly parts. There are some pieces in here where I don’t really look all that kind or maybe even sane. But I wanted the full range of human emotions, particularly my human emotions. I didn’t want to keep anything out even if it was slightly salacious or unsavory. Part of that for me is not keeping humor out, too, which is something that I did when I was younger. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more confident in my own voice. When I was younger, I wanted to be taken seriously. And I looked around and what are the big boys doing? Well, they’re writing poems about Greek myths. So, by God, here’s my Perseus poem. Take this. Ugh.

[laughter]

As I got older, I began to realize that what I want from a book is what I want from a friend, someone who accepts all of me. I began to realize that parts of the way I look at the world were not coming into my work. I think so much about being a human is funny. I think being a mom is funny. I think being middle-aged is funny. I think being in a long marriage is funny. What if I just stopped keeping that part out? All of these micro-memoirs are just ways of relaxing and knowing who I am and being less worried about being judged. I was taught to be a good girl. I was brought up Irish Catholic. It was pretty Victorian in some ways. And part of this book is about being less scared of someone thinking that I’m not being ladylike.

TFR:

I just laughed my head off when you were talking about having a large bladder. And I was like, “Yeah, me too.”

Fennelly:

That’s so funny. [laughter]

TFR:

But I also found more generally that I kept thinking, “Yes, me too.”

I loved a lot of the different ways that you talked about the body in the book. I don’t know how consciously you developed that as a theme, but there were some very poignant places, and there were some very funny places. I thought one of the resonances of this book was that it’s such a little book, but the complexity of the body that you depict in it was so profound. How consciously, when you were finally putting it together as a collection of pieces, did you think about those different, particular elements, but especially that body element?

Fennelly:

That’s a good question. It was hard to put the book together because they’re all stories from my life that are true with people that I know. I have myself as a child, an adolescent, and adult. I have all my major roles. I’m in there as a wife, and a mother, and a teacher, and a writer, and a human. And some of the pieces are short, and some are longer. When I first tried to put the book together, there was almost a problem of too-muchness. And I originally thought the book was gonna be a hundred pieces, because I know a couple of books that do a hundred short pieces, and I love them. But it just ended up seeming almost too exuberant.

My editor is the one who said I should cut it. She said, “Not because any of the pieces are weaker, but you need to strengthen the themes.” That inspired me to started thinking like, “Okay, this person comes in in more than one piece.” Or, “This role I have is in more than one piece,” and kind of cutting the outliers. It was a little challenging to figure out how to narrow it down. But narrowing it down did strengthen the themes. And I am really interested in the body, particularly the female body, and got that way through becoming a mother, actually, and writing about my body for the first time when it started to go south.

[laughter]

TFR:

We take it for granted. And then . . .

Fennelly:

Yes. Pregnancy and childbirth and all that made me inhabit my body and be intellectually engaged with walking around in a body in a way I hadn’t really noticed when I was younger, when inhabiting it was more thoughtless.

TFR:

I think many women writers, especially poets and nonfiction writers, are reaching out into this social moment that we’re having. With the loss of Hillary Clinton last year and the more recent revelations about sexual assault, it feels very much to me like women are saying, “We’re done putting up with this.” I thought that you also sometimes strike a feminist note, for example when you note that someone uses “pussy” as a synonym for weak.

Do you have advice for other writers who desire to address social issues without writing propaganda? How do you manage to bring such a light touch to that process?

Fennelly:

That’s interesting because I don’t think of myself as a political poet or a political writer, and I wanted to be when I was younger, and I failed. When I tried to write political stuff, it came out a little screechy.

TFR:

Pedantic, sure.

Fennelly:

What I realized is my best ideas don’t come out as argument—they come out as metaphor or narrative. In the narrative or in the metaphor, the politics sneak on through sometimes. I’ve always been someone who felt things strongly, but I would’ve been a terrible lawyer. I don’t have the ability to make that kind of logical argument. But the piece that you just referred to—it’s almost like the metaphor for calling a someone a pussy instead of a weak thing, was almost like a literary criticism. That’s a bad metaphor. The reason, of course, is clear in that piece, I think.

There’s another piece in the end of the book, “Salvage,” about my father-in-law who passed away, who I loved so much, who was a mechanic, and he worked so hard his whole life. And then in the end, he had to have his teeth pulled, and he didn’t have insurance to get new teeth. For me, what that piece is secretly about is my rage over unaffordable healthcare. How is it possible to be such a hardworking and dignified man working with his hands all day long, and at the end of his life, be abandoned? You know?

TFR:

Right, right.

Fennelly:

The politics is there, but kind of through the side door.

TFR:

How did you structure this book? You talked about having to pare it down from a hundred pieces. One of the things I noticed, of course, was that you have the three appearances of married love throughout the piece.

Fennelly:

Ultimately, I just tried to make sure I didn’t have two similar tones immediately together, or two pieces the same size. Because I wanted a lot of tonal variation, and that’s something that’s fun to do in short pieces. If you’re writing a novel, whether it’s literary or comedic or thriller, you can have small tonal variations. But with these short pieces, you could have one piece that’s funny, and then the next piece is super sad, and the next piece is bitchy, and the next piece is wry or nostalgic. And every piece can be its own thing, and the next piece can be completely different.

I wanted to move really rapidly through the emotions and to give the reader the thing that I feel like is a pleasure, where your heart is expanded a little bit through reading. And I tried to make sure I spaced the one-sentence ones throughout the book. And the married love sequence, I spaced that throughout the book. That was the kind of thing that guided me. But every time I cut a piece, it was like Jenga because I had to re-order the whole thing. It was so complicated.

TFR:

What is relationship between domesticity and art for you?

Fennelly:

My focus on domesticity here is in reaction to writing a very high stakes, deeply researched, historical novel [The Tilted World] where, if it failed, it would’ve been really bad for our marriage, and our egos, and our kids. After looking through a character’s eyes for so long, I started looking at my own life, and instead of doing research, just working with memory, which is really fascinating to me anyway. I think in a way when I was growing up, female novels were supposed to be centered in the domestic in a way that really was reductive. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that’s where so much of our important work as humans is coming from. It’s a pretty strange decision to say, “Well, this is a domestic novel,” and have that be a pejorative term. And so actually finding everything . . . love, and terror, and misery, and humor . . . finding everything that can come out of the domestic was really fun.

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On the Megabus from DC back to New York, 7:00AM

Newly conscious in Union City,

that so-Jersey place with all-Spanish signage

my parents grew up in and around.

We drive by a huge blue-logoed highwayside gym

that used to be a Toys R Us.

My brother and I often begged to go

when we still lived nearby. That spot

housed all our dreams.

Here my eyes clock

the person next to me’s left knee against my right one,

its tenderness

a babe

of our mutual rest.

How rare to feel cozy with a man neither friend nor fuck,

face half-viewable, stubbly, his skin a few shades lighter

than mine, a small, thick left hoop earring

I think is diamond.

I imagine his mother wears

or wore similar ones,

that he respects women.

I imagine we are two brown queers sharing this row.

How we might otherwise have met awake

at Papi Juice

Bubble T or some other

Brooklyn brown queer party.

Man and his are, of course, projections

much huger than the rest;

also can’t recall if I saw them wearing two earrings

when they first sat beside me in DC,

or which ear is the gay ear. Still asleep, their legs shift away

and our babe slips down the gap.

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Only Tourists Remember the Alamo

She doesn’t know why she gets into the car, but she knows why she’s alone. Jonas broke up with her in an email: On the things that matter, the things that really count, we don’t see eye-to-eye. He’d switched the font to Lucida Handwriting, blue, as if to soften the blow. She’d seen it coming. They’d argued about evolution at the foot of the Tower of the Americas. He pointed at a duck and asked in what universe does something whittle down to that?

One with a sense of humor, she said, but he didn’t laugh.

Darwin was racist, Juliana, he snapped. Darwin said terrible things about black people. Did they teach you that in AP Biology?

Did they teach you that at Jesus Camp? she’d retorted, but only when he’d begun to walk away. He couldn’t hear her over the children screaming in the dry fountain. San Antonio was in drought, like always, so the waterfalls modeled on Mayan temples held no water. Kids in slip-on sneakers raced from bottom to top and down again. She was sure their game would end in bloody mouths, broken teeth, but no one fell.

She knows why she boarded a southbound bus after school. She wanted to go downtown. Her bills were too wrinkled for the token machine, but the driver waved her through with a nod. There were no other students on the bus, not even after the Trinity stop, just a few unsmiling women who glared at the hem of her tartan kilt but wouldn’t meet her eyes. She sat by the window near the back, tucking her skirt beneath her legs so her thighs wouldn’t stick to the vinyl, and watched the sidewalks for someone she knew. Down the North St. Mary’s strip, where bars and clubs beckon the underage. Not yet dark, no one drinking. Day drunks stick to the River Walk. There she’d once witnessed a pink-faced man in a balloon hat relieve himself into the brown current on a Tuesday morning, that summer she served breakfast and lunch at an Italian restaurant where every dish was pre-prepared, microwaved.

This is why I keep you on breakfast, Julibaby, the manager had said, nudging her. There’s a lot more of those groserias at dinner.

A lot more tips, too, she’d considered saying, but she didn’t want him to think she was a complainer. She’d barely earned enough to pay for the tricolor tie he insisted she wear in the 100-degree heat.

She didn’t go downtown to get drunk. No: she is terrified of drunkenness, thinks of it as roving hands and burst capillaries, a sickness you choose. A disease of weak will, the way her mother speaks of it, vergüenza; they’re better off without her father. So Juliana doesn’t drink, not really. She’d tried. The girls said it would mellow her, but at a party with the Central Catholic boys she’d panicked after two Mike’s Hard Lemonades and called her mom to come pick her up.

I am out of control, she told herself as she waited in the front yard. I am out of control. It felt good to say it, even if she knew it wasn’t true.

I didn’t raise you like this, her mother said in the car. Sneaking around. If you need to sneak around you’re ashamed of your life and who are you then, Juli?

I’m the virgin who gets scared and calls her mom, she thought. I’m Shirley Temple. She giggled. Her mother stiffened behind the wheel.

She got off the bus at a downtown plaza, pushing against the current of tourists toward the river. She was numb, blind to the designer chocolate shops and trinket stands and smear-faced kids begging their parents for food and air conditioning. Sweaty strangers but still she’d seen them all before, people set on remembering the Alamo, people who buy t-shirts and ice cream and indulge a history that makes them feel good. She was fixed on something Jonas said the night of their first date: I’m so glad you’re not like everyone else. She kept herself from asking how, letting his words swell in the silence like confession. He didn’t try to touch her, not then. He waited in his car until she’d closed and locked the front door of her house before he drove away. He waited until she was safe.

Dusk hit. The bald cypress trees along the river were mobbed with grackles, their clipped wails piercing the tourists’ din. Not their song, Jonas said—the slick brown-black birds were just trying to echo the downtown crowds. Their real call is much quieter, he once explained, less desperate. They sound almost like songbirds on their lonesome. He was homeschooled; he used words like lonesome. He had a small chip in his right front tooth. He was in a band, played guitar. She wanted to lick the calluses on his fingers until they were soft.

She doesn’t know why she gets in the car, but she knows why she took a pledge of abstinence for True Love Waits: Jonas asked. He came to Incarnate Word High School during assembly with homemade pamphlets and a promise ring on his finger and before a dusty green chalkboard she said yes to God, along with a handful of freshmen and Hilda Rios, who would probably remain a virgin the rest of her life, pledge or no. He wrote his number on her pamphlet, right next to a clip art vision of a smiling bride.

Call me if you want to talk about the promise we’ve made, he smiled.

I’ll be a born-again virgin if I can chill with him, some girl snickered after he left homeroom.

True Love Waits, but she didn’t have to. He invited her to bible study at his church that same week, offering to pick her up at her two-bedroom house on one of the sadder streets in Alta Vista and drive her all the way out to 1604, where box churches beamed search lights into the sky. On the drive she asked if he was paid to recruit virgins. She’d rehearsed the line a few times at home, hoping it struck the bohemian evangelical chord just so.

No, he laughed. It’s more of a volunteer gig. My calling, I guess.

Then, quick like he knew her next question: You’re the first recruit I’ve ever asked out.

He introduced her to his friends at bible study, boys with names like Chad and Tucker who tucked button-downs into belted jeans. Is it Joo-lee-anna or Hoo-lee-anna? one of them asked, and she blushed and shrugged: I respond to everything. Jonas pronounced it wrong but she hadn’t wanted to correct him. Their names sounded better together his way, anyway.

When she left the river, mounting the limestone steps toward the street, a crush of men in chino shorts cheered from a hot pink barge behind her. They lifted their beer mugs in approval; someone screamed nice skirt.

The girls at Incarnate were jealous of her, for once. They noticed her compulsively checking her email in the library between classes. Did you fuck him yet? they asked, poking her waist, laughing. Does he keep his ring on when he feels you up?

No, she snapped, but he does make me wear a crown of thorns. The girls laughed harder, impressed.

He didn’t touch her, not at first. They were never alone in a room. They spent afternoons in youth group in deep, circular discussions about holy desire, how true love is anchored first in faith. They sometimes brushed arms, sitting close enough for her to memorize his smell: Tide detergent and chew. A month before they held hands, six weeks before he kissed her in a dark theater. And then it was an urgent tumbling, a humming thrill that didn’t stop when he stopped (and always, he stopped). She reasoned it was okay, the wanting, because it felt pure. Like something she was created to do. Her body’s own glorious mystery.

Why are you doing this to me? he asked one night his hands in her hair his mouth on her ear.

She expected to find men on Commerce Street, men who bared gold teeth at her as they drove past, slow. Jonas asked about these cars once, early in their courtship: what’s the deal with y’all’s lowriders mang? He used a Southside accent when he asked questions like these. He asked more often those nights his tongue had been inside her mouth. He never waited for her answer. He never asked why she didn’t introduce him to her mother, either. Her house was off limits, he seemed to understand. He might have been relieved.

She didn’t tell her mother about him. She kept her grades up, still went to mass, was home, always, before the end of her mom’s shift. No need for questions.

Why are you doing this to me? he asked again and again breathing into the hollow of her collarbone why won’t you stop me?

Because I don’t want to, she wanted to say. Because you don’t want me to.

Instead she’d kiss his forehead and eyelids and pray he felt it too, the longing that followed her for hours after they touched. In mass, as she pushed the papery wafer against the back of her teeth, she’d close her eyes and meditate on the patch of hair beneath his lower lip. She’d come to crave her own faith, its private, solemn ritual. At Jonas’ church everything was hands in the air, flashing lights, the devoted weeping as they sang.

They’d meant to explore Mission San Jose the night he confronted her about ducks and evolution. She’d thought the majestic limestone church would please Jonas—he was a Texas history buff, could recite Davy Crockett’s monologue from the John Wayne movie on request—but the grounds closed at five o’clock.

