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Blog

Beethoven’s Fifth in the Segregated Housing Unit by John Quintero

December 20, 2021 at 11:09 am

A young man sang in wild tones

from isolation, in operatic moans

that filled the cathedral ceilings

of bedlam, vocalized feelings:

 

“I’m bored. I’m bored.

I’m really fucking bored.”

 

Over. And over. And over.

 

 

 

John Quintero was a former member of the workshop before being transferred to another facility. Highly intelligent, he writes sonnets that can be stunning. A polymath, he is able to discuss almost any topic and listen deeply.

 

Three Haiku by Laurence Taaffe

December 19, 2021 at 11:06 am

A grove

with no practitioners

is blown away in winter

 

Early on solstice morning

raccoons sleep in the trees

but they are not themselves trees

 

Summer’s end

when lady bugs attack

they bite hard

 

 

 

Laurence Taaffe is an artist and poet who has been in the workshop for several years. His artwork, in the most recent issue of Razor Wire, is very strong and his poetry, when he is most truthful, is similarly strong.

 

China Virus by Jenny Hykes Jiang

November 22, 2021 at 1:51 pm

I

His mother’s voice crackles on NPR.

Driving Luke to high school before it stopped

we hear her mourn her son, Wen Liang, doctor

who first saw what’s now named COVID-19

unattached to place/people we can harm.

He had a son, five, a baby coming.

I stop listening at five, only hear 

her putonghua— common language of Luke’s 

nainai— not far from where she is—I think

of son, of father, dead. Not old enough

to be elderly. Not sick. But my son 

hears another putonghua: “I always 

feel good when I hear people speak Chinese.

It always gives me such a good feeling.”

 

 II.

Things I can’t make     make sense        of course it’s death     

  time     space      how we live with people           we don’t live with     

   multitudes    we cannot         speak 

with how we don’t           speak one/same 

language    or what mothers ancestors children

  carry  what’s been 

   done another way to say aloneness  

surviving another   here also not                     right 

here       all the time also that                history happened      

 keeps happening  free shipping     my son    zooming 

English muted       camera  off

 

III

He was one when she came-claimed-relieved-re- 

placed—not true—but I was tired and she knew,

so I receded, watching from somewhere 

else—to be carried as she carried him. 

The hours of singing. She crooned over him, 

cooed, chanted rhymes of swallows scissored tails,

little birds who fly east, fly west, fly to 

baby’s house and eat his rice. His cooing 

sparrow voice, small hungry throat. His first word 

Yao. What they wanted. Baby hands signed more.

They never tired. They were oceans. I watched 

as if behind glass or under water, 

or watching movies of people loving 

in some other world where people know how.  

 

IV. 

Why, Luke asks, as if I knew anything 

about these things do they call things Chinese—

checkers, Chinese handcuffs, Chinese fire drill, 

Chinese jump rope. Does Chinese just mean weird? 

Once a girl pulled her eyes into taut slits.

She was young. Her younger sisters laughed so 

she called her sister chink. I can’t explain 

or remember any reason why.

Only how it felt good to stretch my skin.

We were in the bathtub. We were that small.

A girl sings My mother’s Chinese, my father’s 

Japanese, and look what happened to me. 

Her baby coos, presses his finger

tips, signs yao. He cries more.

 

V. 

I don’t know if it’s okay to say if there’s an okay I can 

say what was that    what that was whiteness    power   something 

      mean maybe what that was that claimed it was okay 

to say kungflu    China virus     Wuhan Flu   CCPV this 

diseaseit’s from someplace

   I know that place it’s                in

my body not apology not excuse 

not    enough not   sorrow something or one more       thing

 we wait for watch what other co morbidities we can

 survive

 

 

Raised in rural Iowa, Jenny Hykes Jiang is a mother, poet, and educator in Northern California. Her poetry has appeared in several journals including Arts & Letters, Little Patuxent Review, and Chestnut Review. She has also delivered sermons and written liturgy for Oak Hills Church in Folsom, California.

Jenny Jiang

letter to a drowned poet by Jieyan Wang

November 21, 2021 at 1:59 pm

 

Qu Yuan (340-278 BCE): an ancient

Chinese poet, drowned himself in the Miluo 

River after the capture of his country’s capital.

in summer, your country falls & you’re left

with nothing but koi fish & sunlit insomnia

miluo: the quietest tributary, the off-cut you

cast yourself into, ripples expanding into rhymes

 

one day you wake & find yourself in the

kingdom of sons. the sons tell you instead of names

we count people by the rice grains we’ve swallowed. eat

as little as you can. your body is already defined

by water. a mother, not yours, calls i’m going to sing

for your slow breaths. reply yes even though there’s

no question mark. your body: it’s always bluing

 

begin with: i greet sorrow & its unopened flower bud

a boat, creaking with dreamlessness, cuts the current

end with: i slip away with my heart in between my fingers

 

exiled parts of my body

my last name dwells in my throat. 汪, meaning

a lot of water. enough to drown myself with

myself. we’re cold my body says to me far too cold.

 

*

the hairs behind my ears are always raised.

they are waiting for a flower petal. what falls

& never forgets. belonging lives in soft pink.

 

*

the distance between china & america lies in

the constellations & what counts them the hand writes

one: you were born where your ancestors weren’t.

*

 

目: two slashes through a box, chinese for eye.

i almost understand it: eyelids half-closed like

a sentence. the pupil: it expands into a period.

 

*

if you spread your arms my mother says the wind

will close its long-winded lips around you. no wonder

i can’t fly. girl is featherless even with the long l.

 

*

insomnia brushes against my shoulders. i hug it

so it twitches like a child who believes she will

live forever. it hushes into the base of my neck.

 

*

add a dot on top of 目to get self. 自: an eye

with a single lash measuring me. i see you

so i can open your loneliness. let me 飞飞飞.

 

*

where does water go? it tends towards ocean,

where salt is the mother of every question. let’s go to

where you’ll dissolve my body murmurs, already blurring.

 

 

Jieyan Wang is a first-year college student at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Passages North, Baltimore Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for The Adroit Journal.

 

Jieyan Wang

Goodbye to Mr. Wonderfull by Robert Brian Mulder

November 20, 2021 at 2:30 pm

     My ex-boyfriend’s name is Tripp Pham, but I recently learned that for the past year or so a group of people have been referring to him as Mr. Wonderfull. As in Full of Wonder. When an almost-friend at work showed me the website on her phone in the bathroom, I leaned forward, squinting, though it was obviously him. “That’s Tripp,” I confirmed, perversely proud. Then I scrolled down. There were photos of Mr. Wonderfull standing in front of palm trees with strangers—mainly attractive young women—their heads tilted together like happily conjoined twins. There were weekend retreats: Metaphysically Cure Yourself through Chakra Work and Transformational Energy Vortexes. There were testimonials: “It’s amazing!!! You free yourself from aging by dynamically reinterpreting your body and by consciously grasping the subtle link between the soul and biology.” There were inspirational precepts: “It is the nature of babies to reside in WONDER and BLISS!!! Remember to practice Baby Talk and Baby Presence!”

     The TV is on. Channel 12. Evening news. Des Moines. A contestant at the county fair crams hot dogs into his sunburned face. His Adam’s Apple moves like a mouse trapped beneath a blanket. Then a reporter interviews a teenage boy with chemical-green hair. He mumbles that his python, Julius Squeezer, is still missing. “He’s about eighteen-feet,” the boy says, stretching his skeletal arms out wide. “Grew up in the wild, so you might keep an eye on your dogs and kids.” When I first saw coverage of this story, I recognized the John Deere sign from the store two blocks up the street. Somebody tossed a rock through it that left a ragged hole where the deer’s heart should be. That night, I watched videos of pythons on YouTube. One showed a female devouring an adult antelope. Head first. “Always head first,” the snake expert said. “Easier to swallow the limbs that way.” The most popular clip had over 120 million views. It was footage of a Burmese constricting and then swallowing an alligator that was eight feet long. I’d always thought pythons suffocate their prey to death before eating, but this gator’s hind legs were still paddling uselessly, as if searching for mudbank, when the snake began to stretch the wide hoop of its mouth around them. 

     I probably fell for my ex because he reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh. Shaved head, boyishly slight frame. The dorky ears, the gap between his front teeth, the habit of frequent blinking, as if warding off flies. And the stillness, the apparent goodness. Everywhere we went, he picked up people’s litter without curse or complaint. Once, when a cockroach skittered across the kitchen counter, I grabbed a saucepan, but he barely reacted, just bent down to its level and studied the creature with a kind of childlike curiosity. Yes, with wonder, I suppose. He told me that he liked Thich Nhat Hanh, too. After I moved into his apartment, we even talked about getting married in Plum Village. The wedding party, all smiling and bald as the moon, dressed in plum-colored robes. Maybe a little girl—like the one he said we’d have one day—holding a bowl of water with a floating white lotus. And me in a traditional Vietnamese wedding dress, the áo dài—silk-ribbon red, with long sleeves of lace.

     I cleaned the entire apartment today. Now it smells like bleach and pine. I left them in every room. On bookshelves, in kitchen cupboards, tucked in corners where the baseboards don’t quite meet. Roach tablets. White as aspirin. I bought a 4 oz. pack last week. On the front of the bright yellow box, a single cockroach is standing on a large white tablet above the words “Mata Cucaracha.” I don’t think cockroaches are capable of facial expressions, or if it’s even correct to think of them as having faces, but this one on the front of the box is visibly eager. He seems to be very pleased with himself, and with his find.

