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HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS , a Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

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HARNESSING WILDNESS: THE PRACTICE OF POETIC LEAPS
A Craft Essay by Kari Ann Ebert

To avoid stagnation and cliché, one of the tools in a poet’s arsenal is to conjure associations that bring energy to the poem and add complex layers. These associations can show themselves as metaphors, changes of perspective, or wild unfettered leaps. Carl Phillips identifies associative poetry as, “poetry that works almost entirely by means of association— no connecting narrative pieces, often no syntactical connection, poetry that is characterized by leaps not just from stanza to stanza, but from one image to the next in ways that do not immediately make sense…”

Robert Frost’s adage, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” is so familiar that we often lose its urgency, but without something fresh and new, why even read poetry? If we’re regurgitating the same form, the same imagery, the same metaphors, why even attempt to write a poem? A disruption is needed to engage the reader (and the writer) when we find ourselves falling into a familiar or even formulaic pattern. Christopher Salerno challenges us to startle and be startled: “I really want to read (and write) poetry that has the ability to startle—startle by getting beyond the automatism of commercial and habitual and unconscious language.” One of the ways we can accomplish this is through associative leaps, and often these leaps are wildly unexpected.

Take, for example, the first eight lines of Salerno’s poem “Wild Lemons”:

We wake like bees and peel a lemon.
Then there is a glowing.
Do you want to eat it wedge by wedge?
Pull the pith off, keep the seeds.
Lift a blue crayon, ring
each other’s mouths in blue.
We all live under a rule—
a lemon law for what’s beyond repair:

Right away in the first line, there’s a small jump: “We wake like bees and peel a lemon.” We don’t associate bees with lemons, but a link exists perhaps in the yellow of the honey/lemon or the singularity of honey/lemon tastes. Another link exists between “wedge by wedge” and the segmented honeycombs made by bees. Those two associations work to store up a bit of kinetic energy leading to a larger, wilder leap. In the lines “Lift a blue crayon, ring / each other’s mouths in blue”  the reader is propelled into the speaker’s / lover’s bodies and emotions. We’re startled by the blue crayon, drawn into a closeup of their mouths. Up until this moment, we had no hint of a blue crayon popping up in this bee and lemon poem. Perhaps we could make a connection because crayons are made from wax, and honeybees produce wax. But that’s just in retrospect. This leap is highly unexpected. Its appearance is unsettling almost wild, but it sets the emotional tone. Blue connotes sadness, and the lovers are coloring each other’s mouths blue. They are together in (perhaps) despair. I can’t help but think of what blue mouths could mean: freezing, oxygen-deprived. The image feels deadly, but the action of ringing “each other’s mouths in blue” vibrates sexual energy. Salerno then makes another leap to this idea of “a lemon law for what’s beyond repair.” This seems to be the crux of the poem, a statement of what is at stake for the lovers and their world. Is there some sort of restitution when things are doomed from the start? From there the poem leaps from wallet pictures to Reader’s Digest to dreams of dead souls to a hunger developing. Finally, the poem ends focused on the lover’s body, and we’re left to wonder if the lemon law will be revoked or if it will be upheld.

Another example, Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus” , builds up the energy of leaps even in the title. Three seemingly unrelated images are presented. Akbar woos us with our own curiosity. How could we not read on? He continues the leaping as the poem weaves in and out of sensory moments, childhood memories, observations of the natural world, and the speaker’s perspective from space. It’s a dizzying mélange of moments propelling the poem more and more feverishly toward the ending lines referring to the speaker’s brother “I wish / he were here now / he could be here  this cave / is big enough for everyone / look at all the diamonds.” The wild leaps leading up to it make the ending sing as it circles back to the title. The energy generated gives this poem a distinctive sense of movement and also pulls it away from the ordinary and banal.

We could look at so many examples of this in poems that excite and intrigue us, but how can we infuse our own poetry with leaping energy? Robert Bly gives us a hint where it originates: “a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” (Leaping Poetry: an Idea with Poems and Translations). But how do we initiate our own mind-leaping? In his essay “Leaps of Faith,” Gerry LaFemina gives this advice, “when writing we have to return to a sense of play, to a sense of possibility, to a sense of exploration.” It seems we must strip away our rigid idea of how a poem acts and somehow ignite the hidden parts of ourselves.

One way to fire up the subconscious is by adding variety and surprise to your poetry practice. Carolyn Forché compiles notebooks full of lists, images, and notes. She calls these “gleanings from the world” that may ultimately become “repositories” housing parts of a future poem inside. Mary Ruefle has transformed over 92 18th century books into full volumes of erasure poetry. Even though she doesn’t have a writing ritual or practice before she sits down to write, these books are her artistic fuel. In an interview with Lauren Mallett she said:  “So I do have a daily ritual, that is my life as an artist, and it’s making these erasures” (Sycamore Review). Surely this practice infiltrates her consciousness and brews up surprising associations and ideas when she sits down to write. In my own poetic practice, I make myself write without stopping for at least 15 minutes. Sometimes it’s lists, sometimes stream of consciousness nonsense, sometimes I pick a rhythm and write phrases with rhyming words that fit that rhythm. In this case, it doesn’t matter if I produce anything with meaning. It’s all about the rhythm and sound of the words. I may never use any of this writing, but in these ways, I prime the pump of my subconscious.

A wilder approach comes from poet C.A. Conrad who developed a ritual-based practice called (soma)tic writing which is a fully immersive experience of the present, whereby the poet investigates and applies sustained concentration on any “thing” and the sensations of the body while taking detailed notes. The poems are brought to fruition through these very specific rituals. For example, one of Conrad’s exercises they have given to students is as follows: “The possibilities of the fridge and freezer are endless. You could hold an empty drinking glass against the side of it and study the sound of its motor. Use a magnifying glass to examine the exterior and interior in ways you had never done before. Use binoculars to sit across the room to look at it very carefully while far away. Close your eyes and smell the inside. With your eyes closed feel the contents, taste them. Take notes throughout the process of a daily exploration of the refrigerator.” More of their (soma)tic poetry exercises can be found here: http://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/somatic-exercises.pdf

Finally, revision presents ample opportunity to look for moments that lack energy. This is the very ground upon which we can propel the poem through a startling leap. In a Dodge Poetry Festival craft talk, Carolyn Forché advised poets to “Read every word, every line. Interrogate them.” She says that every line, stanza, and final ending should lift off into “implication not explanation.” Two revision techniques she uses are to cut apart the poem into strips of each line, then rearrange them and try to rewrite a “finished” poem from memory. Tyehimba Jess reads his poems backwards to see if he should rearrange the flow.

Whatever the approach, the craft of creating startling poetry through wild leaps is really a practice in experimentation. With a little imagination and willingness to reject stiff formulaic patterns, we can write poems that bring our readers (and ourselves) great joy. In the words of Robert Bly, “The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem.”

Kari-Ann EbertKari Ann Ebert is the Poetry & Interview editor for The Broadkill Review. Winner of the 2020 Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry and the 2018 Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, Kari’s work has appeared in journals such as The Night Heron Barks, Mojave River Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Main Street Rag, The Ekphrastic Review, and Gargoyle as well as several anthologies. Her honors include a residency at Virginia Creative Center for the arts (2021), Individual Artist Fellow in Literature: Poetry, Delaware Division of the Arts (2020), and fellowships from MidAtlantic Arts Foundation (2021), The Shipman Agency (2020), BOAAT Press (2020), and Brooklyn Poets (2019). Her limited-edition chapbook Alphabet of Mo(u)rning is forthcoming in 2022 from Lily Press. Kari lives in Dover, Delaware and is an active member of the arts community there.

 

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

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PHOTOTAXIS
by Olivia Tapiero
translated by Kit Schluter
Nightboat Books, 128 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be our downfall. Perhaps even more grating, they go through the trouble of explaining exactly how it will end, as if we can be certain of that from our pre-apocalyptic world. Tapiero looks at these conventions and casually walks past them. In Phototaxis, the end of the world makes very little sense. The streets are drowned in rotten meat, suicides spread like they’re contagious, and the only thing that might hold everyone together is a one-man piano performance. She embraces the one idea about the apocalypse we can reasonably be sure of: when it happens, we won’t have any idea how to deal with it.

Given that the novel revels in uncertainty, it’s unsurprising that its plot is difficult to pin down. There are three main characters, Théo, Narr, and Zev, who, for the most part, meander through their lives while trapped in the “levity that precedes catastrophe.” In some unspecific past, the trio was joined by Zev, who served as a kind of cultural and political leader in their community. After Zev disappears suddenly, the friends become estranged. Only when Théo, a concert pianist, announces a long-awaited return to the stage does Narr come out of the woodwork to reconnect with him. But Théo is too busy for friendship since he devotes most of his time to practice. After all, with the future looking so grim, wouldn’t it be nice to give the people something to look forward to?

Apocalypses are never something we wish for—they’re hands we’re dealt. Phototaxis shows us how we might play them.

The novel inches towards this magical moment when a deftly played concerto might lift the veil of suffering off the masses, but we never get there. Théo commits suicide just before his performance, and it hardly comes as a shock. Death forces itself into each character’s thoughts, whether it’s due to the deluge of rotten meat or constant reminders of the famous “Falling Man” photograph. From here on, the novel practically becomes a character study of Narr. She considers what she should do next, whether or not she should also commit suicide, whether or not she should futilely work for a relative. Locked onto her thoughts, we watch her become overwhelmed with the world she’s stuck in:

All I’d need is a tank of gas to work up the courage to immolate myself for no apparent reason. An incandescent, combustible acceleration.

The action will only be possible on the condition of its being seen. The horror I’ve caused in other people is all I’ll have to help me endure a pain that will only go away, according to my research, once the fire breaches my nervous system.

Just as the narrative gives the reader little to hold onto, the structure of Phototaxis is likewise strange and defamiliarizing. This is Tapiero’s first novel to be published in English (a native of Québec, she writes in French) but her third overall novel, and that confidence shows in the risks she takes here. Between the prose, the novel is cut with theatrical monologues and bouts of poetry. The constant play with form makes the term “novel” fit this book like a mismatched Tupperware lid. About half the time, this experimentation feels like a justified complement to its text. The monologues in particular offer the reader a chance to peek behind the curtains of each character, rounding them out slowly. The other half of the time, the whirlwind of seemingly random details produces a head-scratching effect. Why are everyday citizens flagellating themselves? Why are the streets haunted by the ghosts of bison?

Olivia Tapiero

The punky answer to these questions is that they don’t need to be answered. Tapiero’s novel is much more impressionistic than it is concrete. The what, when, why, and how are less important than the sense of disgust, fear, and nihilism that pervades this world on the brink of collapse. In his monograph On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald wrote that a city under siege, “decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened.” This novel shows people carrying on because there is nothing else to do. Phototaxis is filled with absurdities and theatrics, but the emotional response to tragedy that it captures rings true. The COVID-19 pandemic gave us our own apocalyptic scenario, and the sheer scale of its upheaval made it difficult to imagine a world after COVID. Now, nearly two years into this reality, the pandemic has become something we live alongside, and the world “after COVID” may never come. It becomes easier, then, to imagine how Narr might step over puddles of meat so apathetically and avoid looking the future in the eye. Apocalypses are never something we wish for—they’re hands we’re dealt. Phototaxis shows us how we might play them.

Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

 

 

 

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook

PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be ...
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PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook
PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ...
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THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

tall grass against a blue sky
THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two ...
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THE SPORT OF THE GODS, a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, reviewed by Dylan Cook

The Sport of the Gods book jacket
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy ...
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CLOTEL OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, a novel by William Wells Brown, written in 1853, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Clotel book jacket
CLOTEL, or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Penguin Classics, 320 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest-running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson ...
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MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook

MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli  translated by Elisabeth Jaquette New Directions Books, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Buy this book on Bookshop.Org Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as ...
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SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins ...
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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar
MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay New York Review Books, 336 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver “I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue ...
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SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

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SHE
Theadora Siranian
Seven Kitchen Press, 35 pages
reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz

Theadora’s Siranian’s chapbook, She, is violently intoxicating and sobering at the same time. In investigating loss and trauma, she chooses to present the messy over the meditative. Siranian invites her readers into proximity and distance simultaneously: showcasing the immediate and visceral in the body of her poems, but nesting them under titles that take a step back. She begins with pseudo-abstract poem titles such as “Origin Myth,” “Her,” and “Erytheia,” and when the poem nears its end, she twists our necks to a visceral image: a man’s forearm sliced open by a trapped rabbit, a family attempting to watch tv after their child burned alive, her mother’s skin peeling off her body.

The book is separated into three sections, each beginning with a poem titled, “Origin Myth.” It is important to note that this isn’t the only instance in which a poem title is repeated. There are six poems titled “Her,” not including the poem titled, “Killing HerEach origin myth differs in tone, they are tethered together in a collective project. When Siranian writes:

What was always fresh and unknown
was perhaps not the moment, but it’s a recollection. (origin myth pt.2)

Here Siranian teaches us how to read her chapbook: not as a narrative piece but a recollection of the same tragedy. In her repetition of titles, the reader is asked to look again and the nearly-unbearable and made proximate to Siranian’s position as a witness to her mother’s terminal illness. With that being said, the book is not redundant. Each poem brings us along the journey of the speaker processing this event while simultaneously processing the fact that her mother has caused her pain. What makes the poems so captivating is that Siranian unflinchingly deals with “taboo” emotions to feel towards a dying parent that one is tending to. Anger and resentment are forced into cohabitation with grief and love.

One of the greatest examples of this type of vulnerability is in Killing Her,” here the speaker wakes up early in the morning to examine a bump. Fearing she has breast cancer, she believes that she will die before her mother, who is already sick with cancer.  The poem gets rawer from there until its brutal climax:

I know only this:
There was always me, watching her scream into the void,
this act of witness the only thing I’ve ever truly hated,
this awful, necessary love. In the shower then next morning
I discover it’s only a scratch made during sleep. Wonder:
how can one call it devotion and ascribe meaning to
another’s existence. My heart: this bloody fucking stump,
my first: an open palm, begging.

This access into Siranian’s deepest, most volatile feelings acts as a sense of catharsis for the reader. Describing her witness of her mother’s dying as an “awful, necessary love,” is a moment of brutal, yet freeing honesty. Siranian’s voice is heartbreaking and sometimes humorous. Her recollection of this tragedy pulls out emotions one wouldn’t expect to find here. But her intermixing of blunt language with the lyrical makes her sincere. Her humor is best seen in a poem like, “My Unconscious Contemplates My Mother’s Disease, where she dreams of splitting the orderly head open in a cartoonish way while the doctors sing, “radiation, radiation, radiation.”

Theadora Siranian

Formally, the poems are comprised of either large, unyielding stanzas or a series of couplets and single lines. There are many moments in her poems where her line breaks at an action. At its best, it creates tension and defies our expectations of what we may believe the speaker would be doing. A great example is the first couplet in the quote above. Though we are given hints of bitterness in a few poems before this, it is here where we are truly shown that the speaker believes the mother should be guilty. It changes the ways we should read the prior poems. Still, one of my only critiques is that this kind of line break happens many times throughout the book. And when it works like the aforementioned example, it’s compelling. However, it’s washed out by the times it does not work.

The final section of this book offers a shift in her voice from the rest of the book. Aside from containing two poems that draw a lineage between the Siranian and the Ancient Greek goddesses, Hecate and Persephone, each poem is more steeped in the lyrical, none truly brings us to the tangible moments of her life to ground us. There is no gazing at her mom’s thin and crimson skin and no watching a frightened rabbit tear open a man’s forearm. Though not every poem possesses some sort of tangible event, each section had those poems that grounded the reader in some sort of space and time. An anchor to tether ourselves to as we descend into what Siranian may call her madness.

The penultimate poem is titled, “Anosogosia,” which is defined as the inability to interpret sensations and hence recognize things. Though all three sections return to the same event, this time, the anchor of physical stimulus is lost for us and her. She announces, “Now you can see the edges of it,” (Agnosogosia). One of the poem’s epigraphs states, “[Psychology] revolves around a paradox: an early sign of insanity is to recognize that you’ve been insane.” Theadora Siranian’s chapbook settles in those early moments. The final poems are not a celebration of being healed; instead, they are a somber submission of the state the reader is in. An acceptance of “Pain, so prevalent here, almost begins to lose its magnitude.” (Erythia). Yet, even after multiple rereads, the pain never loses its magnitude. And that is a testament to Siranian’s ability to make each poem feel like we are gazing at a fresh, open wound, that is, at the same time being tended to with great care.

Juniper Jordan Cruz is a writer and body artist from Hartford, Connecticut. She is a 2019 graduate from Kenyon College, where she studied creative writing. Her work has been published in Poets.org, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic. Her works have also been recognized by Gigantic Sequins and the Academy of American Poetry Prize at Kenyon College. Email to query Juniper about poetry book reviews.

 

 

INHOSPITABLE by Virginia Eggerton

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INHOSPITABLE
by Virginia Eggerton

One day in May you show me a video on your phone. A tsunami hit the Philippines and it’s all over Twitter. On your screen a wall of water plows through a city, lifting sedans like Matchbox cars. I watch things that should be permanent crumple like a child’s diorama.

In June you ask me, again, why I don’t want kids, and I try to remind you of this.

“What video?”

The one with the flood, I say. You shrug.

“I don’t remember that one.”

Late in July, a tropical storm hits. It knocks out our power and so we decide to play Scrabble by candlelight, to huddle together and do our best to ignore the rain that’s rattling the windows. We’ve decided to play themed Scrabble, my favorite of your inventions: we can only play words we’d find on a fancy restaurant menu: filet, reduction, scallop. In between turns, you run down your phone’s battery watching friends’ Instagram stories: people gallivanting across Italy, people singing karaoke in loud bars, people announcing pregnancies with bad body paint and puns. I don’t know why you stay with me when I won’t give you what you (and I) want most. You’re waiting for me to make a move, and I’m staring at a line of vowels that approximates the caterwaul of a cornered animal.

In August, the man on the television with cirrus clouds of grey hair says that countries all over the globe hit record highs for temperature. The map behind him is bright red, like Europe has a bad rash. When you ask me where we should settle down, all I can think of is somewhere that will be habitable in twenty years. In ten. In five.

We stay inside the next weekend because by then the heat has found us. Your phone chirps, warning us it’s dangerous to be out in the sun.

“No big loss,” you shrug. “We didn’t have any plans anyway.”

We settle on marathoning our favorite sci-fi movies with the air conditioning on high. The whole house hums and shudders, straining with the effort of keeping us cool, and I dread the spike in our electric bill. Halfway through Mad Max I turn to you, shivering, and ask, Can you imagine being a kid in a world like this? You nod, never looking away from the TV. I don’t even know if you heard me.

Virginia Eggerton has her MFA in fiction from George Mason University. When she’s not desperately reviving houseplants, she’s writing short fiction, some of which has been published by Wigleaf, The Citron Review, MoonPark Review, and Cease, Cows. You can find her on twitter @eggertonhere.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

STINGRAY by John Cullen

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STINGRAY
by John Cullen

My sister and I recall that old Stingray
while we sit a vigil in the critical care unit.
She melts into the vinyl cushions
and I lean sideways, balanced like a circus
acrobat one moment before falling.
My bike rolled sweet, balanced
on training wheels I begged my father to remove.
He wouldn’t lift a wrench without my mother’s consent.
Even Steve Reeves could not have popped a wheelie!
Then, one day he disengaged the pair,
and I rode to the park, where on a dare
from Nancy Haver I jackknifed
a set of concrete steps, snapped off my front
tooth and broke my right arm.
My sister dragged me home while I cried
over my broken bike. She laughs at the memory,
which reminds her, she says, of another story.

Just then our mother shakes
the bedside railing, angry at being jailed,
and calls again our father’s name.
“When will he be back?” She cries.
From my side of the bed, I lift her cup
and guide the polka dot straw to her lips
while my sister punches morphine
and holds her other hand to clamp the pain.
Later, she wakes, and once again
bangs the railing, this time
pulling her oxygen line free,
but the nurse arrives and tapes the tubing.
Exhausted, we slump, almost asleep. She turns
on her side, trying to find comfort
and our father, each of us seeking
balance on the body’s thin edge.

John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press.

OUR FATHERS by Sarah Freligh

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OUR FATHERS
by Sarah Freligh

Our fathers rise at five and whistle out the door carrying thermoses of black coffee and lunches our mothers have packed for them—bags of corn chips that fat up the blood and sandwiches made of meat and cheese. Our mothers tuck notes into the wrap of waxed paper promising what they’ll do to our fathers later in the dark.

◊

Weekends our fathers box-step us around the living room or somersault us from their shoulders into the deep end of a swimming pool. Sometimes our fathers will lock themselves away and listen to the Tigers on the radio or slide under cars until they’re called to wash up for dinner.

◊

Our fathers are men. What our mothers say when we ask why our fathers never cook or change diapers. Restless men, they say. Later they’ll say it with rolled eyes, but only in the evening after a couple of highballs have unlatched their tongues. Men, they will say. Our only inheritance.

◊

On summer nights our fathers gather with other fathers in back yards to drink and bitch about the asshole foreman, the infernal factory clatter. Enough beer and they brag about the muscle cars they’re building, the flex and thrum of their big engines.

◊

Some of our fathers die drunk in head-ons or face down on the factory floor, their rotted hearts knotted as pine trees. Some of our fathers carry their coffins and try not to cry.

◊

Our fathers circle the padlocked gate of the Ford plant carrying signs they shake at the scabs who have stolen their jobs. Our fathers walk in snow and rain, raise clenched fists at the cars that honk past them. They stay out late drinking beer, roll home long after we’re in bed.

◊

Our fathers are shut down, laid off. They drink beer from cans that they crush in their hands and leave on the coffee table for us to clean up. They watch game shows and talk shows where movie stars share photos of the dogs they buy online and fly first class from Tokyo. Our mothers tiptoe around our fathers, steer clear of their simmer and filth. They whisper over the slosh of the dishwasher about how hard it is for a man not to work.

◊

After the Ford plant closes, our fathers go back to school at night. Shaved raw and choked by neckties, they stare down the glare of computer screens. Other fathers disappear into the dark bars downtown, lit by the flicker of TV screens and the thunder of fights. Sometimes the door will open and burp out the smell of beer and sweat and bullshit.

◊

We grow up, go away, marry men who are not our fathers, men with soft hands and clean fingernails. Men who read stories to their daughters about cloth rabbits and moons and spiders that die alone.

◊

Out fathers get old and then older. Soon enough they’re headlights on a wall, there and gone. Shadows, then ghosts.

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

LEFTOVERS by Regan Puckett

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LEFTOVERS
by Regan Puckett

I almost had a husband once, but we never made it to the wedding. Now, he’s someone else’s husband, with a baby announcement on Facebook and a house two towns over. Our last date, we went to an Italian restaurant that served brown bread in gold baskets and didn’t list prices on the menu. A couple’s restaurant. You can always tell who the married ones are. The quiet ones who sit like crumpled napkins and don’t share dessert, eyeing everyone but their own lovers with unreserved curiosity. Visualizing each new body, craving them the way my almost-husband would’ve craved someone else if we’d ever married, even if I let him swallow me whole. I lost my appetite and packed the rest of my carbonara to go.

◊

My father has always been a sloppy cheater. He’d come home smelling like cherries and smile too obviously at his phone when his mistresses sent him a lure, cut out of dinner early when a flirty selfie hooked him. My favorite of his affairs was a waitress at a sandwich shop. She’d send him home with overflowing styrofoam boxes full of cold cuts, kettle chips, loaves of soft bread. Perhaps out of guilt, he’d give them to my sister and me. We’d feast on the leftovers, whispering our theories about what the woman must’ve looked like, if she knew he was married, questions we didn’t ask him, but wanted to. My mother didn’t ask questions either, because she had answers of her own to hide. She’s a quiet cheater. Her affairs leave no trace and bring no gifts. For all my life, their marriage has been a game of hide and seek.

◊

The last married man I slept with was my landlord. I came on to him after careful consideration of his features: brown hair that cradled a blooming bald spot at the top of his skull, a secret for only birds to see, or women he lowered beneath; arms like udon, spongy, thick, and stretchy; furry ankles peeking beneath pants that were too short, like he’d had a sudden growth spurt in his forties, or didn’t have any women to buy him properly fitting clothes. The kind of man who blames his dwindling sex life on his wife’s premenopause, who stares too long when I pass by in the lobby wearing the kind of skirt his wife hasn’t since college. Who gulps when I tilt my head and invite him upstairs. The kind I’d flatten myself against the laminate flooring of my apartment for, let him devour me.

◊

I’ve never slept with a man of my own. Even my almost-husband started as someone’s boyfriend, the kind that couldn’t resist me. Something about me screams I’ll be what your girlfriend isn’t right now. I spent years trying to muffle it before I became the girlfriend and realized some other woman would soon take my place. She didn’t have to be hotter than me, or funnier, or sweeter. She just had to be there, wherever I wasn’t, and make him want to be there too. In the months before our wedding, I searched for signs of cheating, clawing through the couch cushions for unfamiliar hair bands, tracing the rims of the dirty mugs in the sink with my finger in search of lipgloss residue. When I found no evidence, I packed my stuff and left my engagement ring on the nightstand, knowing it is better to give something up than to have it taken.

◊

The landlord’s wife was beautiful and kind and deserved a better man than him. Sometimes I’d linger in the lobby just to watch her arrive, ferrying him coffee and a blueberry donut from the shop down the road, kissing his cheek as a treat. Next to her, he was a wax figure at a museum closed for winter. Greying and sweaty and lifeless. Each time he shed his clothes in my living room, he’d carefully set his wedding band on the edge of my coffee table and slip it on as soon as we finished. I’m not going to leave her, he’d say, firm, as though I was trying to sway him. I don’t want you to, I said, and meant it. A year later, his wife left him instead, marrying her pilates instructor. He sold the apartment complex to a new landlord, someone unmarried and dull.

◊

I attend my sister’s wedding alone. At the reception, I sit between my parents, gossiping with my father about snooty relatives we wish hadn’t come. My mother texts her current affair beneath the table, looking up to smile at us every few minutes. I watch my sister’s husband’s every move, counting how many seconds his eyes linger on a server, how close his hand dips when he leans in to hug a bridesmaid. My sister rolls her eyes at my paranoia, but secretly, I think she’s grateful; he was someone else’s at first, too. When my father leaves early with a headache, Mom kisses his forehead gently, and they both nod. We scrape plates when the last dance ends, and as we do, she asks me why I hadn’t yet found someone of my own to commit to. Instead of responding, I focus on the sound of metal against ceramic. Watch the uneaten food fall into the trash, spoil.

Regan Puckett is a writer from the Ozarks. Her favorite leftovers are Indian takeout. Cold pizza is a close second. Her work has been recognized by a multitude of flash fiction contests and awards, and her most recent stories can be found in Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and the 2021 Best Microfiction anthology.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

MONOCULAR by Tingyu Liu

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MONOCULAR
by Tingyu Liu

Remembering, still: Sunday egg scrambles, green
…………..peppers and sharp cheddar adorning
…………..our fingers, coffee pot chuckling.
Tilt and: our slip of a room
…………..in Havana, stumbling on the party downstairs, sweet
…………..cake kiss, warm cola in colored cups.
Tilt: our orange kayak flush
…………..with the Atlantic, two Coronas propped
…………..between us, shared spots of cool.