How very Catholic, he sniped. Like the Lord operates from nine to five.

That’s not fair. Every church has operating hours.

Worship me from one to three, he sang. After seven, there’s no heaven.

His voice was thin. He couldn’t get it to tremble the right way.

Clever, she said. She reached for his hand but he shoved it in his pocket.

I guess it’s easier to break the rules when you have a million of them, he said. If you think about it, it’s like the Pope expects you to fail. Like he’s setting you up for it.

She didn’t know what to say. In the dead pause she remembered something a Taylor or a Travis had said to Jonas after bible study: How’s that spicy mission work coming along? You still a sucker for lost causes?

On Commerce Street she has a clear view of the Tower, watches its glowing glass elevator ferry diners to the revolving restaurant at the top. She’s never been; only tourists see the city from that height. They sip margaritas made from cheap mix and try to spot the Alamo, where men died for Texas, where their favorite myth was born.

She waits. She carries no purse, no phone. So when a man whistles at her from a cherry-red Camaro that sparkles like candy, she climbs into his passenger seat knowing people won’t find her if this stranger doesn’t want them to. She isn’t scared. It has to be irrevocable, what comes next.

The man talked a big game when she was on the sidewalk, some nonsense about her schoolgirl skirt, but he’s quiet when she enters the plush interior of his coupe.

What are you doing? he asks.

You said you had something to teach me.

He looks all around the car, everywhere but her face. He’s breathing hard. A drop of sweat glides down his jawline.

You don’t belong here, baby girl.

How do you know?

You’re a good girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.

True, she says. But I’ve got to learn sometime.

That’s not how it works, he says, but he lets the car roll forward without pressing the gas.

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The Body Riddled with Bullets: A Five-Part Pastoral

for Emmett Till

On September 23, 1955, less than a month after Emmett Till’s lynching,
his killers (who would later openly admit to the crime) were acquitted
by an all-white, all-male jury in Sumner, Mississippi. Those killers
died in 1980 and 1994 without ever serving a day of time.
Nonetheless, we can still convict them here.

You don’t remember, except the most
Significant crickets,
Sway, clack, clack
Till was still in the high blue grasses along the Tallahatchie River
Along the Mississippi bullfrogs mark
The browning rust of bullets: drown out the night by organs of earth:
Groaning, moaning, under weight of blankets of glimmering worlds.

Tiller of men, women
waves from the swamps drown out scratching hands clank, clack of shovels
“Emmett Till did more than whistle at Carolyn Bryant”
Look: there is nothing not even mud to rub
into my eyes, into the ashes, among reeds and resurrections of night.

We float down the river, on principle,
toward hives of higher ground
The wastes devour him from Glendora Mississippi
to the Freedom Trail highway
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees
Like a spiritual homing
There is no double jeopardy in the swamp.

ii.

From Greenwood, MS, to Money, MS, signs travel
And I reach for the moon
Among the dark vines—
In the buffalo clovers, in the prairie fringed orchids,
Bleating from prairie chicken shrill
Asking heaven to bury the dead.

The dead never sleep.
They stare at small fires.
They stare in the miles of prairie and contemplate steel shells like embers
Gleaming in the moonlight.
At uninhabited grassland, the dead dance
And wait outside houses of horrendous men.

The dead are far off in the mountains.
The dead grow native tongues and cause men to commit suicide
Among shot up placards and sleepless nights, drinking,
And shiver in the bluegrass
Like stolen placards
Kidnapped in gunsmoke
With lutes of tallgrass.

From Heaven, tears of white women and cries of black boys,
The final preparations are made
In the hollows and big bison creeks.
The dead keep the culprits, their souls broken like body,
Ridden in damnation
He’s never gone.

iii.

heavy cotton gin fan tied
to the ten-year-old’s neck with barbed wire
floating down the dark church of the Tallahatchie River
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees

“Bye baby” and “Bye baby” outside the candy shop
Dragged delicately about
The black water skiff hulks and sandy shoals
In the Memphis night he, years later,
Would resurface
As not guilty, preening as a Meadowlark
Calling to be released in the tallgrass
In Ferguson, Missouri, hijacked
Outside a candy shop, “bye baby”
For Michael Brown, “I cant breathe” the air was too thick for Eric Garner,

The grappling hooks behind the gin mill
Could not even clasp the body
He’s gone.

“Bye baby,” the police are probing tonight,
For bodies of black children in the waters of suburbs
Outside, they won’t let me in,
A shiver in the tallgrass: Indian bluestem, Kentucky Bluegrass,
A marker rooted in justice against racism,
The sign vandalized

A white drunkard stares at the open casket,
They won’t let me in.

iv.

in cellars of haunted houses
no one talked about it

the cool dark green moss
subsumed the secrets

the diamond-backed watersnake
whips and dissolves a whisper of water

walter scott was stopped at a traffic light
no one heard the pops

the cellars of haunted houses
are like ancient cities of civilizations that crashed

built on brutality in Saint Paul, in Baltimore,
in McKinney, Texas,

in cellars of haunted houses,
whispers are drowned out by clank and crush of the cotton gin

like Eli Whitey’s patent, or Fones McCarthy’s invention
fallen on big heaps of black men’s backs

no one talked about it

she recants
sheriff promises those things hunted down
nothing he ever did
could justify the blood of Emmett Till

only after nightfall, boys lie awake
wondering, wondering

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Three Poems on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria

The Room I Cannot Enter

The game show host announces the doors to our cultura are

language and food las puertas

son lenguaje y comida

y no tengo las llaves brain locked down when anyone speaks

Spanish too suddenly

In Puerto Rico, I want to crack myself open

an inside-out coconut, let español spill over my beloved island

where I learned to eat my plantains sweet

San Juan, Sabana Grande are where I see my face reflected back at me

in each shop, la playa, bars

near-perfect replica of my mother’s

In Panamá, when she was a child, our familia called her fea—

ugly girl, with our afroboricua smile

that is the mouth I want to know, the Spanish I stretch lips to reach

try

my friends urge

no sé la palabra para try but maybe

my mother kept the keys from me so each blade-

shaped word

could not cut through

forged me as Latina Jeanne D’Arc

her naked back a constellation of stab wounds

No Matter Where I Go, I Carry You With Me

On Sundays when the children’s bodies are dragged from the Rio

Grande

they are reborn

yucca flowers, baptized in cool blue morning broken

dolor

is to run through the fence, barbed

wire laced in your gut,

no tetanus shot to back you up. As the doctor re-inoculates

me, decade since my last shot in the arm

raw with hubris, one more defense

against

desert borders,

bare feet

my choice

When I ask, how do I ready this womb to deliver another,

she says, you know this means you can’t go home

Si, I reply, lo sé,

I know,

there is not enough Spanish in this poem.

Ode To My Latina Machete Heart

If my torso is the transfomer toppled in Coamo by la tormenta

que comenzo todas las tormentas, pole splinters, sundered

lines wrapped around my neck, then my heart is the machete

mi hermano takes to the debris, hacks his way to power

once more. If my mouth is the cage closed on our stolen hijos

e hijas from El Paso to New York, then my tongue is the machete

struck to stone for one spark to ignite the final fire. If my feet

are the desert floor jagged with rock shards and sand scorch,

then my legs are the machete that have held mi madre up since San

Salvador, breaks through brush, past helicopter-light hunt.

If my arms are the closed gate between mi hermana and refuge, then

my hands are the machete, handle bashing down the lock.

This is how I bear this body forward, weapon honed by the white

man since I was una niña pequeña and now they will pay

homage to my machete heart, corazón de machete, your crimson

insurgent beats, those booted steps, you do not bleed, you burn—

your only stillness the song between, breath before the slash,

then the salvo, la fuerza, when they broke through the front door,

you were already gone.

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Orchidaceae

I—Orchidaceae

It was the way he tended to the orchids that let me know papi still held love inside him. The way he gently held thin branches between thumb and index finger, the way he cusped newly bloomed flowers in the palm of his hand, how he clipped slowly and with care, the fear of irreparable damage plain in his eyes. It’s the only thing he did with care anymore. Nothing else in life seemed to be permanent or irreparable.

II—Bulbophyllum

I tried not to let myself cry in front of him, a difficult task for one as young as I was. Children crave company when in misery. Wanting an audience while you cry seems to be something we just eventually outgrow. The few times I couldn’t help crying in his presence, his face went sharp, all lines and angles, and he said the same thing, “A llorar pa’l cuarto,” Go cry in your room. This must have been the seed which turned into the weeds that still hold me in solitude whenever I’m feeling blue.

At least the man practiced what he preached. There was a night during those days right after it happened in which I stumbled out of bed, my small bladder tight and bursting, only to hear muffled whimpers and moans coming from his room. What a sad, terrible sound that was.

III—Epidendrum

Papi’s garden was all colors, bright and blinding; all scents, flamboyant and proud; all life, all hope. Papi’s garden was everything he was not.

IV—Dendrobium

The house on my walk to school. The house, as papi and I referred to it. As if the “the” had some kind of accent mark. Thé house with the garden, with the Rotchschild’s orchids and the Saffron crocus. Papi always believed they had a Shenzhen Nongke orchid hidden in there somewhere, a plant so expensive he assured me multiple times was worth more than our house. He could not afford any of the plants in that garden because keeping me around wasn’t cheap. He looked at those flowers with longing. I looked at them with disdain.

V—Terrestrial Pulmonate Gastropod Molluscs or Papi’s Tiny Nemesis

It frightened me how easily he stepped on snails, how hard he stomped on them, how he swiveled on his heel from side to side, an act of dominance—unnecessary and cruel, seeing that you could crush a snail with the palm of your hand. Once, I suggested moving the snails, collecting and transferring them somewhere else, and in an attempt to sound cunning—hard, maybe—I even suggested transferring them to our neighbor’s backyard. Papi didn’t like our neighbor, he said the neighbor hugged his kids too much, that he was a little too nice, if you know what I mean. I never knew what he meant, but I would always nod silently, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be hugged too much. Surprisingly, he agreed to my plan, he said, “Vamos, tratémoslo,” Let’s try it out.

It was the hardest I’d ever worked in the garden. I wanted to collect and save as many snails as I could and as quickly as possible. I feared papi would change his mind. I plucked snails like grapes from the vine, one by one, delicately and efficiently. After about an hour or two my hands were caked in mud, my face brown—browner than usual—with dirt. I was proud of the haul. I felt like a hero.

If you are an adult, as I am now, you can see where this is all going, you—same as I—have experienced enough, seen enough in life to know that people don’t change just like that, that parents are sometimes harder than they need to be, even when they believe they mean well, when they believe they are teaching lessons.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

VI—Pleurothallis

Some days I wished I was a snail, able to disappear within myself at any moment. Papi would have hated knowing that.

VII—An orchid with no light will grow, but not bloom.

Maybe it was the snail thing, how I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily they cracked and popped beneath my feet, how the sound lingered in my head like a song of death. Maybe it was the fact that mom and I used to pick out snails from that very garden and race them.

I pulled those orchids from the ground like they were bad weeds. I pulled hard, with determination. Some of them I pulled using both hands, the way I had to pull on the lawnmower’s chord to get it started. I ruined the orchids, but only the orchids, because we both knew those were the ones my mother loved the most.

When I was done I ran straight to my room. I got in bed as I was, covered in dirt and mud, covered in sweat and an overwhelming pain my young body had never felt before. A llorar pa’l cuarto.

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Hispanic Heritage Month in Aquifer

Posted on September 16, 2018 by cahcmsadmin

This fall, The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online celebrate Latinx / Latina / Latino writers. Starting September 15, and running through October 15, we will be featuring numerous Latinx authors in Aquifer, and later this fall we will include a special section in 42.2 of the print Florida Review as well.

Starting with issue 40.2, we have focused a special section of each fall print Florida Review on an issue of social relevance. After the Pulse tragedy in 2016, many literary magazines and other media outlets focused attention on the issue, and we felt that we needed to offer a closer-to-home perspective to that national dialog. We featured six pieces of writing dedicated to the impact of the event.

After that special feature, we had the opportunity to interview distinguished author Ana Castillo about her book Black Dove, a memoir partly about her son being incarcerated for theft. Between Castillo’s work, a plenitude of submissions from prisoners and former prisoners across the country, and submissions by family and friends of prisoners, a themed section for Fall 2017 (41.2) emerged. The number of people being incarcerated in the US is an important social issue, and we were able to highlight it in seven writers’ moving literary responses.

This year, in Aquifer‘s second year, we decided to connect online and print themes and to continue to raise awareness of social issues. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are acutely aware of the VIDA count, which documents discrimination against women in the publishing world and sometimes also focuses on writers of color. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are dedicated to being part of the solution to gender and racial inequity.

Nicole Oquendo, special Latinx feature editor, notes, “As editors, we have a responsibility to make time to highlight a diverse range of voices.” As our former creative nonfiction editor, Nicole agreed to come back and help put together this celebration of Latinx authors, especially early and mid-career writers who deserve more recognition.

“There is so much exciting new work going on, and Latinx writers are adding to both the Florida and the national literary scene,” comments editor-in-chief Lisa Roney.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of Hispanic Heritage Month, and we are thrilled that this will be our first Aquifer special feature. Between the Aquifer feature this month and the authors included in 42.2 later this fall, we will have the privilege of sharing the work of more than forty Latinx / Latina/ Latino writers and several artists.

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Our Pool

Our Pool is about the space in-between. Digitizing my family’s VHS collection of home movies was an experience I don’t think I could forget (an experience ironically filled with moments I didn’t remember). Some of the tapes featured family members I had never met or only met once or twice. Others, like this short clip of my mother, father, and siblings in my grandparent’s pool, affectionately labeled “Our Pool,” brought back a swell of memories. One part haunting, another exhilarating; nostalgia meets revelation in the space between screen and memory: boy and girl: self and family.

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Clauses

when asked to get into it
when told not to care
when the committee asks
if I’m planning to have
children before
when told to speak up
when told to take it easy
when asked why
do I care
so much

when taken aside
when asked
(in a whisper)
if I was offended

when they don’t ask me to join
just because

when a man uses air quotes
around feminism

when a friend asks the barista
to make her iced coffee the color
of my forearm,
not the lighter inside—
the outside, it’s perfect.

when a friend asks about ass fetishes and Latinos
when the editor asks me to tone it down
when the editor asks me to spice it up

when asked if I’m okay

This poem begins our month-long celebration of
Hispanic Heritage Month here at Aquifer.
Watch for our print feature in the fall issue as well.

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Silence Is a Language I Cannot Reset

The Mycelium of Memory

The announcement comes over the intercom as I am spelling out words at my desk. Or it is a math quiz. Or it is a blank paper. I am in the front row of the classroom and when the principal’s voice comes pinging into the room I stare up at the bright yellow and royal blue borders that adorn the bulletin boards. Her name is Mrs. Jones. I put my pencil down because everyone must pay attention when the principal speaks.

