|
|
SoFloPoJo Contents: Home * Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Calendar * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar
Prior Essays: Essays 2020-2021 Essays 2022-2023
ESSAYS - November 2025: Madari Pendas & Rachel Whalen
Madari Pendas
|
Season of Attempted Healing
Every year, for the past twelve years, I've tried to write this essay. The attempt usually begins in the spring. The Crepe Myrtle trees hold their pink, papery leaves; tabebuia trees spiral and petal the sidewalk with their yellow flowers; light rain poxes the afternoons, cooling the evenings. A new year delicately unfolds. In some cultures, a new year is celebrated by walking around the block with empty suitcases so the universe may fill the valise with travels. A new spring. Airy, vibrantly pink, and not as heavily scheduled as the fall. Daffodils, hyacinths, and pansies open up, their petals yawning open, refreshed. If spring were a color, it'd be a pastel blue. If it were a word, it'd have lots of plosives, like "pip pip." Pip pip hooray. Each spring, I try to share what happened to me, how he happened to me. I think enough time has finally passed to write about my relationship with my abusive ex-partner, whom I dated when I was nineteen and he was thirty. We met at an improv comedy event, and as time passed, he became more verbally and sexually abusive. I didn't have a support network at the time. I was able to leave once he left for a few months for an internship at a prison (I know, ironic), and blocked him on all platforms. Several years later, he committed suicide. A few months after his birthday. ~ The new year is sometimes celebrated by tossing molten tin into water and interpreting the silver shapes. I wonder what shape my metal takes. A straight line for a pen means I'll find a suitable means to talk about my past. Or a circle. Recurrence. I'll keep writing about him indefinitely. Pain like the spring cycle itself, a push of petals and then a wilt once I'm stuck again. At nineteen, I tried to draft the story for the first time. I vacillated between pronouns, sometimes referring to him as "you" and other times as "him." A poetic vestige, an archaic impulse to address someone directly. I hoped he'd read it and I'd, somehow, be vindicated. I thought all poetry needed to be directed at someone as though writing for oneself was indulgent or undisciplined. In E.E. Cumming's "[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]" he writes to his you: …and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant/ and whatever a sun will always sing is you. During this period, I didn't submit my work for publication. Art was utilitarian, militarized, a beautiful accounting of wrongs in private. That first draft was a linguistic exorcism. In Spanish we call venting "desahogándose," to un-drown oneself. I was forcing air back into my lungs, bobbing as the waves pummeled me mid-speech. So, the idea of submitting anything for publication had an intrusive quality. I wasn't ready, and neither was the work. Besides pronoun confusion, I switched between tenses erratically, unsure of where in my timeline to place him. I couldn't use any other tense but present. While the past tense mitigated the pain, it was dishonest. The past had not passed (to paraphrase Faulkner). My body still reeled from where he had choked me. It wasn't past. If I had tried to use the future tense, what would I have said? One day I'll stand up to you? I will survive you. Writing in the future tense invited theorizing, along with the hope that I'd one day be a survivor or someone strong enough to confront him. And rarely did I believe I had a future. ~ Craft knowledge has helped my attempts. In fact, it's given me myriad options and ways of exploring the theme of abuse and domestic violence. It's also made me aware of the importance of distance and not being so detailed that the reader is repulsed. I tried using his autopsy report, which contained a list of his organs and their respective weights. That had to be something? His brain weighed 1,368 grams. How could I use that in my work? What did it mean to see him summed in this detached way? How do I fix/alter/add to an incomplete accounting of a person? His heart weighed 340 grams. Barely a pound. He was so little, and I wish I had recognized that earlier. Just a collection of averages. ~ In my second draft I tried everything. I ran through a litany of controlling metaphors, used the organ weights to talk about the characteristics associated with each part (heart = emotional; brain= calculating; liver= diluting my complaints), compared him to a canker sore, then to a parasite, and finally called him a mother and daughter's reason for uncomfortable conversations. ~ From the third draft: Even if he calls you prude or withholding or dog-faced leave a part of yourself he can't reach. ~ Here are excerpts from that draft, all direct quotes from D–: I'm not going to apologize for what I like/ my ex said the same thing One summer I worked as a Mexican/ you go talk to the landscapers/ You need to work on your bedside manner/ Your problems are nothing/I have to turn in a dissertation/ You’re not as funny as you think you are/ Would you convert for me?/ Sorry for the backne/ Tell her I'm your boyfriend/ The butterflies have turned to moths in my stomach/ Who is this?