Now: winter and
…………..walking into a corner bar
…………..in Little Italy, bare
…………..golden bulbs and stained counters and I turn 360,
lost in this palindrome,
…………..wanting not wanting.

A bird’s eye view:
…………..stranger, stranger, stranger.

But, had her beak hovered
…………..on you—I think
…………..even, I think that, I think even—

…………..we’d still be a winter
…………..each, a hemisphere apart.

Trees can’t be green everywhere.
…………..A bird changes direction
…………..…………..by beating her left and right wing at different speeds.

Tingyu Liu was born in Huaian, China, grew up in Miami, and currently works in Boston in biotech. She has been published in The Normal School, Four Way Review, Borderlands, Bodega, and elsewhere, as well as various scientific journals for her neuroscience research. She has degrees from Pomona College and MIT.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SEVEN STARTS TO THE WOMAN WHO WENT OVER THE FALLS IN A BARREL by Frankie McMillan

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SEVEN STARTS TO THE WOMAN WHO WENT OVER THE FALLS IN A BARREL
Annie Edson Taylor, 1901
by Frankie McMillan

1

Picture the cold dark inside of the barrel. Annie feeling her way over the padded mattress to a harness hanging from the side. The barrel sways in the water. Picture her fastening herself upright into the harness, pulling the leather strap tight across her chest. Picture Annie flailing about, she can’t find her lucky heart-shaped pillow. Now picture the barrel picking up speed, with the current, heading straight towards the falls.

2

It’s not as if falling was something new. Early on, I fell from my crib, I fell through haystacks, I fell from grace, I fell behind the church to kiss the bridesmaids, I fell between heaven and hell then into marriage and when my good husband was taken off to war I fell into despair. When cholera came and took the baby I fell so low I did not know I’d fallen. I fell short of loving men. I fell into debt. I fell about the house; birds beat against the windows, mold grew upon the cheese. Yet in the dark I dreamed that fame could come with falling.

3

Us boatmen watch the wind fall. Then we anchor by Goat Island so we can get Mrs. Taylor and the barrel ready without too much sway. When she begins undressing, we turn our backs. Let the oars rest in the locks, listen to the falls. We’d done talking. We’d told her no one has ever survived going over in a barrel, it was madness it was. She was killing herself and on her birthday.

We turn around. She stands there, a man’s coat flung over her shoulders. A big flowery hat on her head. Can’t help but stare. The long barrel begins bobbing alongside the boat. Later it’ll have white letters painted on it. Heroine of Niagara Falls. But we don’t know that now.

We spit on our thumbs, hold them up to see which way the wind’s coming.

4

If I hide my grey hair under a hat, if I lie about my age, I have my good reasons.

 5

My poor head is full of measurements. The length of the barrel staves, the circumference of the iron hoops, the position of the bunghole, the exact weight of the anvil at the bottom so the barrel floats upright during the ride. I look the barrel maker in the eye. I tell him I have every expectation of surviving.

Night comes. I talk to my lucky heart-shaped pillow, I talk about the barrel maker, the boatmen, the beef-faced newspaper men, I talk about their buffoonery, their banter, and blather, I talk about the Buffalo Exposition, the crowds that await me, how lucky the timing was for my stunt, and I go on talking while candlelight gives such a ruby glow to the pillow I  push my cheek into the plump mounds of silk and Maude, Maude, Maude I breathe though I don’t know any Maude, not even a bridesmaid Maude and later, to knock some sense into my God-fearing self, I draw my knees up to my chin, listen to the noise of the falls and brace, brace, brace, I cry.

6

A huge crowd had gathered on the Goat Island bank. Some had been there the previous day when the wind got too fierce to get the barrel out. Over the noise of the falls, we hear snatches of a voice shouting from the wharf. Mrs. Taylor, refined teacher of New York  …What are the bets …Will she take the plunge… We head around the inlet into view. The crowd erupts in cheers. Horns blast the air. We pause a bit as Mrs. Taylor stands in the boat, big hat on her head, her arms held out to the falls.

7

The noise from the falls grows louder. You are in a barrel heading for the plunge. You are still upright in the harness, arms crossed over your chest. Your lucky heart-shaped pillow, wedged under your chin. The barrel begins to spin. You are prepared, you tell yourself. You have planned for this. Below the boatmen are waiting. Below is your new life, fame and fortune. The noise is deafening. Happy birthday, you breathe into the red silk pillow. Happy birthday, you.

Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. Her latest book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling and other small fictions (Canterbury University Press), was listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

SILVER FALLS by Melody Wilson

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SILVER FALLS
by Melody Wilson

We have driven east this bright afternoon,
the two of us, young parents on a break from

entropy. I am drowning in something I can’t
define and the day reels out like un-spliced frames

of someone else’s life. We park the car and skirt past
other people’s happiness, past picnic tables and barbecues.

You take my hand and we climb to the falls. The noise
of life filters up: laughter, singing. I am relieved

when the roar of water engulfs the din. I taste the
mist on my anesthetized skin, inhale the green power

of the fall, but do not jump. Something slippery creeps
up by spine, maybe vertigo, maybe hope.

Melody Wilson writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Shore, and Timerline Review. Upcoming work will be in Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and SWWIM. She has recently been awarded the 2021 Kay Snow Poetry Award and is Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE OREGON TRAIL by Mike Itaya

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THE OREGON TRAIL
by Mike Itaya

1884

Today I am eleven years born! We McClelland Family, Pa, Ma, Sis, and me (plus Joseph, our Mormon frontier scout), strike out from Independence, Missouri. The Oregon Trail is bright before us, our ox-pulled Conestoga laden with sundries (except for the calico dress Ma wanted). Ma grumbles that she should have married the Banker from Boston, while Pa pretends not to hear, but it is an otherwise perfect day.

1888

At Fort Laramie, Ma runs off with a cowpoke. Sis, who is laid low beneath a blankie (she caught dysentery from a vegan hot dog in Columbus), says “I think we’ve been here before.” And Joseph, forever gloomy, mumbles, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Ma appears again (with her hair mussed), so Pa stalks off to hunt, and I no longer feel in charge of my life.

1902

Pa, who has something to prove to Ma―she was unimpressed with the 1,663 pounds of buffalo meat he shot back in 1888―chooses to ford Snakehole River against the protestations of Joseph, who says, “Last time we forded Snakehole River, every one of us drowned and we had to start over in Independence, Missouri.” And Ma says, “I’m never going back to that Missouri hellhole.” And Pa says, “Who’s driving this Conestoga? Me, or you assholes?” So we ford the Snakehole River, and every one of us dies.

1906

I have been eleven years old and on this godforsaken trail for twelve goddamn years―it ain’t natural to know the needs of a man in a boy’s body―and the last time we start over, our family scatters six ways to the wind. Here is how we lived and died: Pa drank himself to the grave; Ma married her cowpoke in Laramie; Sis lit out back east to join a vegan commune; Joseph opened a mink farm in Baker City. I am still in Independence, where we began all those years before. I am lonelier than you will ever know.

Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, New World Writing, and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, among others. He studies fiction at Pacific University and is a member of the arts collective, Mobile Canon.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

BIOLUMINESCENCE by Sara Mae

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BIOLUMINESCENCE
by Sara Mae

The pregnancy scare skulks through bay grasses.
It tips us over like cows & drains our peach liqueur.
Flashlights under the bleachers illuminating grope & teen
& tooth & wick, a stick rattling the jellyfish to yield shine.
I was 15, sneaking out to the 7-11 where I had perfected
straddling someone on a skateboard, coming home
a root system of bug bites. My first pregnancy test
all because a boy had fingered me. I think I knew
that I wasn’t pregnant, that I was just practicing,
reverent for the monsters we only face in daylight.
Years later, today & beast bright & the cashier asks
if I want a bag for that & I nod, afraid for others to see
what I carry. She says, I’ve got you, the lighthouse,
the moorless vessel, premonition in high waters, voice
for miles over a body of water like slumber party incantation.
& praise the mornings, revealing our glowing aloneness,
a single pink line balanced on the bones of the clawfoot tub.
Who was that creature I was just beginning to talk to?

Sara Mae is a white, queer poet and fashion witch raised between Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland. Her work can be found in Peach Mag, Pigeon Pages, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In her free time, she is learning burlesque in the studio or in her bedroom, and writing songs for her project The Noisy. If they could go to dinner with any famous person, they wouldn’t care who it was as long as there was Old Bay on the food.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SURVIVOR GUILT by Melody Wilson     

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SURVIVOR GUILT
by Melody Wilson

My sister slept in the laundry room, the door fastened by a
cinch strap and a nail. She painted the cinderblock walls

purple. Some nights tires would slide into the gravel drive and
it was my job to cover. I feigned sleep, confusion, while our parents

banged on the impenetrable door. She taught me to hitchhike,
shoplifted my first bra, considered me a coward.

Freeze, she said, if the cops come. Cry when you’re cornered by a man.
She was the artist, the ringleader, my wildest thing,

my alternate universe, a phone call and some chemistry away.
Always trying to be something you’re not, she said, when I

told her I was clean. I should have chugged malt liquor
with her that November day. We could have smoked grass

as she put me in my place,
all afternoon.

Melody Wilson writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Shore, and Timerline Review. Upcoming work will be in Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and SWWIM. She has recently been awarded the 2021 Kay Snow Poetry Award and is Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

A FEW NECESSARY HOUSEHOLD RULES FOR SYBIL by Gay Degani

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A FEW NECESSARY HOUSEHOLD RULES FOR SYBIL
by Gay Degani

Don’t talk.

Don’t say a word.

Keep your mouth shut.

Unless he talks first.

And if he talks first, listen carefully.

Listen for his tone of voice, look up to see if he is looking down at you.

Don’t smile if he isn’t smiling, and bow your head. Wait to hear what he has to say.

Depending on what he says, adjust your face accordingly before you catch his eye.

When you catch his eye, you have to instantly assess what’s on his mind and respond accordingly.

If you misread this man and answer him with something he doesn’t want to hear, look down immediately and apologize in a gentle tone.

If your softest, sweetest voice doesn’t work, don’t grovel because that’s what he wants to see: you, with that frightened look on your face and the quiver in your voice.

Stay calm and wait and pray the kids are fast asleep and you remembered to shut the curtains and put away the pots and pans, your favorite vase is tucked under the sink, and the heavy metal Pandora station is just loud enough to cover your screams.

Gay Degani has received honors and nominations for her work including Pushcart consideration, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her flash and short story work has appeared online, in print journals, and anthologies. She has published a collection of eight stories about mothers, Pomegranate, a full-length collection, Rattle of Want (Pure Slush Press, 2015) and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). She occasionally blogs at Words in Place.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

JUMPING OFF THE END OF THE WORLD by Kimm Brockett Stammen

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JUMPING OFF THE END OF THE WORLD
by Kimm Brockett Stammen

Five years ago my niece and I stood at The End of the World, an infamous diving cliff near Kualanui Point just outside Kona, Hawaii. Far below us the ravenous Pacific roiled and crashed against jutting tumbles of boulder. Charcoal clouds cast shadows over the sky. Salt wind whipped hair in our faces.

“Auntie, I want to jump!” Kaley yelled.

Of course she did.

When she was small, my sister’s youngest girl was the one whose pink tennies inched closest to balcony edges, who leaned farthest over the aardvark enclosure at the zoo, who skipped with the most outrageous obliviousness over the slick stones of a mountain stream. Throughout her childhood she was continually recovering from some accident or another; she could and had gone, without thought or warning, in any direction whatsoever. When our two families went on outings together, even though there were six wiggly kids, including my own, it was always the jacket loop at the back of Kaley’s neck of which I kept hold.

“What do you think?” she said.

She had managed to stay alive until the age of eighteen. To celebrate that, and as a companion for our daughter, who was a year younger, my husband and I had brought her along to The Big Island for a week of vacationing. I looked down at the black waves smashing into wicked white shards. Kaley was now a legal adult; I couldn’t really stop her. What was more to the point, she had undressed as she spoke and was now wearing only a bikini and a towel. There was no jacket loop I could grab.

“I think if I lose you off the end of the world your mom will kill me.”

To get here we’d driven until we were sure we were lost. Wound down a narrow road etched over swaths of hardened lava so lean it looked as if wind had blown itself here and solidified. Screeched to a stop in a puff of gravel parking lot, then climbed over razor-sharp boulders until there were no more to climb. Ahead of us now was absolutely nothing but the sea. I stood, at an end and a beginning, imagining I could see the curve of the earth.

To our right, on a flat rock jutting out over the plunge, a darkly muscled young man prepared to dive. He glanced back towards a group of others who stood shivering, waiting their turn. He gathered himself, focused, he leapt. Arms pointed skyward, then curved in a parabolic arc downwards, and with a silent sluice the ocean swallowed him. Waves crashed against rock, recoiled, and then smashed again into more incoming waves. After an age a dark head popped up. The young man whipped wet hair from his eyes, exultant, and began clambering back up.

“Go ask that guy for pointers,” I said.

The drop at The End of the World is, I learned later, only about 35 feet high, which looked plenty high enough at the time, but the distance is not actually what makes it risky. It is the unpredictable surf, which is often simply too high, and the fact that, after jumping, there is no easy way to climb out of the turbid sea and back up. The spot is unsanctioned and considered dangerous. Several people, mainly tourists, drown or are injured there every year.

I didn’t know any of that then. I knew that my niece had become an expert swimmer and lifeguarded at the city pool every summer. I knew that—unlike when she was small and leaping thoughtlessly onto horses and off moving subway cars—she had asked for, if not my approval, at least my advice. That was new.

“He says it’s a good time,” she said, coming back from consulting the dripping diver and his buddies. “They come here a lot. The waves aren’t too high now. He can dive again and then wait down there for me to go after. He says just jump out as far as I can.”

“Just jump, huh?”

But she wasn’t. She was thinking first. Considering the risks, taking reasonable precautions. And only then propelling herself off the cliff, into adulthood.

I smiled, and she grinned back and tossed me her towel.

Kimm Brockett Stammen’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in CARVE, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Prime Number, and many others. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies, and she won second place in Typehouse’s 2019 Fiction Contest. Before earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in 2019, Kimm was a concert saxophonist and spent twenty-five years performing, teaching, and touring across Canada and the US. Visit Kimm’s website here. Author photo by Emma Stammen.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

FLOUNDER by Tom Laichas

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FLOUNDER
by Tom Laichas

i

The fingertips know things. Their ridged
whorls …. confess… the … whole.. body’s
whereabouts.

The fingernails know things too, and knew
them even before the teeth.

ii

The left hand arrives like a visitant, held one
arm’s length from the body. The left is a myth
of repudiated power.

The left hand’s five fingers sense a world
different from the right’s.

The left hand is grafted from another gender,
another species, from that one who knapped
the cleverest edges from flint.

The left hand’s arts are other.

iii

We are not born to symmetry. The mouth
turns up one way or another.

One eye is wayward. The other is clouded.

The heart bleeds left. The liver slumps right.

Joints ache one at a time, sometimes in pain
on the right, sometimes on the left.

We dodder into age and our toes skew.
They’re like a child’s milk teeth, growing
higglety-pigglety.

iv

The flounder’s two moonish eyes have come
to rest on its body’s left side. The flounder’s
right fin has atrophied.

The flounder is the omen of our toppling
bodies.

Catch the flounder. Cut it open. Read that
crooked gut.

Never forget: hold the votive knife in your
left hand’s fist.

Tom Laichas’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, Aji, La Piccioletta Barca, Evening Street Review, Stand, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collection Empire of Eden (High Window Press, 2019) and the chapbook Sixty-Three Photographs at the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021).

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

TELL ME HOW TO BUILD AN AUDIENCE WHILE YOU MOVE YOUR ARMS AND LEGS LIKE SERPENTS & SCARVES IN THE DARK OF A CATTLE RANCH by Kelly Gray

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TELL ME HOW TO BUILD AN AUDIENCE WHILE YOU MOVE YOUR ARMS AND LEGS LIKE SERPENTS & SCARVES IN THE DARK OF A CATTLE RANCH

by Kelly Gray

When I was a kid, I wanted to be famous. I don’t know what I thought that meant other than I wanted to be seen, remembered. In thinking of being famous, I would often imagine my tombstone. I could see it with lichen blossoming across the slate. In my child mind this meant I was deserving of afterlife visitation because I had accomplished my way into worthiness and had a name carved in rock. I can be self-conscious if someone forgets my name. I can be self-conscious if someone remembers it, too. I know I am sensitive. I won’t ever be famous. Once, at a party, a girl I went to high school with called me by a name that wasn’t mine. Not a mean name, just not my name. She had a big family and was well liked and she was prettier than I was. I showed up that night looking like I cared too much and right in front of everyone she called me this other name. I realized how inconsequential I was no matter how perfectly I applied my makeup. But when I looked into her eyes, I knew it wasn’t a mistake. For a moment the bonfire light played the same shadow across our faces and I remembered she didn’t get into art school for dance. Despite telling all of us that she would. Despite all the grown-ups telling her that she would. My uncle had offered to film her application video for the program. He had expensive videography equipment that he said was essential. I was sitting in the community center loft looking down at the two of them. She was dancing hard, moving her whole body like she thought she was Isadora Duncan. His face was flushed behind the camera and he kept saying things that made my stomach queasy. I couldn’t use his words to pinpoint why he made me sick all the way down to my ankles crossed, I just knew I wanted to avoid the soft slur he passed off as affection. It felt like a burden the way my friends and I had to dodge his swollen lips when he wanted to kiss us hello and goodbye. She wasn’t my friend but she was dancing harder and harder. She had on a bodysuit and tights and the feet of a dancer, which are basically flexed hammers with calluses. She looked like she could have been carved of wood except that she was moving like water. I guess that’s the tension of dance. Isadora was driving home to get laid when her scarf got stuck in the spokes of the automobile and she was flung to the pavement and that’s how she died. That’s another tension, that split second between propelling forward and stopping so hard time abandons you as your body breaks. You can look at pictures of Isadora and because you know how her story ends, it makes every picture of her ache, especially the ones of her long soft neck. You just think Jesus, Isadora, you really didn’t know what was coming for you. I looked at this girl at this party knowing she never got into art school, even though I did, even though my acceptance letter had embarrassed me because I was embarrassed to write. Scarves around necks. When I told her my correct name, she laughed too big and I heard how fast she gulped in the cold party night air and I thought she would end up dancing for someone that night, just not for everyone. When she danced alone or for a boy, she felt slighted because no one had taught us yet that we were doing it for ourselves. It wasn’t about being seen but being understood and for that we needed swaths of spectators at our feet. Anyone would do as audience as we were just getting started but even then we knew we needed more. Later that night when I was watching her from the space past the bonfire between the barns and the meadow, I could see that she thought about being famous, too. I guess we had that in common, that and that we both knew my lichen-covered name.

Kelly Gray (she/her/hers) is a writer, playwright, and educator residing on occupied Coast Miwok land. Her writing appears in Passages North (forthcoming), Pithead Chapel, Hobart, Inflectionist Review, The Normal School, Barren Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Best of the Net and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. Her book of poetry, Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and her audio micro-chap My Fingers are Whales and other stories of Cetology (Moonchild Press, 2021) are available at writekgray.com.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

flats by Danny Cooper

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flats
by Danny Cooper

hot sand and grainy glass
yours is packed like clay
me i grab some seashells
and scrape to the bone

doe deer’s ribs on hard cement
honey fur still clean and pristine
same wet pink thread of mine
in coiled cervine braid

rigid skull, a cratered moon
flakes like chocolate croissant
under silver steak knife
gray matter oozes out

grimy fingers prod the grooves
looking for the right shape
a celtic knot or bunny-eared loops
force the image clear

mold and wet blur
my grassy eyes can’t glare
i send your vision in the mail
watch me bend in the grid

bug bites on my legs
lunulas swelling their bed
overgrown green marrow
or a neck i think you’ll bite

grind me into ash
amaranth slivers of meat
sieve through the desert
skin in the wind

Danny Cooper is a recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania where he majored in English and Earth Science. He’s originally from South Jersey and is now living in Brooklyn, New York. He spent the past summer working at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities developing climate storytelling workshops.

 

 

 

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PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL by E. A. Farro

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PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL
by E. A. Farro

Minnesota State Capitol May 2018 the last weekend of the legislative session

No one likes conflict, but with the smack of a fist I am a million particles of brilliant light.  However, tonight, I’m taking the punches. The letter is a direct threat, a blunt whack to the nose. I haven’t been home for dinner in days, and I can’t remember what it feels like to help my boys into their pajamas. I’m tired and mad and for a moment frozen in place. It’s Friday, well past the mid-May sunset. As the Governor’s advisor, my life has been reduced to a countdown to the end of the legislative session Sunday at midnight.

I jump up and look into the hallway of quarter-sawn oak doors. Realizing I’m barefoot, I grab heels from my bottom desk drawer.

The door cracks open: Tenzin’s long black hair and heart-shaped face. She pulls me in.

“When we look back, won’t it be obvious this was another Flint?” I say.

“We shouldn’t negotiate,” she winds her arms into the thin wool of her white shawl.

I smile, relieved that at least she and I won’t be battling each other.

Tenzin grew up as a Tibetan refugee in India, where she pulled water from a well that ran dry in summer. I don’t have to convince her that safe drinking water is a choice we make over and over.

When she immigrated in high school, I was finishing college. I admire her political instincts, and though she’s my younger sister’s age, she mentors me. In our jobs advising the Governor, our peers are our best mentors. It is too hard to trust the motives of anyone else.

“Their constituents don’t believe drinking fertilizer can kill babies?” I ask.

“It isn’t about that,” Tenzin shakes her head. I notice the big circles under her eyes. I wonder if I look as worn out as she does. Maybe worse.

“Studies show links to cancer in adults, too,” I say.

“They need a win,” she says, and hands me a bowl of candy bars. All I taste is sugar and salt. I picture the House and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairs dragging dead carcasses down their main streets.

The letter offers the Governor the choice to either sign today their bill that guts his signature buffer law protecting rivers and lakes or, if he doesn’t sign, they will kill his new rule to protect rural drinking water.

Our phones buzz and we look into our palms. The Governor. He wants a draft response.

“I’ll take the first shot,” I say and run out. Agriculture is Tenzin’s portfolio, but the miasma of Buffers, a regulation that doesn’t go far enough for Enviros and goes too far for Ag—that is mine.

I dash downstairs into a deserted hall of the Capitol to sit on a bench. A gargoyle on the base of a lamp gives me a I-just-bit-a-lemon face. To get close enough to knock the wind out of them, I write longhand.

“I am shocked and—” I cross out the words. I used that phrase only a month ago.

“I’m appalled that you are holding a hearing so that you can deny rural Minnesotans their rights to clean and safe water.” The words flow now from the ether of the building.

I run back up and edit as I type. Print. Read aloud. Edit. Repeat.

Tenzin sits at my computer adding her own words. We pass the keyboard back and forth, no laughter, no swears. We’re channeling something deeper. Together, our fists joined for ultimate impact.

◊

To pack from the kitchen: Cut fruit, cut veggies, cheddar cheese. Note: Slicing these gives a sense of control.

I’m tired. I hurt like I did a double shift of my high school waitressing job. I’d woken at five a.m. churning the hundreds of faces I passed in the rotunda yesterday, the tens of people I met with, the endless emails I pounded out responses to. Now, I take in the sounds of my young boys playing a game of sea creatures. I take in the smell of coffee and toast. I need to go back to the Capitol. It is Saturday morning, and I’ll likely be gone until Monday. I have to pack.

“I found the Lego!” my younger son runs into my room. He looks at me, his face falls. He’s been warned not to wake me. I motion with my hand and pull him close, breathe his warmth. As far as work-life balance goes, right now it’s all work. He rubs his cheek against mine like we’re bolts of silk.

My older son comes in, “Mama?” he says, but the question in his voice dies off. I sit on the edge of the bed. Both boys hold onto me. I lean into their wild curls sticking up in all directions. I’m tethered. There are things I pack without realizing it. Tenderness I will discover later and marvel at, but that kind of unpacking won’t happen until I leave the job.

“When did you get home?” my older boy asks.

“Late,” I shrug.

◊

To pack from your room: Sweatpants to go under suit dress, toothbrush, and toothpaste.

I transform before I get out of my car. Last minute item to pack: my smile. Really, most facial expressions. Along with these I pack my desire for a family bike ride, a video call with my niece, coffee with friends, curling up with a book.

I’m usually quick to smile and quick to cry. Good news or bad, it hits me like vinegar on baking soda. But at the Capitol I keep to a narrow range of emotions. The rest I put in the trunk of my car.

◊

To pack from the camping section of the basement: Sleeping pad and pillow.

An invisible umbilical cord reels me down the hill. The sun is out, and the white marble of the building almost hurts to look at. The circle of eagles around the capitol dome look ready to break free.

I start up the wide marble stairs to the main doors, realize it will be like an airport terminal in a snowstorm. The waiting lobbyists and activists will want updates. At the Capitol, information is currency. Its distribution forms and breaks bonds. I weigh the balance of engaging versus avoiding. Engaging could avoid misunderstandings, keep the lines of communication open.

The State Capitol has the fishbowl effect of high school: too many people smashed together. Like high school, clothing is a coded language that signals who you are. Fresh and in style, corporate or philanthropy. Outdated suits that smell of sweat, lobbyists or legislators. People in jeans, fleece vests, or leather jackets, advocates for everything from stopping mines to preventing helmet laws. Older people in coordinated outfits, tourists.

One weapon of the majority is to set the schedule and not share it. This morning both House and Senate members have a roll call. But after? Bills could come to the floor for votes. Or leadership could go into a room to slam together their giant spitball. This mega-bill, the omnibus-omnibus, will combine all program funding and cuts with all policy changes in all areas. Immigration policy with chronic wasting disease in deer with wastewater treatment. A shit show. If you know the schedule, you know when you can nap and eat. Exhaustion and hunger erode resolve, make what was not possible before, possible. Members of the minority party are forced into battle with their own bodies. At some point closing your eyes becomes more important than anything else.

I veer away from the main steps and go in the unadorned doors of the ground floor. Bare limestone walls, no vines or branches decorating them. My right eyelid thrashes, refusing to let me ignore my exhaustion.

Will we negotiate? If they can pull at the Governor’s heartstrings, if they are respectful, if they sit face-to-face with him—I don’t want to think about it. I’ve seen him fold and heard worse.

I don’t know I’m holding my breath until I enter my office. I notice sticky honey stains on the shoulder of my dress. I’m ambivalent about washing off these paw prints of my boys.

Hearing excited chatter I step into the hall. My colleagues are watching Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding.

“Serena Williams!”

“Elton John!”

“Oprah!”

We wonder at the whimsical hats and the Gothic buildings of Windsor Castle. “Scones and clotted cream outside the Communication offices!” a colleague shouts. A TV on the other side of the room shows House members assembling, but I turn away to watch the thousands of waving flags. A surge of energy comes from across the ocean. It’s a tailgating party.