“There has been an attack against the United States,” Mrs. Jones says.

The pencil on my desk has absurd ridges, and I feel them with my fingertips. Metal and rubber and wood are all tastes my tongue knows. I put the pencil in my mouth.

The teacher rolls in a boxy TV on a tall metal cart and we watch the towers smoking. This does not happen, but the images of the towers smoking, of the planes crashing into the buildings, of the towers falling inundate the media for the weeks to follow. It drenches the surrounding time and leaves imposing stains. Many of my memories hold metal shrapnel and ash.

My memories of that time also contain Tyler. We are friends when the towers fall. He is the boy who lives down the street. Friends well before; for as long as I can remember. In the spring he plays baseball; I played soccer once in kindergarten but was too shy to take the field. We play whiffle ball in the gas line easement across the street from my house or in an imagined triangle in his backyard. I am a year older, but I happily do whatever he says. There is a hierarchy to our friendship, and my role is the slavish sidekick, servile, always with a yes on my tongue. I am a mother doting on my child, attending, supporting, yielding. He is spoiled and easily riled. I do everything I can to keep him appeased.

We play videogames together in his basement and mine. We have Nintendo 64s and we play Diddy Kong Racing and Mario Cart 64, blast each other with egg-shooting birds on Banjo-Tooie. We ride bikes through the neighborhood, pass through the forested short-cut, and buy sodas from the Wal-Mart vending machines. A friendship large like skyscrapers, encompassing my childhood; monolith never expecting crash.

Introduction to Life Simulation

In 2002, I live with a purple Nintendo Gamecube controller in my hand. Nine years old and one year into the post-9/11 world my mom buys my brothers and me a copy of Animal Crossing. It comes out just four days after 9/11 in Japan, but it doesn’t hit US shelves until the next year.

On the front of the box, there is a two-story house: animals lean out of each window waving, and a human pops out of the front door. A sign above the house reads: Welcome to Animal Crossing. Inside, there is the small Gamecube disk and a limited-edition memory card with a sweater-clad cat.

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game. You are a human who moves to a new village populated by humanoid animals. You buy a house on loan and pay it back slowly. You can chat with your neighbors and do favors for them. You can collect shells, furniture, fossils, fish, bugs, paintings. There are special visitors who come every week. The seasons change: it rains, it snows, the trees bloom pink in spring. There are things to do—almost an infinity of them.

It is a single-player game, so my brothers and I have to split our playtime. One person plays while the others watch with varying degrees of impatience. Our mom bequeaths her stove timer for the purpose of resolving any disputes.

In the town I share with my twin brother Jared, I make a male character named Justin and choose the house with the yellow roof for him. The male characters wear round hats with horns coming out the sides. The hats change color and design to match the shirt you wear. Justin likes to collect fossils and display them in his house. He also likes the Spooky Series (a matching, pumpkin-themed furniture set, carpet, and wall paper), the Blue Series, and fruit-shaped furniture.

The first memory card I own for myself, I make another Animal Crossing town and populate it with all female characters: Hannah, Lily, and Anne. The women’s hats are conical like a princess’s costume prop. They have round brown eyes with long lower lashes or sparkly black eyes with wingtip lashes. They love the Citrus Set, tulip chairs, fish from dainty pop-eyed goldfish to giant coelacanths, and the Green Series with its cute check patterns. For all the characters I restart the facial feature selection process until their eyes and faces are just right. I want them to perfectly embody me. I love being all of them, though Hannah is my favorite.

Tyler also has Animal Crossing and my brother, Jared, and I go to his house and play in rotating shifts. There are some in-game NES consoles that can be played with two players, and we switch between the three of us. Or, sometimes, it is just me and him and we switch on and off. I like to be helpful. I clean his room once while he fishes in the large, river-fed pond, imagining that I am cleaning up an Animal Crossing house.

His mom comes downstairs and sees the cleaned room and gives me a complimenting smile. “Wow, what a good friend!” she says. She is always friendly, and I want her approval. “I could sure use your help around here.”

I want to be her perfect son. Her perfect daughter. The perfect child.

We plant flowers. We swap fruit. We sail to a tropical island on the dingy of a crusty sea turtle.

I am so excited for life. There are no ash clouds. There are no towers falling. I spend summers playing how I want to live.

Animal Years

I tell myself I am a red snapper aficionado. Jared rolls his eyes. I fish five of the seven fish out of the ocean against the algorithms’ odds. They are worth 3000 bells a piece. I collect gyroids, K.K. Slider songs, fossils I have dug from the star-shaped marks in the ground. My most prized possessions are my collection of turkey-themed furniture with matching wallpaper and carpet.

I spend hours a day during the summer playing Animal Crossing. There are bugs to catch, rare clothes and art to fill wardrobes. The kitchen timer goes by the wayside. I spend three hours hounding the neighbors for favors to do, I clean out the town dump, check the lost and found at the police station, sell fruit and shells. I walk around and around with nothing to do. My eyes ache from the brightness of the screen. The timer’s beeped three times, but I refuse to forfeit my controller.

The September 11 attacks change things before I know any different. A disparity between the life simulated in Animal Crossing and the life represented on TV begins to open. Years pass and the United States begins undeclared wars against countries in the Middle East. My oldest brother starts locking his things away behind a closed bedroom door. He is diagnosed in the 99^th percentile for anxiety, something my parents say I must never speak of. We are all uncertain. I begin to quiet. There are mechanisms in my life that are moving beyond my comprehension and control. But, being a simple, quiet cog is manageable, expected. It is easier for everyone.

Around this time, Animal Crossing codes begin appearing in issues of Nintendo Power which my oldest brother has a subscription to. The codes unlock exclusive Mario-themed furniture décor. But neither Jared nor I is allowed to bother him in the slightest. And we are definitely not allowed to go in his room.

The call of the codes is too alluring. From reconnaissance I know he keeps his Nintendo Power magazines in the bottom of his closet. I wait until he is playing videogames downstairs and my parents are not lurking about to sneak into his room and prowl through the pages.

His room is dark with the blinds drawn during the afternoon. On the walls is a constellation wallpaper. I creep across the dark wood floorboards, halting when one creaks. The closet doors open like theatre curtains. On the floor, there are a few magazine organizers. I sift through the magazines with a constant eye on the door. The codes section is toward the back and I look for the familiar yellow text box. The first magazine is one I have already harvested the code from. The next one, too. I fumble through them, heartbeat racing, the breath caught in my throat. I find the latest magazine with a brand new code. I print the letters and numbers plainly on yellow, lined paper. With the secrets in hand, I sneak out and close the door behind me.

Later Jared and I take turns unlocking items from Tom Nook.

Tom Nook says: “Then tell me the password.”

I whisper the tedious codes to Nook, twenty-eight characters each.

“I see, I see,” he says.

Out of his pocket he pulls wrapped presents and passes them to me. The small boxes contain impossible wonders: huge flagpoles, glowing stars, fire flowers, coin blocks, bullet bill cannons.

After we claim our prizes we destroy the codes, tearing them into tiny pieces.

The US declares war in Iraq. I wonder if it will still be going on when I am old enough to be drafted, if I will have to kill people, if I will be killed. I am not aware enough to wonder about the people who have already been killed by military action so far away from the stability of Kentucky. Thousands of civilians killed in countries that, in my ignorance, I can’t even find on a map as life carries on here just the same.

The Infinity Pocket

Your pockets store a ridiculous quantity of items in Animal Crossing. You can carry thirty six-foot long living coelacanths or thirty ebony grand pianos or thirty four-poster beds. The pocket is a mysterious place. You walk around with tons of items without any sign of distress. When you put anything in your pocket it transfigures into a green leaf.

You can mail impractical items in envelopes, too. If you want you can slide a fishing rod or a pink kitchenette into a standard envelope and mail it to your neighbor.

The media reports that the United States is at war, but not officially. It is Afghanistan. It is Iraq. It is whatever country, whatever group we are fighting. It is a fierce debate what we are fighting for. In the eighth grade, our parents have to sign a permission slip so that we can watch a documentary on 9/11. We sit in the classroom, gathered around a TV on a metal cart.

I remember clearly the pixilated blobs tumbling out of the building, down and down. I see the hovering bodies stuck mid-plunge, their faces obscured, choked with smoke, flushed suddenly with all of that fresh, breathtaking air. The Falling Man appears, their human body signing a four or a nine. The body has a mouth with a voice lost in vacuity of falling.

Tyler has a friend who lives at the end of his street named Hussain who we play with sometimes and ride bikes with on his street. His family is the only Muslim family I know living in our neighborhood. On Halloweens, they have their front porch light on, but on their door they have a sign explaining that they are a Muslim family and that they do not celebrate Halloween. The Halloweens after 9/11 their front porch light is never on. Hussain never comes to play at Tyler’s house. Their entire family retreats as if into the infinity pocket. I imagine now the fear they must have felt in the sea of white faces. And I, a white child, fail to ask a single question. I recognize now the privilege and racism holding my tongue. Silence is a complex, intersectional language that reflects dynamics of power. Already I knew the weight of silence, but to the detriment of those around me I hadn’t realized how I too could wield absences of sound.

Tyler and I never talk about Hussain. We never speak about 9/11 or the war or what the United States is doing to countries in the Middle East. In Animal Crossing, I start a campaign against Dotty, a rabbit who wears a blue check dress. She is programmed to have a peppy attitude, and I have tired of her constant positive vibes. I wield an axe and approach Dotty. Tyler is there, next to me, watching. I go up to her and press the A button, hoping to swing. The game initiates a conversation instead. I try again and again. I just keep talking to Dotty, hearing her inane catchphrase: wee one. “I’ve seen you a lot today, wee one!”

I try other implements. The fishing rod, the shovel. Finally, I try the net. I sprint toward Dotty and fire the A button. The net falls, clunking Dotty in the face. Her eyes widen as if she has been caught off guard. Tyler laughs at the ingenuity of this tactic. The approval invigorates me. I do it again and again. After the third time, Dotty becomes sad and dark clouds crowd her skull. I want her to move out, I want her to be sad. But I am also scared. Who am I trying to imitate? Tyler’s approval in this act unnerves me.

This is a life simulation. The worst you can do is bonk your neighbors on the head with a net, but in real life there are no limitations to suffering.

There are things concealed in my pockets I do not want to touch. I do not want to contemplate the edges of the dark leaves lurking; I do not want to uncover profane items I cannot display in my house or sell to Tom Nook.

What is a human capable of carrying within them without someone noticing? Our pockets are deep. Our feelings are a torrent of green leaves. All of this baggage is so inexplicably light.

The Cost of Wishes

The waters of the Animal Crossing Wishing Well reflect my face. I am sitting on the cool flagstones in the town square, peering into the water. The face floating on the surface of the water is mine, but from when I do not know. It is shifting from me at twenty-three recovering from years of awful buzz cuts to me at eight clutching my stuffed pikachu to me at twelve with a mouth sewn shut with a bitter thread. The great tree behind the Well rustles quietly in a dark breeze. It is night, a full moon.

I am here to apologize to the Well and to ask it for forgiveness. I do not have an undeliverable item as is required by the program. I am here to apologize to the twelve-year-old me for delivering a story I promised never to tell.

In the Well is my reflection. The water obliterates the face. Always it appears an unrecognizable smear. I remember what they wanted. They wanted to be a masculine little boy—they feel the safety of it now. They know inherently it will protect them.

The moon hangs in the Well alongside spent-coin wishes and an old reflection with bubbles streaming from deep below the water and a living body staring up with wobbling, wide eyes.

Placing my hands in the Well, I reach down to you, Justin. At the bottom of the Well, you hope the darkness of the night and the water will protect your story. You have yet to learn that even silence has a language to tell its story.

Obsession

Animal Crossing is a life simulation game where there is always something to do. But after playing for three hours straight, seven days a week for a year and a half, the neighbors repeat their programmed lines. The fruit and the fish are sold. My house is redecorated and all the items in Tom Nook’s store are bought. There is nothing to do.

I have a vision of an Animal Crossing avatar standing in the middle of an acre with nothing to do, nothing to say. Every task and chore has been resolved. The avatar stands there, holding its breath. There is no need to breathe in a life simulation.

I start playing other games with Tyler. We fall heavily into Phantasy Star Online: Episodes 1 & 2. It is a completely customizable RPG with different classes of humans and androids in which you can select clothing, facial features, hair, and more. We replay the levels again and again, playing through Hard Mode, Very Hard Mode, and eventually, our crowning achievement, Ultimate Mode. I have two characters: Zelda, a FOmarl female wizard with a blue dress and long brown hair I eventually dye blonde, and Robot Version 2.0, a HUcaseal who is a tiny female android with a mighty purple body. She wields scythes and blades twice her size. Zelda is the perfect support unit who also has well-rounded weapons. Robot Version 2.0 is of the Hunter class and, being a robot, she cannot cast spells to help her team out. She dives singularly into the fray, dealing massive damage, taking devastating hits.

Something begins to shift in the dynamic between Tyler and Jared and me. He has hit us before, has yelled at us in anger. It has been our responsibility not to make him mad, not to win too many times in video games, to accept whatever he says to us without response or critique, to acquiesce. We are older; we have to be more mature. We are part of this world of anxiety, paranoia, war, and rhetoric of violence and we seek understanding for Tyler’s behavior. His tempestuousness must fit somewhere in this unrest. And if we just stay silent, the violence will stay far-off.

The eggshells we’d been tip-toeing around are all broken. Our bodies are beginning to change. Tyler demands more attention from Jared and me, but he plays Runescape and Maple Story for hours while we stare mechanically at a board game spread on the floor of his family’s computer room with sparse rotations.

Tyler’s brother is throwing balls at us while we ride bikes in my driveway, and we are throwing them back at him and at each other. We pedal away to go to Tyler’s house. I drop a ball that I’m holding, and Tyler runs over it on his bike. When I turn around, he is on the ground crying. His arm is broken. “Maybe it’s not broken,” he says through the tears. But it is swelling, and I know it is. He gets a blue cast put on it and says time and time again that we broke his arm and when he and I are alone that I broke his arm.

Tyler’s mom brings him takeout for dinner while we are playing in his basement. He thrusts his food into my hands to hold while he fishes in the paper bag for napkins. I am hungry. His dog, who I thought was outside, is too. She jumps up into the air from behind and gulps down a portion of the quesadilla. He punches me hard in the side of the head, demanding to know how I could have let that happen. I want to cry, but I can’t in front of Tyler, so I turn my head down and mutter some apology.