/ My mom fucked up the computer again/bitch/ Hold still/open the shirt up/ Take off my boots/ I like the power/ Smile when you take them off/ Now/now/now ~ D–'s legacy is preserved by his death. His name is hollowed and protected by all those who signed his digital obituary, sharing their memories of him, calling him a wonderful soul and person. He's lionized by all those who feel a pit in their stomach on the anniversary of his suicide, by all those who light a single candle in July for his birthday. I want there to be at least a footnote. My story. ~ ~ White, popcorn ceiling, pockmarks near the window– the window: mango tree leaves, dark & waxy; One mango, swings. Is it ready to fall, crack on the ground? Invite gadflies & squirrels & a necklace of ants? Rot is quick, faster on an exposed root or rock. Carpet is gray, shagged, as if it's grown out, pushed through Concrete roots, long enough to chafe & catch mottled strands Of my brown hair. Near the door, I think I see the fading Imprints of Converse, coming in. TV blares, news, a handsome woman, professional/polished only moves her lips, Something bad is happening somewhere in the world. Somewhere. ~ My dad drove me once to D–'s parents' house, and as he pulled into the gated Pinecrest neighborhood, he leaned towards the window to look at the mansions, the luxury vehicles in the driveways, the manicured hedges, and fountains. Elysium. Our car slowed to a roll. "Wow," he mumbled. "Tremendas casas." I looked at him, then away. My dad and I are different. He admires the rich and was raised to believe they'd all earned their statuses and material wealth. He doesn't think of mammonism or exploitation or the way the inhabitants of this gated community would treat him, a mixed-race Cuban immigrant. At the gate, he saw D– dressed in a coffee stained XXL long shirt, basketball shorts and black Nike slides. It was another reason I hated the rich–they didn't even need to try to impress or think about other's perceptions. As I walked from one man to another, I felt wrong. Like a misspelled word. Interloper. Traitor. ~ When I take off his boots, I look inside, there must be something in this black lug sole, sweeps of mildew & sweat, he walked in the rain, mud seeped into the laces, thick, turgid. I wonder for how long & if he took a wrong turn, and pitched into a patch of Seville grass; When will the smell be enough to warrant their disposal? ~ Three years ago, I turned D–'s obituary into a black out poem. |
|
~
Edwidge Danticat wrote in Create Dangerously. "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them." ~ How should reality be rendered? Do readers deserve a happy ending or to walk away feeling like while there are awful things in this world, they can (all) be overcome? Can't I just be slightly fucked up? The best stories refuse to offer contrived closure. I have scars, deep and white, a trench in the flesh with tapered ends. When I look at mine, the lines darting across my forearms, they remind me of the lines of a poem, curated, short, flush with hope. A draft on my body. |
Madari Pendas is a writer, poet, painter, and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in Craft, The Columbia Journal, The Masters Review, The Maine Review, and more. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (2021) and She Loves me, She Loves me Not (2025).
Rachel Whalen
|
Troubled by Uncertainties: A Personal and Etymological Meditation With “Carrion Comfort”
“I am so happy. I am so happy.” These are the last words of Gerard Manley Hopkins.[1] He said this 33 years before his terrible sonnets, “Carrion Comfort” among them, were published. Carrion: flesh in its inevitable, dreaded state; dead and putrefying. Comfort: derived from the Old English frofor, a “state of enjoyment resulting from satisfaction of bodily wants and freedom from anxiety.”[2] Carrion comfort: an atrocious oxymoron, the seductive anguish, the macabre attraction, the half-step between terrible and terrific. “Carrion Comfort”[3] is a poem I carry in my chest. By its perplexing magic, it names the mask it wears, and in so doing it banishes and worships, evokes and casts away. I first heard it in a creative writing seminar with poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, who taught me a lot about the incantatory properties of language. She read the poem aloud in our class, and I couldn’t breathe straight until I returned later that night to that same emptied classroom and wrote it out in sprawling, ghostly white letters on the chalkboard. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s time, the word “anxiety” barely had a century and a half of life. Anxiety, alluding to the self as against itself; “anxiety,” coming from angere, augere, “to choke, squeeze”; for our poet, a 120-year-old full-fledged (but relatively young) word meaning “greatly troubled by uncertainties.”[4] There is nothing more uncertain than a negative. “Carrion Comfort” begins with a “not,” and Hopkins hammers it two more times in the first line. “Not, I’ll not,” he writes in three relentless stresses. He is just one contraction away from saying “I’m not,” in denying himself. But the first line only flirts with the idea of self-negation; crucially, he uses the self as an actor that does and firmly is. “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.” A self-conviction? I’ll not. I’ll not. I’ll not. Will I? The future tense in this first action, yet to be realized (if ever it is), and its self-convincing repetition create both an affirmative declaration and an expression of deep skepticism. Will I go through with it? Will this plane crash? Will my loved ones make it home? Will I make the right decision? Will I survive myself? In the first stanza, our poet grapples with these great uncertainties—and then, a shimmer of hope: “I’ll not… most weary cry, I can no more. I