     It’s hot. Muggy. Highs statewide in the low 90’s all week. But I switched off the AC a few hours ago. I pick at a chipped nail, get up and go to the kitchen, grab a glass, fill it with cold tap water, turn off the TV, return to the sofa. There’s a photograph on the wall, the only one in the entire apartment. After staring at it for a while, I stand up, lift it off the screw, rotate the little metal hooks on the back of the frame till the picture slips out. It’s an old Vietnamese man and woman. They’re wearing cone-shaped bamboo hats and standing in a forest by a tree with roots jutting out of the ground like a giant skeleton’s hand lifting the trunk into the sky. They look alike. Maybe they’re brother and sister. Or maybe they’re one of those lucky couples that lives together so long they start to resemble each other. Tripp told me they’re his parents. I look at the bottom of the photograph, the border no longer hidden by the frame: Getty Images, Inc. Two weeks ago, Tripp came home late one night, the tangy odor of hard liquor on his breath. “You’ve never told me anything about your family,” I said, folding my legs up on the couch, arms crossed at my chest, a little surprised by the injury in my voice. “Tell me something about your parents.” He stood there for a moment, then pointed to this photo. He started talking about the terrors of the Khmer Rouge and how his parents hadn’t been so lucky. Soon he joined me on the couch and cried a little before we made love. After Katie, my almost-friend at work, showed me that website, I Googled “Khmer Rouge.” The Communist Party. In Cambodia. 

     It’s strange to see the door to the bedroom closed. I remember closing it, but still. I’ve been living here for five months now, and I don’t think we ever closed that door. For a few moments it feels like maybe I’m in the wrong apartment. I almost knock or say, “Hello?” When I open the door, I see what I expect to see. A python stretched out on the floor, its midsection massively swollen, the bulge almost comically large, like that of a cartoon snake. At the far wall, the door to the bathroom stands open. A powder blue shower curtain and a metal rod lie in a heap on the floor, along with a busted towel rack and green bottles of shampoo—still and silent as grenades. My ex liked to take a shower every day after work. He always took these long, hot showers. Thirty minutes. Sometimes close to an hour. There isn’t a circulation fan in the bathroom, but he refused to open the window, so everything—the toilet seat, my flat iron, even the mirror in the bedroom—got all foggy and damp. “But it reminds me of being a little boy in Vietnam,” he told me, his eyes suddenly wet with nostalgia. 

     Five maybe six times this week, I put on my purple slippers and snuck in and opened the window as he was taking a shower. “What are you doing!” he said once, but I didn’t answer—just walked out as if I hadn’t heard him. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure myself. Today, I opened the bedroom window, too. A little while later, sitting at the kitchen table, I heard the shower rod clank against the tub. I lassoed a wet tea bag with its little white string and squeezed. Sipped my tea. Then I stood and set my cup in the sink. I walked to the bedroom door, looked in. I shut the door firmly but gently, as though not to disturb, then went out the front door, waved to a neighbor, walked around to the back of the apartment where I wrestled the warped bedroom window shut. Then I stepped laterally over a series of black mole hills to the bathroom window, a movement that reminded me of tennis drills in high school. The python’s tail was dangling out a few feet, writhing like a blind worm at the tip of a spear of grass. When I reached to toss the tail inside, it coiled rapidly around my wrist, exerting a firm, precisely calibrated pressure, like the inflatable cuff on one of those blood-pressure gauges. A few seconds later, the tail relaxed its grip and disappeared inside. As I stretched up to shut the window, I could see that the snake’s jaws had already worked their way down to Tripp’s hips, the front third of its body like an overstuffed Christmas stocking. There was an eerie sound, a reedy, rhythmic whistling noise, faint as the breath of a seashell, coming from a fleshy tube—wet, pink—sticking out one side of the snake’s mouth. Its windpipe, I later discovered. “Pythons are able to temporarily externalize this organ,” the website said, “to do what they need to do to survive.” As I stood there in my slippers, watching, I realized that the last thing I would ever see of Tripp Pham were the pale, perfectly smooth bottoms of his tiny feet, which, I knew, had never touched the soil of a village in Vietnam.

   And now—late evening of the same day—standing in the open doorway, I look at the python once more, close the bedroom door, double-check to make sure the AC is off. Then I flip the porchlight switch, remove my clothes and stretch out naked and sweaty on the sofa.

     That morning, I call in sick. “Herpes-zoster virus,” I say. “Shingles. It might be a few days.” I close all the blinds in the living room and kitchen. It seems I’m always walking by houses shut up like that, all the curtains or blinds closed. It makes me wonder what’s going on inside. 

     At the kitchen sink, I run cold water over a hand towel. Wash my face, arms, legs. Then I sit at the table, open my laptop. I learn that this python, with its red eyes and its geometric pattern of yellow and white skin, is an albino. I learn that it takes a python six days to completely digest its meal, and that during digestion, a python’s heart grows by forty percent.

     I need to pee. 

     When I push the door open, it’s in the far corner, coiled in a rectangle of sunlight. I step into the room, crawl across the bed, reach to twirl the rod to half-shut the blinds, then walk along the near wall to the bathroom. Closing the door, I sit on the toilet. Turn to stare out the window. The window frames a cloudless blue sky. Once, standing in a dimly lit room with a clear blue tank the size of a swimming pool, I saw a tiger shark—idling, perfectly still. I walked up close to the glass. The near eye was a cold black planet against the shark’s moon-colored skin. It seemed to be staring at nothing and everything—at me, and at the totality of space around me. I leaned forward, turning my face to one side. I opened my left eye as wide as it would go, pressing it right up close so that the lens could feel the coolness of the glass. My eye—directly opposite that magnificent black eye. The shark didn’t blink. I didn’t blink. As a schoolgirl, I’d always won those contests. But this was different. This wasn’t about winning or losing. It was more beautiful than that.

     I stand, flush. Bend down, pick up a dark green bottle of herbal shampoo—his, not mine. I flip the cap, squeeze the bottle, take in the scent. Then I look in the mirror. A raised mole on my neck that my senile grandfather, who thought it was dirt, tried to scrub off. Bare shoulders like fins: thin, pale, not quite even. Black eyes. People tell me that I have black eyes. But I don’t agree. I don’t see it that way. Or maybe I just can’t see what it is they’re seeing. 

     I will turn thirty-three at the end of the month.

     He was the first man—the only man—I’ve ever really been with. Unless you count the adjunct professor—of anthropology, I think—who told me to undress slowly and lie back on the bed before he began to rub me with his pinky. He just stood there, at the foot of the bed, fully dressed, looking down at me, rubbing. His gleaming white teeth like elephant tusks. Right as I was about to climax, he stopped—told me he was married, that he didn’t want to be unfaithful. “Could we just do this?” he asked. No, begged. “Could we just meet and do this?” 

     The toilet makes a leaky hissing noise. I jiggle the handle. Then I reach under the sink, grab a pair of orange gloves, kneel and scrub the rusty toilet ring at the base of the bowl. It fades a bit. Maybe. Kneeling there on the floor, using both index fingers and thumbs, I begin to rub my nipples through the thin cotton of my T-shirt. Two summers ago, as they were driving home from choir practice, my parents died in a tornado that touched down in Pella, the little farm town where I grew up. It ripped the four-paneled blade from the giant windmill in the center of town and dropped it in a cornfield forty miles away. Around that time, I developed the habit of rubbing my nipples to relieve stress, or to arouse myself. I usually did it with a shirt on. After a while, I noticed that the nipple area on some of my shirts was fading, leaving two pale spots, a blurry-edged pair of ghostly eyes. I eventually realized this effect was from the peroxide in my facial cream. Apparently, I wasn’t thoroughly washing it from my fingers.

     Lying naked on the sofa, I watch a documentary about storms and snakes. The basic idea is that we bring these non-native snakes into pet stores, mainly in Florida. People buy them as pets, then end up dumping them in a ditch or a field. Or sometimes a hurricane will come and destroy the stores. Then the hurricanes come and destroy the stores, allowing the snakes to escape and breed. We try to control the populations, but we aren’t doing a good job. There isn’t enough money. There aren’t enough cages. There are too many snakes. The snakes seem to be winning. “Once they’re here,” the old guy with a Florida Gators cap says, “we just have to learn to live with them.”

     The next morning, when I open the bedroom door, the snake is still in his corner. Probably waiting for the sun to come through the window. He’s so still that he doesn’t look real. And what if he isn’t? What then? 

     I walk along the wall to the bathroom, close the door, put up the shower rod, hang the curtain, take a cold shower. Then I dry off, wrap my hair in a towel, lie on my stomach on the bed. I study the snake’s bulge. My ex-boyfriend didn’t like tight spaces. He didn’t like hugs. He refused to use bathrooms on a plane. He couldn’t even wear tight clothes. “Too constricting,” he said.

     The day after Katie showed me that website, we stood at a long row of sinks during break, talking to each other’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. As I reapplied my lipstick, she told me about a woman in her building who fell down the trash chute. “Her boyfriend left her. Moved to Seattle with some other girl. Out of the blue. When she found out, she got drunk, then tried to go up on the roof to jump, but the door was locked. So she threw herself down the trash chute instead.” Katie turned. Looked at me. Tilted her head slightly, with concern, like Mom used to do. Then she looked back at my image in the mirror and said that her Holistic Wellness Coach once told her, “If they survive the initial blow, people can usually recover from cancer, hurricanes, any kind of natural tragedy. But betrayal, especially by a loved one, is another matter.” Katie snapped her purse shut, then looked directly at me. “Eighteen floors,” she said. “The paramedics had to come and pull her out of the compactor in the basement. The woman survived, but barely.”

     Near dusk, the lump looks a little smaller. It’ll be gone in a few days. Lying back against a pile of pillows, I hear the rapid, muted rumble of footsteps—the little girl who lives upstairs. This is what always happens before she heads out to play in the open space behind the complex. When the noise stops, I wait a couple minutes, then peek out through the blinds. She is wearing a yellow dress with bright red sneakers, standing with her back to a concrete wall, eyes closed, facing the dying sun so that her shadow stretches long and high behind her. She stands on one leg, raises her arms in a graceful circle above her head, like a ballerina. Then, abruptly, as though suddenly possessed, she turns to face the concrete wall and begins to dance—wildly, unpredictably—her magnified shadow mirroring her every movement. And it’s almost like she’s trying to trick it, to outwit it. Trying to unhinge her shadow from her body—like a man, a foolish man, wriggling to free himself from his fate. After a while, the girl collapses onto the pavement in a kind of exhausted puddle. 