◊

To pack from the secret code passed on by the Cabinet Members: Honey Badger Don’t Care.

Tenzin and I, we have the perspective of being outside the state agencies and seeing them from a bird’s eye view. The group of agency leaders seated at Tenzin’s table, they have the institutional knowledge.

“If we offer them—” an agency leader starts. He is lean, strong, and feral. His hair speckled gray and cheeks hollowed with the first tinge of old age. When he agrees with us, he is the best. If he doesn’t agree, he smiles and then he does what he wants. He and I’ve been in a game of cat and mouse all session.

“No,” Tenzin cuts him off.

“We need to offer something,” the leader from another agency says. He’s well-groomed, but not flashy. Always polite. Refined. He speaks in a quiet voice, only his urgency to jump in betrays his anxiety in this moment.

I stand up, pull on my suit jacket, say nothing, and maintain eye contact. To honey badger is a verb. All I need to do is be still. No scowls. More importantly, no smiles. If my poker-faced is pulled correctly taut, their threats and laughter will ding like hail on a metal bucket.

“They’re blackmailing us,” I finally say. The music from the Royal Wedding floats through the half-open door. For a moment, I entertain a fantasy of stealing the box of scones and jar of clotted cream. I’d hide in a closet and eat them one by one. I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be.

“They need a win!” an agency lawyer shouts. Her smile mismatched to her exasperation.

“This isn’t a game. It’s public health,” I snap. I remind myself: arguing back is weakness; we are a team regardless of our anger or belligerence.

Those motherfuckers, I think, their blackmail will break us apart.

“Anna, they have to have something to show. They can’t go home without another shot at the environment,” the refined one says in his calm voice.

The honey badger instinct is natural with opponents. To do it with my own inner circle sends prickles of heat across my body. If I am inert steel, he will become anxious. We are animals made to mirror each other. I let his words sour in the air. Politics is a war of endurance.

The honey badger, Mellivora capensis in Latin, also known as the ratel, a name used for a seventies South African armored military vehicle that combines mobility with firepower, has a literal thick skin. It can withstand bee stings, porcupine quills, machete blows, and animal bites. In a meme, after a honey badger is bitten by a poisonous snake, it passes out, wakes up, and goes back to eating. That is who I need to be.

The Governor’s cabinet hadn’t initially wanted him to unleash a new environmental regulation. They knew it would be a battle, and they would be on the front lines. They’ve traveled the state and fought for it, but I still don’t trust their impulses. With the administration ending, we are all on edge. All about to be on the job market.

Tenzin jumps in, “The Governor was crystal clear, we’re not negotiating. None of you are to negotiate. He sent his response, and now we wait.”

“Of course. We all get it.” The feral one starts up, “We aren’t negotiating. But we need to be ready. Really, this part of the law—”

“It’s not worth keeping if we have to lose something else,” the lawyer jumps in. She giggles in apology. As soon as she goes quiet, her face pinches back to its pained look.

“How is the Commissioner?” I ask. The Ag Commissioner’s daughter passed away only days ago. Earlier in the week, we’d stood in the back of a crowded room, crying for someone we’d never met. Someone who meant something to us because of how we feel about the Commissioner.

No one plasters a smile on their face now. “It’s hard,” the lawyer says.

◊

To pack from the children: Green ninja warrior figure so they will stop fighting over it.

Back in my office, the shouts, songs, and clatter of footsteps come through the walls of the Rotunda. The sound carries, but the marble and oak distort the words. I imagine this is what it would sound like to listen to someone else’s dream. I stand at my desk. I have no hunger, no need for sleep, no memory of bathing wiggly children, wrapping them in towels, or drying their curls. All that is distant. Here I’m part of a different and larger organism. I feel something in my dress pocket and pull out a plastic ninja. I place it on my computer to watch over me.

I’m alert to the ping ping of texts and emails dashing through air currents. The House debates a bill to dismantle government programs on my officemate’s TV. The Senate votes to overrule a Judge with legislation on my TV. My officemate’s phone rings, then stops, my phone rings. I check the number, look across the room to my officemate, and we pass a knowing look between us. A lemon-twisted smile. Neither of us answer.

Without warning I think of the blue sky outside, the way jokes with a four-year-old are silly, not cynical. I flip the telescope the other way. The room gets very small, words on the page ants. The State Capital and everything in it is tiny.

I pour a rainbow of Skittles into my hand, take a breath, and slowly force the telescope around so the photographs of my boys blur and the room snaps into focus.

I’m at the printer when the feral one walks by. “Oh, hey Anna.” His smiles verges on flirtatious. A habit from lobbying, and nothing to do with me.

“So, what have you been up to?” I ask.

“Well we were talking to the Chairman, and he likes our idea. Really, what we have to give up isn’t a big deal.”

“You were talking to the Chairman?”

“We were just talking. It’s good to keep the lines open.”

With the impact a wind rushes through my head.

◊

Things you will not realize you are packing until months later: Smiling in professional settings unless it is a strategic tool, public tears, the existence of children in professional conversation, any suggestion that it is not normal to work without knowing when you will go home.

I trail behind my boss, Eliza, into Tenzin’s office. She wears a polka dot sweater and holds a polka dot water bottle in one hand. The cuteness of dots is in stark contrast to the way she stands with her legs wide, hands on hips, eyebrows arched.

I look at Tenzin but she shows nothing.

“Did you get clear instructions from the Governor to not negotiate?” Eliza looks directly at each of the agency leaders.

“I think my staff has also said this to you today. So, tell me, why are you talking to Committee Chairs?”

“We weren’t negotiating. We were just talking. It’s good to keep open the lines—” The feral one talks fast.

“Well whatever you call it, let me be clear. If the Governor wants you to do something, he’ll tell you.” She walks out with an audible sigh of disgust.

“Anna?” The refined one bites at my name. “What the fuck are you trying? What the fuck is going on? This doesn’t fucking make any sense.” I match Tenzin’s blank face though I feel a surge in my body. Fists clench.

I think of the time this man and I drove to the western suburbs to spend an afternoon with a recently retired CEO of a Fortune 500. It was an icy winter and halfway up the steep mansion driveway the car stopped. As if we could will it with our bodies, we both groaned, but the car slid back into the street. We tried again, slid back. Finally, we laughed and gave in. In it together, we parked on the street with no other parked cars and no sidewalks, and we walked up to the door uncertain of what to expect.

Now, the tension comes off him like a crackling electric fence. Something in me shifts. I’ve always told myself that I’m just the Governor’s messenger. But this, this moment, it’s like when my brother jumped onto the seesaw and sent me flying into the air with the smack of the wood plank on my bottom. This man, he’s never been my friend. None of them have.

I take a breath and say to myself, “Honey badger don’t care.” Because my heart is thudding and my head is roaring inside, I walk out. I stand against the cold marble bathroom walls until it all settles. Until I can send it all up the hill to the trunk of my car where the rest of me is packed away.

Honey badger don’t care, because honey badger knows the prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

E. A. Farro is a climate scientist who spent several years working in politics. She is the founder of The Nature Library, a literary art installation in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her publications have appeared in Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among others. She is a recipient of a Nan Snow Emerging Writers Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series award. She teaches public policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and creative writing at the Loft Literary Center.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MODERNA by Nikolaj Volgushev

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MODERNA
by Nikolaj Volgushev

My shoulder hurt a lot after the second dose and the following morning I found a thorny vine had sprouted from beneath the Band-Aid. It clambered down my upper arm in an emerald coil. I drove back to the CVS in a hurry but the pharmacist insisted that this was less a medical issue and more a botanical one, so I stopped by the flower store across the street. “Water once daily and give it plenty of sun,” I was advised and indeed the vine flourished under this regimen. A few weeks later it blossomed into a hundred tiny flowers, each one a pale and haunted red just like the year had been.

Nikolaj Volgushev’s fiction has appeared in journals such as the Cafe Irreal, Cleaver Magazine, and Cease, Cows. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany where he writes, programs, and does other things along those lines. Before moving to Germany, Nikolaj lived in Denmark, and before that in New England, and before that in Germany. It is unclear where, if at all, Nikolaj lived before that.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

NIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED by Peter Amos

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

NIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED
by Peter Amos

Mom fell asleep around Labor Day that year and the slumber was deep. Dad bagged the recycling, drove to school on weekdays, spread his papers across the living room floor in the afternoons, and asked me often if I needed anything. I always told him no, but each Sunday when I’d finished my chores, I’d wait at the kitchen table for the chunk-chunk-putputput-whirrrrrr of the lawnmower in the backyard, then venture upstairs to see if Mom had stirred.

One Sunday evening in October, Dad was changing the mower blade out by the shed and I figured he’d be occupied until the stars came out. “Mom?” I called gently from the foyer. “Mom?” She didn’t answer and I quietly mounted the stairs. “Mom, are you awake?”

The bedroom door was open and I crossed the threshold. Twilight sounds stirred in the yard, beyond the drawn shade and the poplar boughs in muted silhouette. The oscillating fan in the corner whirred calmly as I neared the foot of her bed. She was reduced by then to a snoring, pillow-laden mound of patchwork quilts; sometimes on her stomach, other times curled up; sometimes a leg flung free of the bedding, other times an arm. But she was always there, and I stood at the foot of the bed, watching the rise and fall of her breath, uncertain if her presence was a comfort or a disappointment. The clock on the wall, the cicada drone, the fan’s hum all seemed to stretch like a tape cassette when you put a finger on the ribbon. Slower and slower, dragging and slurring, until my ears made it silence and I decided to wake her. I had to wake her. I even moved to touch her leg, but, for some reason, I stopped myself, hand outstretched and fingers spread.

I’m still not sure why.

The best I can think is that I was scared. I couldn’t name it at the time, but I know now that I was wary, especially in those first weeks, of spoiling her solitude, of pinching her while she dreamed, of who she might have become with her eyes closed and how much of it she’d remain if I woke her too early. I can’t remember exactly what was going through my head in that moment, but I hesitated. I held my hand over her leg for a split second, and that was more than I had.

“Shh. Come away from there, Laurie,” Dad said from the doorway. I jumped and drew my hand back, startled. “Your mother’s very tired,” he said, leaning with his elbow on the molding. “Come away from there.”

Mom resumed her snoring and the opportunity stole away with the waning daylight while I watched her and damned my indecision. If I had to guess, I think that was when the idea took root, deep in my belly, that I’d wanted her to keep sleeping, that I’d hesitated because I didn’t necessarily want her awake. She pulled the pillow more firmly over her head and Dad cleared his throat, but I just stared at her, willing away the sudden fear that she might never move again. For almost a minute, Dad and I stood there with the hallway light in a column over the floor and evening gathering in the corners. He sighed and I finally turned to leave, but the idea clung to me. You didn’t want her to wake up, did you? Go on, say it out loud.

I never did say it out loud. It was nonsense.

◊

Dinner that night was reheated chicken over buttered pasta. We ate late, Dad and I, at opposite ends of the table and, when we’d finished, I left the dishes to soak and Dad to wipe down the countertops and went upstairs to finish my homework. Mom snored steadily on the other side of the wall and I blocked it out with headphones full of music. Quadratic equations, I think it was, and I worked and worked while faces stared down from just beyond the dim lamplight; posters of movies, photographs of friends, and caricatures drawn by an amusement park artist on my twelfth birthday in which Mom’s head was too big and my face was cheerier than I remembered being. I worked and worked until, with a pop, the bulb in the desk lamp burned out.

For a moment, nothing moved but the moonlight on the wall. Shadowy branches tickled the pale glow and I removed the headphones and went downstairs. I padded across the dimly lit kitchen to the cabinet where Dad stashed the extra lightbulbs, but none remained, so I wrapped my hand in a dry dishrag and unscrewed the single bulb from the light over the sink. The kitchen went black and, at that very instant, a sudden cough cut the silence. I froze and it came again: close. I opened the back door and found Mom sitting on the porch rail, feet swinging against the balusters.

“What’s that?” she asked casually, balancing a cigarette between the fingers of her right hand. I’d always known she smoked—the house smelled like old pennies and air freshener—but I’d never seen her with a cigarette, never found a pack lying around, never seen her stop to buy them.

“What?” I could feel my face slacken and my eyes grow wide, but she didn’t seem to notice. I felt like an intruder in the night, but she was calm, in control of those parts of herself that were visible in the darkness.

“What’s that?” she said again, this time pointing her cigarette at the rag in my hand.

“Oh,” I said, staring at the red ember as I unwrapped the rag and held up the bulb so that she could see. “We’re out of lightbulbs. My desk lamp died. This is the one from—”

“Ah.” She nodded at the dark kitchen window. “I saw.”

Rustling leaves and the distant, irregular harping of a bullfrog hovered around the edge of the quiet and she raised the cigarette and took a drag. Smoke spilled from the corner of her mouth and I remember her staring back from the shadow, not into my eyes but rather just past them, over my ear or maybe at my forehead or the tip of my nose, like an actress taming her nerves. I started to speak, but she cut me off.

“It’s dark out tonight,” she said.

I stopped with my lips still formed around the word Why and she dropped her gaze. Her feet clicked against the balusters and I looked around.

“Sure,” I said. The sky was a truer black, with a faint silver ripple of cloud in the space where the moon hung earlier. I looked back to her and nodded. “Sure,” I said again. “It’s probably the clouds. It’s just the clouds, I think.”

She took another drag and stared just past me again. As she released the stream of smoke, her face turned slowly from mine until she was gazing over her shoulder, into the night.

“I like nights like this.”

“Like what?”

“Dark,” she said.

“Dark?”

“Dark.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette, then motioned with it toward the yard. “I feel like I can hear more of what’s out there. I feel like, when I close my eyes, I can see what I’m supposed to. Better than in the daylight.”

I didn’t know what she meant so I just nodded, and she was silent for a long time, staring off into the yard. The quiet chewed away at my ears and I wanted to return to the kitchen, close the door behind me, climb the stairs back to my room. “I like it too,” I said finally, just to hear something other than night. “It’s—it’s nice.”

She sighed and took another pull. “I used to come out to sleep in the yard, under the clouds, on nights like this. A long time ago. Before you were born, before this house, before your father.” The crickets billowed and we were both quiet and I remember being oddly certain that she wasn’t waiting for me to speak so much as for her words to decay, to break down into their component elements and join the earth under the poplar where the hostas grew. So I waited. “It’s been years now,” she said, after a long time. “It’s been many, many years.”

A light flicked on somewhere behind me while I puzzled over her face; old and smoke-carved; half-lit by the feeble moon, freed again from the clouds. How could she be so comfortable, sitting there talking like that? I was still watching her when she ground the cigarette cold on the rail, dropped it into the garden, and slid from her perch. The questions vanished and my mind raced for something to say, something to keep her there; anything, fact or fiction, question or statement, that she might find interesting. “Without a tent or a blanket or anything?” I blurted out. “You just—”

“I should get inside,” she said, as though I hadn’t even spoken. “It’s getting late. It’s really getting late.” She yawned, then glanced from the house, back to me. “See you in the morning.”

The door swung shut behind her and I stared after her and knew that she wouldn’t. She slowly disappeared into my reflection and I watched my pale face in the storm door, counting under my breath until I was sure she was far enough away. The crickets sang and I still held the bulb in the rag as I pushed the door open again and climbed back to my room.

◊

The next morning, I came out before Dad was up and found the cigarette butt in the silent garden. My breath came in clouds and I covered the butt with mulch, then went back to the kitchen for breakfast. That night, I finished my homework early and, once Dad was in bed, tip-toed quietly downstairs and out onto the empty porch. The wide moon winked behind sparse clouds and the night chirped and buzzed and rustled. I sat next to the burn mark Mom had left on the railing and clicked my heels against the balusters, but she never came and I gave up and went to bed.

For months, I repeated the ritual, each night after Dad fell asleep. At first, I obscured my purpose in case he woke. I carried a glass downstairs to fill with grapefruit juice from the fridge, left my backpack in the kitchen so I could pretend I’d come down for a book, or rummaged in the catchall drawer for batteries or rubber bands until I was satisfied he was still dreaming in the guest room overhead. After a week or two, I abandoned the pretense, safe in the knowledge that I’d be alone.

She slept through the falling leaves and rain and cooling weather and, over and over, I watched the moon drift from shining climax, all the way to nothing, and back again. From the porch, I listened to the crickets in the hedgerow, the frogs in the creek bed. With only the shape of the night to mark the hours, I waited and waited, but Mom never came back out.

◊

One night, while frost still slicked the grass, I decided to sleep in the yard. It was March, I think, and I had no way of knowing that, in a few weeks, I would wake to the smell of hot bacon and descend the stairs to find her standing over a popping skillet like she’d gotten a single, wonderful night’s sleep and nothing more; that she would wish me good morning and pass me a plate loaded with avocado, eggs, sugared berries, and sliced grapefruit; that I wouldn’t know what to do but pretend I hadn’t thought about waking her, every night for half a year.

I had no way of knowing, and I let the storm door close quietly behind, dropped the pillow and quilt on the porch, and sat for a moment on the rail, under the moon and clouds. The night whirred and whined and I wondered if Mom would’ve gotten out of bed that evening in October—and every morning since—if I’d just shaken her leg. Might she be stretched out right now, waiting for me on the empty lawn, if I’d just wrenched the blankets from her body and thrown open the curtain?

I hopped the railing and pulled the quilt and pillow after me. Mulch and petals, then grass and leaves cooled my feet, and the crickets breathed. I unfurled the quilt in the quiet and the crickets erupted in song as my head struck the pillow. Staring at the moon, I thought about marching back up the stairs and shaking her awake, but with that impulse came the idea that I might’ve been dwelling on the wrong failure, the wrong opportunity missed. Like a flash, it passed, and I fell asleep and dreamed of daylight in the windows, of roller coasters on my birthday, of popcorn on the couch, and her face under the blue flicker of a movie that I knew in the dream but couldn’t recall upon waking.

Peter Amos lives in Queens, New York with his wife and one-year-old son. He was raised in rural Virginia and studied jazz and classical guitar in college before moving to the city. His writing can be found at The Maryland Literary Review, Eclectica, and on his website, The Imagined Thing.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

Men O Pause by Emily Steinberg

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Men O Pause
by Emily Steinberg

For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout history, from the Salem Witch Trials to 19th-century institutionalization for hysteria, to menopause medicalization in the early 20th century. The story ends with her own positive experience of empowerment and self-actualization. In 2021, not only do we no longer need to be ‘fixed,’ but we are quite happy to be living outside the realm of women’s historical natural function.

—Caroline Harris, from M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Flint Books, UK

“Men O Pause” was previously published in M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Ed. Caroline Harris, Flint Books, UK 2020

Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative. Her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at The University of Pennsylvania where she received an MFA in painting and lives just outside Philadelphia.

To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected].

THOUSAND-WATT SMILE by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THOUSAND-WATT SMILE
by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Sara nearly dropped the peeling tin box of Grandpa Teddy’s things when she pulled out the yellowed, cracked black and white of Grandma Bea sitting on the wheel hub of their ‘38 Chevy, chubby ankles crossed.

Sara was only sure the picture was her grandmother because of the distinctive contour that had been carved around where her head and upper body should have been. She didn’t remember Bea, who’d died when Sara was barely two years old, so as a girl, whenever she’d visit Teddy, she’d ask to see the heart-shaped picture, the one with Bea wearing a beret over dark, wavy hair. The photograph was tucked into the corner of the mirror of the bureau Teddy shared with Bea for thirty years—the top two drawers hers, the bottom two his. Bea’s smiling face shone out from behind Teddy’s Old Spice aftershave, hair trimmer, and zippered shoe polish kit neatly arranged on the bureau top, a stack of accounting ledgers and a fountain pen off to one side. Bea’s gold locket engraved with the letters “BL” hung from the mirror next to the picture.

“That’s her thousand-watt smile,” Teddy would say, holding the heart in his hands. “When she walked into a room, everyone looked up, men and women. She was a looker, my Bea, and as sweet as can be,” he’d say, chuckling at his own joke.

Sara had been told that her grandmother died of a heart attack, and when she was growing up, Teddy would pat her hand and say, “Take care of that ticker! It’s the only one you got.”

Now that Teddy was gone, Sara was going through his things before the house went on the market. Inside the eave closet that smelled of old wood and mouse droppings, she stared at this lost companion piece, a heart-shaped hole where Bea’s smiling face should have been. A rusty paper clip held the Daily Sun article to the back of the photo. Sara’s eyes were drawn first to the image of a stockier, more serious Bea than the one frozen in her imagination. Then to the headline:

“Local Grandmother Dies in Briarview Asylum Incident”

Sara crumpled onto Teddy’s dusty steamer trunk with its brass latches and leather straps. She’d looked at the tidy, heart-shaped picture dozens of times, but seeing Bea’s disembodied hands and feet against the old car, reading those cryptic words, reality seemed to slip like a wave receding beneath her feet. Bea was institutionalized? What did they do to her? Had Sara’s mother known the truth? Sara tried to imagine the shame and anguish Teddy must have endured for the forty-five years after Bea left him all alone until his own death at just shy of a hundred; what it must have taken for her guileless grandfather to carry that carefully constructed lie all those years and to pass it on to his granddaughter as smoothly as slipping the heart-shaped picture of Bea into her hands.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes short fiction, long fiction, and poetry, mostly about life and relationships in the US and Lebanon. She studied in the Creative Writing MFA program at Emerson College, has a degree in Middle Eastern studies, and speaks Arabic fluently. Her stories and poems appear in Unbroken Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The New Verse News, and Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. She is currently seeking representation for her novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. Kathryn’s work may be found at www.kathrynsilverhajo.com.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

THANKSGIVING BIRD by Suman Mallick

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THANKSGIVING BIRD
by Suman Mallick

He drove to his mother’s house the morning of Thanksgiving and announced that he just wanted to catch up on sleep, because he wanted to avoid talking to Mom and really wanted to avoid his brother—who had flown in the night before and was the overachiever and overcomer—and did not care much one way or another about Jay, his stepfather—who was nice enough, if not a little too subservient—and because his mother had warned him that he better not use anything on this day, that if he could not even go this one day—Thanksgiving for God’s sake!­—without taking a hit then he should really admit he had a problem and get the help she’s been begging him to get, and by the way, she and Jay had decided that they were not going to open any wines this year and also keep the bar cabinet locked—for his sake, didn’t he understand?—because they loved him and supported him and were going to do whatever it took to help him. Now, back in his old room in the house in which he spent one-half of his childhood, he stretched out under the blanket on the old twin bed with his shoes still on, closed his eyes, and pulled the pillow over his face, and he was back in his other old room in the other house in which he spent the other half of his childhood, his father banging on the door, threatening to kick the shit out of him if he didn’t come out and wash up, now! The banging got louder: last warning, buddy, the bird is getting cold and dry, you come out right now or I’ll break down this goddamn door if I have to but you’re not going to insult me and Leila after this great meal she’s made; then his mind slipped further back, to when he was eight or nine, when Mom dropped him off for practice after school on a Friday and Dad was supposed to pick him up for the weekend, except he was running late because he was still at some happy hour and he had just met this wonderful woman, Leila, he said when he finally arrived an hour after he was supposed to, and he was the only one still at the practice fields, watching the ribbons of birds fluttering in the sky before settling on the electrical wires for the night, families together; then he was five, they had stopped at a farmhouse with a riot of animals and Dad was with a different woman then, this one shortly after Mom put his stuff out on the front yard and got the lock changed, and Dad promised him then that as soon as the divorce was final and he had gotten himself a new place, he could have animals of his own, and he wanted chickens and Dad said, sure, we’ll build our own coop and raise chickens and never have to buy eggs again. Of course, this was just one of many such untruths, and over time he had come to appreciate why some people wear sunglasses at night, he had learned to cope with the clarifications of things by learning how to lose clarity itself from time to time, while at other times meticulously memorizing the ledger of untruths he knew he was going to hurl at his father’s face someday; only the fucker then went off and died, and his own life seemed unfair and unresolved, drolly comedic and cryptically disorienting, like a Todd Haynes movie. Now his mother knocked on the door to tell him the turkey was almost done and they would be sitting down soon, that he should come down and if he did he would feel better, that after dinner they planned to play something, dominoes maybe; but all he wanted to do was sneak into the bathroom and open that bag he was determined not to open, then fly, so he pulled the blanket over his head, covering himself head to toe, even though he was sweating.

Suman Mallick’s debut novel The Black-Marketer’s Daughter was a finalist for the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize and published in October, 2020. His fiction may be found in The Bombay Review, The Gravity of the Thing, and Propeller Magazine. He is the Assistant Managing Editor of the literary magazine Under the Gum Tree and received his MFA from Portland State University, where he also taught English and Creative Writing. He may be found at sumanmallick.com, or on Instagram or Twitter @smallick71.

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE by Tricia Park

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE
by Tricia Park

The other evening, on my way home from a violin recital in Gangnam, I missed a step and fell in the Seoul subway station. I caught myself on my hand, twisting my wrist. I fell hard on my foot, sprained my ankle, and skinned my knee. And because I was walking downstairs instead of up, there was a moment of full-fledged, disorienting fear; a moment when the earth underneath me vanished.

In the aftermath, the only sound was the echo of footsteps slowing down on the platform. People stopped to stare but no one offered to help or asked if I was okay. On a torrentially rainy day a few weeks prior, I’d slipped on some water in a different subway station, near an escalator. The same reaction: people stared at me as if I were mad, as if I were a crazy person. As if I’d fallen on purpose. As if there were something wrong with me.

Later, when I mentioned it to my Korean friends, they laughed: “don’t worry, no one will remember you behind your mask.”

In this city of nearly ten million people, I’m invisible most days. On this day, I was finally visible but only because I was a spectacle. I scrambled up as quickly as I could, but I was dazed and embarrassed. And hurt.

◊

Five months ago, at the Incheon airport, the scene at the immigration line was sheer chaos. We’d been waiting for three hours by then, in a room that was loud and hot as we stood, exhausted, clutching folders thick with documents and test results. Several young men dressed head to toe in white hazmat suits and goggles shouted at us in Korean to download an app we needed to pass through immigration. The scene was dystopian and overwhelming, especially after the peaceful cocoon of the plane. There’d only been twenty-nine passengers on the 747 aircraft from New York, and four of us carried violin cases.

I was too bewildered and tired to cry, though I did cry, copiously, at JFK. I felt guilty and ashamed for leaving on this adventure in the middle of a global pandemic that had claimed the lives of more than 3.5 million people.

Suddenly, a middle-aged woman collapsed onto the floor. She carried a heavy backpack, and a jacket was tied around her waist. No one did anything, said anything. We all just stared. Airport officials stared at her, too, crawling on the floor, not moving to help. I caught a glimpse of her eyes. They were unfocused and glazed over. She didn’t appear to have anyone with her, or at least, no one that claimed to know her. We watched her crawl around the floor for a good five minutes before, finally, someone thought to get her a chair. Someone thought to bring her a glass of water.

◊

Being Korean American in Korea is challenging, just like being Korean American in America is challenging. The details are different, but the feeling is the same. It’s the feeling of being conspicuously alone in a uniquely foreign yet familiar country. Because to be fair, while I don’t feel like I belong here, I also don’t feel like I belong in America, either. And in the absence of belonging, I’m a constant observer, an outsider looking in, longing for inclusion and not ever being quite “right.” In America, I sound right, but I look wrong. In Korea, I look right, but I sound wrong.