We are playing whiffle ball in Tyler’s backyard. His brother pitches hard and beans Jared in the eye with the ball. Jared drops the bat and begins to run home, crying. Tyler tells him to come back, that it’s not that big a deal, that it doesn’t hurt that bad, that he shouldn’t be a baby, a pansy. I run home after Jared, and Tyler and his brother follow and stand in our front yard saying they’re sorry, saying it won’t happen again, saying it was an accident, saying that it wasn’t that bad, saying we just need to come back. I hide in the house and don’t answer the door.

You Cannot Reset

Tyler moves his bedroom into the basement of his house so that he and his brother can have separate rooms. We are all getting older now and need privacy. I have to share a room with Jared so I am jealous. There is nowhere else in our house for us to sleep. Tyler has his own light wood furniture and a TV of his own. We play video games sitting on his bed.

Sometime after Jared and I have harvested all the Super Mario codes, I bring my memory card over to Tyler’s house and we sit in the basement, and I show him my Animal Crossing treasures.

He loves them. He wants them, too. He asks how I got them.

“I got the codes from my brother’s Nintendo Power magazines. I had to steal them.”

“Hey, I want them, too.”

I don’t want to upset him. But the codes are gone. Shredded up. My oldest brother has stepped up security. The last time he found me in his room, he chased me out and kicked me senseless on the floor.

“I don’t have them anymore. Jared and I got rid of them.”

“C’mon, I know you’ve still got them,” Tyler says. “Give me the codes.”

I am speechless. What else can I say? The codes are twenty-eight characters long: I don’t remember any of them let alone more than a dozen. I spent hours stealing them from my brother. I am not about to repeat that process.

Tyler views this silence as insubordination. “What do you want for them? Huh? What do you want?”

He is too physically near, so I shift away.

He punches me in the arm, grabs at my shoulder. I stand up to leave, and he pushes me. I turn in the air and land on my back. The back of my head hits the ground. I try to stand.

He pushes me to the ground again. “Is this what you want, huh? Is this what you want?”

He pulls down the front of his pants by the waistband, exposing himself repeatedly. The shorts are blue or red or white. I am scared. I do not know anything about my body. I have brought this upon myself. My head hurts from the impact with the ground.

“Huh? Is this what you want?”

If you reset without saving in Animal Crossing, you are punished the next time you play. Mr. Resetti, the vitriolic mole, springs from the ground as soon as you exit your house and berates you for irresponsibly resetting without saving. If you reset too often, he takes away your money and later he strips away your eyes and mouth leaving gaping holes where your features used to be.

I am begging for him to stop. To let me go. The wood paneling on the basement walls is dark. The carpet is white and thin. “You’re hurting me,” I say. “You’re hurting me.” The back of my head vibrates. He steps back for a moment, and I am up and scrambling, darting past his grasp, up the stairs. His mom is in the kitchen preparing a snack. I shove my shoes onto my feet, huddled by the backdoor. She says something to me, but how can I respond? I run all the way home and say nothing.

I do not think about this event. The blank space of my mind is where I place every failure I feel I made in our friendship. Every issue I have instigated.

I am his friend, silently, for two more years. Then I stop trying all together, and I let the phone calls ring when I see his number on the caller ID.

In the weeks after, before I blot the event out completely, I wonder if he would have done this to anyone else. Members of his baseball team? His brother? I am not certain. Did he recognize the subtle dissonance in my presentation way back before even I knew? Something he could comfortably victimize?

I try to reset that afternoon for a decade in my head. But Animal Crossing is a life simulation. You are conditioned not to reset. There are things that cannot be undone. Navigating the immutable programming of the past, you must adhere to the limitations of the coding.

Mr. Resetti is always there, wating, face red, ready to yell. Ready to take away my mouth.

Credits Roll

I go to school. I sit at my desk I take notes. I study. I don’t study. I smile. I deserved it. I am quiet. I am loud. I eat quietly at dinner. I am changing. I get detention and conduct referrals. I forget, I say. I deserved it. I feel my parents cannot handle what has happened—they have so many other things to worry about. I am something they do not understand now. I must be their normal child. Their child without problems. The one they confide in. I deserved it. I start running track and cross-country at school. The miles wear down my mind. My body. I deserved it, but it is forgotten, I say. I forget.

How could I be so silent?

It is strength.

It is shame.

It is incredible, incredible naivety.

Time-Travel to the Beyond

In Animal Crossing, it is 31 December 2030. I have started time-traveling, passing through multiple days in a matter of hours, mining them for their valuable interactions. Check out the furniture in Nook’s shop, scour the land and seas for fish and bugs, fossils. Track the special visitors. And then I move on to the next day. It is life in fast-forward. Days and weeks passing by in the span of an afternoon.

In this scope, life is full, teeming, hectic, demanding. The town is overrun by weeds. The villagers count the days since I last spoke to them, yellow waves of shock springing from their heads when I speak to them. It is easy to brush past them.

Peaceful, busy day after peaceful, busy day.

If life is boring, skip forward. If you need money, skip forward to summer when the bugs and fish are plentiful. If you start to think too much, skip forward and chase the next exciting thing. If you want special furniture, skip to holidays. If you want to celebrate your birthday, skip to your birthday. Celebrate decades of your birthdays. Celebrate the same birthday time and time again.

If you want a neighbor to disappear, skip forward years without speaking to them until they move out.

Open up their goodbye letter.

Do not read it.

Shred it quietly between your fingers.

Animal Crossing is a life simulation, but it is not. Under such pressure, the game falls apart, becomes tedious. I skip to 31 December 2030 because it is the last day Animal Crossing is programmed to simulate. I watch the game clock tick toward the New Year, closer and closer to the great mystery of the beyond.

What will happen on the last day when the fireworks go off? I survived Y2K. I have lived in the post-9/11 United States of America. I am paranoid. The animal neighbors are all gathered together, singing, smiling. They are either unfazed by their impending doom or unware of it. Life, even in simulation, can be cruel.

The bell rings, the announcement is made, the fireworks boom. The clock shockingly reads: 1 January 2031. Is this an unprogrammed continuation? I am amazed that something exists after.

The air is full of smoke. Tiny embers and ash flutter down. The fireworks cease. The game becomes a wintered quiet. I shrug and save the file. I open it up again. The clock reads 1 January 2030. A reset. This is the farthest extent I can run. There is no more time.

I will have to live this year again and again and again.

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What It Means to Be Alive

Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, by Anne Panning

Stillhouse Press, 2018
243 pages, paperback, $16.00

Grief takes many shapes and can change as we live through it. For author Anne Panning, grief takes the shape of a discarded Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book, found on a neighborhood street, evoking the memory of her mother. This is where Panning’s new memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, begins. “Grief is so private that it’s hard to take it out into the world,” Panning observes as she mourns her mother’s death. The recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her collection Super America and a Best American Essays Notable nonfiction writer five times over, Panning can capture the essence of human experience. Panning’s essays are known for being fine-tuned and attenuated to the intensity of a moment, built out of vivid and uncomfortable truths. In Dragonfly Notes, Panning collects and uses these vignettes to craft a longer story about family, regret, and the loss of her mother.

Growing up poor in Arlington, Minnesota, the oldest daughter in a family of four siblings, with an addicted father and a loving mother, Panning manages to capture what it is to question where home is and what it means to leave one’s place of origin for good. Panning faces her own family criticism, quoting her brother: “‘Everything has to be such a drama for you,’” he expresses, “‘Isn’t anything just normal, or whatever for you?’” In this moment, Panning addresses a central aim of this book, which is to probe her family history in order to understand the loss of her mother. Her memoir answers her brother’s question easily, adeptly: No.

There is a symbolic mechanism that brings the memoir together, the “segmentation” of its structure, as Panning may call it, or the quilting together of titled sections that form the larger whole. Sections are not in chronological order, revealing Panning’s ability to shift into new time and geographical place naturally, as though she is having a conversation with us. Panning, like her mother, collects things throughout the memoir, and it is notable that the book, like her mother’s acts of accumulating fabric for making Panning’s childhood wardrobe, is carefully sewn from its sections.

Early on, in a section called “Good Girl,” Panning wonders what made her mother stay with Panning’s father. Barb met Lowell when she was in high school, and, as Panning notes, he was already an alcoholic then. Panning lets herself ask questions to her mother that she will never get answers to. This series of questions starts to open the door to what the memoir investigates: How does abuse happen in a family, and how do we get out of it? What does it mean to stay, and what does it mean to leave?

There is a dynamic relationship between Panning’s unflinching approach to her past and her lyricism in describing her parents’ home. Of the distressed Victorian her parents owned, she describes “the upstairs bathroom that our mother had made cozy by wallpapering the sloped wall over the tub in a tiny floral print, painting the vanity and chair a soft, strawberry pink, and glazing flower patterns on the side of the claw-foot tub. It still smelled like her Caress soap.”

Then, in a section titled “Hijacked,” Panning’s anger appears. After Panning introduces her family to her fiancé, whom she identifies as the healthiest relationship she has ever had, her mother asks her to reconsider the wedding. Panning remembers her mother saying through the phone line, “‘I mean, it’s not like he abuses you or anything, but he seems to sort of dictate how thing go in an abusive way.’” Panning, fierce as ever, responds with vehemence in the exchange, telling her mother, “‘You wouldn’t know a good relationship if it hit you in the face!’” And she goes on. What makes these moments so real is how vulnerable and honest Panning is.

The memoir finds its center in a Minnesota hospital with all of Panning’s siblings, waiting after the last of a series of incomplete and failed surgeries her mother has endured. With her mother on life support, Panning circles scenes with humor (eating Harry Potter Jelly Belly jelly beans with her siblings) and ends them with emotional heft (her father’s inability to stop the alarm going off on his wristwatch while getting very bad news). Throughout this section, the strengths of Panning’s writing are revealed: We can hear the potato chip bag crinkle under the weight of her father’s mindless snacking, we can see Panning trying to sing to her vacant mother in her hospital bed.

As the memoir ends, Panning must face her ordinary life. It’s almost as if she doesn’t want to let go, because doing so fades the memories of her mother. In mourning, Panning puts her energy into the writing workshop she’s teaching at SUNY Brockport, where I myself took classes with her (not the one she recounts). In a nonfiction class I took with her, she guided us to figure out the point of an essay by asking “So what?” At the end of her memoir, she asks, “I have parasailed in Malaysia—so what?” Her memoir easily answers the so-what question, and, in fact, there are many answers to that question in this powerful, necessary nonfiction work. Because this memoir will help readers feel hope if they are in abusive relationships. Because this memoir will help people grieve. Because this memoir will teach readers that it’s okay to be as raw and as vulnerable as you can be, as long as you are being honest. This memoir gives to its readers a sense of what forgiveness, grief, and living fully, all at once, can mean to a person. This memoir needs to be read as a vital voice in nonfiction, a voice that empowers, challenges, and gives comfort to those experiencing what it means to be alive.

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Reunion Ode

Do I know you, old friend? You were taken

off our asphalt ballgame expanse

where Sorrento and Parma roads met

before we were ten, to the North,

Edmonton, off my map of the world,

before Oswald shot Kennedy. Then,

you’ve told me, it was 40 below

when you landed without a coat, and found

that town’s kids could be heartless

as Philly’s where I stayed with Robert’s

and Elliott’s fists in my face. No escape

for either of us. Maybe you had more

boredom up in that numbing cold,

a near-paralytic stillness of frozen

lakes, cruel monotony of conifers

far as the mind could wander, a father

who knew only to quietly toughen you,

thicken your hide, and couldn’t. Maybe

I wound up more anaesthetized

by barrage, the din of the Market

Street pinball arcades, the ringing

thunder of bowling balls smashing

the pins under 54^th Street, under

the roar of the one massive hungry kvetch

in the delicatessen above the lanes,

the howl of the great complaint

that was the real American anthem,

deafening song of never enough

belonging. I’d drift to its screech

refrains on the El down to 69^th. How

was it for you? And do you know me,

after all these seasons, your silences

lonely as endless tundra, my screaming

riots of rights marches and acid rock

horror shows? Can we be the friends

we are? You’ve welcomed me

into your house, I see the boy

in the lift of your brow, that considerate

set of your mouth you learned

from your mother, and how you wait

for the kid’s heart to come out and color

the keys when you’re about to play

something for us on piano. You must

pick up on my frightened original

innocence in the blurt-and-pause

of my city-punk talk. And yesterday

when we ambled along the shore toward the old

observatory you showed me, I heard you

wonder as purely as who you were

when we sat on the swings in my yard

and joked, both of us already lost

forever, bedazzled alike under sky

wider than thought, secretly jazzed

to be recognized by one another.

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Interview: Danez Smith

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of two poetry collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and are working on their third. Smith is also the author of the chapbooks Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2017) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). It was while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Smith first discovered poetry through the arts program First Wave. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They are a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. The following interview with Smith took place at the Miami Book Fair in November 2017. Please also see Janine Harrison’s Aquifer review of Don’t Call Us Dead.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I dove into Don’t Call Us Dead with mega-enthusiasm because when I was handed the list of poets I’d be interviewing here at the Miami Book Fair because I have taught your poem “alternate names for black boys” in the protest-poetry section of my intro to poetry class. It’s a great poem to teach for so many reasons. It relies on this list of names, in the body of the poem, which are not names at all, but images, which is the point. It shows students how this poet, you, totally trusts the images to do the work, and I struggle to teach our young poets this form of trust.

Smith:

It’s hard, it’s hard. You know, I was teaching a workshop the other day, and everybody was so caught up in talking content and asking, What do you think of this poem? And talking about it as if it’s a story that somebody just told, and I’m like, No, where are the images, what makes you actually like the poem? I’d been writing a lot of poems about black boys, about police violence, about the many violences America throws at the black body, and I think I got to a point where I could no longer tell the story, I just had to curate the images, to let everybody else tell it to themselves.

TFR:

I like that term, “curate.” I’ll continue to teach the poem, and it makes it so much more exciting to teach it after meeting the poet and to talk about your concept of “curating the images.” About 50 percent of my students are writing about police violence. Many of my students are in that age range of about twenty-five or younger. I’m not going to ask your age—

Smith:

Twenty-eight.

TFR:

How people view the police has changed, and so the culture changes. We all know poetry should try to disrupt, and make changes, and nudge people from their comfort zones, and obviously you’re doing that, clearly, in terms of your writing as well as your performances of slam poetry and your recordings. What do you see as hoping it’s going to accomplish, and will in the future—the poetry—and continue to do so, and with media?

Smith:

I think poetry’s goal has long been to distill something in the human (uniquely human), and the human is often beautiful, but it can be ugly and political as well. Our humanity is an ugly and gorgeous thing. I just hope that people read and that we have a diverse readership. It’s just not about inspiring a next generation of poets, but also making creative poems that inspire the next generation of policy makers, that inspire the teachers, the lawmakers, the educators, the shakers, and the movers, and everybody that makes up our society. To make poems that push the world by pushing the readers, and by offering them something, that some bit of language that can better seed the word in their world, or with words that better describe it. I hope to put into language what I know I feel, and maybe to help other people find some way of being, of seeing, of moving forward.