     The last day I went to work, I’m walking down the sidewalk and recognize a woman I’ve seen before, though only from a distance. She is always pushing a baby stroller. I notice that she stands off to one side, misaligned, pushing the stroller with just one of the handles—and there is a jerkiness, a clumsiness to her movements, like those of a marionette. As we get closer, I can see and hear one of the plastic wheels dragging sideways, scraping the concrete, and I can hear this woman mumbling something, talking to her baby, it seems, trying to engage or to console it. When we are about to pass each other, the woman’s pinched gaze and clenched jaw are directed up and away. She is addressing some absence, a blank space in the air. “Fucking bastard,” she says, leaning over to spit on a bush. “You goddamned motherfucking bastard.” I hesitate, but then glance at the baby in the stroller. The baby isn’t moving. And it seems too small, this baby. Unnaturally still. Then, as the woman’s shoulder brushes roughly against my own, I look down once more and see that it isn’t a baby. It’s a doll. A plastic doll with one pale blue eye and stiff carrot-colored hair. And then, as my feet carry me unsteadily forward toward the busy intersection, I overhear myself whisper, “You motherfucking bastard.”

     Last week, after learning about that website, I admitted to Katie that I’d noticed a pattern—that he only gave spare change to the cute homeless girls. I left work early, came back to the apartment, searched his desk. Eventually, I found it. A list of passwords. For the next two hours, I read his email correspondence with Nelischka, a Kazakhstani woman who’d attended two of the retreats. She’d loved the Circle of Authentic Sharing practice, where everybody had been encouraged to shirk convention, to express their feelings without restraint or inhibition. And she’d been “fricking AMAZED!!!” by his object lesson one morning during breakfast when he’d captured everyone’s attention by simply holding up a hardboiled egg, still encased in its protective shell. After a brief period of silence, he delivered an impromptu homily about the importance of being radically open to the breaking of our own hearts—how we should not resist this breaking, how resisting this inevitable breaking leads to bitterness and resentment, to a shrinking and hardness of the heart. As the emails between Mr. Wonderfull and Nelischka grew more frequent, there was talk of a trip to Plum Village. And there was Baby Talk, nauseating back-and-forth Baby Talk.

     Now I flip open my ex’s computer, log in to his website. I type: “All retreats canceled till further notice. Mr. Wonderfull is undergoing a profound transformation.”

     Two days pass. 

     A long, gray morning. Afternoon, the same. Towards dusk, I sit on the edge of the bed. My bare feet don’t quite touch the floor. It’s hot. All I’m wearing is one of his T-shirts. It still has his scent. The scent reminds me of tiger stalls at the zoo—that sharp scent of sawdust. After a while, I get down on my hands and knees and begin to crawl towards the corner where the snake lies, motionless. The stenciled pattern of yellow and white scales like wallpaper. The eyes, red, one slightly clouded, a black vertical slit at its center like the pit of a fruit emerging, breaking through. The forked tongue tests the air. 

     I reach out, stroke the tail. Cool, familiar. Males have large spurs, bone-like vestiges of hind legs, which they use to stimulate females during sex. Tongue between my teeth, I trace the tip of my nail along the curved edge of one spur. The other.

     By now the bulge is barely visible, like the belly of a mother in her first trimester. I slide one hand up so that I can feel the slight swelling. Then I place my other hand on my smooth, flat belly. I cried last week, for three consecutive nights. But not now. Now my eyes are dry.

     I awake in the room on my side, facing the window. The morning sun is burning the edges of the half-open blinds. It is the feeling of shipwreck, of being dislodged, hauled by a great net to the surface light.

     I can hear my own heartbeat. Feel two heartbeats. I rotate my head. The bulge is gone. And then I see it, on the wall, the shadow, the strange shadow on the wall, like that of a single being. 

     A box with white tissue paper sits open beneath the window. The faint scent of perfume. Red lace extends from my shoulders to my wrists, where it flares like blossoming lotus flowers. The silk of the traditional áo dài, embroidered with gold thread, hugs my breasts and hips. And as I lay there on the bed, I know that the python is resting on the floor, but I can almost feel it—lying in the warm rectangle of sunlight on my legs.
     I rotate my head. The python’s bulge is gone.
     When I rest my head back on the pillow, I stare at the wall. A shadow there. A familiar shape. My own.

 

 

 

Robert Brian Mulder lives in Portland, Oregon. His stories have been published in The Sun, Cimarron Review, and Moon City Review. He was longlisted for the 2021 LitMag Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Fish Publishing International Short Story Prize. He also received an honorable mention for the 2017 Glimmer Train Press Very Short Fiction Contest, and was a finalist for the 2003 Boston Review Short Story Contest. His flash fiction and poems have appeared in Pennsylvania English, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Evening Street Review, Sky Island Journal, Sandy River Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine.

Robert Mulder

Mrs. Nixon’s Third Grade by Ismael “Izzy” Santillanes

November 20, 2021 at 12:06 pm

The wooden ruler with the brass edge is treason upon his brown arm and not until a week after you’d used it on the back of my hand did I hear the air hiss rip through to weal the skin of my childhood friend as Mexican hieroglyphs pulverized against the back of my teeth cringed at such a fantastic and frightful display from a being not our own tall white hair creature with thin lips flowered dress waist pulled in by a thick belt it was Cortez all over again but like I had done he also recognized el conquistador bled like any other human being and kicked your shin where I had left it scabbed and ran and ran into the desert like a wild flightless quetzal and as you bent to stop the poison from seeping out pleased I walked out myself to join in the desert nest of your victims.

 

 

Ismael “Izzy” Santillanes is currently enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles. He believes in the process of writing what one knows exactly as exists in the body as a means to self-knowledge. Having lived in deserts most of his life, he engages the page with a xeric mindset, making every drop of ink a necessity.

 

Queer Seoul by Mee Ok Icaro

November 19, 2021 at 2:39 pm

After wading through the Seoulite crowds with their iPhone screens blazing tiny future K-pop stars into the night, Dee and I hit up a convenient store for snacks and beer before settling onto a bench in one of the many hangout areas. There was something so relaxed about my newfound friend nearly half my age, with her unbelievably long hair tied up in a high, scrunchied ponytail, her oversized pink T-shirt tucked into her mom jeans, and her silver glitterbomb backpack shimmering like a disco ball in the open September air.

“How was your meeting at the adoption agency?” I asked.

“I didn’t find out much.” She cracked open a beer. “I just went in. Didn’t even schedule an appointment. Did you find out anything?”

“Yeah, they found my mom,” I said, as I offered her some chips. “She doesn’t want to meet me.”

We sat in silence as a small group of young Koreans began setting up a keyboard, mic, and speaker in the middle of the courtyard.

“You know,” Dee’s voice lingered, “it’s weird that I don’t see any gay people here—like openly gay people, because I have so many gay friends in NYC.” She took a swig. “Like all of my friends are gay… although, not a lot of lesbians,” she added, surprising herself, then continued, “but, like, my best friend is this Filipino gay boy, Brad.” She stopped in her mental tracks with another epiphany, “Actually, I think the only straight guy I know in New York is my boyfriend. Holy shit.”

“Actually, your boyfriend is totally gay,” I said in a tone bearing bad news. “He told me, like, right before we met up.”

“Aw, he’d be such a good gay boy too,” she swooned. “Seriously though, I mean do you notice that? That there’s like, no gay people here just, like, being gay or whatever?”

“Yeah, it’s super fucking weird because I see gay people all the time—mostly guys—but I know they can’t be out, and it’s creepy because they may not even know they’re gay. It’s like being in Arkansas or something. Except they’re all wearing make-up.”

“Gross, why would you be in Arkansas?”

“I’m kind of from there,” I half-explained, almost apologizing.

“Oh whoops… my bad,” she laughed, polishing off her beer. “But are there like any lesbians here or anything? Not to assume that you would know just because you are one,” she backtracked.

“I have no idea! I’ve actually been wanting to find a dyke club here just to see what the scene is like. It has to be crazy, right?”

“Oh my God, me too! But, like, I couldn’t because, you know, I don’t want to be ‘that straight girl.’”

“Well shit, you can just come with me. I don’t drink and you’re not gay, so together we’ll sort of belong there.” We laughed.

“Seriously though,” Dee’s tone lowered. “I’m totally cool if you need to ditch me and get laid or whatever.”

“Yeah, I doubt that will happen. I’m not so into Koreans.”

“Well, I’m just saying. Don’t pass that ass up on my account.”

 

*

 

My friend Simon had warned me that I would have trouble finding this popular fried chicken joint. “Reggae Chicken”—as it was aptly named—had a nondescript storefront, unlike the other surrounding eateries, which announced their presence with all the subtlety of a McDonald’s playground on fire. With a few chairs pushed up against the wall next to a door, propped open by a questionable stool, its entryway was like the yawning mouth of an urban cave, exuding all of the charm of a toothless free hug. And above it all, the words “GAE CHIC” poked out under the overgrowth of vines lounging on the roof, looking like the thick, sleepy dreads of a Rastafarian. Once inside, the warm glow of red lights replaced the waning rays of daylight fading against the crimson walls, and I quickly realized this place for what it was: a small Bob Marley-themed dive with the Jamaican flag and framed portraits of ganja crowding every surface available. The hostess led us to a table where I sat in an actual hole in the wall.

Seoul was disorienting, but I was amazed by how supremely effortless it felt to be racially integrated into a society, and I had been there for over a month. Every day the prospect of moving there grew more seductive with its cheap food, taxis, and Asian-fitting clothes. And Simon and I both loved Korea for its greatest attribute: everyone left us alone. No lingering looks, no one asking where you’re really from. It turned out that the freedom to simply exist lifted a crushing burden I never even knew I was carrying.