Being part of the diaspora means always floating, forever looking for a place to land, a place to call home. Perhaps that place doesn’t exist. Maybe homecoming isn’t really possible. Maybe it’d be easier in a completely foreign country, where I didn’t speak the language or know anything about the culture and, most importantly, where there’d be little to no expectations of me to assimilate. I would still feel the pain of loneliness, but minus this unique pressure of feeling like I ought to belong.

◊

Talking about loneliness makes people uncomfortable. I imagine it like a cloud of body odor; when you meet someone who stinks, you avoid them, but you also never tell them that they stink. Similarly, when you meet someone who reeks of loneliness, you walk away, disturbed by the invisible need that oozes off them. The chronically lonely feel stigmatized: the concept of the “loner” or the “loser” is deeply embedded in our culture. If you’re lonely, people assume something is wrong with you.

Loneliness is cloaked in shame, even as research shows that the rise of urbanization, single-person households, and the disintegration of meaningful community all contribute to a growing social construct that makes loneliness and alienation not the exception but the rule. In general, single people living in urban centers are lonelier than people who live communally in lower-density or rural areas.

Loneliness is pervasive, reaching across various demographics. In 2019, 61% of Americans admitted they were lonely and 22% said they were often or always lonely. 44% of the elderly are lonely and while 50% of my generation, Gen X-ers, confessed to chronic loneliness, that percentage rises with each generation, with millennials seeming to be the loneliest of all.

Another article mentions seven ways to alleviate loneliness. I do most of them on a regular basis: I make small talk with strangers, I reach out to friends, I avoid social media, I get to know my neighbors, I invite people over, I engage in creative activity (hello, I’m writing this damned essay, aren’t I?). And while these steps alleviate the loneliness temporarily, in the long run, they aggravate my alienation.

Because what I want, what I miss, is daily connection that I don’t have to initiate, with someone I can fully trust. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt that kind of closeness. But it seems this is more than I can have and too much to ask, even with the most well-meaning and loving of my family and friends. Daily connection, while fine for other, luckier, and possibly more worthy folks, seems not possible for me.

(Oh, I forgot to mention, the one thing on that list of seven things that I can’t seem to get a hold of: human touch.)

So, I’ve concluded that I’m just too much. I want too much. I’m too greedy, I guess.

◊

Social scientists define loneliness as a liminal space, the distance between the connection one desires and what one is actually experiencing. In other words, loneliness is the gap between what you want and what you have. It’s the distance between the ideal closeness one longs for and the closeness (or lack thereof) that one experiences. It’s the pain of that distance that makes every interaction feel like rejection.

In the struggle to find a “cure” this is the one constant: loneliness is subjective and hard to quantify. It’s a sliding scale of intimacy that varies from person to person, situation to situation, making loneliness a very difficult thing to address and heal, let alone define unilaterally. Because one can be completely alone and be perfectly content while another may be surrounded by people and feel loneliness like a stab to the heart.

Indeed, the effects of loneliness are physical. Lighting up the same parts of the brain that react to physical pain, loneliness registers as a supremely palpable wound. Chronic loneliness is linked to increases in many health risks, including heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances. Loneliness is also an indicator of premature death, since lacking social connection is a bigger risk factor for early mortality than obesity and is the equivalent of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

But suddenly, the Covid pandemic made it okay to be lonely. Loneliness was normalized and for once, I felt like I belonged. Ironically, my internal sense of loneliness dissipated as the global loneliness spread. I wasn’t alone and no one expected me to be okay.

Because really, it’s about belonging. Loneliness can be especially potent for immigrants, the elderly, LGBTQIA+, minority groups, and all people living on the margins. We all have a deep need to belong; this is not a luxury, but in fact, an essential human need. Shame regulates how we behave and the tolerances we construct in our efforts to stay within the tribe.

Belonging is not a trivial matter but of biological importance to wellness and our overall ability to contribute in meaningful ways. When we experience perpetual otherness or outsiderness and then, adding salt to the wound, when these experiences of alienation are ignored or negated, we learn to sublimate our needs and, therefore, our internal compass becomes confused, and I believe this leads to intense self-loathing and internalized hatred, when there isn’t any outward way to resolve this loss.

In other words, in the absence of visibility and acknowledgement, our need to belong is so intense and essential that we will shapeshift to fit the tribe, even if this means we vanish and reject ourselves.

◊

So, what can we do? While all research points towards proactivity—putting yourself out there, making yourself vulnerable to increase the chances of connection—I’m weary of this advice and highly skeptical. Because, at the risk of sounding, truly, like a whiny baby, I have to say that I think I am, more often than not, the one to reach out. But the more I reach out, the more people pull away, increasing the gap between what I want and what I have and, therefore, I feel even lonelier. Over time, I’ve learned to keep my hurt parts hidden from the world, lest someone use this weakness to hurt me later. Better my hurt be in stasis than risk some mortal wound that I will never recover from.

◊

Why am I saying all of this, now, for all to see? After all, people are baffled: But don’t you have a lot of friends? From your Insta, it looks like you’re having a great time! What do you have to complain about? I’m so surprised, you seem to be doing so great. And all of this adds to my shame. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how it appears, it matters how one feels. One is lonely if one feels lonely, no matter what things look like.

Of course, I don’t want the Covid crisis to continue. I’m deeply relieved that, with vaccines, there’s a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. But I do wonder, selfishly, what this will mean for loneliness, moving forward. Will people sweep it under the rug, this moment of global loneliness and trauma, and whisper: “let us never speak of this again”? Like a regrettable one-night stand? From texts and social media posts about how ecstatic everyone is to be reunited with their friends and loved ones, not to mention the promise of a second coming of the “roaring 20’s” and all the hedonism that may provide, it looks like loneliness is a parenthetical nightmare from which most people will soon escape.

Earlier in the summer, I’d texted my friends: “is it pure bacchanalia there in the US?” I was facetious but also green with envy. “Are you all raw dogging it, maskless and 2019 style?” No, they’d said, not yet, though I wondered if they were just trying to make me feel better. After all, one of them mentioned going out to dinner with her partner only to be flanked on both sides by unlikely revelers; two 50-year-olds necking like horny teenagers at a drive-thru and a pair of flamboyantly drunk middle-aged men, swaying atop their barstools.

◊

An hour-long subway ride later, I arrived at my home station. Hobbling up the stairs, I noticed a huddle of people in the corner. They surrounded a young drunk woman who was vomiting profusely; not an uncommon sight at ten p.m. on any given evening in Seoul. Two friends held her hair back, two others stood guard, drunk and unsteady but, nevertheless, protecting her from the eyes of prying Seoulites. And in that moment, I was envious and bitterly resentful; she had friends to protect her in the midst of her own, self-induced drunkenness.

While I’d done nothing more than miss a step.

The next day my wrist and ankle ballooned, and after a visit to the hospital, I called to cancel a gig. The organizer said nothing but, “how am I supposed to find another violinist on 48 hours’ notice?”

To be fair, I don’t want to vilify the Korean people for what I’ve witnessed in these isolated instances of what, I suppose, can be called a lack of good samaritanism. And because I know that people will be tempted to draw binary conclusions, (after all, we feel better when things fit neatly into a box), I want to be clear and say that my loneliness is a constant in America, too. There are shitty people everywhere: New York, Tokyo, Paris, Sao Paolo. Indifference exists all over the world, different lenses on the same telescope.

And years ago in Manhattan, when I was in a coffee shop with a man that I loved very much, who I thought loved me, too, I saw a woman sobbing. She was young and beautiful and so sad, it hurt my heart. I wanted to hug her, but I hesitated and when I turned around to find her again, she was already gone.

My Korean language teacher explains to me that people were likely respecting my boundaries, trying not to embarrass me with attention. She agrees that this is a cultural difference and empathizes with my culture shock. In truth, there’s also something humiliating about a stranger helping you up; it’s just a different kind of theatre. What I long for is not the kindness of strangers. And, in general, Koreans are wary of strangers, so any unknown person, whether they’re falling downstairs or asking for directions, is regarded with suspicion.

And there’s a part of me that understands this: as a country that, since its inception, has been battered by complicated and ongoing unresolved trauma from generations of invasion, occupation, and dictatorship, a continued US military post-war presence nearly eighty years after the Korean War ended and the constant threat of nuclear and civil war from the North, it makes sense that Koreans are always on high alert. That we always feel threatened.

But then there’s also the halmoni’s, the grandmothers who pick fallen flowers out of my hair and give me candy, praising my Korean when I offer to take their picture for them. “Why are you here all alone?” they ask, and I’m grateful for the attention even as my eyes fill with tears.

This is also part of what it means to be Korean, this jung, this feeling of unspoken connection and profound affection that all Koreans experience and feel for one another. But even this specifically Korean concept is fading, migrating from cities and into the countryside with the tidal wave of neoliberalism and cutthroat competition that makes Seoul a global powerhouse while suffocating its citizens. Nevertheless, jung is what connects Korean people across generations and continents, creating a net of solidarity that transcends time and place. I think this is what happens when there’s the fear of disconnection, when you live in a land that’s always under threat of disintegration. When there’s always the possibility that everything you know will disappear. You find ways to connect, and you cling to them. You learn to make home out of nothing, to house your loneliness.

Tricia Park Author PhotoTricia Park is a concert violinist, writer, and educator. She is a music graduate of The Juilliard School and received her MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tricia is a  Fulbright Grant Awardee in Creative Writing and currently resides in Seoul, Korea, where she’s working on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and has received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia has served on faculty at The Juilliard School, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa. She has taught creative writing for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa and is on faculty for Cleaver Magazine, where she teaches writing workshops and is a creative nonfiction editor. She is  the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Tricia also maintains a private studio of violin/viola students and writing clients.  Learn more about Tricia and listen to her podcast at: www.isitrecessyet.com. Listen to Tricia play violin at: https://www.youtube.com/c/triciapark.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

TWO STUDENTS WALK INTO A BAR by Sara Davis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

TWO STUDENTS WALK INTO A BAR
by Sara Davis

I can’t believe you haven’t heard this story. I feel like we tell it all the time! Maybe not in class, no, but grad school isn’t all lectures and bad coffee. We do have fun sometimes. Anyway, Lee and I used to come here all the time in our first year, because on Thursdays they had pierogies for fifty cents apiece and we’d have money left over for nasty beer, except I think this happened on her birthday so maybe it was nasty rum instead. I’m sorry, I don’t know if I should try to tell this story without Lee, I’m not going to remember it right. Well, anyway, we were sitting up at the bar over there having some kind of intense conversation. I think it was when we were planning on co-teaching a class about rape culture—I told you, we know how to have fun. So we were just talking with our heads together when out of nowhere this guy thumps down right next to her and says “Hey, you, have either of you read any Russian literature?” I know! Not even an excuse me! He wasn’t from our program. I remember he had really long hair down to his waist, but otherwise he just looked like a guy. Anyway, yes, of course we’ve read Russian literature—not all of it, obviously—but in any case that’s not his business. So we turn away and try to find the thread of our own conversation, but next thing he started in talking about the Frankfurt School. I truly don’t know. Maybe he’d just read a book about it, or maybe he really loves critical theory and that’s always how he chats up strangers. What was funny, though, is that Lee and I had just turned in our papers for that first-year course on critical theory. We could talk about Althusser all day. Even though he did strangle his wife. Maybe that’s the class we should be co-teaching: all the philosophy guys who killed their wives. So this guy started talking to us about ideology, and I was trying to catch Lee’s eye like, is this okay? Are you okay? I mean we were still getting to know each other then, I didn’t know if she would enjoy the attention, but it was her birthday and she was still talking about interpellation, so I tried to be chill. When you get to critical theory next term, you’ll see how Althusser describes interpellation: if a policeman says “Hey you.” to a person walking down the street, that person—regardless of how they feel about it—is transformed into a subject of the state. Maybe when a guy says “Hey, have you read any Russian literature?” to women at a bar, they are incorporated into his own ideology, like they’re not people in their own right but mirrors reflecting back his own self-image. Or so he thought, but Lee was verbally batting him around like a cat with a mouse and he was getting more and more agitated. So finally the guy asked Lee what she wanted to do, like when she grew up I guess, what she wanted to do for a job. And Lee said she wanted to teach, because that’s the dream, right? That’s what we all come in wanting to do. And the guy, who was pretty worked up by this time, slammed his hand on the bar and roared “That’s bullshit!” And Lee said, “I’m sorry?” Because that’s what women do, isn’t it? A man walks into a bar and says ouch; a woman walks into a bar and says I’m sorry. And I leaned across her and said, “Did you just call my friend’s vocation bullshit?” And he said, “Yes, your job is to tell people what to think, and that is bullshit.” I know! So funny. Like sure, yes, we are tools of capitalist indoctrination, and that’s why we are celebrating Lee’s birthday by pooling our quarters for all the pierogies we can eat! And, okay, Althusser does not believe in the liberating potential of education, but if education is oppression then what do you call bothering women with philosophy at a bar? Not that we are giving much weight to Althusser’s opinion of how to talk to women; I did say he killed his wife. Find me a philosopher who was a good man, though. Like everything else, we take the parts that are useful to us and leave the rest. Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m so bad at telling this story. I don’t remember telling the guy to leave, but Lee says that’s what I did. Like: that’s not what teaching is, and also that’s not what ideology is, goodbye. But the man must have said “That’s bullshit!” a few more times, because for the rest of the year Lee and I would yell “THAT’S BULLSHIT!” and collapse into laughter. But he did leave and the bartender gave us each a plastic token for the entertainment. I still keep it in my wallet. It was supposed to be good for a lifetime discount but the new manager won’t accept it. You missed a chance there to say “That’s bullshit!” But the pierogies are still fifty cents on Thursday, and they come with a whole basket of condiments, so you can really make a meal out of them. You’re welcome. That’s what I’m trying to tell you: in this program, we have to look out for one another.

Sara Davis (@LiterarySara) is a recovering academic and marketing writer who lives in Philadelphia with two elderly cats. Her PhD in American literature is from Temple University. She has previously published flash in Cleaver Magazine, Toho Journal, and CRAFT literary magazine, and she currently blogs about books and climate anxiety at literarysara.net.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

 

AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN) by J.M. Parker

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by
AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN)
by J.M. Parker

I kept a hand-written note, on creased but still clean typing paper, wedged into the pages of a book

Dear Sweetheart―

You’ve got the tv program and today’s newspaper―
some white wine in the fridge,
and the end of a bottle of red one on the table,
and another one and pastis in the kitchen―
I don’t know what time I’ll be back
but until that moment
I kiss you―
Frédéric
Also, if the phone rings
let the answering machine answer―see you―

I’d kept a photo of the two of us grinning while cutting up a dead rabbit to put in a stew, after which, as I remembered, we’d sat on Fred’s couch, and I told him I had a boyfriend in America. “I love him,” I’d said, “But he isn’t in love with me.”

“Without love, it’s like a day without sun,” Fred said―and this had sounded romantic, or even sympathetic.

After pulling his note out of the pages of that book and then a phone call, I stood in the atrium of Fred’s office, looking up at his desk. Fred sat at a monitor, smiling at something on his screen until he glanced down to see me. “Sorry I’m a little late,” he said downstairs, meaning he was sorry I’d been standing in the lobby in view of his colleagues instead of waiting by the door, as he’d suggested.

It was gray outside, boats along the canal St. Martin battened down for winter, tarps sagging with water. In French, as in English, people are expected to ask each other how they are on meeting, then to reply pleasantly before inquiring all over again more methodically. If they’re interested. We were. Sitting down in a café, Fred talked about Abriel. “Abriel is complicated,” Fred said. “I’m complicated myself. It isn’t easy for complicated people. Every week is like a Russian mountain.” Fred made up-and-down movements with his hand, I supposed to illustrate the shapes of mountains in Russia.

Two years earlier, Abriel’s name had come in the same moment Fred taught me the French word for “magpie,” one morning, sitting on the couch. As Fred explained that Abriel had spent the night in the courtyard downstairs trying to call, a magpie had landed on a chimney outside, catching my attention. “What is it, that bird?” I’d asked, and Fred told me. I’d never seen a magpie. “They’re fascinated by bright things. To steal them,” Fred said, explaining the magpie’s personality. I’d thought of the two of us there on the couch with the sun and coffee, of Abriel waiting in the courtyard, and of a long-tailed bird who steals bright things that catch the light. “Look,” Fred had said, “With Abriel, things have been getting more serious lately.” Then Fred had put me on a train and we’d said goodbye.

Will you have wine? Fred asked.
Will you?
Up to you, he said.
I don’t mind.
A carafe, then.

We sat discussing our story, discussing how we felt about it, the way you’d talk about a film or a book and what you thought of it. Fred didn’t mind if you looked at his face, but if you looked into his eyes, he shifted them slightly so they changed their way of looking to something more blank. If you persisted, he looked away. “You look a bit sad,” he said.

“You always say that,” I said. Then there was a silence between us, after this reference to an “always” that covered only a few distant days. I waited to see what he would do with that silence.

“I wonder,” Fred said, “What you think about us.”

“Us?” I asked. His face puckered in disgust at my pretending not to understand.

“It was two years ago, wasn’t it?” he said.

“What was?”

“When we met. Was it October?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was in October.”

“I wonder what you think about that now?” The strangest thing happened now, something that hadn’t ever happened to me before and hasn’t since: without moving in the least, my line of vision suddenly fell perfectly level with the tabletop, so I saw everything on it, our plates and glasses with their sharp outlines, from their undersides. It was difficult to draw away from this vision, but his face above it all waited for an answer.

My answer, completely unplanned, was completely familiar. “I came back to Paris because of the sentiment I had here with you. Now I’m here, and never see you, and miss you.”

He sighed. “I didn’t know your thoughts then. I wasn’t sure of you.”

“You didn’t expect me to stay, so you took me to the station and put me on a train.”

“Yes, it was like that,” he agreed. “But you are here now?”

“I’m here.”

“You can call my office when you want to have lunch.” Full of wine and caffeine and energy, I walked across the canal, wanting to think. Fred and I had always been honest with each other. It felt good to say the truth.

I put my hands behind my head on a park bench on the other side of the city, watching a tiny black poodle walk alone across the wide dusty paths and, for the first time, saw I wanted something that wouldn’t be simple to get and that if gotten, wouldn’t be because of anything I did myself to make it happen. A low fog made everything close grainy, everything faraway closer. An hour with him made it easy to remember how he made his coffee, the cup he drank it from, the noise he made falling asleep. Above the Champ de Mars, Eiffel’s tower stood, clipped from a painting, pasted over the chestnut branches, hanging there. The drug-like sense of everything being an option intensified: an option for happiness, an option for sadness, one of a thousand spaces somewhere in between. I’d fallen in love with Fred two Octobers ago. This fascinated me.

That autumn two years before, backpacking across Europe, I’d prepared for France. Handing my passport to the receptionist at the youth hostel, I’d been the only person in line who spoke French. “You are American?” she’d asked. “Yet you speak French?”

“Yes,” I’d said, “I’ve also recently purchased a métro pass―want to watch me smoke a cigarette?” I put Paris’s neighborhoods on different sections of my tongue, moving them around slowly―sweet, salty, sour, bitter. I’d drunk watery lattés and eaten greasy croissants at the youth hostel, found Shakespeare & Company full of American divorcées with loud purring voices, and Gertrude Stein’s house in a street where gusts of wind brushed the granite facades, pouring along ankle-level, like a beach. From Montmartre, the sun withered behind the city, the clack of roller blades passing up through the trees. A Paris sunset.

I took the subway to the Marais, feeling foolish and happy. In a bar, two men stood together laughing, one stout with glasses and a pasty complexion, the other shorter, blond, a silk blazer hanging off his shoulders, shaking as he laughed. After a beer I said hello. The men exchanged a startled expression which read―a foreigner! The blond, curious, stepped closer, clearing his throat, turning his face up into the light so you could see it. It was a nice face, drawn around the mouth with a smoker’s wanness. Turning to his companion in a furious whisper that seemed to generally establish shock between them more than to seek a response, he turned back to me. “Tu parles Anglais?”

“Oui. Pourquoi? Mon français, c’est mauvais?”

He turned to his companion again before answering. “Ah, non! Your French―it is vary, vary good!” He’d taken some care in selecting his clothes, you could see, his hair neatly brushed: a professional. They both smiled. He turned back to his companion, who was making a blowing noise with his mouth, then to me.

“My name is Frédéric,” he said. “This is Jean-Pascal.”

“Max,” I said, putting out my hand. Frédéric and Jean-Pascal had had a little chuckle together. Max: the monosyllabic glamour of the American first name―yes, a real American. Frédéric shook with laughter.

“We are going to another bar,” he shouted over the music. “You might like it. A bar for―les artistes―yes? You will come?”

At the bar for artists, glaring, middle-aged men and goateed boys with glasses danced slowly, foot to foot. A mustached Turk in a baseball cap looked on, shuffling his feet now and then. Jean-Pascal and I danced. Frédéric got drinks. I stood holding mine to my lips, watching Frédéric pound the floor with his shoes, scrunching his shoulders under his blazer. After a while I sat down and he sat beside me.

“Sleepy?” he said. Green eyes. Eyebrows flecked with blond.

“Oui, un petit peu.” I said, mimicking his pronunciation.

“Can I take you home?” he asked. We looked out to where Jean-Pascal was dancing by himself.

“He’s having fun,” I said.

“Yes,” Frédéric said, “Jean-Pascal likes to dance.”

Outside, the street quiet and dark. He hailed a cab. “My things―” I said, “Mes affaires―sont à l’ostello―à la . . . la maison de jeunesse, the house of youth, non?”

“Oui, oui. Où est ton auberge, your things?”

“Bastille,” I told the driver, kissing Fred, then remembering that we’d already kissed in the bar. Frédéric waited in the cab as I came downstairs with my bags, smoking, a hand hanging out the window. “I never waited for a boy in a cab before,” he said, bemused. “I didn’t know how long to wait―one cigarette, or two . . .  three.”

“Was I long?”

He nuzzled me. His hair was the softest thing I’d ever felt. “Richard-Lenoir, s’il vous plaît,” he said.

The next morning, children played in his courtyard. Women called across balconies as they hung out their wash. The sun through the skylight came across Fred. I went to test his shower, smelling like a tourist―paté, beer, dust, and smoke. Fred climbed down from the loft, taking me by my shoulders to dance on the tiles in his bare feet. “Je t’aime,” I’d said. Then Fred was prostrate on the couch with a cigarette, ashing into the blue ashtray.

“Je t’aime,” Fred explained, isn’t a phrase one unleashes on a new-found lover. “Je t’aime” is très serieux.

 

The second time I called for lunch, it rained again. The canal boats’ plastic tarps dripped and sagged. He wore the same brown turtleneck, face red from the cold.

We ordered plats de jour, getting warm. “Abriel is jealous now,” Fred said. “I always tell after I’ve seen you, but never before we meet.” He paused. “When I describe you, I must make you out to be rather the ideal boy.” I smiled, hating myself―easy flattery. “With us, it’s always like a Russian mountain. Last month we broke―I think the same in English―‘broke up’?”

“Yes.”

“Two weeks not seeing each other.” He paused, lit a cigarette, offering me one. “I was happy with you,” he said, going off in a slew of French he must have been saying for its own sake, seeing I didn’t understand. Rain spattered in waves across the window behind him, a pure gray, as gray as the city looks from an airplane window in winter. Normally his eyes were so sharp that I was surprised every clerk in every store, every waiter, every person on the street, didn’t realize how amazingly alive he was and jump on him, all at once. Looking at me carefully now, his eyes went dead, with nothing in them.

“Listen.” I’d had too much coffee now. That we only had an hour together―and how much time apart after that―terrified me. “If it gives you trouble, I don’t want to see you anymore. But if there’s anything in your heart that gives you any indication that you feel something similar to what I do, please think about it.” Unsure what I was saying had been true half an hour before, it seemed true now. Fred picked up his glass and set it down again. “The last time you asked what I thought of us, you didn’t say what you thought,” I said.

“I would ask you not to ask me that. Let’s eat our lunch. You’ve hardly given me a moment to think.” The waitress came for our plates, and that was the end of it.

 

At the third lunch he explained that he had a tank of fish that were slowly dying. He and Abriel lay in bed watching them swim. Every few days another dead body had to be scooped from the surface of the water. It was Abriel’s birthday recently. I said it was my friend’s birthday, too. What day, he asked. Ah, well, that was also Abriel’s birthday. But he couldn’t understand why his fish were dying.

“Did you get your tank new or used?”

“Used.”

“Did you clean it before you put the fish in?”

“No. Perhaps it is that.”

“I have sympathy for the inhabitants of your aquarium. Because you killed some of me, too.” Learning a language, drunk on the options of things you can say, you sometimes say anything that comes to your head.

“Oh? I killed some of you?” Fred smiled, turning away, the smile still on his lips, enjoying it to himself for a moment.

“What did you do after I left?” I asked.

“There’s no sense talking about that.”

“I’ll say what I did,” I said. “I sat in that train for five hours, feeling sick. Once the train stopped, I walked all over whole cities feeling sick. Then I took another train, a lot more trains, and buses, and a plane, feeling sick some more in all of them. I bought a bottle of Pastis, drinking it every night to make myself sick again. After a while, I didn’t miss you anymore. I just made myself sick.”

“I didn’t mean to make you sick,” Fred said. We were quiet for a while.

“Abriel is in Province,” he said finally. “I don’t know if he’ll come home tonight. I hope not. He always wants to go out, and I love to go to bed early. I like to get up Sunday morning―at ten, say, or eleven. Abriel isn’t easy to live with. But I’m very difficult, too.”

“I never thought so.”

“Oh, yes. I’m always afraid of losing someone. If they say anything―for example, Abriel and I were at a restaurant, and I asked, ‘Are you happy?’ and he said, ‘Happy about what?’ and I”―Fred pulled a sad face, glancing back over his shoulder like a scolded dog. “I can be sad for no reason. Just sad. I’m very difficult to live with, I’m afraid.”

“You were never afraid to lose me.”

“No. Perhaps because I knew I would. There’s some irony for your story,” Fred said, putting his glass down. “Does your friend travel very much, too?”

“Tonight he leaves for Strasbourg.” Our eyes met without either of our faces saying anything.

I thought he might call; I thought I might call him; but I didn’t see him again for two years.

He was “content de me revoir”―de m’avoir retrouvé, he corrected himself, explaining that content, a strong word, which most people used to mean “satisfied,” meant “fulfilled.” Our original fifteen days together―he’d counted them―had been a dream. At three in the morning on the Boulevard Sebastopol, our hands in each other’s pants trying to hail a taxi, Fred said he was falling in love with me. I wasn’t falling in love. I was already in love. He was my destiny, Fred said. I’d been pretty close to thinking it was my destiny to be with someone else, I told him. That wasn’t my destiny, he said. I should get myself used to that idea, Fred said. He’d been alone, mostly alone since Abriel left, and wasn’t ready for me yet. But if I went back to America for three months, he’d be ready when I came back.