TFR:

And that language is like magic.

Smith:

Language is magic, yeah. But this language is not high; I think I’m trying better to bridge those two worlds. I want my poems to sound more like me.

But there are many me’s. I think poets always randomly say some high-lyrical jargon off the cuff [laughter] because we’re not even trying [to connect], but poetry for me is most interesting when it encompasses all the language that our world holds.

TFR:

The form of your poem “litany with blood all over” fascinates me. This to me is so powerful: “my blood, his blood, my blood, his blood, over and over” because it works as such a visual object as well. When you say that you’re not just reaching out to young poets, or young students, but across ages that’s great but difficult. I’m fifty-six and grew up in Chicago, but I have a totally different mindset than a lot of other people from where I live now. If I showed my neighbor, for example, a poem, it would mean nothing to him. I struggle to reach those people. Tell me what went through your mind, when working on this, it seems so full of emotion.

Smith:

I think there’s a certain point where a poem decides it wants to break out of some type of a traditional way of being on the page—I became aware of this studying poets like Duriel E. Harris, like Evie Shockley, like Douglas Kearney—and with this poem I reached a point where I had said everything I could say, and what actually needed to come out was something more visual and less legible, but full of emotion.

TFR:

There’s also a powerful rhythm to read this—“my blood, his blood” from the poem we spoke of earlier, “litany with blood all over”—repeatedly, over and over with its powerful visual overlapping like a spell—I don’t know what else to call it. I suppose you could find a powerful way in a straight-form line, but to me this is so powerful that you did it like this.

Smith:

It had to be like that—

TFR:

It had to be it like that?

Smith:

Yes—the poem wants to start breaking out of the traditional strategy for lineation. Even other poems are kind of wonky, where, you know, poets get rather tab-happy, with the tab button on their computer and sort of start pushing lines to the other side of the page for no reason [laughter]. That’s the kind of stuff I start playing with—

TFR:

Tab-happy?!

Smith:

I don’t know what that’s called, so I just call it “tab-happy.”

I’m just like, okay, you wrote a poem and you decided want it to be all over the place, and that’s fine. I love those poems, I write those poems all the time.

Tab-happy sounds so fun—but I think even when the poem is hard—“litany with blood all over” is a very serious and sad poem—but still there has to be an element of play within the writing process, I believe, even when you’re writing about possibly traumatic, or serious, sad, melancholy, depressive, what-have-you topics.

In that moment of trying to figure out how to make this my blood, his blood, this overlapping of language and blood, I think I found a way to lift above language and it actually just becomes the blood on the page. Here’s a moment of play. I remember becoming very excited trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I started writing “my blood my blood his blood his blood” and thinking I wanted this to crash together—How do I merge these things? That part just becomes fun, you start getting into Microsoft Word or InDesign and just have fun.

TFR:

When did you know you were going to be a poet, when did you feel you were a poet, and when did you feel—besides just expressing yourself ordinarily as a young man and a person—when did you say, This is what I want to do? What did you first read that made you excited? Or hear? Music?

Smith:

I wasn’t reading. I definitely came into poetry as an auditory tradition, oratory tradition, oral tradition. I came into poetry first, at least was first excited by it, through the oral tradition. A lot of my teachers were teaching Frost and Dickinson, and blah blah blah—well, not blah blah blah, but at the time it felt like blah blah blah—and Langston Hughes was only taught if it was February. It was spoken word, it was sort of the like Def poetry movement that happened in the early 2000s that caught me up.

TFR:

Got you—

Smith:

Yes, because at first I didn’t know poets were alive.

[laughter]

All the poets they showed us in school were dead! And so I thought poetry died with the poets—I didn’t know there were still living, breathing, poets. I’m glad to see there’s been a greater shift in the last ten-fifteen years to push living poets into the classroom, and the high school and college classrooms, and thank God for it, because for so long, I don’t know what people were thinking in the ’90s and early 2000s. It felt like nobody was actually interested in bringing in anything actually contemporary to students, and what I needed was a voice a little bit closer in, well not in age, but in “moment” to me. I heard that other poets were talking about things I cared about, not just things that happened in the past, but things that still are relevant, that still have echoes, that still have resonance today, where they were talking about today. That felt important. So, you know, I first found a little poetry then. I was always going to write poetry—I didn’t know it was a career option—and in college I was part of a hip hop and spoken word arts program called First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I was curious—we’d have these poets come through and teach us workshops and perform, and I didn’t know how they did this. How do you pay rent and call yourself a poet? Do you have a day job? Some had a day job, some did not, and I think for me it was never a question of whether I was going to write poetry but was more a question of income, which is a very real thing for artists.

I’ve been a poet since I started being a poet at fourteen, but at a certain point I was making enough to be a poet full time.

TFR:

In one interview in 2015, you mentioned that were obsessed with intersectionality. I like hearing about what other poets’ muses are, their haunts, their obsessions. Is this still an obsession?

Smith:

Okay, I don’t know if I’d say I’m obsessed with intersectionality, I think intersectionality is in everything, intersectionality being a foundational black feminist thought that you are never just the one thing—

With my first book, I was definitely obsessed with that. What happened with [insert] boy, part of my life process with trying to build that book was trying to parse out my identity to have a section that was supposedly about blackness, to have a section about queerness, or my life as a sex worker, about my family. The fun part about that was that even as I was trying to suss these topics out, they were still bleeding into each other, still speaking to each other. I couldn’t talk about just being black. I had to talk about also being queer within that, and all these other identities I hold—

They’re all layered over each other. I think then I was kind of obsessed with the concept of intersectionality, but not so much anymore. I think now in my work intersectionality is now just a fact. I think it was something I was playing around with in my first book, and now it’s our lives, we are, all of us, we each are our many selves.

TFR:

As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? You’ve moved on, so what questions do you find yourself asking questions in the newer poems?

Smith:

I think every poem is a pursuit, is a failed pursuit of an answer, but just a poem getting a little bit closer to it. I wrote [insert] boy, and I spent time with those questions, and I wrote Don’t Call Us Dead, and spent time with those questions, and now I’m writing new things and working toward my third book, and so I have questions there that I’m trying to pursue too.

TFR:

It’s great to have a book like Don’t Call Us Dead for my advanced poetry class, for studying form—students need to see these new forms, they need to have their eyes opened. I make it a point to use few, maybe one or two dead poets.

Smith:

Well, now I love Frost and Dickinson, all those folks. I love William Blake, [laughter] and Keats, and stuff like that—

TFR:

Crazy guys!

Smith:

Right, crazy guys! I find something of value in that—but it took falling in love with contemporary poetry for me to be able to reach back, and where we understand something historical of note.

TFR:

Okay, then I want to ask a last question, did it take something to unlock the door, and there you went, and you kind of exploded from there?

Smith:

I didn’t love poetry for a while, and then a professor of mine in college asked me, “Are your poems only going to be good when you’re around to read them [aloud]?” And then that’s what really changed my life and sent me to the page. Then I discovered another whole other realm of possibility of how to be a poet, and I was already in love with the concept of poetry, and it was nice to discover it also be lived in a vibrant way on the page, too, because I think that’s the thing—when I found spoken word I did not also find the contemporary written word. That came later. I knew folks were speaking poetry into the world, but I didn’t know folks were still publishing books!

TFR:

Often people who like spoken word or slam poetry don’t think about looking at it—on the page or in a book. They think this is too quiet, or “I’m not going to get it.”

Smith:

No, no, books are loud, books are loud, books are forceful.

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Someplace Better

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press, 2017
88 pages, soft, $16.00

In their second collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith screams at America, particularly white America, to become woke, once and for all, instead of denying the genocide of black males via racism and homophobia. Smith’s words are so pointed and powerful, impassioned and infuriated that I cannot help but equate the poet with James Baldwin, whose writing was frequently, as stated in his essay, “The Creative Process,” a “lover’s war” with society.

In this three-part work (since named a National Book Award finalist) replete with snake, blood, burial, water, fish, black sky, and star symbolism, Smith illustrates what is possible—the frontier of form serving content—poems with segments both traditional and prose-like, that begin and end in concrete form, are epistolary, contain lines that offer colons and backslashes, that are hermit-crab, fill-in-the-blank, and crossed out. However challenging, though, the texts are accessible, a balancing act achieved throughout the book.

Smith’s words are often born in fury, as may be noted in poems that bookend the collection. In part one, “dear white america,” they make it clear that they would rather move to a new planet in danger of being sucked into a black hole than to continue to subsist on Earth. The poet asks, “… how much time do you want for your progress?” In part three, “you’re dead, america,” they make white america aware that only because of “brown folks,” “realer than any god / for them i bury whatever / this country thought it was.” Unlike the black boys buried in earlier poems, the persona buries “america,” respectfully, yet still using a lower-case “A.”

In “Summer, Somewhere,” the prologue, in which they write, “if snow fell, it’d fall black. Please don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better,” black men are removed from coffins as boys again, given a second chance, and “… go out for sweets & come back.” Trayvon’s new name is “RainKing.” The poet inquires, “do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?” The poem, although steeped in a context of injustice, is gentle, beautiful, like listening to a dirge—a sense of relief and release created about this imaginary haven, racist and homophobic hell on earth slipping away.

One theme of the timely collection is police brutality. In the prologue, such references as “sometimes it’s they eyes who lead / scanning for bonefleshed men in blue” and that even in this alternative heaven, they still can’t shake their fears, “we wake up hands up.” When I reached “dear badge number,” still in section one, I wondered why the poet was so heavy-handed with his emphatic two-line piece, “what did i do wrong/be born? be black? meet you?” In another context, I would have criticized it for obviousness, but I realized that Smith sees the time for subtlety as long gone. Directness is needed so that white readers cannot possibly misconstrue their words.

Smith writes about homosexuality in equal measure. In “last summer of innocence,” the poet illuminates the final summer before the speaker was aware of their homosexuality. They write about homosexual dating and racism therein, and about sex itself. Tender lines come across as a love letter to black males. This work serves as orientation for what is to come: witnessing a grieving process as the poet, who has revealed publicly they are HIV+, takes readers through the agonizing stages that led to acceptance of such a diagnosis. The poem “fear of needles,” for instance, contains three centered lines written in second-person point of view, in which Smith pushes readers into a place of fear experienced by sexually active gay men:

instead of getting tested

you take a blade to your palm

hold your ear to the wound

The poet delves into the intricacies of being HIV+, discussing betrayal by partner and self, loss of future progeny, homophobic religious leaders, and even the disease as a form a genocide. They intertwine police and infected blood cells, jail sentences and HIV sentences. In the epigraph of “1 in 2,” Smith states that a 2016 CDC study revealed that one in every two black men who has sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV. They observe:

If you trace the word diagnosis back enough

you’ll find destiny

trace it forward, find diaspora

They push themselves in terms of not only content but also form throughout section two, most notably in the final poem, “litany with blood all over,” when the pain becomes so intense that the piece ends concretely as “his blood” and “my blood” increasingly mingle, becoming one, across one-and-a-half pages of type.

To call Don’t Call Us Dead “brave” would be an understatement, an insult. I wish that this collection did not exist, that there was no need. But there is, and since there is, I cannot think of a poet who could handle its subjects more deftly or with more grace and poignancy than Danez Smith.

Please also see Judith Roney’s Aquifer interview with Danez Smith.

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Stretched between Sunshine and Shadow

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, by Kate Carroll de Gutes
Two Sylvias Press, 2017
200 pages, paper, $17.00

Kate Carroll de Gutes’s debut memoir, Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Memoir, and she has written another noteworthy book. Her new memoir, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, has already won an IPPY (Independent Publishers Book Award) and will speak to many readers who share the struggle between our public personas and private feelings. The book was sparked by a thought-provoking question that poet Fleda Brown posed to her online community about resisting the tendency to present life on social media as perfection, depicting beautiful children, beautiful friends, beautiful houses, even beautiful food—all of the time.

De Gutes set out to see whether or not she could intentionally share what she calls “the duality—the both/and, the light/dark—of life” for thirty consecutive days on her blog. She examines the way social media is used to “connect” with friends and acquaintances in the very moment we have a thought or a photo to share. In her work, she considers the questions: Has the immediacy of social media made us more isolated than in the days of neighbors chatting over the fence, mailing handwritten letters, and making phone calls? Has shaping a public persona overshadowed engagement in authentic human relationships?

She could not have predicted just how much her life would be stretched between the extremes of sunshine and shadow across the time-span of her experiment. Things took a dramatic shift when shortly into the #LightAndDark blog project, her mother experienced a series of strokes. Less than a month after her father died, De Gutes remembers taking her mother to a play. Her mother was having trouble keeping names and plot points straight:

I didn’t think it was Alzheimer’s then. I thought it was grief that kept her from tracking. . . who would think it was anything more than the grief of losing a spouse of forty-six years?

As the play began, my mother reached over and patted and squeezed my right hand, then let her hand linger there. Looking at this now, I see she was apologizing and thanking me in the same move. But all I felt was discomfort. My mother’s hand on mine, me standing in as spouse like I had done so many times before. I never wanted this role. Now here I was starring in it. I withdrew into myself. My mother felt it and pulled her hand away.

Then her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and eventually moved into a care facility near De Gutes. After the strokes, De Gutes and her sisters moved their mother again—from the care facility to adult foster care—in order to get the hospice care she needed. Just ten days later, she died. De Gutes made her mother’s funeral arrangements, delivered her eulogy, and closed her estate.

Within ten months, De Gutes became the primary caretaker of her close friend Steph. When cancer took her friend, De Gutes closed her estate. Then her close friend, editor Judith Kitchen of Ovenbird Press, died of cancer two days after completing the final edit on Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear. Grief shook the bedrock of De Gutes’ world, and multiple aftershocks continued to leave her feeling ungrounded. At the same time, she was busy giving public readings to promote her debut memoir, winning awards and giving speeches.

Under these circumstances, De Gutes still carried on The Authenticity Experiment, trying to render an honest depiction of her day-to-day reality. Some days her post went up only minutes before midnight, but she wrote something every day for the full thirty days. This chapter, just one short paragraph, titled NEGRONI (PRN) illustrates the swiftness of change in her life and the weight of the decisions that fell on her shoulders.

I’m not sure which is harder: moving my mom to an adult foster home on the down-low so she wouldn’t continually be retraumatized when we had to keep telling her about it, or leaving her there. Which is why tonight I’m sitting at my new favorite restaurant and drinking a Negroni. I ate here two weeks ago tonight with my mom. I feel like I’ve been in one of those Progressive Insurance “Life Comes at You Fast” commercials. Was it really only two weeks ago that I had this same drink at this same table with my mom?