“Have you tried to date here?” I asked after our drinks arrived.

“Yeah, it’s a little weird,” Simon hemmed. “In Korea it’s great though. You get to feel like a man.”

I would frequently hear this refrain from male adoptees who had moved to Korea, that they had found an escape from the feminizing West. Their masculinity was never called into question here, even with a face full of K-pop make-up.

“I don’t know, Simon. I’ve been here for nearly a month now, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never once felt like a man,” I smiled.

“You know what I mean. The women here, they don’t look at you like you’re less.” He nursed his beer as I munched on our free popcorn.

“But we get those looks—that we’re less,” I crunched. “It’s just different and doesn’t come with emasculation.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “But girls here let you open doors for them. They’re not afraid to cook for you…”

I sensed that along with the Jamaican lager and the Bob Marley photos staring at us with blood-shot eyes, we were entering 1960s territory. So many male adoptees’ feelings of being “real men” conflated their masculinity with a kind of misogyny, the kind that ironically led to their mothers giving them away. Male adoptees could marry native Korean women, but the inverse was unthinkable. Noticing all the couples in the restaurant — women with all the sensibilities and physical attributes of a Korean Mad Men and men looking for a sex-doll mommy — I wondered if a giant metropolis like Seoul was still so gendered that even with the evaporation of race, I could ever be comfortable here in my own queer lady skin.

“So, then, what’s weird about dating?” I asked again.

He stiffened on his stool. “Korean women are too status-oriented. They want you to drive an expensive car and have a high-powered job.”

I grinned. “Right. That doesn’t sound emasculating at all.”

After demolishing our fried chicken, potato wedges, and onion rings, Simon walked me over to the nightclub area of Hongdae, where the dyke bar was to be found. 

“Too bad you can’t stay for a drink,” I said, as we wandered the streets looking for the small alley that would lead us to Mong, the lesbian bar where I had planned to spend the evening with Dee.

“Yeah, I don’t think they let our kind in,” Simon smiled.

“Or maybe they do?” my voice wondered as we both noticed the hetero couples smoking outside. But as we approached, it became clear that they were in fact not straight at all, and that half of the women outside smoking shared Simon’s relief of feeling like a man in Korea. We laughed.

“Well, I guess I’ll leave you here to meet your friend,” Simon demurred. And with that he wandered off into the night. 

I stepped through the glass doors into the trendy bar adorned with an entire wall studded like a darkly lit Twister board and suddenly remembered that I hated gay bars only slightly less than straight ones. It felt disorienting to be inside a bar at all, so to be in a gay bar on the other side of the world crossed over to surreal. I looked around at the few couples sitting at the dimly lit tables and booths and noted the K-pop crooning from the dark corners of the ceiling. It was utterly queer. 

I took a seat at the bar, glanced at the menu, and instantly ordered, “Omija mojito, no alcohol.” While my drink was being mixed, I stepped outside for a smoke where a young, ravishing girl sat, saying something incomprehensible and motioning for a light.

“I don’t speak Korean,” I stated flatly as I lit her cigarette, trying not to stare. She appeared to have stepped straight out of the nineties, a Korean Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks, with her short, wavy hair, leggings, and silk top under a blazer with more shoulder pads than an episode of Lois & Clark. Maybe I am into Korean girls, I reconsidered as she exhaled a cloud of smoke under the cold flicker of electric blue lights. She stared knowingly at me, considering my presence while her cigarette, stained lipstick red on one end and burning scarlet on the other, dangled in her hand.

“How do you speak English so well?” she asked.

“How do you speak English so well?” I echoed.

“I teach English.” She spoke with a slight accent before breaking into the laugh that belongs to women who know they are beautiful.

Happy to be in a position to chat up a girl, I engaged her. “Where did you learn it?”

“I’ve taken it all my life in school,” she inhaled. “And a long time ago my parents moved to Brooklyn for one year. But I was very young. Nine years old.” Her eyes stayed fixed on me. “What is your name?”

“Mee Ok.”

“Mmm… You don’t hear that name much anymore.”

“You don’t hear it at all in the States.”

She smiled coyly. “You are American?”

“By nature, not by birth,” I nuanced, as I packed my bowl with tobacco.

“I like your pipe. We don’t have those here.” It was true. All of their tobacco shops were riding the vaporizer wave and selling candy-flavored cigarettes long outlawed in the West due to their appeal to children. “Can I see it?”

I handed it to her as she fingered it gently. “It’s a nice pipe.”

“It’s British,” I said out loud, immediately regretting it. It’s British, I mocked in my head. Good one.

She laughed as she handed it back to me. “What do you do in America?”

“I’m a writer—or trying to be,” I looked away, insecure. I wasn’t published anywhere, had just started a graduate program at the age of 37, and had, well, less than nothing going on before that.

“Ah, so you are writing a book?”

“That’s the idea,” I spoke quietly as I leaned in to light another cigarette.

“What is it about?” Her mouth, painted too red, seemed to shape the air as she formed her words.

“It’s about my life,” I recited, like an idiot. “People say it’s an interesting one.”

She gazed out at the quiet alley, hidden from the rows of night-food, bass beats, and throbbing bodies in the next street over. “My life is not so interesting.”

“Well, you are gay in a country that doesn’t approve of it,” I offered.

“Who doesn’t approve?” she asked, offended.

“I read that at Seoul’s gay pride two months ago there were more protesters than queers.”

“Oh that,” she waved the air, as if brushing away the ignorance.

“You don’t think being a queer person here is interesting?” I protested. “It’s so… taboo, I thought.” I was completely confused why she was so blasé about the whole thing. I thought of my first date in Korea with the 34-year-old professor who had suggested Mong to me a few nights before over text, though she had been too afraid to ever come here herself — or any gay bar in Korea.

“I just live my life. Queer, as you say,” she exhaled. “It’s no big deal.”

“Are you out to your parents?”

She dropped her cigarette on the pavement and stamped it out with her stiletto, her eyes growing wide and incredulous. “Of course.”

“Really? But that’s unusual… isn’t it?” I pressed.

“Hmmm…” she hummed as though she were falling asleep. “I like you. You seem like a writer.” 

She then stood up and walked over to the door, expecting me to follow, which I did. We sat in the dark, sipping our drinks, when she suddenly hopped off her bar stool. “Someday I hope to read your book. I have to go now.” Then she strutted over to the entrance where a tall and dashing woman entered, as handsome as any K-pop star, and together they disappeared into the shadows of the bar while I faded back into obscurity.

Moments later Dee tapped me on the shoulder. “Shit, dude, sorry I’m so late. This place is a bitch to find.” She took a quick glance around. “It’s weird to try to find a place that sort of doesn’t exist, you know?” She set down her bag and looked up. “What are you drinking?”

 

*

 

After ordering her first round, Dee swung around to stare out into the darkness of the lounge. “Damn, this bar is tame. Not really a place to meet the ladies,” she observed, picking up that everyone in the room was in a couple. When the butch bartender came back with her martini, she asked, “Is there a dyke club that’s, like, a party?”

Shortly after, we followed the bartender’s directions, retracing our steps back and forth trying to find a place that made every effort to remain hidden. The streets themselves appeared as broken as the bartender’s English, with paths searching for something but leading nowhere, as if old confused cattle trails were recently paved over, uneven and strange, slicked by dystopian neon lights.

“It’s supposed to be, like, right here… right?” I asked, side-stepping the throngs of club-goers crowding the tight alleyways. We had circled this area several times already.

“Maybe it’s up there?” Dee pointed to the tallest building around.

“Hey, are you guys looking for Labris?” I asked a group of three queer southeast Asian women who looked lost and ready to party.

“Yeah, the map says we are here,” the smallest one said in an accent I didn’t recognize.

“Where you from?” I asked, raising my voice over the club music.

“Indonesia,” she said.

“Singapore,” said the others.

“Why are you in Seoul?” I asked.

“The gay scene,” they chorused, as if I were blind to Korea’s gay awesomeness. Suddenly, I understood. In Asia, this is as good as it gets.

“Let’s just go up there and see.” Dee turned and started marching toward a shadowy entrance while we sheepishly tried to keep up. Once we were all packed into the elevator, she punched the 8th floor, beaming us all up to God knows where.

When the doors rumbled opened, there was only black. A curtain that, once pulled, revealed a round woman with a buzz cut checking IDs not for age, but for sex. No men allowed. We got a stamp on our hands and a plastic token that was good for one drink and slid through yet another dark curtain, where we were instantly caught in slow-motion, frame by frame, blinking under strobe lights. A thick bass vibrated through a large warehouse space that opened before us—multiple stages, high industrial ceilings, a long bar with bartending ravers, and two DJs spinning high above the dance floor in a carved out, high tech cave. I took a deep breath. I am way too old for this shit.

It was packed and the music was so loud it was hard to remember that no one was supposed to know we were up here. Everyone smoked inside the hazy room due to elevator traffic and also because a collection of drunk dykes on the street would give away our position, inciting attacks from Korean men or inviting evangelical protesters. As we made our way to the room-length bar so Dee could get a drink, I played the fine-drawn game of surveying the room without making eye contact with anyone. Initially the warehouse looked like what I imagined a straight club in Korea would look like, everyone playing a strict gender role—long hair, dress, and make-up or slicked, shaggy men’s coiffure, hip hop outfits, and liquid eye-liner.

“God, I would’ve cleaned up if I had lived here in my twenties,” I thought out loud.

“Oh yeah? How so?” Dee asked, sipping her drink, the bright futuristic color of radioactivity.

I showed her a picture on my phone from before I got sick, looking rakish and bored in my tight jeans, Italian leather shoes, and a tailored suit jacket.

“You don’t think you could clean up now?” she asked.

“Korea’s totally Eurotrash,” I protested. “And I look like I’m perpetually on my way to an ayahuasca ceremony,” I added, noting my chakra T-shirt, moonstone necklace, and one pair of Lululemon pants, which I basically lived in. 