Over the months I was gone, I received notes like this:

I’m a little drunk
I’m not going to say anything now because you will think I say that because
I’m drunk
I have a lot of things to tell you
you will see if you ask me…………..
you have to ask yourself questions concerning abriel, ask me, I will answer
and you will see that you REALLY are in my heart and in my LIFE
I love you and it’s not a joke
as Carmen would say, “et si je t’aime prends garde à toi”
fred

I had no particular questions to ask. He wrote back: “Why don’t you write? Did you meet someone else?” I sort of had.

We agreed to meet in New York. This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Imagine it like this:

A guy gets off a plane with that dopey, expectant look people getting off planes have, waiting for a face to come up out of the crowd at them, too shy to look at every head in the terminal, the whole fluorescent-lit crowd, the features of each a pang of disappointment. Imagine the guy walks past the crowd, his gullible ears perked up, waiting for his name to be called, like a half-hopeless dog, steeled for the surprise. At the back of the terminal, he pretends to be just a guy in the crowd, watching the heads coming off the plane from behind. Imagine him walking toward the exit, that same goofy half-grin on his face making people want to smile back at him, though they can’t because he’s avoiding all eye contact like hell.

Imagine that half-grin gone by the time he stands outside, his jacket collar (someone else’s) tugged up to his ears (he thinks leather jackets look good on him), smoking cigarettes and scanning the inside of each passing bus. He’d never fly into Kennedy in a million years if it wasn’t that the guy he’s supposed to meet found a cheap flight from Frankfurt and was afraid he wouldn’t find the hotel. But with construction at the airport, finding an address in Manhattan is easier than finding the right terminal at Kennedy, it turns out, because the hotel’s night staff tells him his friend the European checked in two hours ago and is waiting for him at the bar next door. There he is, not looking him in the eye.

He’s since sworn never to travel with the French again. For all their railing against American-style homogeneity, they want everything the same wherever they go. Any fluctuation―in coffee, food, prices, smoking regulations―becomes an item to deconstruct.

They drink beer sitting up in bed, sleep coming fast, that nice effortless kind you learn to appreciate, curtains left open to a view of barren Midtown wasteland. Imagine that last night in a cab or a bar, when Fred said he wasn’t in love anymore. “But touch me,” Fred said in the cab, “Like that,” the cab speeding up the avenue, past a statue he’ll see years later, then again more years later, and again after that, first with pangs, then with simple familiarity.

Imagine, when things start going wrong, he calls someone else who lives in New York. Imagine, one night when things start to go wrong, he meets this someone else in front of a theater, goes back to his apartment, explaining nothing of what is going on in a hotel room twenty blocks south and saying nothing to Fred when he comes back to it. Imagine the next morning he gets in a taxi and leaves Fred eating breakfast on a Broadway terrace.

Imagine a long line of gauzy curtains against a bay window the size of a ship’s prow, someone else asks, “Why did it end between us?” And imagine he can’t really think of a reason.

J. M. Parker’s fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, Segue, Foglifter, Gertrude, and SAND, among other journals, and been reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2015. His novel Seattle or, In the Meantime was recently published by Beautiful Dreamer Press. He lives in Salzburg, Austria, where he teaches creative writing and American studies.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LAB RAT VENGEANCE
by Sarah Schiff

In the neuroscience lab where I worked as an undergraduate intern, we were studying what makes mice experience the sensation of fullness. You can just imagine who’d want access to those findings—the know-how to regulate people’s appetites. The primary investigator, Dr. Hillbrawn, suspected a specific subnucleus of being the moderating agent of satiety, so my job was to locate and then lesion it (which is fancy scientific jargon for destroy, and, just so you know, I am pretty fancy). Once I could do the surgeries without supervision, I started coming in late at night so I could work without the distractions of other people’s gossip and smells. One grad student played Nirvana on a loop, so the whole white room consistently felt filled with dismay.

On a late September night, I had an adolescent mouse head-fixed into the stereotax, a kind of miniature operating table. The mouse, big for his age, lay belly down. While his red eyes looked blindly up at me, shiny with ointment to keep them from drying out, I shaved the white fur at the top of his head, made a slice, and pulled the pink skin apart into a vaginal-looking wound. After I drilled a hole through his skull, just as I was about to lower the electrode, I saw the mouse’s whiskers twitch. Or I thought I did. From ethics training, I knew we were supposed to give a booster of anesthesia if we sensed the mouse waking so I pinched his tail, and his whole body flinched, a clear indicator that the dope wasn’t enough.

But what if it had to be? If I continued the surgery how would this mouse react, skull-cracked, brain-exposed, but alert to the world? What if I just—

At the electrode’s pulse, his sticky eyes filled with dampened terror, followed by screeches that rent the antiseptic night. When I pulled the wire free, his body and limbs thrashed across the metal surface, his head locked in place.

I watched with a kind of thoughtful horror. This writhing mouse has touched death, must sense himself on the brink, caught up in the suck toward oblivion.

What a rush it must be. I could almost feel it myself.

After sealing the mouse’s scalp with vet glue, I set up an arena and video camera and grabbed one of the female mice we kept for breeding.

Even among mice, males are considered the norm, the females too inconstant, so to ensure we always had female mice in estrus, all hot and bothered and ready to rut, we had to keep them separated. Just like us, female mice get on the same cycles with their fellow cage-dwellers. Whenever a new litter of pups was born, we’d wait the twenty-one days until they were weaned, pick out the surplus of females, dump them into a tank, and fill it with carbon dioxide, slowly at first to put them to sleep, then full blast. Their very own girls-only gas chamber.

At least they were spared the life of a lab rat.

During my training, I’d watched some videos of mouse sexual behavior, which happened to be even more formulaic than human. The male would dally before sniffing the female’s backside, and that sniffing would go on for quite a while, in all kinds of positions, before mounting, then withdrawing to lick his junk, then mounting again, and soon done after several quick-time humps and rapturous squeaks. The technical term for mouse foreplay is, get this, anogenital exploration.

Feel free to use that next time you’re looking to spice up your dirty-talk.

This mouse, whom I would dub Ladies Mouse, was having none of it. He must have been woozy from the drugs, but once I put him in the cage with the female, he leaped at her like Superman, or rather, Mighty Mouse, snort. It was as if it was his last lay, his final chance to pass on all the genetic material that defined Ladies Mouse and Ladies Mouse alone. He did it for the same reason shipwrecked men carve their last words into the bark of trees. Because even the most is never enough.

The going theory was that if you stress out animals, they’ll do all they can to return to homeostasis. The last thing they’d be up for, supposedly, was the agitation of a courtship ritual. But Ladies Mouse defied the theory. He didn’t fight or flee but found a way to do both, to force himself on another and allow his DNA to escape.

I put on a pot of coffee, already planning my next experiment. First I had to confirm that I’d lesioned the part of Ladies Mouse’s brain I’d been aiming for. Stereotactic surgery only gives you a suggestion of which part of the brain actually gets hit by the electrode. Mouse brains are small, after all.

Which meant I’d have to kill Ladies Mouse. Wishing I hadn’t named him, I put him in a cage and marked it: “Surgerized mice. Save for Deb.” It would take a couple weeks for the neurons to die off, if I’d destroyed them at all. Maybe I’d just stimulated them. Or maybe the burned neurons had nothing to do with it. Was the stress of waking during surgery enough to explain Ladies Mouse’s desperate and freakish last lay?

Over the following weeks, I prepared for Ladies Mouse’s final surgery, and when the time came, I laid him down in a tray of crushed ice inside the fume hood. This time I was sure to inject him with a healthy dose of anesthetic—actually it wasn’t so healthy, har har.

This final surgery, a transcardial perfusion, would be belly up.

A draft from somewhere rustled some hairs that had escaped from my bun as I made a horizontal incision just beneath his rib cage and pushed apart the skin with my thumb and forefinger. The twitching bright redness of his organs made me stop. I could just glue him up now, virtually no damage done. But I kept going, remembering the steps of the surgery in my head like a telephone number. With the scalpel, I traced the shape of a shield along the edges of his ribcage and, as if peeling away a sticker, lifted the skin, followed by the sternum. There his heart pumped wildly, I couldn’t believe with what tempo and vigor. His system was drugged and irreparably damaged, but his heart beat pertinaciously on. Holding my breath, I pinched the pulsing heart between the forceps, pierced a hole in the right atrium to let the blood ooze out, and, with a trembling hand, inserted a needle into the left ventricle. I didn’t exhale until the saline, then paraformaldehyde began their journey through his organs. Ladies Mouse’s whole body moved as if in a seizure, then just his fore paws, as if waving goodbye. In less than twenty minutes, his body had gone stiff, all the organs paled to a chalky white.

Rather unremarkable scissors are sufficient for cutting off mice’s heads, but I thought Ladies Mouse deserved the guillotine that we reserved for tough-necked rats, the royal treatment.

With his head in my blood-dappled gloves, I scissored away his skull as if it were a cuticle on a nail, and the clattering sound of me dropping the scissors back on the tray made me jump, an alarm bell shrilling its warning in my head. I looked around, expecting to find someone who’d been watching me this whole time.

But, no, I was alone. What was the next step again? All I could think about was the bloody, decapitated body and a missing witness. Had I pickled Ladies Mouse for nothing? Then I saw the mini-spatula and knew what to do.

After severing the cranial nerves, I popped Ladies Mouse’s brain out like a pea from its pod, and my heart clamored against my chest as I caught it before it fell to the floor. Concentrate, I told myself as I slid the brain into a vial of paraformaldehyde for post-fixing. Then I tossed Ladies Mouse’s corpse, wrapped in a surgical glove, into the freezer with the other carcasses, bound eventually for the incinerator, and tried not to feel sad for him. All the next day, I stayed in the lab, drinking coffee and keeping my eye on the solution, making sure no one disturbed it. That night, after everyone had finally left, I cut the solidified brain into sections, stained them, and searched for the missing neurons under a microscope.

It was a miss. I’d put Ladies Mouse through all that, only to hit a neighboring subnucleus.

But maybe it was a happy miss. Discoveries can’t be anticipated, after all. Maybe, I thrilled to think, males also have an ever-elusive g-spot, and maybe it’s in the brain.

The next morning, I was woken by Jason, the grad student responsible for supervising me. I didn’t like sharing what I’d been up to, but I’d need his help, and Jason was always railing against the Man, by which he meant academia, its rigidity, its unpredictable hesitancies, and its general stinginess. He usually spoke in a low, emphatic tone that sounded on the verge of angry, but once I’d explained my plan, his voice seemed to jump an octave. “Sweet, nice work, Deb. Way to stick it!”

He set me up so I could spend the next few months breeding my own litter of mouse pups, which mostly just consisted of him signing forms I put in front of his face. After I’d put aside half the weaned mice as the control group, I dove into my experiments. How could I get them to take that desperate lunge toward whatever life remained rather than retreat to nurse their wounds? The findings, I knew, could have huge implications. Forget controlling appetite. Whoever knew the formula for invigorating the sex drive could rule the world. Or at least buy it—and was there a difference?

◊

Over the holidays, the city was aglow with Christmas spirit, but I was in the lab, trying to figure out what I was missing in my research. As the new year approached and as more and more mice failed to live up to their predecessor, I started to suspect that my initial results had been an anomaly, related more to Ladies Mouse’s distinctive qualities than anything endemic to mice, let alone humankind.

There was no payday in sight.

Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Jason delivered a presentation to the whole lab, complete with PowerPoint slides. The topic: my research.

I was sitting at the back of the conference room, in denial. This couldn’t be my hypothesis, my experiments and data, my potentially field-changing findings he was claiming as his own. I considered briefly, and absurdly, that he’d been working on a parallel experiment this whole time. But no, I even recognized my mice in the videos, the ones whose neurons I’d been destroying and whose sex acts I’d been filming. The more he spoke, his voice assuming that self-righteous tone of being the only person in the room to have thought of something previously unthought, the more insistently my heart pumped, and the feeling of it nearly bursting through my chest made me remember the blood draining out of Ladies Mouse. What did Ladies Mouse ever do? The undeserving one was Jason.

I wasn’t even a footnote.

After the presentation, I found him in the cafeteria, a huge building, airless as a shopping mall, with a daunting design of hatched wooden planks on the high ceiling. Fight or flee? I went up to where he was sitting and slid his plate of salad bar salad down the length of the table like an air hockey puck. When I put my face in front of his, the clatter of his dropped fork, just like that of the scissors I’d used to trim away Ladies Mouse’s skull, made me shiver. But his obvious fear made mine manageable.

“Deb.” Even in that one syllable, I could hear the quavers in his voice. “How was your Christmas?”

“Bullshit, Jason.” I got so close, our lips were almost touching. From afar, the moment might have looked romantic, like I was willing to vault a cafeteria table just for a kiss.

“There’s nothing to say,” he went on all aquiver. “I was the lead on that experiment, set you up, supervised you.”

“It was my idea, Jason. I did the work. You just gave the okay.”

“More like you were the manual labor, the benchman.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it.”

“I provided the materials, the animals, the equipment, got the go-ahead from Dr. Hillbrawn. You don’t even have a college degree. Everything you used was mine, which means so are the findings.” He sneezed, and it sounded like the karate chop yip—hiya!—of a cartoon ninja.

Maybe he’d done those things, but none of it was enough to justify taking my work. Authority too often gets the glory, without even showing up. “I’m telling Dr. Hillbrawn everything.”

“He’s been kept apprised this whole time. We even got IACUC approval and had to cover up some of your shadier techniques in the process, I’ll have you know. As far as he’s concerned, the experiment’s mine, and that’s because it is.”

“That’s some false reality you live in,” I said, but to my own ears, at least, my voice sounded thin. He couldn’t have me beat.

“I tell you what, Deb,” and he hopped his chair forward and picked up his fork as if about to dive into an invisible meal. “I’m presenting the findings at the conference in April over at NYU. You can join me at the poster session, help me answer questions when it gets busy.”

“I’ll be there.”

He lowered his eyes to my short black skirt and rainbow leggings. “Just make sure you look the part.”

I made my best holier-than-thou face. “I thought you were all about sticking it to the man.”

“I am. But sometimes you have to play the game.”

And here I was, thinking I was playing.

When I left the cafeteria, it was snowing. As I watched my step over the sidewalks, I wondered why it didn’t thunder in a snowstorm. Where was the protest of the sky?

◊

Since ketamine is a schedule three controlled substance and hallucinogenic, any lab that uses it is subject to DEA inspection, thanks primarily to a rather experimental bunch of 1970s California yoga instructors with a death wish. Dr. Hillbrawn kept it in the lab as anesthesia for the mice and rats. The problem, though, was the dosage: I’d need to hoard it for months before collecting enough to cook down and concentrate, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Or patience.

How ironic, then, that powder AP5, just another antagonist of NMDA receptors, was readily available for a couple hundred taxpayer dollars. In Dr. Hillbrawn’s lab, there was AP5 to spare.

So when it came time for the neuroscience convention, I was ready. In a single bathroom off the main conference hall, I took out my stash of AP5 in dimethyl sulfoxide, since it can dissolve chemicals that are hydrophobic (afraid of water, of all things). It’s also great for transporting substances through skin.

As I stirred deliberate figure eights into the solution, I could feel the heat building under my arms with the prospect of revenge, but that was soon chased by doubt: Was I the bad guy here?

Feeling like a witch above her brew, all I could think was I needed to come out of this without losing my dignity, even if meant doing something as rotten as the smell drifting up from my potion: a heady blend of spoiled milk and asparagus-laced urine.

All vengeance really was was self-defense after the fact, a welcome balm to helpless feelings.

As I looked around to ensure I hadn’t left anything incriminating behind, I caught a glimpse of myself in the streaky mirror. It was the nicest I’d ever dressed: gray twill pants and a white collared shirt, complete with a narrow snake-skin belt.

No witch was I.

After pulling on fresh surgical gloves, I donned another pair, these made from black lace. The left-handed one was soaked in my solvent. Before leaving, I doused myself with patchouli to cover the smell and thought, it’s not just mathematics, firefighting, and rock and roll that young girls get dissuaded from. Our potential for bad doings gets stymied too. We unlearn our capacity for trouble. Beamed to us daily, we hear the messages that we’re built for good, for caretaking, obeying. Boys will be boys, but girls aim to please.

How deep did the lesson run in me?

Across a sea of ambling scientists, there was Jason, setting up his poster at the far wall. In all his high fashion sense, he was sporting a short-sleeved collared shirt with a bowtie. Feeling as if my gliding body was a substitute for the real me, I weaved my way toward him, protecting my left hand as if it were broken. I felt unbound, sipping on trouble, a drink like liquor that rouses and dulls.

“No hard feelings,” I said, clutching his arm and holding on a few seconds longer than a casual greeting merited. He grinned, reached for my shoulder, and said, “That’s my Deb.”

With my most innocent smile, I withdrew my hand, claiming nervousness. “Gonna go to the little girls’ room before the big show.”

“You might want to wipe off some of that patchouli or whatever the hell it is. It reeks. And lose the gloves, Elvira.”

“I guess I got carried away,” I said and hurried back to the bathroom, feeling as if I’d had too much caffeine and might be propelled into a topple. To get the stink out, I rinsed and scrubbed the glove, wrapped it in a couple plastic bags, and buried it deep in the nasty bathroom trash. Then I splashed some cold water on my face, trying to tame the flush in my cheeks.

“You go here,” Jason told me when I returned, indicating the spot against the wall. He stood on the other side of the easel that held a rather shoddily designed poster. The sheets of data pinned to the board hung askew, and the small font was hard to read. Shockingly, he hadn’t asked me to design it for him, but probably—rightfully—he hadn’t trusted me to give it my best. My kind of crafty wasn’t for him.

He didn’t seem at all conscious of his poster’s inadequacy but stood with hands on hips, looking out with a devil-moon grin at the meandering scientists. When he bent to tie his shoe, I scribbled my name into the bottom corner.

As the scientists made their way toward us, they stood close to the poster, as if about to grab the easel up in a waltz. Soon they were gathering in droves, intrigued by the originality of the research, not to mention the fact that it was about the sex drive. Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk about Sex” was stuck in my head, and I hummed it to try to still the nerves. When would the AP5 kick in? As he handed out ivory-colored business cards, Jason’s voice rang with confidence, and with each card, I worried more. Maybe I hadn’t held on to him long enough. Had I screwed up the dosage? Maybe AP5 didn’t work the same way ketamine did. If nothing happened, I told myself, nothing would happen. Maybe it would even be a good thing.

Motivated by the size and stature of his audience, Jason kept expounding, but after he’d been through the spiel multiple times, handed out at least thirty cards, and answered dozens of questions, his responses grew suddenly curt. He shuffled the cards in his hands. Was this it? When he stared at the ceiling, mouth agape, I took over the presentation. “As you can see, the results far exceeded the expectations of my hypothesis.”

The next time I glanced at Jason, his business cards were strewn across the floor, and each hand was clasped to the opposite shoulder, his elbows draped in a V across his chest. He started rocking, alternately standing on his tiptoes and falling back on his heels. Accustomed to eccentricity, the scientists looked at him out of the corners of their eyes.

Then Jason growled, and the real hallucinations set in. “Fuck you,” he started yelling at the scientists. I flinched at the first one. “Get the fuck out of here!” He was moving erratically, like a bee was after him.

Now my fears were upturned. Maybe I’d given him too much. What if he became violent? What would an overdose of AP5 look like?

“Are you okay?” one of the scientists asked him. Her name tag told me she was Dr. Chelsea Pak from Stanford.

What if he died?

“Get off me!” he yelled.

“Is this normal?” a Dr. Brian Alexander asked. I’d all of a sudden become Jason’s handler.

What if there was an investigation?

What else hadn’t I thought of?

“Shut up with your incantations!” Jason got up close to the scientists, who wiped his spit from their faces. Then, as if they’d bared fangs at him, he jumped back, dabbing his forehead, chest, and shoulders before holding up his two index fingers in the shape of a cross. Like a sprinkler, he moved the cross back and forth, forming a barrier between him and some of the smartest people on the planet. “Christ!” he screamed. “Christ, save me! Save me from Satan’s children.”

“Anyone an MD here?” Dr. Pak asked. Another scientist, Dr. Portia Green, was inching toward Jason, making shushing sounds. As she approached, Jason crumpled to the floor and crawled under the table, wailing hysterical tears, ringing the pathetic tones of a lone child finding himself at the end of the world. “Oh Christ, Oh Christ! Save me from this hellscape.”

As the scientists looked at each other in nervous horror, I slipped Jason’s business cards into their unfeeling hands, feeling fine and redeemed.

But the next morning, I woke in sheets that felt marinated in sweat. What if there was a comeuppance? I’d covered my tracks well, but would Jason suspect me? After all, he knew I had a motive. I spent the next several nights drinking late, feeling by turns monstrous and vindicated, sip by sip.

But time passed, and I was left alone. Vindicated then. I’d done Ladies Mouse proud.

Why had I even doubted myself?

I’m not sure what was more damaging to Jason’s credibility, the delusional hysterics or his invocation of Christ, but, as far as I know, he never got a job in academia.

Dr. Hillbrawn, though, became the director of a major sexual dysfunction research center in Manhattan. Last I heard, none of his products worked better than placebos. But sometimes that can be enough—just thinking things are so can be pretty damn persuasive.

At other times, though, you need every corrective at your disposal.

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her stories have appeared in Raleigh Review, J Journal, MonkeyBicycle, and Fiction Southeast, among others. One has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Lab Rat Vengeance” is excerpted from her novel-in-progress, As Though to Breathe Were Life.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

NAMED by Alex Juffer

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NAMED
by Alex Juffer

If I had clocked Kenny Vicarini we would have kissed. Not at that point, of course—I would have waited until the swelling went down. In fact, I would have swung for the gut, stole his air so he had to collapse into me.

He was an asshole looking for someone to stand up to him, from a long line of assholes looking for someone to stand up to them. But he was first in my line. His daddy had a boat and land. Kenny had cocaine and cheekbones so sharp you could have done lines off them.

Cooper McKenzie, he said, with the intimacy of any good curse, low enough that the jeering onlookers couldn’t have heard him.

Cooper. The name of an oil scion, perhaps, although the closest my family got to that was mom’s job at the Super America. Cooper—their best effort to give me an opulent future. Here’s a name worthy of a legacy. Go build one.

◊

Maybe I would have swung if I wasn’t the eldest child. Maybe if I wasn’t co-captain of the wrestling team. Maybe if I hadn’t signed that DARE anti-drug pledge, which we all made fun of, but I did sign it with a spastic little signature, and it made me nervous to go against my own name, about the only damn thing I had in the world. My name wasn’t worth anything yet, but it could be.

I tucked my fists in my pockets and walked away. Kenny called out insults to my back because he had to. You can’t let someone walk away for free. The ring of people wanted violence, but you can’t get blood from a stone, and you can’t squeeze guilt out of a boy who has rid himself of want.

No one remembers a stoic demeanor or cool temperament. No one falls in love with even-keeled. No one has sex in the back of a Toyota Corolla Hatchback if their hands are burrowed, their jaw clenched shut, their thoughts adrift as they measure the value of a name.

◊

I put my name on everything now. Endorsements, nameplates, email signatures, condolence cards, business lunch checks, another condolence card, this time for an employee I’ve never heard of, mortgage down payments, dating apps—with a first name and last initial like a partial staking. An object, a tool, more stamp than identity.

I don’t remember what the fight was about. Fundamentally, it was the invitation to fight, whether you accepted or declined, who you trusted to swap skin with. Kenny’s chin was cocked, mine drooping towards my chest. The fight would have been perfunctory.

If I could do it again, I would have clamped his chin between thumb and forefinger, hard enough to stop him from talking. I would have pressed my lips to his and then released before he could enjoy it. I would have given him a reason to remember my name, just as I’ve remembered his.

Alex Juffer is a graduate of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University. Recently, they have worked at Southern New Hampshire University, the Loft Literary Center, and the University of Minnesota, teaching literature, creative writing, and public speaking. Their work has been previously published in Epoch, The Red Line, Maudlin House, and more.

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

29 REASONS WHY THERE WILL BE NO REPLY by Chelsey Clammer

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29 REASONS WHY THERE WILL BE NO REPLY
by Chelsey Clammer

  1. You didn’t visit me for fifteen months.
  2. I know, pandemic and whatnot, and we live three states apart, but why isn’t your lover in your “circle”?
  3. When we did finally see each other, it was only because I came to see you, but even then
  4. You didn’t spend the night with me because
  5. You didn’t want to tell your wife I was in town, meaning that
  6. You spent the day fucking me, then lied to her by coming home at night and saying work was fine that day, which also means you, yet again,
  7. Put your wife’s emotional needs (to continue denying the ongoing affair you finally told her about) before not just my relationship needs, but also your own.
  8. Why?
  9. Because you are a fucking spineless coward, or it’s possible that
  10. You’re lying to me about wanting to leave your wife to be with me, which isn’t a terribly baseless accusation because
  11. I have witnessed you lying to your wife for over two and a half years, so
  12. How can I trust you?
  13. Because it’s like my mom said: “He’s either a liar or a fool,”
  14. And I don’t know which it is.
  15. But whether liar or fool, you have your self-proclaimed dream girl right here and you won’t jump through some hard, emotional hoops with your wife to be with said dream girl.
  16. After two and a half years of your unfulfilled “I’m leaving my wife” promises, you have finally lost your dream girl.
  17. Because I have lost respect for you.
  18. Also, because you never replied to my last text (re: “I can’t keep holding on to something that’s never going to happen,”) which means I guess we’re no longer together, which also means
  19. You gave up.
  20. And yet, you’re ‘liking’ my Instagram posts a few days of silence later as if, what? We’re friends?
  21. We’re not.
  22. Excellent point my real friend made when I told her that you ‘liked’ my Instagram-posted selfie: “He is a TURD. A floater turd that will not be flushed away.”
  23. The most excellent of all excellent points my real friend made when I told her you ‘un-liked’ my Instagram-posted selfie about an hour after you had ‘liked’ it: “If that’s not a lack of commitment, then IDK what is.”
  24. I deserve to be liked without any hemming and hawing about it.
  25. I also deserve to be treated like I matter.
  26. Re #25: I’m remembering the last time I saw you. In the Aubrey hotel, room 1602, when you arrived the morning I was leaving, and I had been crying the night before, alone, because I had a realization, and when I told you my realization (i.e., “No matter what I need or want or what I do, it doesn’t matter any in this relationship.”), you got real quiet, then finally looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to answer that.”
  27. Because it was the truth—I don’t matter, no, didn’t matter in our affair-ship.
  28. Thus, if you ever do text me back, silence will be my reply.
  29. At least that’s the plan.

Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School, and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. www.chelseyclammer.com

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS A Craft Essay by James Diaz

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BUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS
A Craft Essay by James Diaz

When building boats, we try to craft something that will hold us aloft, a durable vessel that can bear and balance the weight, and hold out against the waves. Some boats are perhaps more beautiful than others. Some just do the job. When you’re in a jam and need to cross whatever inner seas need crossing, you work with whatever you have to work with. It’s important to write against the grain, it’s important to fuck up, fall flat, rip your pages apart, regroup, keep dreaming into the agony. Writing is agonizing. Organizing agony, categorizing wounds, sorting old stories, finding new insights buried beneath the familiar ways of seeing our life.