When the thirty-day experiment reached its conclusion, some of De Gutes’ readers didn’t want it to end. She decided to continue to write under the #DarkAndLight hash tag, posting longer essays a couple of times a week. The result is a compelling collection of skillfully written essays, which with honesty and vulnerability celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. They read like letters from a dear friend. The thread tying them together is her understanding that life is never all good, or all bad. Life is messy. Joy mingles with heartbreak:

We live in the great mess, the humus, or soil, of life—which has for its root, the same prefix as human . . . Life should be dirty, tumbling around in all the organic components that make up our lives, our living, ashes to ashes, and all that beautiful fertileness that makes us who we are.

In The Authenticity Experiment, readers are invited to bear witness as the author navigates her way through profound grief, all the while doing her best to fully experience the good things happening for her as well. De Gutes takes her readers along with her to public places, delivering acceptance speeches at award ceremonies, delivering eulogies, and into the most personal spaces, while navigating the legal system to close two estates and being engulfed by crushing emotions in unexpected places. On each step of this journey, she bids readers to consider what she learned from that impossible year—what she calls the “both/and” of our lives. How do we give ourselves permission to experience joy in the midst of grief? Where can we find enough strength to be vulnerable and stay fully engaged with our families, friends, and communities? She asks, “Everything is always both/and, isn’t it? We are alive, and we are dying. We are there, and we are here. We are confused, and in our confusion we are finally able to see clearly and sing out in our full range.”

De Gutes doesn’t offer a road map. She’s not in the business of giving advice. Still, her story teaches by example that it’s possible to pay attention and appreciate the glimmers of light that brighten even our darkest days. Sometimes it requires conscious intention.

Please also see Heidi Sell’s interview with Kate Carroll de Gutes.

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Interview: Kate Carroll de Gutes

Packing my carry-on bag for a flight to Portland, Oregon to visit my son and his husband, I ran my finger along the spines of books I’d purchased but had yet to read. I selected a memoir called Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, written by Kate Carroll de Gutes. I read the first few pages in order to weigh its merit as travel reading. I sat down to finish just the first chapter. An hour later, I had to force myself to close the book. Before tucking the book into my bag, I flipped to the author bio and learned that De Gutes lives in Portland, Oregon. This felt like kismet.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I quickly sent off an email asking her if she’d be willing to meet with me and allow me to interview her. Instinctively, I knew this author could guide me around some of the obstacles I’d been bumping into in my own efforts to write a memoir. Kate graciously agreed.

We met at Townshend’s Alberta Street Teahouse where we took up residence in a couple of chairs nestled in a back corner. For the next hour or so, we discussed the sometimes sticky challenges of writing about our lives and the people in them who didn’t necessarily sign up to become supporting actors in the stories we need to tell.

Kate Carroll de Gutes is the author of two books, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (Ovenbird Books, 2015)—which won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir—and The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, winner of an Independent Publishing Award medal in LGBTQ Nonfiction (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). Please also see Heidi Sell’s review of The Authenticity Experiment.

Heidi Sell for The Florida Review:

You began your writing career in journalism. I’m wondering how that background informs your creative work. I’m finding there’s no shortage of people standing by to declare, “That’s not how it happened,” or “I never said that!” Since memories do indeed shape-shift over time, what strategies do you use to reconcile objective facts with subjective memory?

Kate Carroll de Gutes:

Both fiction and nonfiction are writing towards truth, but nonfiction writers are constrained by a ‘box of facts’ that they have to work within to get to the truth. I don’t make any composite characters in there. I don’t compress the timeline. I leave things out of the timeline obviously, but I don’t compress it as if ‘this all happened in one year’ kind of thing. Because I’m a real believer in facts. That’s why we read nonfiction, because we’re interested in the facts of someone’s life.

I don’t think it’s that hard to hew to fact and still get to some truth. I think you have to think awfully hard about it. How do you get there? And like you said, you have to bust through your own denial. What does that really mean? You have to bust through your anger and your pain and your shame. All of that.

TFR:

Something I keep running into is that in my own mind, some memories have morphed and merged, and I realize that couldn’t have happened that year. We didn’t live in that house when she was that old, or whatever . . . What do you do with things like that?

De Gutes:

I think you tell your reader. There’s a phrase that I use a lot in that book [Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear], which is, “But that isn’t exactly true,” or “But that can’t be true, because we didn’t live in that house then.” And sometimes I interrogate myself on the page. Is this true?

There’s an essay in the book about my dad in the Navy. I had to do a ton of research for that. I got my dad’s Naval records. I talked to people that he was in the Association of Naval Aviators with. You know, my mom had Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t trust her memory. She said, “Your dad wasn’t an aviator.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, he was. He had his wings.”

And she says, “Yeah, he just had those. He wasn’t an aviator.”

“But he was in the Association of Naval Aviators.”

She said, “No. They let anybody in.”

TFR:

Really? Can I get in?

De Gutes:

Yes! It turns out they do let anybody in, but it also turns out my father had his wings.

I have a new essay I’m working on. I inherited the kitchen table that I grew up with, and it was, I thought, my grandparents’. My mom said, “Oh, no. That was your great-grandparents’.”

And my sisters and I were like, “You have Alzheimer’s.”

This table always squeaked, and I sent it out to be repaired, to be re-glued and all of that and when the guy came to pick it up he was like, “Oh, wow! This table’s a hundred and thirty years old, at least!”

We’d totally dismissed Mom. So, I think those are important things to tell a reader. I’d completely dismissed my mother, and it turns out this was true.

TFR:

I sometimes feel dismissed by my family that way, because I’m known for having kind of a wonky memory. So even when I’m sure I absolutely know something to be true, if they have any doubt, they just assume I’m the one who remembered it wrong. That’s something that I struggle with in trying to write my story. So I just think out loud on the page?

De Gutes:

Think out loud on the page, and also you have to remember that everybody has a different memory. You know, you’ll remember one thing from this meeting and I’ll remember another. It’s like the old car accident scene, right? Six people watch a car accident, and everybody has a different story about what happened.

That is the tricky part of memoir and that’s why, in my opinion, you always have to alert your reader. Like, “I’m imagining this. I don’t know this to be true. I think perhaps it happened this way.” I think an honest memoir writer will always alert their reader to the fact that they don’t know.

You know, my siblings remember this differently.

TFR:
Did you get a lot of push back from them?

De Gutes:

None, which I find fascinating. My dad had died by the time I finished the draft of the thesis. My mom read it. The original thesis was very different with a different ending. Her only comment was, “I don’t look very nice in this.”

I said to her what I think you should say to your family, which is, “Mom, these are just my memories, and they’re just the memories I chose to put down. It’s not the whole story.” When you’re writing about people, it’s hard.

You know, it’s like, No, I’m imposing a narrative structure. It’s okay, but people who aren’t writers don’t understand that.

TFR:

You mention in your book the generosity of your ex-wife and her current spouse in allowing you to tell your version of what happened. Did they know you were writing Objects as you were writing it, or only after you finished?

De Gutes:

My ex-wife definitely knew because we divorced while I was in graduate school. We were together twenty-four years so we had a lot of years of both reading together and talking about writing. I gave her the whole manuscript, and I said if there’s anything you object to let’s talk about it.

And she said, “I’m not even going to read it right now, because it’s your story. You tell it.”

You know, really gracious. She came to the book awards. She’s an amazing individual. And even her current partner, he’s like, “I hear I show up in the book. Do I get royalties?”

I’m said, “If you sell five thousand copies, I will send you on a cruise!”

He’s like, “All right, I’m working on it.” He’s a really good guy.

TFR:

If it hadn’t gone that way, if they’d been resistant or really upset with something you’d written, how would you have handled that?

De Gutes:

What do you do?

TFR:

Yes. Would you have gone ahead? Would you have abandoned the project?

De Gutes:

Well, that’s a great question. It’s a hypothetical, but I’m always open to change, you know? I’m sure you found my blog, which is actually becoming a book [The Authenticity Experiment]. I write about the people in my life. They all have nicknames, but my siblings were really upset about one of the posts.

And they said, “If you’re going to write about us, could you tell us and we could read it first?”

I said, “Sure.” And I actually changed a post for them. It was a simple change.

I think had my ex-wife been very upset about that I would have considered making changes. I would have considered cutting. As it was, you don’t know what happened in my marriage. That’s the biggest question I get from readers, “I don’t understand. What happened in your marriage?”

And I say, “That’s between me and my ex-wife.”

I hope I’ve told enough of the story that you’re engaged and it’s not tell-all. Nobody wants a confessional memoir, I don’t think. Read the National Enquirer for that.

TFR:

I have a blended family, so there are always these undercurrents of emotional stepfamily stuff going on. I’m trying to honor each of those stories that overlap my own, but it’s really difficult to tease apart and still tell a whole story. You talk about nonfiction writers being constrained by a ‘box of facts.’ So you use nicknames. That’s not something I’ve thought of trying, but they’d still know who they were in the book.

De Gutes:

Right, they know who they are. I write about so many people on the blog and they didn’t sign up to be friends with, or to love a nonfiction writer, so you know . . . nicknames work for them. And some people I don’t name at all.

The post that just went up, my two friends that I was with, I didn’t name them. They both contacted me and said, “That was such a great post and I’d forgotten that happened. Thank you for that great post.” Neither one said, ‘Thank you for not naming me,” but I’m careful with people.

And I think with your blended family, again, you still have to tell your story. It’s your experience of the step-kids coming in and blending them with your own children. And is all of that germane? That’s the question I ask myself, too. I write it all down. You know, I write hundreds of pages to get ten. I’m sure you do the same.

TFR:

Yes. There’s a scene that I have written again and again and again. I just can’t get it right. Part of the problem is revealing another kid’s personal crisis that was occurring in the same time frame as the event I need to write. That scene is crucial to the story, but difficult to write without exposing a painful time for our family that really isn’t relevant to the story I want to tell. Recently, I started over. Stopped trying to revise what I had already written and just started all over. This time I put everybody’s names in it, everything.

De Gutes:

Good.

TFR:

And now I’ll go back and revise again, but what do you advise in a situation where two stories are so tangled together?

De Gutes:

Well, the reality is it’s your story about it, so you don’t necessarily have to get their blessing. Right?

TFR:

That’s what I keep going back and forth about. I think of Anne Lamott who says that if people wanted you to write nice things about them, they should have behaved better.

De Gutes:

Right! Exactly, exactly! Anne Lamott will also tell you that she changes people. She uses composite characters sometimes.

TFR:

But you don’t feel comfortable doing that yourself.

De Gutes:

I don’t. I think it’s wrong. I really do. I do feel comfortable, like on the blog, giving nicknames and I also know there are some stories I can’t ever tell. There are stories I’ll never tell except for—you know—like sitting here I might tell you a story, but I’ll never write it.

But you’ve got to write this one.

TFR:

I can’t see the story without it.

De Gutes:

So I think if I were to give you any advice, I would say try writing it from a different point of view. Try writing it in third person. Try writing it in second person.

TFR:

I noticed that you use second person quite a lot, and it’s so powerful.

De Gutes:

It is. And it’s a great way to approach a scary topic. So is third person. She could tell you there were many times when she saw what was true, but chose to deny it. You know, that kind of thing, right? It’s fascinating what a change in point-of-view will do for a story. Another thing is try writing in future perfect. Using second person or third person, you know. She will tell you in 2017 that . . .

TFR:

I like that approach. I haven’t seen that in other memoirs. That’s something you did in this book that really caught my attention, that I really found to be very powerful.

De Gutes:

It happened by surprise. It happened because something was out of the timeline, and I thought, I’ve got to make this work. Oh, I’ve got to change the tense. Oh, and it’s got to be future perfect. And there’s one other one that’s future conditional.

TFR:

Future conditional. I must admit I don’t remember exactly what that means. [Laughs.]

De Gutes:

Me too. I didn’t know what to call it. There’s a great book that I always refer to called Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tuft. It’s just fantastic. It’s so helpful in these situations.

TFR:

You shift those tenses throughout the book. And I guess in my head I thought that was ‘against the rules’ until I read Objects.

De Gutes:

Fuck the rules, right?

TFR:

Some of your chapters are really short. It makes me wonder about how I might use little snippets of my own that haven’t grown into anything bigger.

De Gutes:

Well, you might think about juxtaposition and how you can bump some things up against one another, because they inform each other. But sometimes a really short piece just works.

I’m also a big proponent of if you’re just writing a scene and it’s powerful and it stands on its own, then okay. I’m also a big believer in doing what works for you. Judith (Kitchen) was a big believer in working with your weaknesses. So you want to tie it up tidy, and she’s like, “Life isn’t tidy. Let’s work with that, you know?”

Your weakness is that you want to tie everything up. Let’s leave it untied. See what happens. I think it’s human nature to want to tie it all up, but you can’t.

TFR:

I think for me the trick is giving the reader a bit more trust to make their own meaning out of things instead of trying to tell them what I think it means.

De Gutes:

Right, and you never know what your readers are going to bring to the page anyway. I’m stunned when somebody tells me what they see and I think, Well, you’re right, but I wasn’t thinking that. I never saw that.

TFR:

Have you had anyone write a review of your book that you really disagreed with?

De Gutes:

No. I’ve been so lucky that I have only gotten good reviews. At least, the published reviews. There are a few on Amazon and Goodreads that . . . well, there are trolls out there. But no, I have been so, so lucky that my written reviews have all been good, and I’m really grateful for that because I know I would be kind of devastated.

TFR:

It’s tough to put yourself out there. I think most writers are introverts.

De Gutes:

Right, and sensitive little beings!

TFR:

Do you have a workshop group, a list of first readers? How do you keep yourself moving forward?

De Gutes:

I keep myself moving forward because I’m just ridiculously driven, so there’s that. I’m always writing. I always have a journal with me. I’m constantly working on something that may turn into something and may not. Like I said, I write a hundred pages to get ten.

I do all my work longhand and then type it. I have a great group of first readers that I went through graduate school with and they’re all thanked in the book—Cynthia Stewart Renee, Judith Pullman—and they’ll read anything for me, anytime. I’ll be on a deadline for something, it’ll be totally last minute, and I’ll ask, “Does anyone have time to take a look at this for me?” And they will. We do that for each other, and so they’re great first readers for me.

I have another friend who is a singer/songwriter, a storyteller, and she gives me a different kind of feedback. She’s like, “You need to take me right into the story here. I wanted to go right into the story. And I wanted to know what the cigarette smoke did to your nostrils. Did you sneeze? Did it make your eyes itch?” You know, things that other people don’t notice. Songwriters notice all these physical details.

TFR:

I wondered if there are any other writers in your family.

De Gutes:

None. Well, my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Bobbi. She was a writer.

TFR:

Did she have any impact or influence on your decision to go into this field?

De Gutes:

No. she died before I was born. I’ve always written. I wrote as a young kid even. It’s in my blood. Music and writing.