Dee laughed through her drink. “It’s cool though. You got your own style. I mean, it’s not like I’m dressed for this place either.” Dee moved around the room so effortlessly, having no stakes in this game. I didn’t really either, but something old had risen out of me, the fierce yet tender rumblings of a dormant libido in a space meant to incite sex. “Are you sure there aren’t any guys in here? Because like, I don’t want to be a dick or anything, but I see a lot of dudes.”

“Yeah um… they’re not dudes,” I laughed, thinking of all the times my ex-girlfriends and I were asked who “the man” in the relationship was.

“Are you sure?” she asked, unconvinced but respectful of my gay authority.

I looked up. “The only actual guys in here are those two shitty DJs.” The music was objectionable on a number of levels. Generic techno reprisals that were impossible to dance to spun by men in an otherwise all-female space. “This music sucks even for the kind of music that it is.”

“You don’t like techno?” she asked, surprised.

“Not this.”

She paused and listened. “Wow, yeah, okay. I mean, dude, how many times can you drop a beat?” Dee continued to sip and scan the room. “Okay, over there, with the white T-shirt. That’s not a guy?”

I followed her gaze across the room to a handsome young woman in what appeared to be full male Korean drag, while Simon’s voice rang in my ears. In Korea it’s great. You get to feel like a man. “Yeah nope. That’s a woman.”

“Fuck!” Dee yelled, frustrated and embarrassed. “Okay, but definitely the one standing next to her, right?”

“Also a woman,” I laughed.

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with me? Am I just, like, too straight?” she stared at the two women as if they were the riddle of the gay sphinx. Then I watched the answer dawn on her, a look of disappointment passing over her face as she whispered, “Yeah, I’m just too fucking straight.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m really fucking gay,” I encouraged. “I’m probably even gayer than you are straight. Like, I have zero interest in going to a straight club with you and I have, like, a straight friend—and he was a theater major.”

“Yeah, I feel you,” her spirits started to lift. “But how can you tell?”

“Honestly, one easy trick is the shoulders. Look at the DJs’ shoulders.” We scrutinized the area above the stage. “Now look at your girl’s over there.”

“Oh shit,” she glanced back and forth. “That’s a pretty awesome gender hack.” Then someone else caught her eye. “But what about h—them.” She was staring at a butch rugby-looking Korean with the shoulders of a well-fed ox.

“Look at the chest,” I hinted, like a really fucked up Mr Rogers. “It’s harder too because, honestly, Asian men and women kind of look the same. Like the fishiest drag queens are always those bitches from Thailand, you know?”

“Wooooow.” The second drink was starting to hit her. “That’s so true.”

“Do you want my drink pass? I’m not going to use it.”

“Are you sure? I mean, maybe you want to buy some girl in here a drink,” she said.

I surveyed the room pulsing with rainbows of light, a cotton candy cloud of smoke gathering above the dance floor as drunk girls on stage let it all hang out because it was the only place they could. It was another world from me, far away from the girl I had imagined I was chatting up just an hour ago, and even further from the one where my birthmother would ever want to meet me. In this world, the one that I actually found myself in, I realized I had already retired any thoughts of taking a chance on yet another Korean woman.

“Nah,” I passed Dee the token. “I’m good.”

 

 

 

Mee Ok Icaro is an award-winning essayist, poet, and memoirist. She placed as runner-up in the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest and was a finalist for the Scott Merrill Award for poetry as well as the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, River Teeth, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, American Journal of Poetry, Michael Pollan’s “Trips Worth Telling” anthology, and elsewhere. She is also featured in [Un]Well on Netflix. More at Mee-ok.com.

 

Mee Ok Icaro

WHY I DON’T GO TO CHURCH by Monica Rico

November 18, 2021 at 2:45 pm
The priest          talks of gardens
but doesn’t grow fruit.

Oh, the mess     song

birds make. Someday

they will go to seed,
sprout,               and shoot.

A white lab mouse
released into the woods
doesn’t have the sense to run.
           Instinct

bred out,

it slips,               head first

like the priest into           collar and gold

embroidery with almond
nails, my grandmother   calls
lazy. The film of incense

           a tiny fire.               all of it

preserved prayer

           in the pellet            of the owl.

 

Monica Rico is a Mexican American CantoMundo Fellow, Macondista, and Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award winner who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s HZWP and works for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. Her manuscript PINION is the winner of the 2021 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Kaveh Akbar.
Monica Rico

Northern Lights by Christina Leo    

November 17, 2021 at 2:57 pm

At the tilted pole of a distant planet on the date of the summer solstice, the eyes of a young astronomer reflect the faint glow of a radio-sized machine which measures the countdown to sunrise. This far north, it will be the only daybreak of the year. Four minutes of morning.

Wilted logbooks lie beside her in the snow, open to her notes and weighted with shards of sea glass. She glances briefly at them, at the penciled calculations of parsecs and parallax, and despairs at the neatness of her penmanship. No one demands her data or commands her to be swifter. The dispatches she receives from the southern posts—from the teams of scientists scurrying to report on new medicines, new weapons, new morals—arrive dimensionless to her computer screens with rarely a spot of handwriting. Their world hurries to repair itself. To repopulate, replace. No one craves the mathematics of the sky’s unblustered canopy.

And so she is alone at the pole. She had wanted to be. She uses time to write slowly, to linger in the trails of her numbers, her words. Meridian. Aphelion. Obliquity. 

Years ago, when the astronomer stood no taller than the heads of dune grass, she had lived above the cliffs of an island on the wider side of the world. The sands there jostled underfoot, black and porous and rough—lapilli stones, her father had called them. Volcanic remnants of an earth on fire. 

Once, after dinner, the astronomer and her brother had slipped out the back gate of their mother’s garden and into the shade of the woods, a damp and quivering jungle which sprung from a river and led to the coast. They sometimes brought their records there, and listened to music by the sea. This time, they carried a net, stalking the thin crustaceans which scurried up the bark of antler-torn trees, watching for the larger beasts which hid, impossibly, out of sight. They stained their shoes with moss. They mimicked the caws of feather-crowned birds, pocketed the sun-bleached skull of a shrew. Bare-shouldered, red-kneed, they made their way to the beach, where night appeared with the blue ringed planet and its two twin moons. Where they realized, in the dark, that they had forgotten their lanterns on the kitchen table. 

They wandered, lost, for what felt like hours. The sky had merged with the sea.

As they rested in the sand with their backs to the tide, the astronomer lifted a piece of the lapilli stone just above the line of the bordering cliffs, cradling a low-hanging star in the groove of the stone’s imperfect shape. She did not know the constellations, then. She did not know that the star she cradled was among those clusters which showed the way north, and whose names appeared in all the annals of the old explorers. She did not know that the stars of her island were also the stars of the pole, and that they led to the everlasting night at the cattycorner of the world.

Her chosen star winked in the darkness until, from around the edges of the stone, the blackness of space began to pale. A spot of brilliance gathered behind the grass on the cliff, growing into a haze which swallowed the star and began almost to solidify. The astronomer recognized the effect as she had recognized the glare of lighthouses through mist and rain. A beacon. 

Her brother shook her shoulder, told her to stand and wave her arms. And when the astronomer brushed off her knees and looked again toward the bluffs, it was the beam of her parents’ lanterns which emerged fully formed at the ridge. It came with a hum like music—one long, high-pitched note, one low—until the sound of her name grew rich on the wind. She squinted into the glow of the mantles cresting on her cheeks, her nose, and even, as she cried back, in the palate of her mouth. A taste like honeysuckle, soft and fleeting.

From behind her, she thought, the gasp of a porpoise broke the surface of the sea before silencing once more, and diving away. 

These are the rules, her parents said afterward: If you get lost again, stay put. Don’t move. Wait for us to find you.

Many years later, the astronomer stood again on the beach of the lapilli sand, in the stench of brine and sea-rotted scales. In the shadow of the cliffs. No one at home. Only the survivors, their bodies still clean, unblemished by illness, wandered the coast. They stood in the surf as if searching for a single particle of scattered ash, one lonesome fleck of memory, to pass over their bare feet, to cling to their skin. Wait for us to find you.

She couldn’t bring herself to stay. By then, the astronomer had learned that lapilli stones don’t always come from the earth. Some of them, indistinguishable by sight, arrive from the opposite direction. From the plummet of meteors crashing from space. 

In the sky above where she crouches in her coat, and astride the long horizon between the low icy crags in the distance, thousands of stars flicker in the guise of their former selves. Their effervescence arrives too young, hiding tendrilous nebulas or expired white cores behind the slow tide of light-years. They seem to the astronomer, on her loneliest days, like airborne embers from a blanketed fire. Or snow on the lashes of unblinking eyes. They are so orderly. They do not move as planets move. They look as if they might last forever. But the astronomer, watching the numbers of another year’s countdown, knows the ulterior truth of physics: that everything beyond the earth rushes imperceptibly away from it, and the earth from everything else, all the universe speeding away toward its unknown boundaries. Even the moons and the blue ringed planet which hang always in view, tethered by gravity, slacken their ties with each year’s revolution, party guests escaping a conversation which has run its course and now drifts lazily onward, aimless.

One day in the far future, when the light of all the stars and the orbs of all the planets retreat too far, a person could stand on the pole of this planet, look up, and see nothing. Nothing at all. As if the earth were the only object in existence. 

The green radar screen beside the countdown displays the fine lines of a digital globe divided into quadrants, a small blinking pulse marking the zone in the top right corner, the place where the astronomer kneels in the snow. And though the cosmos has no direction, and she may just as easily consider herself south or east or west, at night—or rather, during the sleeping hours of the pole’s constant darkness—in her bed, she has felt the pull of the cardinal north from her toes to the tip of her head, which on her pillow lies in the direction of the polar constellations. In those instances she feels mineral, electric. As if she has been born of iron poured from the core at the center of the world, and retains its elements in her bones. Even now, the observatory station some long strides behind her glows with the lights she keeps always burning.