How did I become the writer that I am today? Therapy. Lots and lots of therapy. Sitting in a room with another person who holds your story and then returns it to you in a different way. It might sound strange but give me a moment to explain. For most of my writing life, I had no voice that I could truly call my own. I was always writing because I knew if I didn’t something bad would happen. Bad things happened anyway, most of them self-inflicted. Quite simply: I wrote to not die. I wrote because it was all I had. Mostly, it had me. I had no idea what to do with it. When I read old pages from my twenties I wince at how little I really knew. And then I think: how beautiful, kid. You did what you could and you didn’t stop there.

I’ve always heard that we write what we know, we write from experience. Well, what do you do when you’re somewhat cut off from your own experience? It can be dangerous to know where you’re really at sometimes. So, you disassociate, separate rooms for different emotions. The right poems never find each other. Sometimes they put cups to doors and listen in. Sometimes they catch a glimpse. It’s a frozen wasteland for a while.

I don’t know why, but I always believed in the power of psychoanalysis. It wasn’t enough for me to be diagnosed and medicated, I needed to know what the deeper story was, because maybe, just maybe, if I could find it, I could retell it. I didn’t have access to it for a long time. But I had access to the rooms of 12-step recovery fellowships. And what I heard there were stories, so many stories. Us addicts can tell a good story. At some point, I began to realize that healing and narrative were kindred forms. The books I loved most were all about people just trying to heal. Like we all are, I suppose. But are we all writers? Maybe. I don’t know. Joyce Carol Oates says that everyone has at least one good story in them. I’d like to think that’s true. I’d hate to think it weren’t. What I do know is the people I’ve known needed it to be true. They needed to be able to tell their story. If you think not everyone has a good one in them, I think you should check out an open 12-step meeting sometime.

By the time I found myself in a psychotherapist’s office at the tail end of my twenties, I was at a place in my life where I just knew that if I didn’t learn what my deeper story was, I wasn’t going to make it. I got lucky, I guess. I found the right person. Someone who sat for years with my numb and frozen states, my painful unknowing, until eventually the ice began to crack. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But when you’re sitting in a room with someone every week who is listening for all of the things you don’t say, who gives you time to find what those things are, and to speak them aloud for the first time, in your one and only true voice, there is a poem in that that just sort of happens.

What we all do is we tell stories. “My childhood went like this. My father was explosive, my mother was cold. This person said that and then I felt this way. I’m scared. I’m angry. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t want to talk about feelings today. I just want to sit here. Is that okay?” And you do. You sit there and most of the time you can’t even hear yourself talking. You talk and talk until one day you hear parts of yourself getting through. You hear and feel someone hand you back parts of what you’ve just said in a different way. You become curious. You become open. All those doors you locked emotion behind, they too begin to unlock. The more I knew about myself the more I was able to enter into a poem in a real and embodied way.

“Where are you feeling what you’re telling me right now? Is it in your chest, in your gut, in your head? How do you locate your words in your body?” It’s terrifying to get inside of yourself like that. Over time, my body and my words began to meet at a kind of crossroads. “Listen here,” they’d say to each other, “we’re in this thing together or not at all.” Write the body, and the poem really begins to sing. Maybe the only way we become anything at all is by letting other people into our story. We’re changed by others, they’re changed by us. Any therapist will tell you, their patients made them better therapists. Therapy made me, not a better poet, but an open one. Open to the song I don’t always know all the words to, but I’ll sing it anyway. Ugly boat, beautiful boat. Sometimes you just have to build a boat.

I’d imagine there are many ways to find our deeper story. And if everyone has at least one good one in them, I think it’d be a shame not to share yours with someone, somewhere, at some point. Who knows, you might just find you’ve a few more in you somewhere. Where are you feeling it? Head, chest, gut, heart? That is art, location. Compass. Honing in. It takes time to find what kind of state you’re in. But once you do, there is a kind of basic rhythm that begins to take shape. We each have our flavor, our emotional psychic taste buds.

How do we become better at our craft? For me, personally, it was by getting to know myself better. Getting to know myself better through others. Listening to myself through them. Sharing out who I was to get to who I am. A good friend can do that for you as well. Or a fellowship of recovering addicts. Any place where people come together to try and make sense of who they are is an opportunity for, and invitation to, a kind of poetry. All I know is you have to start at the place you’re at. And that place does not always offer you the best harvest. There are seasons and there are seasons. You just have to walk through the not-knowing until you do. Some days you have nothing to say, some days you have too much to say. The good poem, if such a thing exists, is probably somewhere in between. Like they say in the rooms: more will be revealed. Don’t give up five minutes before the poem happens.

In a world so often low on kindness, James Diaz is trying to refill the tank. Poetry is his imperfect medium. Author of two full-length poetry collections, This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021), Diaz is the founding editor of the online journal Anti-Heroin Chic. He currently resides in upstate New York.

A Conversation with Amy Koppelman, author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR by Michael McCarthy

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A Conversation with Amy Koppelman
Author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR
Two Dollar Radio
Interview by Michael McCarthy

I spoke with Amy Koppelman as she was finishing making her first book, A Mouthful of Air, into a feature film. Though she wrote the novel eighteen years ago, it still seemed fresh in Koppelman’s mind. As I spoke with her over Zoom, she searched for the right words to describe her first novel. In this work, Koppelman engaged the experience of postpartum depression when conversation about the topic was rare. The book was first published in 2003 by MacAdam/Cage (a small press that has closed) and is now being reissued by Two Dollar Radio.

In this interview, which Koppelman and I have edited for clarity, Koppelman discusses how she began writing, the encouragement she received from Joan Didion, and whether writing is a world in which she feels safe. —MM

◊

Michael McCarthy: There are a lot of words that could describe this book: masterfully written, engaging, suspenseful. But one word that also describes it is important. In it, you talk about an issue that has still not received much attention: postpartum depression. When was the moment when you knew you simply had to write this book?

Amy Koppelman: I didn’t know that I was writing this book. I don’t think that anybody sets out to write this book. When I wrote the second-to-last scene in the book, my fingers jumped off the keyboard because I just couldn’t believe that was what I wrote. I knew I wanted to write about shame, how we perceive shame within ourselves, and what we allow for ourselves within the confines of that shame, but I had no idea what the story was.

I started writing the day Kurt Cobain died. My husband called me about the news while I was lying in bed in a dark room. He didn’t know about my depression because I was really good at acting. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be like Kurt Cobain. I don’t want to die, even though I really want to die.” So I had to figure out how to get better. I called a therapist that day—a name I’d been carrying around on a card in my wallet—and I also started writing around then. So I think originally, to answer your question, I was putting my emotions on paper. It’s not an autobiographical book, but the feelings of shame and self-loathing and all those feelings that one feels when they’re depressed—those were all mine.

MM: The main character Julie Davis is a character who, in modern lingo, really “goes through it.” She endures a depression that could register on the Richter scale. As a writer, you chose to go deep into her thought processes on a day-to-day level. Was it ever emotionally difficult or personally strenuous to spend so much time with a character who was going through that kind of depression?

Amy Koppelman

AK: I had two little kids, who I loved spending time with, so I would drop them off at school, then go home and work. Being able to put all that sorrow and ugliness into the computer gave me the ability to be the most present, happy mom. There was always this huge disconnect between the shit I was writing about and how I was feeling with them, which was very happy. And very grateful.

There was nothing—is nothing—I like more than being a mom. I wasn’t writing about that pain at the same time I was feeling it. I was remembering it, so the emotional whiplash wasn’t as bad.

MM: What kept you going through the writing of this book? What was your routine?

AK: I have no writing routine. My kids and my husband always came first. If somebody was sick or needed me, a couple weeks could go by before I got back to it. But if no one needed me I would just do my “housewife” stuff—my chores—and sit down and work for a couple hours until I picked up the kids from school.

MM: The protagonist of the book leads a rather privileged life. She lives in a nice apartment in Manhattan. She has a supportive family and a nanny. She has access to mental healthcare as well as more conventional healthcare. As an author, was there a conscious decision to choose a character who led a life with such privileges as a way of talking about depression?

AK: Yes, that was an intention. Eighteen years ago people were just beginning to talk about depression as an illness. It was important to me that people understand that depression was no different than asthma or diabetes. You need to go to the doctor. I didn’t want the reader to find an “excuse” for Julie’s behavior so I removed every obstacle.

Julie had the time, support, and means to get any help she needed and she still couldn’t figure it out. She was trapped in a loop of self-hatred. “You’re not a good mother. You’re going to fail. You can’t help but fail.” So imagine a single mom, raising kids, working two jobs. How is she going to find the time and/or seek out the resources—especially when the very nature of depression makes everything feel futile?

MM: Were you ever frustrated that she couldn’t get better, or perhaps made decisions that made getting better unnecessarily difficult?

AK: She’s extraordinarily selfish, right? There’s nothing more selfish than killing yourself. Julie leaves her husband, her son and her baby girl. Even if they get better and are able to move on, the collateral damage of suicide is so vast and awesome. It’s nearly impossible to recover. It has a ripple effect on every subsequent generation. Of course, I was frustrated with her. But in a way that was the point. I wanted Julie’s story to serve as a cautionary tale. Don’t be like Julie. Make different choices.

Live.

MM: If my research serves me well, this book had a difficult publication history. It was difficult to find someone who would be willing to publish a story that was so dark and relentless in its depiction of depression. I believe there was even an interaction with Joan Didion. Could you take me to that moment?

AK: Sure. No one wanted to publish this book. I didn’t even take it personally. I was frustrated, though, because I knew there were so many women who were pushing strollers down the street and were in so much pain behind their smiles. At the end of the day, all you can really do is write the truth as you see it, as you hear it.

That said, after several hundred rejections you start to wonder: what if the reason I’m being rejected is because I’m not a good writer. Maybe the book just sucks. I had seen some article that said where Joan Didion lived, so as a gift to myself, I dropped off the manuscript for A Mouthful of Air and a note. I told her how much she meant to me, and then I asked her, “Am I a real writer?” Because if I’m not a real writer, I should start doing something else.

Everyone I knew was like “Joan Didion’s not gonna write you back.” But she wrote me back! She said that she had read the manuscript and, “Yes Amy, you are a real writer.” When you’re a writer you face a lot of rejection, that’s okay. Don’t pay attention to the rejections. Just collect the positive things people say—hold onto those words. (Amy waits a beat, smiles.) Most of the time they’re not from Joan Didion. That was super special.

MM: And after that bit of encouragement, how was the publication process?

AK: After getting rejected by virtually every agent in New York City, I finally found an agent in San Francisco. Randi Glass took my query out of the slush pile and gave it to Amy Rennert. Both women believed in me, they weren’t scared of the story. And they even found a mainstream publisher. This was my first novel. I was offered something like $10,000 from Doubleday (I think it was Doubleday)—a really nice advance—all I had to do was change the ending. But Julie has a psychotic break. She couldn’t pick up the phone and call 911. It just wasn’t true.

And that’s always been my “north star” as it were. To tell my characters’ truth. To depict the inner pain of someone with a mood disorder. No matter how ugly it is. So, I didn’t change the ending.

At that moment, I basically chose the trajectory of my career. Indie presses didn’t (and still don’t) get the same shelf-space or table-space in bookstores, which was everything back then. But Amy didn’t pressure me. She continued to hunt for a publisher and ultimately Pat Walsh, the editor at MacAdam/Cage said yes and published the novel in its purest form. And now Eric and Eliza Obenauff, the publishers of Two Dollar Radio are giving the novel a new life. I feel so proud to be part of the Two Dollar Radio family and part of the indie community. Independent presses are vital and I think very underappreciated.

MM: Depression seems like a near-impossible illness to write about because at its core, it makes day-to-day life seem nearly undoable. It seems that it would be almost impossible to get a book out of a character for whom daily life is so trying. What obstacles did you face in dramatizing depression, and how did you overcome them?

AK: The stories I tell are very small. They’re like a photograph—an image of a woman in a specific place in time. Writing something with any kind of through-line is always the hardest obstacle for me. I write freehand for many years—with little idea where I’m going. I know the feelings I want to convey, the mental illness I want to portray but I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish it—translate those ideas into a novel. Eventually, I write a scene that reveals the answer: “Oh, that’s what this novel is about.” Then I go back and piece together the story. Your subconscious is smarter than you. If you keep writing, you will find the answer. 

MM: What challenges did you face moving A Mouthful of Air from the page to the screen?

AK: As I was adapting the novel I’d ask myself the following questions:

  1. What’s the action of this scene, the physical action? —for example, Julie crosses the room.
  2. What is happening in the scene emotionally? What are you conveying about her mental state? — Julie starts the scene self-assured and happy but ends the scene insecure and anxious.
  3. Is this emotional beat necessary to convey? —Yes, because now we know that when she’s in a group of people, Julie gets anxious.
  4. Why does the emotional beat matter? —Because we see that Julie is disproportionally fearful. Depending on where the scene is placed in the novel, this bit of information tells us something important about her character. About her POV. And about what’s at stake.
  5. After the first draft I went back and asked myself how many times was I making the same point? — There might be four scenes that show Julie anxious. Do they build? Are they all the same? If so, how many should I keep?

Amanda (Seyfried) said she wanted Julie to have a career, so I made her a children’s book author and illustrator. When my daughter Anna was little she had crossed eyes and wore an eye patch. Kids would make fun of her relentlessly, so at night before she went to bed I’d tell her about this little girl named Pinky Tinker ink who was born with an ugly, wrangled finger. And just like Anna, kids made fun of Pinky. It turns out, though, that Pinky’s finger is actually a key that helped her unlock doors no one else could see—this helped Pinky solve mysteries—find the answers. The idea was that the very thing that Pinky was ashamed of is what made her special.

I thought Pinky was a good—alter ego? Is that the right word?—for Julie. In the film Julie is well known for her books about a little girl named Pinky Tinkerbink. Through Pinky, Julie helps kids unlock their fears but can’t figure out how to unlock her own. And I think somewhere in there is the tragedy of Julie’s story.

MM: It’s interesting to see this book being made into a film nearly twenty years after its publication. Do you notice any change in the conversation surrounding postpartum depression?

AK: When I wrote this book, I had no idea that this category of depression existed. I remember when the book was published I was invited to attend a conference on postpartum depression in Jersey City, and there were like twenty people there. Today there are hundreds. So, yes. There have been huge strides. People are aware of it, “postpartum depression” is a term that people are familiar with.

In 1998 when I was a new mom, people rarely talked about postpartum depression and it remained largely undiagnosed. Today we know that one out of every five women suffers from postpartum depression. In a bunch of states now, there are laws that require gynecologists to screen new mothers to see how they’re doing. But there is still no national protocol—no system in place to check on a new mom’s mental health. That’s very upsetting.

People take antidepressants much more regularly now but I still think most people are undermedicated—no matter what the hip magazines say. Most moms—most people struggling from depression are still profoundly ashamed to ask for help. My biggest hope for the movie is that someone will see themselves—or someone they love—in Julie’s character. And they will get help. Postpartum depression is very treatable.

MM: I have one more question that involves a quote from the book. Julie goes to see her brother perform his music. You write, “Gently, forcefully, he manipulates his world. This, the only world in which he feels safe.” The question I want to ask you is this: is writing a world in which you feel safe?

AK: No one can hurt you when you’re in a room by yourself with your computer. The characters in your head certainly can’t hurt you. The keyboard can’t hurt you. Not being able to string two sentences together is frustrating—you may want to bang your head against the wall, but even that can’t hurt you. And if your thoughts and feelings get to be too much you can simply shut your computer. There is no judgment.

Writing for me started as a safe place to put all of my sadness and I think in many ways that’s still what it is for me—a safe space to process grief and trauma. I learn through my characters’ choices. The good choices and the bad ones. So yes, to answer your question writing is a safe place for me—for everyone actually.

Because everyone is a writer—all you have to do is allow yourself to write. If you can tell a story to your friend at the coffee shop, you are a writer. You don’t need permission. Writing is a safe place to put your thoughts. But that doesn’t mean your writing needs to be safe.

Michael McCarthy headshotMichael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.

ASK JUNE: August 2021 The Case of the Callous Grandpa and the Burden of Old Photos

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Dear June,

A few weeks ago my wife and I were watching Noah, our two-year-old grandson, at our house. He was playing with some pots and pans on the floor of our pantry room, totally absorbed. I stepped out of the room for half a minute to refill my coffee, and the next thing I knew there was a crash and Noah was screaming. Either from Noah’s pulling at it or from sheer bad luck, a set of shelves had separated from the wall, raining down boxes, bags, jars, and cans. Ginny, my wife, came rushing in, back from the bathroom, zipping her pants as she ran. She scooped Noah up and took him to the sink. At least one of those cans or jars must have hit him because he was bleeding pretty heavily from a cut in his scalp. Ginny cuddled Noah and cleaned him up a bit, but when she saw how much he was bleeding she told me to bring the car around to go to the ER.

Since Ginny had the Noah situation under control, I had been spending the few minutes since the mishap taking care of other things, mostly resealing bags, putting jars of mayo and simmer sauce that had come open into the fridge, and so on. When she said we were going to the ER I spent maybe thirty more seconds putting a chicken we had been cooking into a Pyrex bowl and refrigerating it, and finding a gallon Ziploc for the flour, which had opened and was getting all over everything. Ginny had barely gotten Noah fastened into his car seat before I came out and took the wheel.

Everything turned out fine. We hardly even lost any food. But now my wife is mostly not speaking to me. I am perplexed and a little annoyed. What should I do?

Shunned in Short Hills

Dear Shunned,

Let me get this straight. Your wife goes off to the bathroom and leaves you alone with a toddler in a pantry full of all kinds of loose stuff on some sort of poorly-attached shelving, and you decide to leave the room, too, and refill your coffee at that same moment. Then, when the shelving comes off and rains full cans and glass jars onto your grandchild, you leave your wife alone to deal with soothing him, giving him first aid, deciding what to do, and putting him into his car seat. You do not get to the car until after she has brought him out and fastened him in because you are so concerned about cleaning up and saving your chicken and flour. And I can’t help but notice that, although you let me know about the fate of your food, you tell me nothing about Noah. (Stitches? Bruises? X-rays? Concussion?)

What you should do is apologize. Tell your wife that you are really sorry you messed up and didn’t rush to help her and Noah. If you can find even a grain of truth in this idea, you might add that you were so confident in her ability to handle a crisis that it clouded your judgment. Promise her that you will never again leave Noah alone for a minute in an area that is not fully toddler-proof, which means just about everywhere. Swear that you will never leave her in the lurch like that again. Reassure her that Noah’s safety and wellbeing are your highest priorities. Keep all those promises. And get better shelving.

◊

Dear June,

Family photographs are weighing me down. Not only do I have boxes and bulky albums full, I also have boxes of photos from my parents and grandparents. It seems like generation after generation, photos are being passed down but not enjoyed. For some of the real oldies, with ladies in feathered hats and men alongside Model T’s, I don’t even know who the people are!

My daughters were born in the 1990s, so their baby and childhood photos are not digital. Like many parents then, I often took three or four (or five) photos of special moments, hoping that one shot would turn out well when the film was developed. Then I’d select the 2-for-1 print special at Walgreen’s to have extra images to send to family members. I know I’m not alone in this! But as a result, an entire hallway closet is filled with photo boxes, and albums are stashed under a bed in the guest room. Each time I walk by that closet, I think, “What am I going to do with all these photos?” My bigger fear is, “How am I going to face all of these?” It’s hard to look at pictures of my children when they were little. That precious time went by so quickly, and as a younger person, I didn’t realize just how quickly it would go. Sometimes a picture fills me with regret over past choices and struggles.

I want to live in the present and enjoy my life as it is, right now. The photos and albums are heavy and taking up too much space. Packed away in a closet or under a bed, no one can even see or enjoy them, so what’s the point of having saved them (and all the negatives)? They’re also occupying mental space and energy. Yet when I’ve tried to sort and throw some away, it’s been painful. How can I put a picture of my child or a beloved grandmother in the trash? There’s a reason Marie Kondo says to leave photos for last. I’d be grateful for your advice on ways to accomplish this overwhelming task so that I can finally complete it and move on.

Walking Down Too Many Memory Lanes in Mamaroneck

Dear Walking,

I’m in the same boat—maybe even worse off, since I have somehow ended up with not just three generations of my own family’s photos, but also several photo collections from collateral branches. So I could not be more empathetic. And, despite not yet having even tried to deal with the accumulation of photographs in my own house, I do have some recent experience sorting somebody else’s that might prove useful. Earlier this summer my niece and I spent two days and three long evenings in Florida, sorting through fifty years’ worth of photographs from an incapacitated relative (let’s call her Great Aunt Lucy). There were hundreds and hundreds of photographs and negatives in boxes, and more albums than I care to recall. As we went along, we developed some rules and rhythms, and ended up not hating the process, which relied heavily on banter and ice cream sandwiches. We also got fairly good results, winnowing the collection down to two boxes for Lucy herself, who is in assisted living; a few choice photos and albums for other family members and friends; and only two cartons for me and my nuclear family, which was about ten cartons fewer than I thought I would feel obligated to bring home to my already-overloaded shelves and closets.

But we had an advantage over you: our backs were to the wall. The house that had held these photographs was being sold, so we had to do something with them right away. And our choices were not so fraught. Once we had set aside what we thought Lucy would want to keep—a fairly easy process since we both knew her well—fewer than 300 of the remaining photos were unique images of our own parents or children, which I have to admit we found almost impossible to relinquish. As you imply in your letter, facing certain photos can be the worst hurdle, which we solved by giving them cursory glances and then keeping them all.

It sounds as if you really want get started, but are not yet at the back-to-the wall stage—I assume you aren’t expecting any terrifying in-laws to move in and demand all the space under the guest-room bed?

Sound like you need a plan and maybe also a prod. The best way to begin, I think, is by reviewing what you are trying to accomplish, then dividing this undertaking into smaller, more manageable, less emotion-laden tasks.

As for your overall goals: it sounds as if you want to prune your collection while saving the photos and albums that you, your family, and your descendants are likely to find most meaningful and entertaining. You want what’s left to be easier to access. You would like to free up some of that storage space. And you’d like the process to be as painless as possible—dare I say, even to produce some happy moments?—and to leave you with a sense that you have done all you need to do, so that you can move on.

Those goals all seem clear enough. But they do not go far toward resolving the specifics of what to save, and what to let go. Decisions about what’s worth keeping obviously have to be yours, but I can offer some guidelines you might use as you winnow. I am confident that you’ll figure things out as you go along; that, the more deeply you go into the process, the clearer your mind will be about where you want to end up and how you will get there. That has been the case for me, my niece, and everybody I know who has spent a chunk of time sorting through photos and other memorabilia. (Well, there was my cousin Harold, who totally lost it and finally just abandoned all his family photos on a street corner—which is how, thanks to a woman who found me online, I ended up with one of my collateral-branch collections. As it happened, some of the images he jettisoned turned out to be family treasures.)

Now for tactics. Here are some ways to divide your job into smaller jobs:

—by date or era

—by source (who took or collected the photos)

—by subject (which person, place, family, major event)

—by format (size, color vs. black and white, album vs. loose, etc.)

—by order stored (or easiest to reach)

Or you may just want to start with the place in your house you most want cleared out, like that area under the bed.

Try to sort either by era or by source, and start with whichever time or source strikes you as easiest to get through. From your letter, it looks like the “real oldies” would be a smart place to begin, since you do not seem especially attached to those Model T’s and unidentifiable people and so on. If photos or even whole albums have no meaning for you or your kids, by all means dispose of them: throw them out or, if you think they may have value as antique objects or as records of a time and place, give them to a store that sells old photographs or send them to the relevant local historical society or library

And if getting rid of most or all of your “oldies” seems extreme, there are less radical solutions. For example, just taking photos out of albums, especially those enormous old ones, can drastically cut the storage space needed. When we were in Florida my niece and I saved a few old albums: two that were charming and had worn well, one that we thought my brother would like, and one that was so very old it felt like a historical artifact. The other old photos didn’t seem to lose much by not being in albums, and took up so much less space once liberated that we ended up saving far more of the photos themselves than we had originally planned. This spared us considerable regret and time-consuming indecision, since we are both hopelessly sentimental about old things, even pictures of Gibson girls who, for all we know, were just cousins of some in-law or other.

We did toss some of the loose oldies, though, mostly blurry images of unfamiliar places or multiple shots of the same unidentified person. Since my niece and I represent two generations in our family, we decided that if a photograph didn’t move either of us or inspire any curiosity, everybody else in our family would probably feel the same way.

After you do the “real oldies,” I suggest moving on to the slightly less oldies. That’s what we did, anyway, culling the photos taken during, or shortly before, my childhood years. My niece and I found that the photos from this era were the easiest to sort.

We saved almost all of the earlier, mostly black and white, photos from this era, partly because they were beautiful and taken by my father, a gifted darkroom photographer, but also because there were not too many of them, and most were photos of us or of people we loved.

(By the way: are there also photographs from your spouse/partner’s forebears under that bed? If so, I strongly urge you to encourage your spouse to sort them, and to leave them unsorted if that doesn’t happen.)

Lucy’s other photographs were mostly snapshots from the past forty or fifty years. After getting rid of all duplicate prints (except for a few standouts we set aside for our respective siblings), we decided to toss all negatives and almost all storage CDs, since anybody who ever wanted to could make perfectly adequate copies directly from the prints. Then we tossed all photos of people we did not know and were pretty sure neither Lucy nor any of our other our living relatives knew, either.

By the way: One thing we did NOT do was label any of the photos we kept. Even though we were pressed for time, I now think that this was a bad mistake. Don’t do what we did! Google and YouTube can show you how to mark photos safely with a pen. You will be doing a service to your descendants, and preventing your current family from becoming the 2070 equivalent of those anonymous ladies in feathered hats.

Next to go were most of the travel photos, including almost all the famous landmarks, natural wonders, and museum art. The rule was: if you can get more or less the same image from an outside source, toss it. As we got tired, we broadened this rule, and started throwing out all artistically meh photos of places and objects, with a very few exceptions like wedding dresses, interior shots of beloved former homes, and a few cars we considered members of the family. Speaking of members of the family, we surprised ourselves by agreeing to throw out most of the pet snapshots, mostly because there were so many of them: pictures of one cat in particular, now dead these forty years and more, made a pile twice the size of the pile for photos of my father. We also found that cats, and some dogs, do not have all that many different facial expressions, at least not in amateur photographs.

Even after we crammed about fifty more photos into Lucy’s boxes, this process still left us with three times as many recent snapshots as my niece or I wanted to keep. We kept sorting and discarding until our choices started to seem totally arbitrary. So we gave up: but we had gotten down to just a couple more cubic feet than we had wanted to take home, and that was good enough for us. I drove back up 95 feeling like a silver medalist and told myself that it was sensible to have a cushion of photos in case in case Lucy decided she needed more fading snapshots of some dog or prom or lighthouse or other.