TFR:

And why journalism first? Over fiction or other genres, what took you there?

De Gutes:

Well, you’ve got to make a living. Right? I don’t make a living with this—teaching and selling books does not provide what I want. So, I ghost-write magazine articles and e-books and blog posts and thought leadership pieces for technology executives. It works. It’s a little draining, like I’ve got to leave here and jump on a call, but it affords some flexibility, too. I can look at my schedule and know when I can book myself out. I work for myself.

I don’t consider it ‘real writing.’ But other people say, “It’s real writing. You put words down every day.”

TFR:

Do you have other big projects in the works?

De Gutes:

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life is coming out from Two Sylvias Press in September (2017). Then another project I’m working on is probably narrative nonfiction/memoir. I think it’s going to be a hybrid book on Alzheimer’s. I’ve got an agent in New York now, which is great. I’m finishing the book proposal for that, and then she’ll shop that for me. And then I’ll have to write it.

TFR:

That’s a story that’s needed.

De Gutes:

That story is needed, right? There are 65 million people right now that have Alzheimer’s. We haven’t even hit the peak of the baby boomers aging. It’s a problem.

Judith died, my best friend died, and my mother died within a ten-month period, and I had to close my friend’s estate and my mom’s estate. I delivered three eulogies and closed two estates in ten months.

TFR:

That’s life changing.

De Gutes:

Right? Objects came out in June [2015]. Judith died two days after she finished the edit on the manuscript. So my book came out in June, my friend Stef died in January, and my mom died in August.

The years 2015 and 2016 are just kind of lost years for me. I keep thinking, when did that book come out? It’s just been a year since I won the Oregon Book Award, so the massive change in the last two years of my life has been huge. You know, it’s both good and bad, which is why I started writing The Authenticity Experiment. We have to stop thinking in the binary about everything.

Life is messy and it’s both things—dark and light.

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The Void Witch

Erin knew that her only recourse was to lie. Her minimum-wage job usurped the term papers, extracurriculars, and the part-time gig scanning microfilm at her college library. It became the reason she woke up and then, later, didn’t sleep. It became a chemical gratification tethered to the smallest silver spiral in the tip cup, even as she found herself in the freezer hyperventilating over round egg patties, or rebuffing the advances of shift leaders, who cornered her against the donut display to talk about all the things their wives wouldn’t do.

Her housemates played golf and made bony, lowercase poems for course credit. They sprawled over their desks and whispered about the cock sizes of “townies,” very careful not to say black. And when Erin came home, fingers sticky with jelly and powdered sugar, they asked, why don’t you just quit?

The answer was a one-bedroom apartment in Albany where her mother worked as a freelance seamstress and hospice-care associate, and where her father, just a year before, left for a doctor’s appointment and never returned. The answer was a flirtation with the poverty line, unsubsidized student loans, and a reckless impulse to double major in two areas that were expensive exercises in vanity. Her housemates thought she was slinging crullers for club cash, but she hadn’t donned a pair of heels since junior year.

Her academic advisor called her into his office and steepled his fingers and she could see it on his face, all the plates she’d left, teetering on sagging sticks. They looked at the steady decline of her grades and apologized to each other–she, because she was one of eighty-four black students and naturally felt a responsibility to represent well the totality of her race, and he, because of a mutation of white guilt that made her personal failure his personal failure.

The college was semi-elite but a little insecure about itself, and so prone to manic email blasts about notable alumni–all of whom were white men in suspenders who made bank on conservative news condemning the scourge of black Santa.

To afford this college, and perhaps one day spoil its reputation on the strength of some minor feminist accomplishment, she cleaned the guts of the milk machine, brewed arabica until she couldn’t remove the smell from her hair, donned white gloves in the basement of the college library, and scanned old, flaked film. It was all for something. But in the middle, between the unread assigned books, the betrayal of every genus of alarm clock, and the slack bullshittery of class presentations on dopamine inhibitors and Lewis Carroll, a central part of her personality became negotiable.

That is, her long and sexless history of being a know-it-all, the sort of coy, homework-loving show-off that bummed out her own parents, who though terribly mismatched were united in their desire for a daughter who might go out at night, do some sweet, illegal thing, and bring home a boy they could hate.

So she was a smart girl. And it was on this assumption that she rationalized all failure elsewhere: the social awkwardness, the general unluckiness with boys. But it meant nothing when customers pulled knives or wrote online reviews about her stinginess with the hazelnut syrup. It meant nothing when her coworkers–locals from the damp hollows of Hyde Park—decided that she was bougie, the kind of black girl that comes from the suburbs with shiny, respectable cheeks.

It was easy to be fired because it was easy to be replaced, so she couldn’t just be sick. She couldn’t just want time off. A family member needed to die, and that family member was going to be her father. It was almost the truth. In her fevered sleep, her mother’s voice emerged, husky through a length of telephone wire. The voice said simply, your father is gone. And though her mother was pathologically calm, there was a note of panic in her voice that made Erin resolve to never forgive her father—so inconsiderate, he couldn’t skip town under the standard guise of going to get cigarettes. And now in her senior year, her father, a liar, was going to become the lie that would get her out of work.

“Comic-con,” she whispered to Alexander, a customer (medium cream, no sugar) and art school dropout who sold frosty, hydroponic weed. The first time he crashed her nightshift with his halfway smile, they were already in the middle of something. Out of his eyes circling her face as she frothed milk came a candidly transactional dynamic in which his five-dollar joe became a two thousand percent return on blueberry kush. And occasionally, her body beneath his, pliant and stoned. Initially, he spent a great deal of time trying to get her into his car, which was, she thought, the kind of car drug dealers should avoid—a monstrous, candy-painted, German exercise in masculine panic. But as she slid into a smooth, heated seat, she was charmed. By the crooked cigarette hanging incidentally from the corner of his mouth, by his haywire strawberry blond hair, nimble rolling fingers, and the almost ugly collection of consonants in his protracted, Slavic surname.

So she became a customer of her customer, and this was not an insignificant factor in the disorder of things. It was work, school, smoke, sleep. It was the sudden redaction of sleep, kind professors pulling her aside to talk about the necessary recycling of T-cells, about the sunken pupil bombing reasonable midterms with unreasonable, fever-dream scrawl.

Her mother, a rehabilitated addict, had given her a speech before her freshman year. It was all about the family history, the bright, narcotic predisposition, laced between the hemispheres of her brain. So when she got high she felt guilty. Her housemates ate the donuts she left for them at night and complained about the haze around her room. Alexander came over, rolled sticky satori in sweet grape papers, and fucked her with his shoes on.

It was Tuesday when she told him about comic-con and the lie she planned to tell to get out of work. There was a contortion of his face she thought she understood: the you fucking nerd of it all. The very palpable change in a cool person’s regard when you admit investment in the fictional, your otaku-ness becoming a sudden strain of leprosy. But they’d talked enough about video games for her to expose herself, and for him to show that he was unbothered, if not forgiving of her off-putting excitement about the old school magic of turn-based systems.

His reaction was in fact the beginning of the end of the strictly casual nature of their relationship. It happened so stealthily that she didn’t realize until he was pulling a sketchbook of unfinished drawings out of his backpack, or she was in his car on break, trying to calm down after some minor disobedience of the espresso machine. No doubt the seriousness between them was a bit of a buzzkill, but it could not be stopped. And now, after telling him about her master plan, he said, all too casually, that his mother had a very aggressive kind of lung cancer.

She was unprepared, caught between hollow words of condolence and their post-coital radioactivity, and so she said to him, wow. She said, that sucks. Ultimately, the choice of words was significantly less weird than the fact of it coming out like a question. It was a phonetic contagion that spread like wildfire throughout her sorority, a dubious, lingusitic beckiness that she’d absorbed from the campus eyebrow gods.

It was lucky he didn’t seem to be looking for any particular reaction, and as he slung on his jacket and gathered his keys, she got the feeling that it almost didn’t matter that she was there, that the objective of his confession was a thing of tongue and teeth and throat, merely an effort to see how the words hung in the air. Still, when he started avoiding her, she was secretly relieved.

She got to work on her costume. It was a cosmetic exercise that became an existential one. She came home with the tulle, spandex, and paint, and studied her naked body in the mirror. Despite the smoking and the donuts, she was somehow in the best shape of her life. In her teenage years she’d attended a handful of local cons and marveled at the diverse set of acned girls in Lycra, their colorful synthetic wigs, the unabashed cant of their hips. She’d envied their confidence, watched as they pouted and smiled for pictures, unconcerned about the girth of their thighs.

It was why Erin took the new-fangled, network-approved idea of geekdom so personally. It was why she simply could not abide the fake glasses of sexy, square-jawed men. The cachet of the outsider had evolved to include her dopey subset of pit-stained, rough-thumbed gamers and anime freaks. But it was wholly antiseptic, and the reason why was because of a complete oversight regarding the terrible, squalid shame of the thing.

There was no ghoul in a letterman jacket to mock her fanart or douse her in pig’s blood. There was simply a tacit understanding about the things you did not talk about if you wanted to be invited to parties. Fandom became an interior endeavor, and in her cowardice, she began to resent the outliers, the ballsy few with their acrid D&D cologne and keen topographical knowledge of Gotham City. But to be a girl meant your bonafides were always questionable.

And if you were a black girl, there was a daisyed hellscape between the unimaginative and the well-meaning, a cognitive dissonance too ingrained to parse, requiring both peacocking and frantic camouflage. It was a series of rooms in which she was unwelcome—musty multi-console gaming rooms at dinky local cons where fedoras turned in unison to appraise the errant antigen, put-upon homunculi offering unsolicited education about the finer details of canon, hoping to show her up as a fraud. The general feeling of having nowhere to relax into her native tongue and release all that uncool, earnest ooze. But when she looked at herself in the mirror in her skimpy, badly sewn cosplay, for the first time in her life, there was no shame. The shame she felt now was reserved for a more current indulgence in make-believe: the successful mimicry of extroversion.

It happened like this: She came to college wanting to be someone else, and via a series of forced club outings, compulsory one-night stands, and soulless extracurriculars, she’d become a shadow. She was in pursuit of what all black girls were supposed to be born with—a jovial, ironclad self-esteem, a sense of rhythm, and a witchy finesse with jojoba and coconut oils.

She was in pursuit of that inalienable right to say whether or not someone was, in fact, down. So she went out and shouted over the music at dull, drunk boys. She socialized with her classmates, who gazed into the middle distance instead of at her face, coming alive only to disparage their parents who dared buy them used cars and ask for help with Microsoft Word. She joined a sorority, the college paper, the student-run literary journal, and, for reasons she did not want to investigate, the college gospel choir. She fell in love with any negging techie who emerged with an axe to grind about the fineries of sub and dub. She travelled to lonely Hyde Park churches and sang wan renditions of “Amazing Grace” in exchange for deep pans of post-service ziti. She checked for missed calls from her father and found none. She mixed with her sorority sisters—a band of leathery tanning fiends whose most distinct characteristic was being proud of being from New Jersey—and learned the right vernacular to pass off her casual bitchiness as truth. She took an editor position at the literary journal, where she met black student #57, her co-editor—an owlish neurotic in green-colored contacts who practiced calligraphy, approached her at a party simply to declare that he preferred Asian women, and who then tried to sleep with her to embarrassing avail.

Over poems about birds, menstruation, and heavy-jowled trees, he apologized about not being able to get an erection. At a mixer with a fraternity, she met black student #73, a rich, deeply fine Black Republican who was himself physically excellent proof of their race having once been bred for fields, but who frequently fawned over the administration of the elder Bush. When they slept together, it was a battery of punishments: the iron heft of his body and smug, brutish use of his mass, and the ebb and flow of sympathy and disdain.

At times he seemed human enough to share that old inside joke of having pulled off the improbable trick of thriving in white space. But then he’d fasten his belt and suggest she chemically straighten her hair. And when she somehow became vice president of her sorority, vetting new girls’ scared renditions of the Greek alphabet like the dictator of some lawless, Mediterranean Sesame Street, she knew she wasn’t in on the joke either.

She was a fraud, loyal to no particular version of herself. So maybe this is why it was easy to march to the registrar and demand—in the unlikely event of her graduation—that her diploma reflect a revision of her hyphenated name. And on the day she received confirmation that she could remove her father’s name, Alexander reappeared at her dorm with carnations and a black eye.

Here, he said, shoving them into her arms. And there was homework and a shower she needed to take but he was already shrugging off his jacket, rolling a j, and licking the edges, and she knew all of her lines. There were things she could do without too much calculation—harmonize, turn a cartwheel on the grass, reach through a wall of smoke and hook herself onto a man. But sometimes it was overwhelming, and every uncool word clamored up her throat, earnest and wet. She was smart enough to press her teeth together. She’d never become wily enough to control the ugly spasms of her face.

Black student #73 liked to use mirrors. He liked to say, look at yourself. And she would look, hoping to find something powerful, the way women held mirrors under their skirts and found in those mouths a crass new vocabulary. But when she looked at the way ecstasy rearranged her face, she only knew that she never, ever wanted to see it again. So it felt like a cruel moment of telepathy when Alexander, with his pretty half sneer, asked her to stop making that face, and also that when she smoked, she was too tight.

“Okay,” she said, dismounting and looking for her clothes.

“Hey, you don’t have to be like that.”

“You always keep your shirt on when we fuck. And it’s weird. I’ve never said anything about it. But it’s weird.”

“Yeah well, you talk about cartoons like they’re real.”

“They’re real to me,” she replied, realizing too late that saying this out loud would only exacerbate her humiliation. Alex, sensitive to this miscalculation, seemed for a moment like he might try to diffuse the situation, but then he turned away and began to collect his things.

“I gave you that Alaskan Thunderfuck at a wild discount,” he said, and the invocation of the central currency between them suddenly did not feel casual. Erin understood that she was meant to feel demeaned, and that was reason enough to direct her criticism where she knew it would hurt.

“You should’ve given it to me for free. Don’t think I don’t notice the discrepancy between what you sell me and what we smoke when you come over. It barely gets me high.” She took a little pleasure in the short circuiting of his face, the silence in the air as he tried to accommodate this impossibility. Then he laughed, which scared her a little, not least because he was still fully erect. He took a deep breath and pulled on his pants, his shoes.

“You know you belong here, at this school. You’re one of them. You don’t think so, but you are.”

After spending so much time fretting about how she was going to tell her manager a believable lie, it was as simple as pulling him aside during the breakfast rush and saying that there’d been a car accident. She was almost insulted by his nonchalance, by the long, irritated sigh as he retrieved his pen and snatched the shift schedule from the wall. When she finished her shift, she threw her apron over her arm, went outside, and felt the sun on her face. It occurred to her that her father actually might be dead. It was odd—in her youth she had obsessed over the mortality of her parents. She called them incessantly when they left the house, bartered earnestly with God for their safe travels to work and the grocery store. To some extent, she still felt this panic about her mother, but about three months after her father left, the fear she kept for him went out like a light.