The countdown clock in the little machine is almost out of time. About thirty minutes remain until all units read zero.

The astronomer contracts the antenna, gathers her notebooks and the machine into her arms, and turns back to her home where the eye of a telescope at the cusp of the still, domed rooftop reflects all but one of the eastern stars.

Inside, the downstairs studio weeps with electricity. It comes from more than two dozen lamps of two dozen shapes on the countertops, the desks, the upside-down boxes, and from tall torchieres blooming in poppy splays, all golden and ruby and budding-white. It comes from mismatched sconces—frosted glass and cast-iron lanterns—screwed into the walls between tall, narrow windows like those in stone cathedrals or castle ramparts. It comes from dozens of cords plugged into the walls, and from paper-shuttered bulbs and a lone chandelier hanging low on long wires from the ceiling. The astronomer’s supervisors, when they arrive with the quarterly shipment of supplies, always suggest that she raise these higher, but she ignores their wishes. She likes the feeling of revolution when she moves around the crowded stations, from the computers to the mapping tables to the drafting desks, and to the charts which curl up the walls in waves. She has traced upon these, some nights, the passages of old satellites known only by their earthly records, for they receive no new signals, and send none out in return.

The astronomer removes her boots by the salt-crusted floor mat, hangs her coat and gloves and hat on a peg. A sprinkling of snow descends from their fabric at the slightest of her movement, at her breath when she sets the machine down on the floor. She does not want the seconds ticking down beside her while the spin of her planet prepares itself. She likes to be surprised by the potential moment, the larger moment, the prolonged instant at the upstairs window when the countdown to sunrise must almost be ending, could end at any second. 

Dressed in her socks and sweater, the astronomer looks at nothing in particular. It is her hand, instead, which moves to a trio of switches on the wall beside her. She presses all three at once, slowly, and the hanging bulbs, the sconces, and the low chandelier fizzle out without a sound. The remaining lamps glow like minuscule galaxies about the room, culling dust motes from scents of cedar and pine.

In their spectrum, the veins beneath the astronomer’s skin flow green like jungle rivers viewed from a rocket’s height, and she has been known to sit, wrists up, under a curtain of lamplight, and recall in them the colors of her mother’s old garden at the line of zero latitude. 

But for now, she moves on. Her notebooks she places into a tray on the closest table, beneath a lamp textured in the golden scales of the many-finned fish which swam in the waters of her old home. Atop an old music player, a stack of records languish like sand-dollars pulled from a pool, catching moonbeams in their ridges. A generator in a neglected corner struggles to maintain a trill, growing quieter and quieter, and then only whispering once the astronomer pulls the cord under the shade of the lamp. When the scales turn to silver, then slate. 

She wishes sometimes that a doormouse could survive the long winter, that it might scurry out in the darkness and tap on the floorboards when she finishes her day’s work. Instead, the only rattling comes from a dram of tincture and a bottle of anti-virus pills stamped with a government seal which sit beneath a lamp in the shape of a pond-side willow, with light in each leaf. She barely looks at the thick hardcover book peeking out from the darkened outskirts—Chemical Warfare, Vol. 2—nor at the mess beside it, at the vials of Vitamin C and D spilling across a petri dish. The astronomer pushes a tab beneath a knee-bent root, and the filaments expire. 

She passes, next, a half-opened shoebox overflowing with old envelopes, each labeled “No-Entry Zones: N Hemisphere,” under the light of a lamp as crystalline as an icicle. The message repeats itself on a large map leaning against the wall behind it, where thick, inky “X”s cross out huge swaths of land and sea, leaving only small patches unmarked. A thinly drawn circle encompasses a small patch of tundra where the observatory stands. A twist of a knob, and the icicle melts into shadow.

The astronomer powers down the sear of the computer screens, the petal glow of the torchieres. With each extinguishing her skin grows paler, more alien. She presses her shoulders back when she feels herself growing heavier, when her neck begins to bow. But still she moves delicately through the studio. She knows her pupils are expanding in the dark. They will gather what remains. 

Every lamp she touches—the broad one in the flat curve of an umbrella, the soft ones puffed like mushrooms, the slender necks of silver and gold—fades into its drained surroundings. The moonlight from the windows cuts into the work tables, leans against the handmade map of the solar system as broad as the southern wall. The astronomer weaves past it to the back of the room, but the silver ink of circumnavigations flashes once against her face, as does the cobalt blue of the drawing of the ringed planet, of the sketches of the moons, of the gas giants too soft for landing. Her supervisors have yet to notice the inaccuracies of the map, failing to comment on the few extra constellations, the handful of pulsing quasars, and even the spare green planet the astronomer has painted into the orbits of the galaxy. Little things all her own. A different world. 

One last layer of light comes from a wooden staircase ascending the back wall. These steps lead up to the second-story apartment, to the base of the observation dome where the great telescope stares into the sky. Somewhere, thinks the astronomer, someone must be looking back at it. Unknowingly, and unknown, much too far away. 

She grips the railing as she climbs, rising along the wall where several framed photographs and government documents hang in uneven rows, lit by a trail of holiday lights like mourning lanterns floating upstream. In one photo, her mother and father wear outdated clothing and bright white smiles in front of their small wooden house, surrounded by spindle trees and dew drop flowers. The family home. In another, the astronomer and her brother hover behind a birthday cake, grinning wide enough to force their eyes shut. In a third, a fourth, and a fifth, the foam of a breaking sea on sand suspends its shells with an amber clutch, warm and opalescent. She catches her reflection in the glass covering a diploma in astrophysics, which hangs beside a moisture-cracked sheet of paper—“Relocation Request Approved”—nailed to the wall with its torn envelope, with an address she no longer knows by heart.

The top step creaks as the weight of the astronomer leaves it, and the light of the trail extinguishes, glass by glass by glass. 

Wait.

The upstairs apartment is a low field of fireflies amid a hard beam of metal. These are the dim phasing lights of the machinery along the floor, this the solemn glint of the telescope as it reaches, faceless, into the dome. A small chair on wheels sits empty by the mount, attended by scatterings of papers and pencils like fallen roof tiles, while varnished sheets of space-black astrophotos almost disappear behind their pins on the wall. The room lies in darkness, and the gabled window which looks out onto the tundra gleams like an eclipse in reverse, reflecting the snow. 

The hour nears. 

The astronomer passes her narrow brass bed to reach the view, passes the overturned crates beside her lopsided pillows where a single lamp with a simple shade sits black and dormant. Her chest thrums. Her fingertips throb with pinpricks. She crawls upon the window seat and looks out, silent.

This is the long instant. The moment of a year. 

It peeks. 

It peaks.

Outside, the tundra is a ballroom floor. White marble and wax. Even the blue ringed planet pales with its moons behind a thin gauzy curtain which creeps from the horizon like haze from a hearth at the core of the earth. The bulk of the crags harden into coaly imprints, their shadows streaked and extending back and back in slow crescendo while the ocean of snow blooms violet in the swath, the softest of its divots reassembling their shapes. Week-old footprints, here. Tracks from the sled, there.

In true spring, as a child, the astronomer had plucked flowers just this tone and pressed them in the leaves of a long-lost diary. The fields of home had sprung in height and multitudes of texture. She had felt the scratch of the palms, the brush of an airborne seed on the wind, large as a moth in the short, warm nights. How many footprints there would have been had the snow touched down on the island. There would be her father’s, always larger, always one step ahead. Her mother’s, creeping by the sides of ponds for snails with bodies soft as custard. Her brother’s, disappearing at the base of a tree, as if he had spirited inside, his posture in its boughs nymphish with sweat and happiness. The sky to her then was the blue fire of distant stars, and the greatest one of them always above, its light only minutes old, always new. A million light-years an open book before her eyes.

But now, the turn of a page. Here is the first clear crest of the spectrum above the curve of the earth. Feathery down on the back of an infant swan. And here, blooming into the palette of clouds, a match of the sky strikes the slate of the horizon line and flares, flares red like a holiday sparkler once given to the astronomer by her brother so carefully, so beautifully dangerous on a warm summer night. The snow, too, bleaches after so long in the blue of the moons and the many-ringed planet, pure white as a star on the brink of its death. But the astronomer is here, and the sun is breaching, and she still has time, for the world is turning, and her blood in her veins is the heat of momentum, is traveling breakneck through space to catch up to this moment at the top of the earth.

Four minutes. The arching of the light, the fire red on the cold, hard snow. Lips parting for a taste of honeysuckle.

A last goodbye. 

A slow descent. 

The waning of spectrums back into violet, into the ghost of a damselfly’s discarded skin still clinging to its reed.  

The tilted planet had seen many things lost. The astronomer thinks often about one type of loss in particular, one that would have happened in the days before machines, before the great eye of telescopes and the advent of electric light and the knowledge of atoms.  She can imagine a child who must have existed hundreds of years ago, maybe on a small country hill many miles from a city, who has just heard her favorite song for the first and last time in her life. Not because she is dying, or because she will go deaf, but because she has come to see a traveling orchestra which will not pass her way again, not for a very long time, when the repertoire has changed, and she has decided just now that this ending of a song—maybe a long, high-pitched note, one low—is the most wonderful, most perfect experience in the world. She is blessed for only a handful of minutes. Only that. They are all the minutes she will know of this music. Of all the minutes in her life. There is no way to capture it, not even if she assembled every musician she knows, for she does not know how to teach them the tune. She will spend a lifetime in hums, trying to recall the moment of such brief time. But the song is forever elsewhere. Four minutes of mourning.

The astronomer presses her palms to her eyes as the stars reappear in the light of the moons. The ringed planet endures. The tundra softens. Her hands come away damp and sparkling. 