I hope this narrative of my recent adventures in photo wrangling has encouraged you and given you a few ideas. But I see that I haven’t really addressed those photos of your children and how to choose among them, which sounds like the most serious problem, the one that gets a person thinking in terms of Sisyphus’s boulder and Hercules’s labors and, of course, the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. My Florida experience is not much help here, since we found relatively few unique photos of the people we most cherish; and, as I admitted back in the distant past when I began this letter, I have not yet tackled the nuclear-family photos in my own closet. But it occurs to me that I am writing this as an advice columnist, not a road-trip memoirist or role model, and I do have a few more suggestions to offer in my capacity as the wise June. These apply to all your photos, but especially to those evocative, heartstring-tugging photos of your kids.

First, choose a day to get started, and set aside a block of time: day, weekend, recurring shorter periods, whatever works. Mark your paper calendar in red and your digital one with dramatic emoji, announce your plans to your friends, put in for a personal day; in short, do what you need to make the starting time stick. You can set a deadline as well as a starting point, if you want, but I suspect that imposing any but the loosest deadline on a project like this will only add to your stress, making it harder to begin at all and easier to abandon if you do. Once started on the project, though, it will probably take on a momentum of its own – and even if this does not happen, you will have made some headway or least assessed the situation. Sort of like grading papers. Or writing.

If you have tried to break down your task and still feel daunted, consider further subdividing it. If you are sorting by era and have, say, four boxes of family photos from 1990-2000, you might aim to do two of them per session. If you finish early, you can always pull out more boxes.

Second, consider getting somebody to assist you. The right person can be a great help getting you started, keeping you moving, and lessening your anxiety and indecision along the way. Having an adult child or even a supportive friend with you should help insulate you from the regrets you say you sometimes feel when confronting certain of these images.

The problem here, of course, is that you have to find somebody who is willing to do the job and won’t actually make it harder for you. Have you thought about asking one or more of your kids to help? My niece was just about perfect for the Florida photos: a close relative, but from another generation. She also had similar, but not identical, attitudes about what sorts of images should be preserved and why. Also important: neither of us tried to talk the other one into discarding any photographs we wanted to keep – which, happily, lessened the tension and actually made many photos easier to sort and discard.

I can see why you might feel this is a job you would rather undertake alone, but do consider the idea, if only because scheduling a session with one or more other people would be a great prod to get started and keep going. If you can’t find anybody, or don’t want anybody, to help with the actual sorting, you could invite a friend or relative over just to sit with you, for moral support. Sort of like grading papers at Starbucks. Or working in a writer’s room. Your moral supporter could bring knitting, perhaps, or a guitar.

Third, do as much no-brainer culling as you can (see Florida, above):

—Toss most if not all negatives of your old Walgreen’s prints and similar nonprofessional color prints. (If you have any photo CDs from the post-film, pre-smartphone era, you might want to take the time to upload them; even if you never look at the uploads again, having a backup is reassuring. Or don’t bother. We didn’t.)

—Remove obvious duds and photos you are sure nobody will care about. At the same time, remove all duplicate prints and put them in a separate pile. At some point—I favor doing this as I go along, but that might slow you down, or you might want to evaluate the whole pile first—decide which duplicate prints you think other people might want, and throw out the rest.

—As you take photos out of envelopes and boxes, and any albums you may decide to dismantle, do some preliminary labeling, and try to keep them in some sort of order, probably chronological. Then you can get rid of most of the envelopes and boxes as well as the albums. Yet another anecdote: Right before the pandemic I helped a friend sort photos after her sister died. The sister had been a performer and a bit of a hoarder, so there were thousands of photos; but they were all packed in smallish boxes that conformed to their size, and filed chronologically, with lots of labeling. I was amazed at how little space they took up on her shelves, and how easy it was for people to find specific photographs or subjects (and, I assume, toss the rest).

Fourth, and this is the part where you have to think and feel most deeply: now that you have done the emotion-free busy work, take a moment to evaluate how much more you want to cull this herd of remaining photos, and start sorting in earnest.

My hope is that you will find many groups of images where one stands out, and the others offer nothing really new or different, at least to your jaded mother-of-grown-children eyes—especially if you decide not to discard these similar images but to send them along to your kids or other loved ones.

Remember: as with books, one great way to downsize collections of photos is to give them away to people you know. For example, consider giving your children not just any duplicate prints of their childhood photos, but also all but one of those “three or four or five” photos of the same “precious moments.” You could even throw in some photos from other collections—your wedding, your own baby pictures, a favorite cousin—or any photos you’re ambivalent about but hope one of these other people would like and/or has some stake in. (I gave my son about 98% of our rugby photos. Unlike me, he can tell them apart. He is glad to have them, and would not have wanted me to destroy them. ) Then send these new mini-collections off right away—preferably in decorative boxes, to underscore their status as thoughtful gifts. Your kids will probably be delighted.

Giving these photos away will free up some closet space without consigning any images to oblivion, and will give your children or any other recipients you designate a chance to see and own photos they may cherish, and can always dispose of or digitize themselves if they don’t. Sometimes kicking the can down the road actually makes sense.

With any luck, pruning those similar images, and your earlier no-brainer culling of dupes and duds, along with unremarkable sunsets, zoo animals, other people’s kids at bat, etc., will leave you with a collection you find manageable and accessible.And remember that you can digitize whatever you want to these days. If, even after removing negatives and packaging and duplicates and duds and similar images from your collection, it still seems too large, this might be a good time to approach your family photos in a new way, thinking not of the photos you still want to discard but the ones you love most. My suggestion, if you have the time or money, is to digitize everything you have left, then select only the prints you treasure – the ones you would like to hold in your hands or pass around a table, the ones you would save if there were a fire. You can discard the other prints; or, if this makes you feel squeamish, you can consign them to some more remote storage site than your closet or under the bed, given that you are unlikely to be looking at them again any time soon.

If you have a decent digital camera or one of the newest smartphones, you can do some or all of this digitizing yourself. Your collection, even as pared down, does sound like it might be a bit large for DIY digitizing, and there’s no point in creating yet another daunting obstacle for yourself. So I would opt for spending some money on pros. But phones, personal cameras, and home computer software are great for filling in gaps here and there. When I was in Florida I made myself a little cardboard platform and took iPhone pictures of photos I had relinquished to Lucy or my niece but did not want to lose, then sent them to my kids. The images looked fine, and I have every hope of adding them to the digital albums I plan to create at some point in the nebulous future.

You can also use the wonders of modern computing to preserve some of your favorite photos not just in digital albums, but also in printed books that can be much easier to to store and retrieve than the old clunky albums used to be.

Fifth, please don’t expect perfection. You end your letter by saying that you want to “finally complete” this “overwhelming task” so you can “move on.” I see that. But unless you want to emulate my cousin Harold, you are going to be doing a lot of balancing and making a whole lot of compromises. If you are like me – a fan of Whitman and Dickens who loves getting lost in times and places, and would choose potential and inclusion over order almost any day – you may not sort your photographs as quickly or as thoroughly as you would like, and you may be left with more photos and less organization than you’d hoped for. Or you may decide that nothing but drastic reductions will free your mind. Either way is okay, and you can and should still move on.

Best of luck! I hope you emerge from under the weight of your photos and your memories before too long. Onward and upward and, as my mother used to tell me: do as I say, not as I do.

ask-june-square-for-facebook-no-border-300pxCleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at [email protected]. Find more columns by June in her attic.

 

THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE, a poetry craft essay by John Wall Barger

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THE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE
by John Wall Barger

Je suis maitre du silence
—Rimbaud, “Enfance”

I.

At fifty, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I drove my 1989 BMW motorcycle from Philadelphia to The Hambidge Center in the mountains of northeast Georgia for a three-week writing residency. They provided me with a cottage in the forest, with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough space for a person to spread out their work. My first feelings, when I’d taken off my jacket and sat down, were—as Wendell Berry describes it in “Stepping Off”—“along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement / a little nagging of dread.” It was so damn quiet.

I’ve always felt an aversion to quiet. I was a hyper only child. The kid with the firecrackers and toy soldiers. The teenager with the boombox. As an adult, I am a talker and—I wince to admit it—a loud one. “Silence,” as William S. Burroughs said, “is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”

In my humble opinion, I’m qualified to write an essay about silence precisely because I compulsively verbalize. I’m the least silent person in the room. I observe silence from the outside looking in. With the least “natural” perspective on the matter of anyone you know.

◊

The Elephant of Silence built a house beside the sea. It contained all you’d need, including a bed and fine teacups. He liked to wash teacups and stare at the sea out the window. His radio cackled, “The Last Forest contains 8,609 trees. A great number, albeit less than last year.” As he replaced his dishrag, he noticed an odd scene out the steamed window: a bride in white washed up on the surf.

There came a knock. He opened his door. The bride stood there dripping wet beside her pet pig. He invited them in. The bride burst in and, with effort, lifted the Elephant of Silence as if he were her groom. Her legs trembled. She moaned. Held there, feet off the ground, the Elephant of Silence waited patiently as the sun set. The pet pig stared at them with open admiration. Soon the bride was pancaked under the Elephant of Silence.

The pet pig butted him with his snout for pure joy. “Shall we go for a walk?” he asked. The Elephant of Silence packed them a picnic lunch. That night they slept in the Last Forest and their dreams were tinted spinach green. Next morning they began climbing the mountain. It took them 2,000 years. Dynasties fell. The forest vanished behind them. They might have been the last two creatures in existence, for all they cared.

At the peak of that foggy mountain, the Elephant of Silence spoke, at last, with reverence: “I have never met anyone as silent as you.”

 

I wrote this poem in 2012, soon after I started living with my wife, Tiina. The Elephant of Silence is her, I think. I didn’t mean it that way, but it’s unmistakable. She’s from Finland, where folks value calmness and tranquility over storytelling and arrogance. I’ve been to “parties” in Finland where a group of friends sit for extended periods in complete silence. I’ve sat with men in saunas where none of us say anything; they just sip beer, happy as the day they were born.

When there’s a gap in a conversation, I’m the one who panics and fills it with small talk. It’s taken me years of marriage to grasp the importance of leaving space while talking, for everyone to gather their thoughts. What’s more, Tiina is a philosopher. Smarter than me. Far more logical. It might be clear to you already, that in my poem I’m the pet pig, following along beside her, learning from her.

◊

Being by myself in the forest at Hambidge reminds me of another writing retreat I went on at twenty, in 1989. I—living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I grew up—had just decided that I was a writer, and figured that meant I should have some alone time. So I borrowed my father’s 1975 Ducati motorcycle and drove four hours to our old camp in Bear River, Nova Scotia, where my parents and I lived for a year when I was a kid.

The camp, five miles from town and a quarter-mile in the woods from a dirt road, was no longer the cozy candle-lit gingerbread house of my childhood. It had been adapted by neighbors into a hunting shack. They’d shoved the stove under my parents’ old loft and sat at the window, leaning their rifle on the sill. When a deer showed up, alert and beautiful, they shot it. The spirit of the house was gone.

Nevertheless, I arrived full of gusto, with a pen and a sheaf of empty pages to fill with poems. I was set on finding inspiration deep in the forest. What I found, instead, was silence. And loneliness. I was alarmed. I felt aversion, and wanted to escape.

Pure stubbornness kept me from jumping back on the bike and riding home that very day. I had, after all, bragged to my friends about the writing retreat I was going on. So I sat in the armchair, read a long terrible novel a girl had lent me (Sidney Sheldon, If Tomorrow Comes), wrote a poem, slept, and sped home promptly the next morning.

That might have been the longest day of my life.

◊

I always knew that there was value to being quiet. But it’s hard. I resisted.

Despite the noise I generated, I did grow up in a culture of silence, of a sort. My parents were hippies and meditators. Our house contained walls of books on Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Sufism. Novels, nonfiction, my dad’s math books, comic books. They were readers. There was space in the house for contemplation and curiosity.

I was an only child, used to creating my own games. I was often in my room playing chess by myself; reading comics; playing with toy soldiers. Was I quiet at those times, or perhaps humming and singing to distract myself? I don’t know.

When I became a writer I didn’t think it would have anything to do with silence. But it does.

◊

Over the days at Hambidge I settle into a routine, making my peace with the quiet. Since it’s my weakness, I sit with it. I meditate. I walk slowly in the forest, staying alert but trying not to obsess about ticks and bears and rattlesnakes. I stare at the ceiling. And, slowly, as the dread diminishes, I feel calmer. My focus deepens.

I love the feeling of quiet pooling, when I give it space. I get hungry for it. After days full of such quiet, even the calm communal dinners—populated by seven polite artists, the banjo player from Atlanta, the sculptor from Arkansas, the painter from Spain—seem jarringly noisy. Then I walk briskly back to my cottage in the semi-dark, shut the door behind me, and lie on my back staring into nothingness, until I feel like myself again.

◊

One morning, while I’m lying on the couch puzzling through a poem, I see a movement. A deer at the edge of the deck. Brown on green. Infinite gentleness.

I sit up straight, she sees me, goes still.

Ears high and aimed at me.

◊

When I try to listen in the Hambidge cottage, I realize it’s never really quiet. The house creaks and tics. There are birds outside. The fridge, every hour or two, hums for a while. Cars on a near road make an oceanic whooshing. And of course my tinnitus: a constant buzzing in my left ear from all the rock concerts and discos I went to in my 20’s.

Quieted, other quiet memories from my life, as if on an ice floe, drift by.

Waiting tables in a packed restaurant in Temple Bar in Dublin, August 1998, at noon the day after the Omagh bombing, we were quiet an entire minute. Not a glass clinked.

Sitting by myself in the desert sand outside Las Vegas in 1992.

Hanging upside down from a tree in Bear River in 1977.

Sitting to dinner with my parents, thousands of times, holding hands before we ate.

◊

It’s more about trying to be quiet—that intention, active listening—than a lack of noise.

Or perhaps, my wife who loves neuroscience might say, the poems come from synaptic firings, which occur in a kind of silence.

All I know is, when I’m quiet the poems happen.

When I allow myself the luxurious time and space to slow down and focus, poems spring up out of the cobwebs. The Elephant of Silence is seated in the middle of the room, his great trunk wrapped around my chair. The Elephant of Silence is the room.

I did not say the poems spring up out of myself, for I, and my feeble psyche, don’t feel like the wellspring. Poems arrive like deer. If I’m quiet, they sometimes surprise me with a visit. If I run up to grab them, they bound away.

II.

Silence is, rather than the negation of sound, quiet.

But is consciousness ever quiet? Not mine!

The mind is a noisy intersection between internal thoughts and external environment. Many of us search our entire lives to find a balance between internal and external, which compete incessantly. We use external stimulus, like music, to distract ourselves from unpleasant internal thoughts. Some drugs, like Adderall, treat this process as an imbalance that can be corrected chemically.

Some religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, suggest we use a mantra—a “sacred” utterance (like Om, or ॐ), considered to possess mystical qualities, repeated with eyes closed—to calm down the internal.

To some extent, I think, the good relaxing feeling derived from mantras, or creating in any form, comes from minimizing internal thoughts and external stimulus, and maximizing focus.

◊

 

Where does a poem come from? Quick answer: the consciousness of the poet.

Long answer: silence (as I define it), which includes quiet, contemplation, focus, oblivion.

Silence:

1. Absence of sound; quiet
2. Stillness; calmness; meditation; contemplation; imagination; dreams; the inner world
3. Fascination; sustained absorption; focus
4. Oblivion

First comes our intention to be quiet. With luck, we find it. I shut my eyes. I find a spot under a tree. I quit my job pouring drinks in a disco (Dublin, again). I buy earplugs.

Once I want quiet, it walks beside me. Nearer than I’d thought.

Stillness follows. Now I’m sitting, facing the window, not tapping my foot, not fidgeting. Breathing deeply. And with stillness comes images, the inner cities flashing with lightning.

Contemplation, or reflection, is the impulse toward stillness, and vice versa.

I’m no longer running through a crowded market just to get through it, but walking slow and breathing and pausing to look at the bearded man on a unicycle. I’m riding a bicycle rather than driving. I’m sitting by a lake rather than riding a bicycle.

I am the dreamer. The source of all poems.

With contemplation, images percolate, formlessly. Focus brings discipline to stillness. Focus brings form.

I’m sitting by the lake, a cloud catches my eye. Rather than just looking at the next cloud (or my phone), I hold that cloud in the mind, let it pool, see where it leads. Does it look like a fractured ship sinking into the blue? Is it Coleridge’s “painted ship”? Or Franklin’s ship, trapped in the blue ice of the Northwest Passage?

◊

I want quiet, it comes. The body goes still. The inner world shivers awake. I’m suddenly absorbed in my external environment. Objects pool, morph, go meaningful.

These states of mind can blend, occur in different order. Stillness might happen before quiet. Contemplation and focus might mean the same thing. Some dream, others “think.”

And, it’s worth repeating, by silence I don’t really mean the absence of sound. One can contemplate on a noisy street, with focus. Silence is possible within noise.

John Cage’s composition, 4’33” (1952), is about silence but not the lack of noise. His score instructs performers to take their places and not to play their instruments for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. As a result, the piece consists of the sounds of the environment that listeners hear while the performance lasts.

If we foster contemplation and focus, we can find form. Every artwork—no matter how vers libre it seems—has form. In Cage’s piece, the form (albeit malleable) is the length of time (4’33”), the performance space, the musicians, the audience, the time of day, the light.

◊

Oblivion is the limbo-feeling I sometimes get if I stare too long into the forest or night sky. It says that I am an insignificant speck on the face of the earth, and that my life and my poems are meaningless.

This is, I think, the feeling that scared me at twenty in the forest of Bear River. A feeling of lonesomeness bordering on worthlessness.

But if we hold the feeling of oblivion, and don’t resist it, its value emerges. Because the truth is, of course, we are insignificant specks on the face of the earth.

John Donne liked to imagine himself “coffind”: he posed for his own funeral monument, and slept in his future coffin. Such a reminder of death, putting our brief lives into perspective, is surely healthy.

But we should not stay in a coffin for a week. It’s like a whirlpool that sucks us down in the flesh and heaves us out a husk.

◊

The 1968 spaghetti western, Il Grande Silenzio (The Great Silence), directed by Sergio Corbucci, animates this idea of oblivion.

It’s a sublime revenge narrative. The main character, called Silencio, is the fastest draw in the West. As a child, bandits cut Silencio’s throat and kill his parents. During the film he, the “hero,” hunts them down. And falls in love with a Black woman named Pauline.

Il Grande Silenzio is set in winter, with great white vistas swallowing up the tiny towns. People freeze in snow, drown in frozen lakes. Everyone shivers. Death is close.

Corbucci leads us to think that the great silence is God, in the form of Silencio the savior. But at the end, the gang of bad guys (led by Klaus Kinski, with nasty charisma) murder all the good guys, including Silencio.

How refreshing! And uncomfortably realistic. The Great Silence, it turns out, is death, coming up the driveway for the good folks and the bad.

III.

By silence, I don’t mean secrecy or censorship; the silencing of voices. I’m not talking about passivity, or what Audre Lorde meant when she said, “Your silence will not protect you.”

Rather, the silence that encourages the opposite: the quiet that allows us to know ourselves. That lets us become more ourselves; more of whatever it is we are already.

◊

Allowing our wounds to surface (contemplation), holding those wounds long enough to write them down (focus), and deciding which wounds will stay in the poem (extended focus as editor), all require a degree of stillness and quiet and patience.

If we are telling the poem what to say, impatiently (viz. noisily), then the good parts (the cloud “magically” turning into Franklin’s ship) might not have a chance to evolve.

We artists love the accolades and the recognition of art, what little comes to us. But the crux of making artwork happens in moments of silence when we are alone. Or moments—among people, with or without noise—when we, like turtles, have withdrawn and found focus, which is an aspect of silence.

Such silence is the source of the work, its theater, its portal of transmission to the reader.

David Lynch describes, in his non-fiction book Catching the Big Fish, how meditation has been a tool for him to become the person and artist he is. The big fish, he says, is the great idea, the film, the line, the vision. We bring ourselves to the water and wait for it to break the surface.

We cannot force the big fish to come. All we can do is live a life that best allows us to glimpse it, when and if it comes.

◊

A simple and ancient idea. When we’re still and calm, the work appears to us. For an artist silence is, as Lao-Tzu said, “a source of Great Strength.”

Rumi summed it up well: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing there is a field. / I’ll meet you there. // When the soul lies down in that grass / the world is too full to talk about.”

Where does art come from? That field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing.”

◊

The deer visits me again. This time I’m reading, facing the big window.

I watch her, but do not move. I don’t even lower the book.

We are both completely still.

John Wall Barger’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hopkins Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, and elsewhere. His fifth book of poems, Resurrection Fail, is coming out this fall with Spuyten Duyvil Press. He’s a contract editor with Frontenac House, and teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. (johnwallbarger.com)

YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing) A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

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YOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing)
A Craft Essay by Mark Danowsky

In Poetics, Aristotle essentially defines a poet as someone who has “an eye for resemblances.” This is a nice reminder to look up, both literally and metaphorically, look around, look within, simply look. We are all trapped in our physical bodies while also inhabiting external spaces. What are your spaces? What is in these spaces?

People say, “Life happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Sometimes, in order to return to your writing, you need to live a little. This is not because you lack content. Flannery O’Connor famously says, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Writers each have their own metaphor for “waiting for the well to refill” so that their ability to approach the page becomes feasible.

When you’re not actively writing, or you feel like you’re not writing as much as you should, maybe you’re doing exactly what you need to be doing. Maybe what you need is a period of reflection. There are times for simply living life and times when you need to write to make sense of the world.

I used to believe all writers need a day job. What I really meant but did not yet understand was that writers need stimulation to encourage them to put pen to paper. It’s not necessarily what you do, it’s that you’re subconsciously soaking in data. In Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry, he writes, a good poem has an “arc of associations which corresponds to the inner life of the objects.” Basically, poetry is all about associative thinking. This is part of the reason I encourage cherry-picking material you enjoy from the various types of data foisted on us 24/7. Pay attention to the different environments you move through; watch how people in, around, and outside your bubble go about daily living; notice repetition and variation; reflect on the particular way your mind and your body move through days that are short and days that seem to go on forever.

A misstep is believing that living wild brings wildness to the page. Going to bars too often and driving Uber/Lyft may be the source of a few of my most entertaining stories, however, these are not the source of my better writing. The times in my life when I’ve been most productive are the times in my life when I’ve had structure and routine.

Writers have notoriously odd habits and routines surrounding their writing. Goethe had his thing with rotten apples; Auden kept a strict schedule (common) which included a daily dose of amphetamines (less common, not recommended); Dr. Seuss turned to hats (not surprising); Haruki Murakami maintains a strict schedule (common) that includes a considerable amount of exercise (also fairly common). Most writers have little practices that are a bit like superstitions.

I’ve heard variations on reasons why writers leave their daily work purposefully unfinished. I find this concept interesting; although, it is not part of my own writing practices. There are writers who say they stop in the middle of a sentence; who begin the new day’s writing by rewriting or re-typing the previous day’s work; who stop writing in the middle of a section because they know where they’re going (so it feels easier to get started the next day); who make a point of stopping while they still feel the urge the continue writing. It is almost exclusively writers who do not write poetry who I have heard speak in this way.

Ask a poet about The Muse and, whether or not they believe in this concept as beyond themselves, they will usually tell you that they write until the words stop coming. Most poets bleed themselves out. A notable exception, Mary Ann Saymn has said that her most notable strength as a poet is her ability to walk away from the page. You can feel it in her poetics. There is a very real distance between lines. The poet has deliberately chosen to let lines sit, to let the poem rest incomplete, to wait for the next best words to arrive.

Stephen Dobyns wrote a poetry craft book called Best Words, Best Order and then went on to write another craft guide called Next Word, Better Word. I find this both interesting and funny. The best words are only the best words for now. This is why poets and writers are often wrongly accused of writing “the same” thing over and over again. It’s not that Stephen King is writing the same book again, it’s that he’s still trying to write to best version based on his original intention.

Matthew Zapruder says, in Why Poetry, that “The poem is an experience of continual speculation and wondering.” To me, Zapruder is saying the poem is incomplete. Incomplete because it requires a reader to bring all of the reader’s experience and thoughts and beliefs to the table while in the act of reading the poem. Each time we encounter the poem, we bring a new version of ourselves. And so both the poem and the reader continues to evolve.

A great poem, a lasting poem, is both good now and good later. In his essay, The Figure a Poem Makes, Robert Frost encourages us to aim for a poem that we can reread over and over without it losing its power. In Frost’s words, “Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance.” Frost focuses attention on the importance of surprise in a poem. Famously, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” By contrast, Linda Gregg says, “Don’t make the reader do too much guesswork.” You always to have to work to find the sweet spot. The greatest Confessional poets were skilled at walking a tightrope of sentimentality. Too sentimental? You fall off an emotional cliff. It’s hard to do it right but so is anything worth doing.

Mark Danowsky, Poetry Craft Essays Editor, is a Philadelphia poet. He is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal, Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, and a regular contributor for Versification.

WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice, Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa, October 24 to November 21. [SOLD OUT]

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WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH!
Flash & Microfiction Practice
Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa
4 weeks: Sunday, Oct. 24 to Sunday, Nov. 21
Mostly asynchronous with one weekly Zoom meeting:
Sunday, October 24 – Intro; 11 am
Thursday, November 4, 6:30 pm
Sunday, Nov. 7, 11 am
Thursday, Nov. 18, 6:30 pm
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

SOLD OUT

Do you tend to procrastinate? Do you often do your best work under pressure? Do you sometimes start stories but never get around to finishing or revising them? Do you find the whole process of submitting work for publication stressful or depressing?

This four-week workshop is designed for busy writers who want to put writing time and accountability into their schedule with a combination of online prompts, real-time writing sessions, constructive revision suggestions, submission tips, and a group of writing buddies willing to take the submission plunge with you. We will focus on short flash (up to 500 words) and microfiction (up to 400 words). The first two weeks, we will work on generating new stories; in the third week, we’ll focus on revision; and by the fourth week, everyone will commit to submitting three stories for publication (as your classmates cheer you on).

Kathryn Kulpa, THE ART OF FLASH; AFTERBURN; FLASH BOOTCAMP; WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH!, (flash fiction and nonfiction) was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.

WRITING THE BODY, taught by Marnie Goodfriend, October 13 to November 17, 2021. [Cancelled]

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WRITING THE BODY
Taught by Marnie Goodfriend
6 Weeks
October 13 through November 17
Zoom meetings 6:30pm to 8:30pm ET on Wednesdays October 13, 20, 27, November 3, 10, 17
$300
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

Cancelled

We all live in and through our bodies. Connection to the self and how we perceive, and are perceived, by the world around us is intrinsically tied to the vessel we reside in. Bodies can be political battlegrounds, sacred spaces, pleasure palaces, and crime scenes. As creative nonfiction or hybrid writers, how can we deepen our writing and understanding of ourselves by looking at the layered relationship we have with our bodies?

Open to new and seasoned writers, this six-week workshop will focus on six pressure points to generate new material from different life experiences: eating, politics, health, intimacy, physical and emotional trauma, and crime. We will read works by writers such as Roxane Gay, Chanel Miller, Kiese Laymon, Maggie Nelson, and Porochista Khakpour to spark ideas about we can approach our own stories about the body.