He was eighteen years older than her mother. When they met, her mother was slim and strung out, and he was an old sailor who’d already buried two wives. They weren’t in love, but then a daughter, then a marriage. She wanted her daughter to have the father that she’d been denied. She wanted her daughter to be able to trust men, to love them without her fists half-drawn. And for a while it worked. In fact, he was closer to his daughter than he was to his wife, so much so that on the day he left, her mother just sighed and said, “I mostly can’t believe he would do this to you.”

The morning of comic-con, Erin received a third urgent email from her academic advisor that she promptly ignored. She relished the opportunity to make a photogenic, labor-intensive breakfast. She washed her hair slowly, put on her face with a steady, serious hand—the slick primer, powder, and kohl. She rolled the fabric of her costume between her fingers and forgave its hot glue and crooked, sagging wings. She smoked a couple of joints, pulled on her wig, boots, and cardboard galactic gun. She boarded a city-bound bus, and when she arrived into the sea of Lycra and make-believe seething at the doors of the convention center, she was sure she was going to faint. It was pure and narcotic, the half-queasy feeling she usually got before a promising date or dreaded family engagement. A man in a Gundam suit hailed her out of the crowd, asked, “What are you?” And she was so happy to be asked that she didn’t notice his penis, hanging flaccid through a chink in his mechanical suit.

“I’m a void witch.” She spread her arms and spun, emboldened by all the theater around her. “From the White Dwarf Chronicles? Second to last boss after you get to through the water chamber. A supermassive black hole gathers mass and density and then it—” when he started to stroke himself, she allowed herself a moment of paralysis, and then simply turned and walked in the other direction. Nothing so ordinary was going to sour her mood.

When they opened the doors, she ran to the comic-book cages. The red carpet was already soiled with mustard, glitter, and unpopular swag-bag toys, all the off-brand blockbuster heroes, meticulously hardwired mechs, and harried, plain-clothes journalists suspended in a state of ecstatic media res. She hung around in the stacks and tracked with her own eyes the transition of superheroes from silly ’60s panties to sleek post-aughts body stockings, the dewey decimal stink of expensive vintage issues thickening her throat. She hit Artist’s Alley with wild delusions of grandeur regarding her personal budget, leapt into makeshift dressing rooms, shimmied out of her cosplay into professionally sewn steampunk petticoats, and left with a handful of mismatched clocks. She watched the professional cosplayers strut between walls of polymer toys. She admired large oils and acrylics that rendered hokey two-dimensional icons with burly realism, the uncanny valley spread out before her like an odd, vaguely sexual dream.

She haggled for stickers and expansive giclée prints, already imagining how she might arrange them on her walls at home. And there were people who really did want to know who she was, some who already knew, mommies and daddies with cat-eared tots, laughing and raising their cameras, unphased by her cleavage and bloodshot eyes. Of course, there was the underarm stench, the claustrophobic cattle drive to the speed dating and gaming rooms. And then there were the panels.

The chance to see all the gods of her fantasy worlds, writers and fine artists who worked crowds like standups, guzzling water between awkward technical gaffes. There were others who were clearly too introverted to be on stage, men and women who were precious and cold, so allergic to eye contact it was hard to imagine how they managed their fame. There were voice and screen actors who moved in and out of character so fluidly that she worried over fractures in the fantasy and closed her eyes against their vocal tricks. Most importantly, among the stars of the con was Erin’s childhood idol, Haru Takahashi.

It was the first time he’d ever appeared at a con. A somewhat reclusive man of forty-five, he was notoriously awkward with fans, rumored to have a thing for dollar-store licorice and old, erotic film. Per his colleagues, he was prone to fainting in his home studio and rupturing his vocal cords for the acrobatic demands of his job, which was to be the voice of TV’s most beloved monkey god.

The Monkey in the Moon was a raucous, intergalactic animated saga that had been on the air for fifteen years, frequently alienating its multi-generational fanbase by ignoring its own rules, casually killing off fan favorites, and going on long, corny digressions about interstellar transit law. But none of that mattered to Erin, who had watched every episode more than three times, who, when newly indoctrinated into the fandom at nine years old, spent afternoons writing crude fan scripts that her cousins dutifully performed for her Fisher-Price tape recorder.

And so it was on this basis that she set out to attend his panel, maneuver her way to the front, and figure out a way to convey silently what she wanted to scream. Only just as she went to find the appropriate line, she checked her phone and found a fourth manic email from her academic advisor—whose subject line read: Get Your Shit Together, Erin!

There was no choice but to read the backlog and confirm what on some level, she already knew. She was failing out. Erin shut herself in the bathroom, ripped off her wig and considered the glitter on the toilet seat. Sweat streamed from the wig cap and into her eyes, and when she jogged back to the panel, her thighs caught on each other. Too late, she realized she’d left her galactic gun on the hand dryer. That she was still high was almost a comfort, a way to rationalize why the news felt italicized, why the floor of the con suddenly felt hostile, fluorescent, and too smelly to bear. It didn’t help matters that her wig had taken to spinning around her head, resisting every attempt she made to straighten it, until she simply gave up and parted it where it chose to sit.

With seconds to spare, she tumbled into the panel room and spilled all of her clocks. Sheepishly, she gathered them into her arms, and marched to the front of the room. She sat in the dark until it was time, fanning herself, looking around at all the mortals, the moist disarray of speedsters, expository villains, and ersatz sidekicks taking video, feeding burritos through their masks. She zeroed in on Haru, noting the way he fiddled with his notes, pushed his long, silver-streaked hair away from his eyes, and then seemed to regret his sudden exposure to the lights. He appeared as solitary as she hoped. The most subdued of all his co-panelists, when he did choose to speak, it was in that careful, golden tenor, his clipped, sarcastic answers splintering the room. It occurred to her that everyone had come for him. And so when it was time, she rushed up and planted herself directly in his line of sight. But when they passed her the microphone, her heart rose into her throat and his face swam before her eyes.

There was a prickly susurrous rising in the dark room, a titter here or there that she couldn’t quite make out over the emergency in her chest. He seemed relaxed as ever, almost disinterested, but there was a slight smile, more wary than pleased. She cleared her throat, looked down at the clock she suddenly realized was cradled against her breast. “So obviously I know you can’t spoil which level of quartz the grand ape mined from the saturnalian mine. But I need you—can you see me? I need you to know that I can’t imagine my life without your voice. The voice of the monkey king. He’s living in fear of the moon and the Luminescent Boar and I’m such a fan, and I just feel really—” She paused, and without warning, her eyes began to run like organic peanut butter, at which point she apologized, handed the microphone to small Batman standing behind her, and promptly rushed out of the room. Outside the convention center, she noticed the man in the Gundam suit—who she only now realized was not attending comic-con, but was a cousin of one of those dubious Times Square Elmos—was still out front. She bought a pretzel just for napkins to use to dry her face.

She looked around and found two Harley Quinns sobbing by the garbage, a Spiderman smoothing out a large piece of cardboard, setting up a tip cup next to a stereo. When she felt her phone buzz, a smiley, eastern European New York tour briefly engulfed her, their eyes turned skyward. Without thinking, she accepted the call. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar. Then it was too familiar. When she’d imagined this moment, she was prepared. She was steely and degreed. Sometimes she imagined she might hang up. But there his voice was now, after a year.

“How is my little girl?” the voice said, and she wanted to laugh, to scream. Because of course it was all so much better in her mind. Of the course the fantasy was in reality as casual as this—a knotted synthetic wig in her fist, a drooping falsie on her cheek, as she summoned a breath and said,“Oh, I’ve never been better.”

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The Illinois & Love, This I Know:

The Illinois

Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile high

skyscraper dream had 528 stories,

and atomic powered elevators.

It makes you think of a caterpillar.

Maybe we are all one caterpillar,

and our apocalypse is a chrysalis?

Love, This I Know:

My face was not my face

until it lost your trace.

Heartbreak is the power

to flower a flower.

Love is summer snow

& words are pajamas:

Fire won’t burn my hand

and miss, kiss, mere air.

Love can no more carry

my heart than a suitcase.

We have passed by

stand-ins & sentries—

There is the ‘one’

& ‘two’ or ‘three’

Never touch like we!

Walk on winter sand

we in we & in we?

(Wait, let me take a breath

& laugh today at death…)

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Two Videos by Carl Knickerbocker

Visual account of an audio visit to a convenience store.

I got Apple TV. Periscope came free. I got a little infatuated with Periscope. Made this short. On separate evenings recorded visual then audio Periscope broadcasts.

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Caught

Your mama drops you off at five o’clock, rolls in with an extra-large suitcase full of clothing for all seasons, a blue balloon nightlight, a patchwork baby blanket, coloring books, picture books, an unopened box of crayons. On her arm dangles another bag with blue toothbrush, blue toothpaste, your special blue cup, the blue multivitamins you take before bed. And at her side, you—a round, far-gazed boy, one hand clutching the fabric of your mama’s jeans, the other gripped around the snout of a stuffed pig in a checkered waistcoat.

“Any problems,” your mama says, “just call.”

“Yes.” In her shadow, we both keep still while she frets and fidgets, takes out a notebook crowded with tightly coiled numbers. She was like this as a little girl too, your mama—my daughter. All fluttering hands and nervous glances. “I’ve made up your old bedroom,” I say. “Logan can sleep there.”

She tears a sheet from the notepad, folds and presses it to my chest. “There’s where you can reach me,” she says. “And that one’s Doreen, his regular sitter. And Mrs. Bogart; she’s got a spare key if there’s anything you need from the house.”

Ink seeps through the page, blackens my thumb and forefinger. “Don’t worry,” I say.

Your mama plucks you off her leg and guides your hand towards mine. She says, “I’ll pick him up Monday morning. Before preschool.”

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

For an instant, her face becomes pinched, punctured with tension before she breathes and nods. She kneels, cups the side of your head, and kisses you goodbye.

The tears begin after she drives away. A lost look, a panicked look, and then a wail that sounds like a ship taking its first voyage away from land. Water plunges past the hull, a huge exclamation, an oil-drum symphony between my ears. You pound a tiny fist on the window, twist backward in my arms. So, we go to your room—her old room—and I barricade the door on stiff-jointed knees.

Mama! Mama! Mama!

Shriek and shriek until you’re too tired and I can hold you again. There’s a little wind-up music box on the shelf—it plays “Singin’ in the Rain,” and you like that. Twist the handle round and round, sit sprawled on the old Parisian rug sniffling the last sobs away while I go downstairs to make peanut-butter banana crackers. Your mama used to eat those the way a magpie eats ladybirds.

—

Before I turn off the lights, before I leave the room, you reach across your bed—from beneath the cotton-wool blankets already kicked into a tempest—and say “Balloon.” I plug in the nightlight. Your eyes see further than mine, to something inside the blue Kool-Aid glow.

—

Almost dawn now, no orange on the horizon but at least a paling of the darkness. Stars begin to fade. Air rises off the ground cold and thick, like a glass of milk fresh out of the fridge on a summer afternoon.

And the front door groans open.

I can see you from the window, Logan. I can see you teeter down the front path and onto the deserted road, little feet almost too round to balance on—that stuffed pig under your arm better dressed for the cool morning than you.

I run.

I run and leave the front door wide. Feet naked like yours, over wet grass, past the post box with its tin flag rusted upright. I run fast and hard enough to see just as you dash across the neighbors’ lawn and behind their car.

“Logan!” I yell. And then “Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

You keep going, leave footprints in the begonias, footprints in the chrysanthemums. They’re shallow impressions, only the size of my palm. At the end of the yard, you squeeze between two loose fence boards, no wider than the stump of a cherry tree. “Logan!” I yell. The stuffed pig lies grinning, plush-and-tumble on the ground.

Run down a back alley, through another yard, and then another. The footprints this time are puppy-dog small, brown markings over a stranger’s driveway. They wobble towards an accidental patch of trees, a scraggly bunch of growth that the men with cement mixers and trucks of rubble forgot to chop down when they built this place forty years ago. Fallen branches murmur at my ankles, but I can see you now. I get closer and you get smaller, smaller—small enough to fit inside one of my winter galoshes.

“Logan!” I yell. Nearby, you laugh—because it’s all a game, cat and mouse, grandmother and grandchild—you laugh and dart between the brambles of a knee-high brown bush. Footprints span the length of my thumbnail. Thousands of inchworms hang from invisible threads, and I thrust them aside like tasseled bed curtains. Now the grass wavers where you weave through it; now it doesn’t because you’ve grown too small for even that. You laugh and laugh and laugh, and I follow that sound, follow it around twisted oak trunks, bowing evergreens, and skinny matchstick saplings. Mayflies scatter like wrong-way raindrops. Rooks chitter and fling themselves at the sky.

“Logan.” I don’t yell this time because laughter fills greenery. Somewhere close, overhead. “Logan.”

Rising light catches the trees in faint silhouette. I look up and there you are, caught in a spider’s web, caught in strands of leftover moonlight, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

—

In my hands, fall asleep again. I carry you back: out of the trees, across the alley, through the fence, over the lawn. You grow bigger as we go, filling one palm and then two, filling the crook of my elbow and then my arms. I ease you into bed, spread blankets smooth.

Tomorrow, when she comes to pick you up, your mother will look head-to-toe at you, at me. She’ll say, “Everything go alright?” And I’ll say “Yes alright. No need to worry.” Maybe you won’t say anything. Maybe you’ll laugh.

Steely spider threads tangle your hair. I pluck them free one-by-one, lay them on the pillow while you sleep until your face is crowned with silver.

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His First Night Home

from the hospital, I heard him cry

and lifted him from his bed

and brought him into ours,

and after his mother had fed him,

I rested him on my chest,

which rose and fell with him

until daylight.

And when I brought him home

from the hospital again,

after the social worker persuaded him

to let her call me, and after he told me

he thought he was ready to quit

using, I was afraid he might

sneak away in the night,

so I had him sleep beside me,

where all night long I heard

his labored breath, felt,

his legs beat against the sheets:

that sparrow, stunned

by the window’s false sky,

trembling in my hands,

catching its breath until

it fluttered and flew away.

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he likes to stare at walls

the world is waiting in line / at target

The Room I Cannot Enter

No Matter Where I Go, I Carry You With Me

Ode To My Latina Machete Heart

The Mycelium of Memory

Introduction to Life Simulation

Animal Years

The Infinity Pocket

The Cost of Wishes

Obsession

You Cannot Reset

Credits Roll

Time-Travel to the Beyond

The Illinois

Love, This I Know:

New from Aquifer

Sonnet for trigger → obsessional doubt → consequence

Miss Lorenz

make a poem out of nothing

Two Poems

Two Poems

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