After a few breaths more of immobility, the astronomer turns from her gable, setting her feet on the hardwood floor. The eye of the telescope peers up and away past the ceiling of the room, the panels of the dome extending downward from its center like gravity’s pull on a dripping firework. It siphons images of faraway galaxies, witnesses a million suns. It is fixed and transfixed. The astronomer approaches it, brushes it gently with her fingertips as one does to the shoulder of a suffering friend who would rather be alone. 

She feels twenty pounds heavier, battered as an asteroid, but she moves. She moves toward the bed by the stairs. On the nightstand, the plain white slope of the single lamp covets the blue of the tundra outside, and the astronomer lifts her arm as through the crush of ocean tides, and finds the beaded cord beneath its shade. It is almost too heavy, an anchor on the sea floor, but she pulls. Clicks. And the veins of her hand are green in the golden sheen. And the white sheets are cumulous, and the brass is burnt like obsidian, and the wood on the tabletop is sienna and umber, the colors of her hair. The waves of each lock flow like dune sand, like jungle rivers, when she lays her head down on the pillow. Facing the east gable window. The moons and the blue ringed planet. Her snow-laden tracks. The night-long glow of the lamp. 

The astronomer closes her eyes as the yearly countdown starts again in the downstairs corner by the salt-crusted boots. The old pull from the center of the earth reaches for her again, and she holds it against the blankets, against the cold. It brings a snowfall down on the pole with the return of darkness, and gathers the still-cycling satellites to their daily orbit. It suspends every star in unreachable hoverings. Today, it does. 

Through the telescope’s eye, a flash in the atmosphere registers on the quiet machines, is recorded by the computers without disturbing the astronomer’s hand. Their numbers describe a meteor, burning and gone. An elegy in signs.

Low is the drone of the generator. Colorless, the night. Slow and steady is the departure of the universe from its moorings, the combing of stardust into the archives of the dead. 

The astronomer has underlined as much in the footnotes of her books: a star can burn for ten billion years. But nothing, in the end, defeats its own life. The galaxies will stretch away. The world will one day be alone. And yet. There, in the astronomer’s pocket. She reaches for it as sleep descends. A fragment of collision. Glacial coolness. A piece of her island’s old lapilli stone. She gives heat to its surface from the palm of her hand, fire present for fire past. She mimics the clutch of the mesosphere through which this chip of the universe had managed to slip. A little salvage of a wreck. 

Somewhere overhead, the telescope’s meteor turns to soot. But should one particle of its ending land on the tundra at the top of the world, it would see on the black horizon a semblance of its former self. In the distance, the lamp of a gable window persists in the night, and the fireflies of machinery spatter like comet trails, and that returner of the universe would fade in comfort, in brilliance, in wonder at these infinitesimal suns. These small northern lights.

 

Christina Leo is a journalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After earning her MFA from the University of Notre Dame as a Sparks fellow, she returned south to the world of magazine publishing, where she pines for snow but rejoices in not having to shovel a driveway. Her previous fiction has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and appears in Salamander as the winner of its 2019 Fiction Prize.

Christina Leo

Unscented by Andi Brown

November 16, 2021 at 3:02 pm

When I return home at night, I’m careful not to kiss my wife. It’s by mutual agreement. It was a routine we had before COVID, when all we had to worry about was MRSA, C-diff, and any human fluids that might get on my scrubs. In lieu of kisses, I strip my clothes off in the laundry room and walk naked through our apartment to the shower. Even our dog knows he will have to wait to be petted. 

The shower is when I return to myself. As a trans healthcare provider, I leave half myself in the parking lot when I go to work at the hospital. I’m supposed to be calm and professional, so good at my job that they keep me around in spite of what I am.  

But at home I get to be me. I use body wash called Dragon’s Roar. It comes in a giant orange bottle and has a studly knight on the front wearing chain-mail with the sleeves cut off. It’s the kind of oppressively masculine scent high school boys prefer, and that I always wanted to smell like when I was a teenager. 

It’s terrible. My dog won’t sit next to me after I get out of the shower, and my wife, Sam, gives me that fixed smile that says, “I know you are going through something, so I’ll put up with this.” 

I am going through something. Testosterone is rearranging my body. The fat from my thighs has migrated to my stomach. I’m growing the beginnings of a mustache. I’ve started smelling like a rutting deer. When my wife wears her black racer-back running shirt, I want to stamp my hooves and scratch my antlers against a tree.

I also sweat constantly. The patients I work with think this is hilarious, especially the way it makes my paper mask cling to my cheeks. They are freezing all the time, wrapped in hospital blankets up to their necks and tucked around their feet, the temperature in the rooms turned up to Oklahoma scorch while sweat collects on my forehead and drips down between my glasses. 

“Why is your skin so red?” Deloris asks me. Her face has a blank look even when she’s joking—blunted affect, I will call it in my documentation. Her Parkinson’s has stripped away the movement of her face, hollowed out the muscles around her eyes, and made it look like she’s wearing a skin-colored mask. 

“It just is.”  

She holds up her arm next to mine and says, “See! Red!” And then laughs, a husking sound. 

Today is the day for her to practice showering, and I’ve turned on the heater in the rehabilitation shower in preparation. 

A few days ago, I shaved my face. Not because I’m growing a beard yet, but the downy hair on my cheeks makes me look soft and feminine. I noticed an errant eyebrow hair and shaved straight up from the bridge of my nose without thinking. Now my eyebrows are spaced far apart, like I’m perpetually surprised. 

Deloris thinks that’s hilarious, too. I’ve stenciled them on with a thick black pencil, but as soon as we start her shower, they melt right off. She holds a trembling finger up to my face and points at the black smudges. 

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, rolling my eyes for effect. “Yuck it up.” 

Deloris doesn’t use Dragon’s Roar body wash. She uses the stuff they give away at the hospital that smells faintly of aloe and gladiolas. Her hands are too weak to open the bottle, so I do it for her and pour the green goo onto a washcloth. I remind her to lift her breasts and wash gently under them, where the skin has turned a chapped pink, and between her legs and her bottom, raw from so much sitting. 

When I give her the hand-held showerhead, she sprays my shoe and cackles again. 

“Your shoes are wet,” she says, crowing in delight. 

I hop and lift one leg up, playing it up while she laughs. 

—

A couple of months ago, I could not get my testosterone because of issues with our health insurance and had to go without for three weeks. One night, Sam cuddled up close to me and stuck her nose in my armpit. 

“I want to tell you something,” she murmured, breath against my skin. “But I don’t want you to hate me.” 

 “Okay,” I said. 

“You smell like you used to,” she said. “Like you did when we first got together.” She hid her face and quietly cried. “I miss it.” 

I rested my cheek against her messy brown waves, always untamed because she washes her hair with Bronner’s mint body wash and doesn’t use conditioner. Bits of grey are winding their way through, coarser than the soft brown strands. She married someone different. Ten years younger, no back pain or crunchy knees, and with the sweet, milky smell of estrogen. 

“Do you want me to stop taking it?” I said. Because, Lord help me, I would give up everything for her. 

“No,” she said, lifting her head so I can tell she’s serious. “I like your new smell, too. It’s just…” 

I guided her head back to my chest and resumed stroking her hair. “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.” 

—

After she finishes rinsing, Deloris stands, and I have to step in front of her and put a hand on her waist to steady her. Her right hip is broken, and she forgets that she can’t put full weight on her leg. Even the pain doesn’t seem to register for her. She’d wobble down the hallway naked and never notice a problem. 

“What am I going to do all day with half an eyebrow?” I ask, drawing her attention back to me and helping her sit back down. 

She takes a moment, but then laughs and points again at my face. The steam has long since fogged up my glasses, and I’ve pushed them up into my curls. 

I can see that she’s thinking about standing again, so I drop to my knees and towel off her feet. “Can you dry your hips?” 

She nods and pats her left thigh with the thin, white hospital towels. They are the fabric equivalent of one ply toilet paper. The stuff that reminds you that you are sick, in a hospital, alone. 

My mask is now soaked on both sides – inside from perspiration and outside from steam. It sticks to my lips so closely I look like a puppet. I think about making a joke about this, pretending to be a duck or something else stupid just to get Deloris to laugh, but she is still absently drying her right thigh over and over again. She’s shivering now that the water is off. 

“Dry your arms,” I suggest. She looks surprised, like she had forgotten I was there. 

Deloris dries her arm now, the same spot, pat, pat, pat. She’s tired and fading, and I know she won’t be able to learn anything more today. 

“Let’s sing our song,” I say as I take over. 

She moves her head to the rhythm before she remembers the words. 

“Oh, when the saints,” she sings. “Go marching in. Oh, when the saints go marching in. Oh, I’m dah dah dah.” She always forgets this part, and looks at me, head cocked to the side and watching while I keep singing. She joins in on the last line, “when the saints go marching in.” 

I finish helping her dry and slather barrier cream below her breasts and at the crease of her stomach and thigh. She needs my help with her shirt because the fabric clings to her still damp back. The buttons are too difficult for her shaking hands, but she manages one and I finish the rest. When I get her yellow no-slip socks on, thread her briefs and pants over her legs and fasten the gait belt around her middle, she stands and I hold her with one arm, dry her bottom, and help her pull up her pants. 

By the time she’s dressed and back in her bed, the sweat on my face has soaked my sideburns and burned the thin pink skin on both of my eyes. 

“You’re a good girl,” she says to me, patting my hand in the same distant way she dried her thigh. 

I ask her if she wants her door closed and leave the room staggering from the blow. I’m a woman to her. I’m a woman to all my patients. And to anyone in Muskogee, Oklahoma, who might see a transgender man and want to do something about it. 

I go home and follow the routine of immediately taking a shower and washing my scrubs. When I’m clothed and out of the bathroom, my hair still dripping wet, I kiss my wife and join her at the dinner table. Sam has been sneaking vegetables into my meals because she loves me and doesn’t want me to have a heart attack. 