Each class will include exercises, writing prompts, and discussions of assigned readings. Participants will workshop one essay and receive feedback on their generative writing in a safe and encouraging environment.

Marnie Goodfriend, WRITING THE BODY is a writer, sexual assault advocate, and social practice artist. She is a 2018 VCCA fellow, recipient of the Jane G. Camp scholarship, and a 2016 PEN America fellow. Her advocacy work, Write to Healing, helps sexual assault survivors reauthor their experience through narrative healing. Marnie’s essays, articles, and other writing appear in TIME, Washington Post, The Rumpus, She Knows, Health, and elsewhere.

Read her essay “Fund What You Fear” on Cleaver.

ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES, poems by Andrew Levy, reviewed by Johnny Payne

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ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES
by Andrew Levy
Chax, 176 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne

The traditional identification of poet and prophet is acceptable only in the sense that the poet is about as slow in reflecting his epoch as the prophet. If there are prophets and poets who can be said to have been ‘ahead of their time’, it is because they have expressed certain demands of social evolution not quite as slowly as the rest of their kind.

Trotsky said it best: “All through history, the mind limps after reality.”  The aloof intelligentsia continues to believe in the power of reason alone to move the world.  No amount of revolution has yet changed this fact.  As a recent electoral outcome pretends to remedy the hyper-capitalistic state of siege in which we all currently exist, neoliberalism, a name which in itself has become insufficient to describe the evolving phenomenon, applies an over-the-counter balm to a suppurating gangrenous wound.

Into this hyperkinetic stasis comes Artifice in the Calm Damages by Andrew Levy.  It is a series of meditations on the self as written repeatedly onto a historical palimpsest in an attempt to describe a personal politics adequate to the age of dread in which we exist.  This act requires a pilfering through of the self, though not in the conventional manner in which a poet might revisit his childhood, or love affairs.  It is, at bottom, a history of mind.

Levy, in his poetry, is both in time and out of time, fast and slow, that his method of composition stages the flux of a disconcerting, cognitive-ideological fugue state of existence.  It is a state of shock, like experiencing the shocks of a car with a shot engine. You drive, not like the Angel of History flying, head backward, body forward, beleaguered yet elegant in pushing against the wind of the future-past, but jolted on a rutted dirt road, with your hands on the wheel, feeling yourself stupid and jerky, gunning the engine but not quite in control.

Detected and corrected,
The resting places within the poem are allographically
Indistinguishable.
—From “Destroying Exculpatory Evidence”

Andrew Levy

All the way down to the fonts, the cursive or blocking handwriting, the poem’s unique stamp can easily get effaced in the complexity of the political age.  The demand for instant meaning, declaration, relevance, doesn’t easily allow for the “resting places” of personal meditation on the self and on the act of writing.  Levy’s very style of writing, while theatrical, often feels like a fertile prelude, rather than the grand gesture of meaning.  He is constantly hedging his bets, inviting us into long lulls of cognition, ones that require patience. The poet exists as an enlightened copyist, as a scribe, a witness to devastation, issuing warnings of the now and trying to awaken historical consciousness.  That is the artifice in the calm damages.  There is found text, and quotations with or without attribution, as the voices of wisdom speak in turn within each poem.At its height, we are given excerpts like the following:

“Get your breath,” Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn said:
“When you utter a word before God, then enter
into that word with every one of your limbs.”
One of his listeners asked: “How can a big human
being possibly enter into a little word?” “Anyone who
thinks himself bigger than the word,” said the zaddik,
“is not the kind of person we are talking about.”
—From “Nothing is Free of Presence

Here, sacred knowledge, while ultimately usable, runs counter to applied knowledge.  The enjoinder to dwell in such questions and riddles suggests that any philosophy, ultimately, gets evaluated as a wisdom tradition.  Sacred and secular (materialism vs. kabbalah) are not seen as being in opposition.  They are streams of thought that issue into the same big river. Reading these pages, one thinks of the great parable makers, entirely comfortable with living inside indeterminacy, not as a “language experiment,” but existentially—as though one might say, “Speak a combination of sentiment, sense and nonsense, because we might be here a long time.”  The sentimental satirist Isaac Babel comes to mind, eye sharp yet deeply committed emotionally.  Economics may lie at the heart of our malaise, and Levy fully explores that reality in his poems, yet the playful qualities and the beating heart of the book belie either mere pragmatic dogmatism or head-scratching flight into language in itself.  Significant value resides in this dialectical gesture of inward gathering, whether abstruse or simply shy of declaration, and the outward thrust of praxis.  The latter is repeatedly arrived at, but all in good time, and as a continuous process rather than a thunderous blast of insight.

The enigma of existence censors and remakes, as
well as mission control, is ridiculed by another group at
the nearest borders of heaven.  Such consumption
of anthropomorphic thinking splatters in the blink
of an eye.We do not see the beginning—one can’t help it—
or the end.  No promises are made.
—From  “Nothing is Free of Presence”

That is the genius of this volume, to eschew the prophetic, teleology, and to focus on that blank slate, that refusal to promise, and to present a ‘clear enigma.’  The book is path-breaking in that regard, when the language poetry phase has exhausted whatever modest value it possessed in shaking up sensibility and has passed into sheer commodity.

Real things become garbage.
Your request for information and its corresponding
Rhetorical analysis is caught forever in the structure
Of words.  The garden as a heterogeneous site
Is a collage of the real?
—From, “Gender-specific Headfuckery”

It is that “real” as alpha and omega that keeps these poems grounded in a discourse of action, rather than fetishizing the “aloof intelligentsia” of which Trotsky so long ago complained.  Gramsci said it clearly: “Given the principle that one should look only to the artistic character of the work of art, this does not in the least prevent one from investigating the mass of feelings and the attitude towards life present in the work of art itself.”  Such a statement, which should now be obvious among even those of us who believe that form precedes content, has gotten muddied by Anglo experimentation of the late 20th century, the winds of which blew their crumpled paper into verbal arroyos, skipping its way toward an ideological landfill, without them ever considering words as an actual form of material reality—rather, they were supposedly only ‘signifiers without referents,’ which is ultimately skewed Platonism masquerading as radical displacement.  For once, in Artifices, the overworn term “reification,” so abused by post-structuralists, lands. Hearken below to Levy’s tender marriage of high concept to image.  Reminding us he is first and last a poet, he uses here, as in many places, a striking and mysterious image to situate us within his thoughts.

The smoky and sline heart can be forgiven or withdrawn,
And that may help us understand something about who
is being deceived and who no longer has anything to
Unveil. There may be a serious flaw in our delirium,
A series of traps for the capture of objects.
—From “Destroying Exculpatory Evidence”

Again, the calm damages are patiently, steadfastly cataloged by Levy with subjective objectivity, emphasis on the “object.”  Damage happens to humans as beings, their physical suffering going beyond idealism toward dialectical nominalism.  It is a conjectural version of W.C. Williams’s “No ideas but in things,” half-destroyed detritus that is charged with illumination.  That’s what we have to work with.

Let us imagine as far as we please; a limited number of phenomena,
may decompose the act which divides an impalpable but probable
body of metaphor, fathers and mothers never to be restored
except as lovers in the abyss.
—From “Lovers in the Abyss”

Trotsky spoke true when he observed that Futurism’s violent oppositional character did not absolve it from reckoning with the past.  Its advanced-guard nature didn’t necessarily speak to the objective needs of the working class (into which we can now add an eroded middle class, turned virtual working-class unable to afford property, and for whom participation in consumer culture no longer satisfies, or masks the ideological contradictions in which they exist).  He speaks true in declaring: “it is not necessary to make a universal law of development out of the act of pushing away.”

That is the dilemma that the forward-looking writer faces, yet Levy’s grounding in the affective, such as sincere, non-ironic contemplation of rabbinical wisdom, effaces secularism as a goal in itself.  In the calm damages, knowledge is wherever you find it.  In the verses below, language in fact finds you, and in that resides its power.  You don’t just use language to form thoughts.  Language breaks you open, it pushes against you, insinuating respect for its nature as language in itself.  It disturbs, and out of that disturbance, consciousness evolves.

Only a debased
Class believes one owns words.  But the meaning of words
Continues to be contested, to be built upon.  Sometimes you
Don’t have to invite them, they just come up into your living
Room. You can get used to them being there in the basic
Atomic structure of matter.  A petro-melancholia made to fit
Until you have to throw yourself out.
—From “Beauty in this Digital Eden”

It is there, in the intersection between petro-melancholia and absolute knowledge of one’s “deer-like self,” that this transcendent collection resides.  Beckett’s characters resided in trash bins.  Gorky’s The Lower Depths drew pessimistic, if insightful, conclusions, setting up a limited situation regarding human endeavor and the possibility of self-understanding.  Levy’s message is, if deliberately and necessarily inconclusive, more redemptive.  It fucks with our heads, offering no permanent or secure location, taking away with one hand what it has given with the other.  In the end, there is no single authoritative set of playful-serious declarations, rather the artifice of the real.  There might be a benign “master narrative” that would guide political action, but we don’t know what it is. Meanwhile, we make sallies into the immediate sphere, doing what work we can.

I believe the best times are still ahead for our species.
At this time, I prefer a small to a medium-sized platform.
And yes I like to swing straight ahead sometimes.  I write
Explicitly circular.  The social comprehension is perceived
At once.  Abandoned by my brother, ice cubes become
A giant rumbling. The goal is to take them hostage.
—From the poem, “Because you’re a Socially Aware Person”

Johnny Payne author photoJohnny Payne is a poet, playwright, director, and novelist.  His recent books include his book of essays on French and Latin American poetry, under his alter ego Étienne D’Abattoir; the novel Confessions of a Gentleman Killer; and the plays Death by Zephyr and Cannibals.  He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University.

Masterclass in Visual Narrative Memoir with Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg, October 2 to November 6, 2021

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Visual Memoir
VISUAL MEMOIR
Masterclass in Visual Narrative Memoir
with Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg
6 weeks
Zoom meetings Saturdays 12:00-2:00 ET, 10/2, 10/9 , 10/16 , 10/23 , 10/30, 11/6
$300 
Class limit: 12
Register Now
Visual Narrative, both ancient and of the moment, is a powerful and unique way of storytelling that employs words and images to maximize the communication of thoughts and ideas. 
Join Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg this fall for a 6-week advanced workshop in visual narrative memoir. Bring a project you are already working on or one you have been wanting to dive into for a long time. This class offers creative community and feedback for students looking to deepen their craft and move to the next level. All visual mediums are welcomed including drawing, video, collage, photography, and anything else you can think of. 
Bring your curiosity, enthusiasm, and a desire to find out what happens at the intersection of words and images.
Emily Steinberg, MFA, is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and comics and serves as Cleaver’s Visual Narrative Editor.  Her work has most recently been published by The New Yorker Magazine and is included in Menopause: A Comic Treatment, which won the Eisner Award for Best Comics Anthology, 2021. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg is a lecturer in Fine Arts at Penn State University, Abington College, and Artist in Residence Drexel College of Medicine where she teaches visual narrative to medical students. 

SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLEm a craft essay by Laraine Herring

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SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
A Craft Essay by Laraine Herring

I was eight years old when the tree spoke to me. My dad had just gotten out of the hospital after a near-fatal heart attack, and I would ride my bike down to my elementary school to escape the new person who’d replaced the father who told jokes and let me walk across his back. I always brought a book. I’d lean up against the massive oak’s trunk, nestling in among the raised roots, and let the tree hold me. When she spoke, I thought it was the wind. When she spoke again, I thought it was birdsong. The third time, I knew I was both losing my faculties and gaining something magical. Her bark scratched at the place I couldn’t reach on my back. Her voice crept around the edges of my eardrums.

I won’t tell you what she said because it’s private, and because she’s dead, her voice alive only inside me. She was bulldozed down to make space for more classrooms sometime after we left North Carolina for Arizona in the early 80s. I tried to take my husband to meet her on a trip back home, but I found only concrete and steel, no hints of her whisper in the thick air. I cried on the new playground in the noon heat. She was gone. How had I not felt her leave? How it must have hurt to be rooted and unable to run when the saws came.

When I was undergoing surgery for colon cancer in 2017, I was pinned to a table, breathing anesthesia, unable to move when the knives came. Unlike my tree, I didn’t die, but part of me was sacrificed so I could continue to live. I don’t remember what happened in the operating room, but my body remembers I was not there to protect her when the surgeons drew out my blood. I still feel her fear when I touch the scars on my belly. My skin speaks to me, not in English, but in colors and sounds.

◊

What language should a writer use for these liminal moments? How do we express a truth that is outside of linear time and dimensional space?

The colon’s function is similar to that of a tree’s roots. They both absorb the necessary water for the organism to survive and create a microbiome that helps all the other systems thrive. When roots rot, when the colon gets cancer, the future is unsteady. When I emerged from treatment, the edges of my world had blurred. My borders had shifted, and the story I wanted to tell was pulled from experiences I couldn’t point to on any map. Reality had become fluid; perceptions opening and closing like a fish gasping for air. I was in two worlds, grasping for footing.

I understand my world through what lives on the edges—the whispers of a tree, the energy in an object, the ghost in the kitchen. They are more real to me than rock, steel, and brick. When I write my stories, I infuse them with what I know: sentient places, hauntings, and dreams.

◊

Was there room in literature for me and my story? A fractured person with a severed root system? And if so, what form would best reveal the truth?

I wanted to explore what happened internally after my cancer diagnosis. I wanted to write about my dead father and his dead parents, and I wanted to write into the ghostly arms of grief. My hauntings are my companions. You can’t see them, but I meet them every day. We break bread beneath my tree, and we trade stories of the dark.

“Write a novel instead,” I was told by more than one writer-friend. “Readers of memoir won’t accept that this is real.” I thought about it. I’d written novels before. I love fiction. But calling my inner journeys fiction would be the lie—a disservice to a lived experience. If I denied my tree’s voice, what kind of friend did that make me? If I still feel her, solid trunk, scratching branches, why would I disrespect her by dismissing her presence?

Speculative memoir allows for an explosion of the inner landscape. By utilizing speculative elements to dramatize an internal transformation, a work becomes elevated and opens to stories that transcend the five senses. Through speculating, we gain new vision.

◊

The day after my diagnosis, I started drawing again for the first time in thirty years. At the time, I only had an iPad and my finger—no stylus—but I enjoyed playing with color and shape, and my touch on the screen soothed me. The first piece I created was a silhouetted witch holding a lantern, walking with her black cat on a bright orange background. I knew that no matter what happened with cancer, I was about to go somewhere unfamiliar. I was going under. I was going in.

I printed that piece and pinned it above my computer, and it served as a guide for my forthcoming book, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. The journey of the book wasn’t cancer, though that was certainly something I experienced. The story of the book, the truth of the book, was how cancer triggered an exploration of unresolved grief and intergenerational trauma. The external period of that year of my life was spent mostly indoors, mostly in the bathroom, and mostly in bed. But the landscape of my interior lit up, and on that velvet-curtained stage, my dead father appeared to me as a raven and began to speak.

Raven brought me a book. Raven brought me a voice, and he brought me here to you, on a bridge made of marks on a screen, suspended on the trestle of magical, invisible Wi-Fi.

We can’t see it or touch it, but we all know it is there.

Laraine HerringLaraine Herring’s latest book, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens, will be released in October 2021. She’s the author of a trilogy of writing books, including Writing Begins with the Breath; a tenured professor of psychology; a book coach for women over 40; and the founder of Hags on Fire, an online ‘zine for women writing about menopause and aging.

THE WRITING LAB: Playful Experiments to Unstuck Your Writing, taught by Tricia Park, Oct 3 – Nov 14, 2021

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THE WRITING LAB:
Playful Experiments to Unstuck Your Writing
Taught by Tricia Park
A 6-week Generative Writing Boost
6 weeks: Oct 3 – Nov 14
Mostly Asynchronous with two Zoom Meetings:
10-11 am ET on Sunday, Oct 3 and
10-11 am ET on Sunday, Nov 14
$300
Class Limit 12
Questions: [email protected]

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

—Anne Lamott

Register Now

Stuck in a writing rut? Don’t know how to get started? Together, we’ll give ourselves permission to start where we are, with curiosity, no matter how stuck we may feel. In this class, we’ll discover the “play” of writing, with prompts and generative exercises that’ll get you unstuck and boost your writing practice into high gear.

THIS CLASS IS OPEN TO WRITERS OF ALL LEVELS AND GENRES. In this workshop, we’ll generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide and receive feedback on writing you produce in our workshop. We welcome new and experienced writers, who are looking for structure, guidance, and support with your writing practice.

This class offers weekly deadlines and assignments but you can work at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom check-in or two to provide additional support and inspiration.)

What you’ll get in this class:

  • Gently intriguing prompts to jumpstart your creativity
  • Reading and discussion of texts by inspiring writers.
  • A safe and supportive environment to cultivate your writing.
  • Small, clearly defined weekly assignments to keep you motivated.
  • New writing that you can continue to nurture and grow at home.

 

Each week, we’ll explore exercises/prompts that I hope will generate work that will surprise and delight you. We’ll also read and discuss texts that I’ll provide for you as examples to emulate and prompt new writing. Most importantly, I am looking forward to the community we’ll create together so that you may feel free to loosen up and take new, playful risks in your writing.

There will be space to share your work and receive feedback on your writing. I’ll provide clear guidelines for constructive feedback on new and early drafts. The focus of this class is to develop your practice and generate new writing!

If possible, I encourage you to write long-hand for your generative work and then transcribe to the Canvas discussion board but a laptop or tablet is also fine.

Note: The Canvas platform works best with the Chrome and Firefox browsers. If you are experiencing technical difficulties in Safari, try accessing the class in a different browser. There is also a Canvas Student App available through Apple or Google Play.

CLASS OVERVIEW:

Week One: Getting Started

Natalie Goldberg advises, “Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.” Getting started is often the hardest part. We’ll answer prompts to remind ourselves that writing is just thinking out loud and that we already do it every day.

Week Two: Freewriting and Playfulness

Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “I made a decision long ago that if I want creativity in my life – and I do – then I will have to make space for fear, too.” We’ll find ways to move through resistance as we approach our writing with playfulness and curiosity. We’ll dive into freewriting and whimsical exercises/prompts.

Week Three: Using our Senses

Maya Angelou reminds us that “once you appreciate…one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.” Sensory details infuse our writing with richness and dimension. We’ll respond to prompts that encourage us to take in our surroundings and connect with our senses.

Week Four: “Gaming” our Writing

In this class we will explore ways we can “game” our writing, approaching it obliquely with a light-hearted touch. We’ll see how prioritizing “play” through constraints and rules can, paradoxically, free up our writing.

Week Five: Following Our Obsessions

We all have core obsessions that keep us up at night, occupying our minds in a constant and regular way. Why not put our obsessions to good use? Rather than controlling our fascinations, we’ll channel them into our writing.

Week Six: Writing Down Memory Lane

Lois Lowry says, “I’ve always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.” We’ll delve into our unique memory banks to mine our past and present, generating writing that is bound to surprise us.

Tricia Park Author PhotoTricia Park is a concert violinist, writer, and educator. She is a music graduate of The Juilliard School and received her MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tricia is a  Fulbright Grant Awardee in Creative Writing and currently resides in Seoul, Korea, where she’s working on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and has received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia has served on faculty at The Juilliard School, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa. She has taught creative writing for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa and is on faculty for Cleaver Magazine, where she teaches writing workshops and is a Creative Non-Fiction editor. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Tricia also maintains a private studio of violin/viola students and writing clients.  Learn more about Tricia and listen to her podcast at: www.isitrecessyet.com. Listen to Tricia play violin at: https://www.youtube.com/c/triciapark

REVISING *IS* WRITING: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Self-Editing in Creative Nonfiction, a Master Class in Craft by Lise Funderburg, Sunday November 21, 2021

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REVISING *IS* WRITING:
Unlocking the Creative Potential of Self-Editing in Creative Nonfiction
A Master Class in Craft
with Cleaver Creative Nonfiction Editor Lise Funderburg
Sunday, Nov 21, 2021, 12-pm to 2 pm ET
$50
Class limit: 18
Questions: [email protected]

Register Now

The unsung hero of the creative process is revision, but the aversion to it that so many of us feel can be laid at the feet of most of our experiences of formal schooling, wherein NO ONE ever showed us how to engage with work past the first draft. In this technique-based master class, Lise will teach you strategies and practices that will take your creative nonfiction projects from their jumbled beginnings to polished, publishable gems.

Lise Funderburg HeadshotLise Funderburg’s latest book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, a collection of all-new work by twenty-five writers, which Publishers Weekly deemed a “sparkling anthology” in its starred review. Previous books include the memoir, Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and the recently reissued collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity. Her work has been published in the New York Times, TIME, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, MORE, Chattahoochee Review, Oprah Magazine, and Prevention. Lise has been awarded residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, Thurber House, and Blue Mountain, among others, and she won a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches at the Paris Writers’ Workshop.

Crafting a Great Personal Essay, taught by Lise Funderburg, October 10-31, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

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Crafting a Great Personal Essay
Taught by Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Lise Funderburg
4 Weeks
October 10-31
Synchronous with asynchronous writing assignments
12-pm to 3 pm ET on Sundays, October 10, 17, 24, 31
$200
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

SOLD OUT

Writing from personal experience is always a double-edged sword in Creative Nonfiction: on the one side, we have almost limitless access to material. On the other, familiarity often breeds blind spots, cheating the work of dimension, resonance, and narrative drive. In this generative and reflective series of workshops, we will build strategies and craft practices that help you to hone your personal essays/memoirs until they shine.

SYLLABUS

In addition to the time we’ll have together in Zoom, expect to spend 2-3 hours each week on readings and writing assignments. And while it is not detailed below, there will be many opportunities to give and receive feedback on the work everyone creates for the class.

Week One: What Makes A Great Personal Essay Great?

We’ll start off by sharing and dissecting several short personal essays from great practitioners of the craft. This will help everyone identify the components and potential of personal essays, and at the same time, amass an arsenal of strategies and techniques to experiment with in your own work. With explicit guidance and writing prompts, you’ll also have the chance to generate your own material.

Week Two: Experimenting with Form

Any essay can be lyrical, but not all essays can be lyric. Lyric refers to approach and form: generally speaking, lyric essays push past conventional boundaries by enlisting formal aspects of poetry and unusual structures. Examples include Braided essays, Collage essays, and this week’s celebrity guest star, The Hermit Crab essay. This week we consider the essay’s exoskeleton, the way a writer’s choice of form creates possibilities and limitations. You’ll have several exemplary short essays to read, all of which use recognizable, conventional modes of communication….then subvert them through unlikely content. After that, you’ll have a go at it.

Week Three: Revising Your Way to Greatness

We’ll have an in-class freewrite, of course, but beyond that, this week is all about strategies for revision, methods and action steps and critical-distance-creating exercises that are meant to refresh your perspective on the work at hand and offer new ways of accessing it, even after you’ve read it over for the umpteenth time.

Week Four:

In this, our final week, you are asked to look both behind and ahead. You’ll consider where you are in your writing practice and how it’s grown, some of which will be made evident in a supersized workshop. You’ll also create a plan of attack for what to do next and how to keep your creative engine running.

Lise Funderburg HeadshotLise Funderburg’s latest book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, a collection of all-new work by twenty-five writers, which Publishers Weekly deemed a “sparkling anthology” in its starred review. Previous books include the memoir, Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and the recently reissued collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity. Her work has been published in the New York Times, TIME, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, MORE, Chattahoochee Review, Oprah Magazine, and Prevention. Lise has been awarded residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, Thurber House, and Blue Mountain, among others, and she won a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches at the Paris Writers’ Workshop.

VOICE LESSONS Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry, taught by Claire Oleson, October 16 – Nov 20, 2021

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VOICE LESSONS
Identifying and Creating Perspective in Poetry
Taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson
October 16 – Nov 20
Asynchronous with optional Zoom meetings 11 am ET on Oct 23,30 and Nov 20
$200
Questions: [email protected]
Class Limit: 14

Register Now

In this course, we will plunge into the murky waters of what is meant by “voice” in poetry. Each week, we will look at two to three poems by a single poet and investigate how they bring something of the same perspective, tone, specificity, and selfhood to different poetic projects. In light of this investigation, participants will be invited to work on their uses of voice in their own poetry. This class is designed to create a platform on which to find, develop, and hone the connective tissue between different works by the same writer. For five weeks, participants will be encouraged to find themselves within their language and explore the ways in which they may take on an identifiable style while maintaining flexibility across different pieces.

We will work primarily on generating new work, encouraging participants to push their boundaries and hone their voice to create memorable and authentic work. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on the spaces between poems that the participants bring to class.

We will read a few selections of poetry weekly that demonstrate the application of different uses of voice in poetry. By the end of the course, participants will have a better handle on how and where their voice exists in their own work, allowing for more intention and awareness of its application. Far from considering poems as singular revelations in a void, this class is one that is fundamentally about context. Inevitably, we bring our lives and ourselves to the page when we might not mean to: how can we begin to do this with consciousness, control, and thought to how our poems talk to each other?

The readings will be brief but rich, with the intent of inviting multiple re-readings, close readings, note-taking, and flexibility for everyone’s lives and work. Supplemental reading will be available for those hungry for more plums from the proverbial icebox. Prompts will be provided inspired by the week’s reading, but will be designed more as springboards for beginning rather than hard-and-fast regulations. Work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One piece will be chosen by the student for revision for the final class. Optional Zoom conferences will be held to discuss the reading for those interested. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.

A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work.

Instructor Bio

Claire OlesonClaire Oleson is the winner of the 2019 Newfound Chapbook Prize and a graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. She has participated in graduate writing workshops with the Kenyon Review, where she also worked for the entirety of her undergraduate career. She has worked as a TA for Northwestern University’s summer creative writing courses. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Sugar House Review, among others. She currently serves as the poetry editor for Cleaver and lives and works in NYC.

 

Schedule (October 16 – Nov 20)

New Modules posted on Mondays,

Pieces due by Friday, 11:59,

Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59

Optional Zoom sessions on Saturdays at 11 am ET

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What is voice?

We will open with an investigation of what “voice” means and how its both employed (and oftentimes, entirely ignored) in poetry. This week will focus on learning to see how the voice of a poet can be seen across different works of theirs that have totally different goals, but still carry the same author in their stanzas.

2: Joy and Grief

We will take a look at how the same poet approaches heartbreak and celebration. We will explore what places change and what uses of language and mood are maintained between two different emotional extremes captured by the same artist.

3: The Picture and the Lecture

This module will invite an analysis of poems that “show” and poems that would rather drag out their soap box and have you sit down, no pictures included. We will ask how the same voice illuminates the imagistic and the didactic and what survives or dies off between these modes of communication.

4: Caged and Free-Range

In this second to last week, we will dive into two poems: one that embraces a strict form and one that shirks most formal elements in favor of free verse. We’ll ask what it looks like to dress a voice in constraints and what it might mean to let it lead itself, and the language, on instinct and whim.

5: A New Tone

In this final module, we will take a moment to look at pieces by an author that look completely different in both project and voice by the same poet. This week, participants will be invited to make work that encapsulates something totally outside the voice they’ve begun to develop, allowing both the use of voice, and its absence, to become intentional.