She tells me about her day, and the calls she had to make for work, and how our dog barked at that one pug he hates. I tell her about the podcast I listened to on my way home and the new adaptive equipment I ordered for our therapy room. I tell her about Deloris, a little, leaving out the bit about being “a good girl,” omitting the subtle humiliations that pepper my day. None of that is new, and it’s a story that tires me to tell. 

After dinner, we watch a TV show together, something that we can both ignore while she reads, and I paint. By the morning, the smell of Dragon’s Roar will have faded, and I’ll be ready to go to work, unscented. 

 

 

Andi Brown is a trans writer and artist. His most recent publications include stories for the Tulsa Review and Months to Years, and he was recently awarded a MVICW Pandemic-Writers Conference Grant. Andi lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he works as an occupational therapist. You can find out more about him by visiting andibwrites.com

 

Andi Brown

The Guards Who Guard the Grief Inside—Essays and Poems on the Razor Wire Poetry Workshop by Shaun T. Griffin

November 15, 2021 at 11:56 am

For the past thirty years I have taught poetry at Northern Nevada Correctional Center.  More than 150 men have participated and almost all of them have stayed out of prison.  Some have completed degrees, many have married, have steady jobs, and very few keep writing.  Poetry is a way to reclaim themselves, or as one member has said, “to save myself from me.”  The workshop takes place in the prison chapel, an almost surreal location if you can still believe in something beyond its concrete walls.  This past spring, due to Covid, I taught on-line for the college.  One man from the workshop was able to attend.  This essay originally appeared on my radio show, A Writer’s World, on KWNKradio.org.

 

Dispatches from Prison  

Sometimes books are like angels—they swoop into a life to alter its course, and Billy was no exception.  He read Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir, A Place to Stand, in five days.  Just weeks earlier he heard Baca speak in class, albeit via Zoom—but he heard him.  He felt his words deep beneath his skin.  They took him places, took him to worlds he had not understood or known.  They took him inside the man he thought he knew—the old Billy—and for the first time, he was able to consider things he had not been able to share.  

This is what I can never explain when people ask how poetry works.  This is what I am not able to define.  Billy was a reluctant learner.  Poetry meant obfuscation—stay away at all costs.  But he came to class after class and struggled mightily.  His first paper was a kind of prayer that some words might get lobbed over the finish line and record a one point victory.  And he was disgusted when they did not.  I told him not to worry about the grade.  Grades had nothing to do with poetry.  He could not hear that and I sat with his criticism:  “I worked my ass off on this paper and all I got was f___ing C.  How the hell am I supposed to keep writing?”  I didn’t have much to say—the poem had become his nemesis, an outlier of language that it was thought to be.  My praise of his effort floated into the chapel—the unlikely classroom—like 

unwanted confetti.  The others in the room sat with his words too.  Did they have a chance, could 

they succeed in this “stupid” class?

It was one of those pivotal moments when what is shared can bend the men to

epiphany or disgust.  I hated teaching online; I was so much more comfortable in person where I 

could see their eyes, read more than what was said.  Now their faces were a blur, the details of expression unclear at best.  We had gotten off to a rough start—the technology failed night after night.  I could not hear them, sometimes the screen went dark or crashed, and I could not share materials in real time.  I was teaching with my hands tied—except when I had to use them to mime responses.  It was the usual electronic pandemonium.  It took three weeks to discover the class was on mute and I could not override the system.  A small correction we would discover after hours with tech support.  None of this had anything to do with poetry, with the reason I taught inside.  In fact, it only emboldened the naysayers.  We started off with poetry that was expressive but not too dense.  I wanted to give them a way into the art form.  I began each class with poems from men and women who were or had been inside and bypassed the argument of why poetry?  If it was good enough for them, the ten men in my class could tiptoe in… or so I imagined, but the paradox of poetry is rife with understatement.  No matter what I said to assuage their concerns—that it was not life threatening—the art form and I, by inference, were suspect.  Grades only made it worse.  Somehow they had to guess what I was thinking or wanted and what I really wanted was for them to listen to themselves, to plumb the depths of their experience to witness what they were doing, who they were, why they had trouble finding a place to stand.  This was not so much, I intimated.  Sure, it took risk, took more than cursory effort and meant they would have to look hard at what had gone down in their lives but after reading many poets whose lives were changed by poetry in this very same hellhole, my hope could not be refuted.  

Right?  

Wrong.  Hope doesn’t have these requirements.  Hope lives by itself and flutters down to 

our lives when we least expect it —but in the presence of a poem?  Never happens.

Stubbornly, I kept on, threw them every kind of poem I knew and let them sit with the 

refrain from one of my former workshop members—“Poetry saved me from me.”  He spoke in the class too and confided his trepidation when I had asked him to write about what he knew.  “I’ll write about myself,” he said, “I know me.”  Nothing could have been harder.  He did not 

know himself.  He was staring into the abyss of his life after years of incarceration and what he knew was “desolation.”  This was an abrupt end to his poetic aspiration, a halting cadence in his poems.  He confided his first memory of reading a poem in the workshop when the men cringed—something he can laugh at now—but when he shared this experience with the men in my class they were taken aback.  “You mean your life was not sufficient to write about?” they asked.

“No,” he said, “I was not prepared to look within.  I lived without looking at myself for my first twenty years and until prison, I had done just fine.  I thought I had escaped this process.”  

He went on.  “It took more than cursory effort to stare down the man I had become.  I realized that poetry was the vehicle to stop bullshitting myself.  If I couldn’t be straight with myself, how could I possibly write a poem proclaiming to understand its author?  I could not.  I could only fake it—which up until now, I had been so good at.”  

There it was, laid bare in the chapel:  this wasn’t a game of chess.  It was the paradox of growing into a self he had not known.  A paradox that seemed almost worth trying—meaning he could start to express what required him to slow down and sit with these questions.  

Poetry rarely answers but it does provide ample questions.  It helps us to sift from the 

debris.  Almost imperceptibly, the sifting had begun.  The words were so much stronger when 

they did not emanate from my tongue.  My former workshop member who was facing life cut 

through all of the excuses.  There was nothing left to proclaim.  Innocence stood outside the 

chapel waiting for the men to accede—an innocence born of vulnerability.  To really take risks in a poem, I kept saying to them, you can’t lie to yourself; the questions are real.  They are there for a reason—they keep you close to what cannot be expressed but what is felt—and that is the province of poetry.  Something tangible like grief or the echo of a parent was just beyond their grasp, and yet it wasn’t.  It was right in front of them if they could express that momentary recognition.  A recognition of letting go, of whispering to some other self not known but experienced and buried.  This is the refrain my former workshop member kept repeating—”you have a lived story, a vital and necessary voice, but the story has not been shared.”  Then he paused:  “I was afraid of my story, afraid to let the old perceptions go, and there wasn’t much else to say without it.  The poem lurched forward, I tried to tag along but my words seemed lifeless.”  

This was a metaphor for creation—you must try and not know how or why.  The ancient Chinese poets expressed this best.  Here is Po Chü-i (Selected Poems, translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 2000):

Listening, I feel my thin hair

quickly turning white:

 

still growing old, still

sleepless, still alone.

 

These are lines from a man who has spent his life making poetry—of course he was alone, sleepless, and growing older.  Of course he could not name the thing that disturbed him but he was glad to be a part of its revelation.  He recorded the isolation so that nearly 1300 years later I could read his poem and know without a doubt that inexplicable silence.  I shiver with recognition as I age into that silence.

Weeks later, near the end of class, Billy was starting to find his way.  He was excited 

about having another go at the last paper.  He wanted to show me what he had learned.  I was 

grateful he had not disappeared from view.  Prison can be an ornery teacher—there is poetry enough to go around if you’re able to absorb it.  And I would not have found him if he disappeared into that maelstrom, that desolation my former member referred to.  Not Whitman’s song, but a derivation of life without song.  But he did not.  He promised he would give it his all, do everything to demonstrate his knowledge of the craft.  I let him know how much that meant—not just to me, but to his journey from who he was to who he had become.  

In a late spring snowstorm, I read Billy’s paper and indeed he had mastered the first two subjects but when I got to the third and fourth he could not quite articulate why the poems worked as they did.  I read on and found a letter.  He thanked me for helping him return to the man he once knew, for being able to share this man for the first time in his life.  I set the letter down and looked out at the flakes—they were falling without worry to a dry land, a land I had tried to name in a hundred poems—and Billy had just written a letter that was so much more than understanding.  Its veracity was close to poetry, close to what the most earnest of teachers hope for:  that day when the subject becomes synonymous with its expression and there is no longer any need of demonstration.  Billy had found his way into the poem.  Nothing more needed to be said.  It was his former peer who led him on this path.  It was the example of his peer’s own saving, of Baca’s saving, of so many more whose names are not known, but whose poetry is present in his eyes and mind.  Some part of this cannot be recorded and lies within him for what words may come.  Like my workshop that has gone on endlessly for three decades, I did not want the class to end.  I had to trust Billy found a way into the words without me and that the poems would do their work:  an empathetic rendering of what lay within.

 

 

 

Shaun T. Griffin co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency for twenty-seven years.  Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me—Essays from a Poet, was published in 2019.  The Monastery of Stars, poems, came out in 2020.  For over three decades, he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center, and published a journal of their work, Razor Wire.  He and his wife Debby live in Virginia City, Nevada. 

 

A Note from the Editor: Community Outreach

November 14, 2021 at 1:46 pm

 

At Witness Magazine, we often hear from writers from all over the world, but we can fulfill our mission, as stated, to amplify extraordinary voices, and highlight pieces that speak to the present moment in an enduring and distinctive way by engaging with our local community.

To that end, we worked with Shaun Griffin, a poet who teaches a poetry workshop at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, to highlight some of the voices and writers he has worked with. Shaun and his workshop also put together their running chapbook series Razor Wire. The Community series will be published ongoing starting tomorrow.

We loved these poems and essays and hope you will too.

 

-Robert Ren, Fiction Editor

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