can.” An affirmation. Yes, I can! A fleeting, two-word triumph. But it’s immediately deflated: What can the speaker do? “Can something”? “Not choose not to be”? There it is again, that “not” tolling something dreadful. We could cancel out the negatives here and read this as “I will choose to be,” but that’s not what the poet writes; the best his speaker can do is confirm that he can try to not be not. What does it mean to not be a negative? Keats would say that it’s certainly not the same as being a positive,[5] and Hopkins conjures these infinite terrifying possibilities with one deft stroke. The speaker is not that dreaded unknowingness; but that very declaration eclipses him as a subject. He himself becomes a verb; he becomes his effort to not be not. When I was eight I began to wrestle a heart that threatened to overwhelm, an overwhelmedness that threatened the heart. The darkness above me took on impossible shapes. It was full of my failure, my lack. An impossible repulsion split me in two. “I will not choose not to be”; “I will not feast on thee.” Thee, you, beast that bears many names: carrion comfort, Despair, O thou terrible. In our first stanza the speaker addresses this struggle head-on and begs it questions: “why wouldst thou rude on me / Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?” Why, he asks, would thou “fan” “me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee”? I was heaped there in my childhood bed; I was frantic to flee myself with nowhere to go. I find this word heap to be important. It evokes a sense of utter helplessness; it deconstructs a person into limbs and bones stacked together. And if we consider the word “poet,” if we reach back through the centuries, we get Latin poete, Greek poētēs and poiētēs, from the reconstructed kwoiwo-, “to make,” from kiew, “to pile up, build, make”; until we finally arrive to the Sanskrit cinoti, “heaping up, piling up.” To be a poet, then, we must heap up; we must accumulate, gather, throw words onto the pyre. Hopkins, the poet, says that his speaker is a heap as he himself is heaping; the devastating image becomes an action, the self-same act of creation. Herein lies the strange, elucidative spell of “Carrion Comfort”: It announces itself in a myriad of layered conjectures. It is a kaleidoscopic look at the agony of existence, a uniquely human conundrum; it examines what it means to construct (in poetry) at the same time as it examines what it means to be deconstructed (in an emotive sense that is also physical, felt). While scholars have speculated about Hopkins’s likely “modern-day” diagnosis (often thought to be some version of bipolar disorder), he claims to have suffered, in the language of his time, bouts of “melancholy,” also known as the sin of “spiritual sloth” or acedia.[6] Remarkably, in “Carrion Comfort,” his melancholy answers the seemingly rhetorical question he asks of it: “Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.” I am never more aware of my heart than when I’m anxious, when feel it beating uncontrollably—and Hopkins too isolates his from his body, personifying it, saying it “lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer” as though it were an autonomous actor working against the forces from within himself that threaten to choke and squeeze it. And then, the series of questions, the doubt bubbling up from its pit: “Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród / Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?” The speaker’s torment at trying to uncover who it is he was joyful for, who it is he celebrated-- which of his two selves was happy—is a harrowing inquiry working towards the nature of emotions and from where they come, and its lack of resolution firmly places it in the grueling camp of the terrible sonnets. There is no response, no Christ who “plays in ten thousand places” who is “lovely in eyes not his…through the features of men’s faces.”[7] The subject is alone, confronting God with no real answer. Nearly a decade after I first discovered “Carrion Comfort,” I began to have obsessions. (Obsession: from obsessionem, “siege, blockade, blocking up”; in the 17th century, the “hostile act of an evil spirit.”[8]) I’d find myself smiling into mirrors to be sure my teeth were still there. Smiling into the oven to be sure it was off. Smiling into the locked door to be sure it was locked (“I am so happy,” said Hopkins. “I am so happy”). My body was compelled to do things my brain knew it shouldn’t. Or perhaps it was the other way around; perhaps knowledge is something that comes from the body (“my heart…lapped strength”), and the evil spirit of it all was my brain. After all, in Hopkins’s poem, the body is little more than a victim (“my bruised bones”) stealing joy whenever it can. After talking with a few therapists last year, I made some serious changes in my life and began taking medication. This has, by and large, seemed to work. One day I spoke with a good friend who told me that, after a period of struggling with an eating disorder triggered by stress and by the pandemic, she was feeling better too. “It’s as if I didn’t even know what I was doing,” she said, adding that if it wasn’t for her partner, she might not have come out of it. With the peaks of our respective struggles more or less in the rearview mirror, my friend and I now had the wherewithal to look over our shoulders and shudder. And isn’t that what Hopkins does in his final line? A glance back at the carnage, a “what would have happened if”? Take a second to read aloud and listen to the poem’s final sentence: “That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.” Here I found Aristotle’s catharsis, a comprehension of my own feelings at a distance; I saw myself heaped there on the page. I don’t think I’d really processed what had happened to me in these recent years of anxiety—an anxiety so strong that it pushed me to the brink of compulsion, that I felt I’d lost control of myself—until I went back and reread “(my God!) my God.” Perfectly, paradoxically punctuated; a screamed whisper, a chillingly vulnerable expression of astonishment. There is no other language to put to his horror but the name of his God, with whom he fought. With that, I understood; I had my carrion comfort, my freedom, my bodily purging, and my relief. I still struggle with anxiety; I don’t think it’ll ever be a “done darkness.” I still find myself in occasional sleepless nights, staring into the dark with an invisible weight on my chest. But being on the other side of several particularly challenging years, I’ve realized just how much I’d lost myself in that breach. I was so preoccupied with worry that, like Hopkins’s speaker, I obfuscated myself: When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw only my effort to not be not. And perhaps, at the end of the day, that effort to exist is existence. In chapter six of Poetics [9], Aristotle says that “life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.” It is the verb that gives language its root, its power, its sense; and it is the verb that defines us, be it in states of happiness or (and I think the vagueness is important here) “the reverse.” It is the “wrestling” as well as the “can something.” It is the “not I’ll not.” The heaping, the choking, the sieging, the making, the proclaiming: “my God, my God.” |
_____________________________________________
[1] “Sinopsis--The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” The Copyright Group, Librerías Gandhi, https://www.gandhi.com.mx/6b8143cb-10cf-39b8-9595-0bb001d054bb/p?srsltid=AfmBOooK9W6rs7lzHzXiGUJY0lbn8t87963EjekqcP6ADAqsQAYdmp4R
[2] “Comfort.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/comfort#etymonline_v_17214.
[3] Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Carrion Comfort.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44392/carrion-comfort.
[4] “Anxious.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/anxious#etymonline_v_15437.
[5] Keats, John. “Selections from Keats’s Letters.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters.
[6] “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins.
[7] Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire.
[8] “Obsession.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/obsession#etymonline_v_30291.
[9] Aristotle. “Poetics, Chapter 6.” SparkNotes, https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/poetics/full-text/chapter-vi/.
[1] “Sinopsis--The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” The Copyright Group, Librerías Gandhi, https://www.gandhi.com.mx/6b8143cb-10cf-39b8-9595-0bb001d054bb/p?srsltid=AfmBOooK9W6rs7lzHzXiGUJY0lbn8t87963EjekqcP6ADAqsQAYdmp4R
[2] “Comfort.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/comfort#etymonline_v_17214.
[3] Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Carrion Comfort.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44392/carrion-comfort.
[4] “Anxious.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/anxious#etymonline_v_15437.
[5] Keats, John. “Selections from Keats’s Letters.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters.
[6] “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins.
[7] Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire.
[8] “Obsession.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/obsession#etymonline_v_30291.
[9] Aristotle. “Poetics, Chapter 6.” SparkNotes, https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/poetics/full-text/chapter-vi/.
Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She has an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Mexico City. You can find more of her work at rachel-whalen.com
ESSAYS - August 2025: Ryan T. Pozzi
Ryan T. Pozzi
|
In-Progress
Dear Silence, You don’t say anything, of course. That’s your whole act. You just show up and sit there like you’re owed something. Like I deserve this. Like this isn’t waiting but punishment. Maybe it is. Maybe this is the sentence for wanting too much, asking too often. For chasing every almost. For hoping out loud. I keep trying to read you like a signal. Like you’re holding something just out of reach, and if I stay still long enough, I’ll hear it. But there’s nothing under you yet. No shape. No texture. Just my own thoughts getting louder. The longer you last, the more I fill you in. With fear. With made-up endings. With reasons someone might not write back. With the cursor blinking from an empty inbox. Some days I try to make peace with you. Pretend you’re neutral. Pretend you’re just space to think. But you’re not quiet. You’re taunting. You’re the absence of what I need twisted into something personal. You make it feel like the world has already decided and is just too polite to say so. That the verdict’s in, and you’re here to deliver it slowly. You don’t shout. You don’t accuse. You just wait. And in the waiting, I do all the work for you. I dig up every mistake I might have made. Every sentence I should have cut. Every version of myself I should have sent instead. You hold the door open and let my doubt walk right in, take its coat off, make itself comfortable. I tell myself it’s not about me. That silence isn’t judgment. That people get busy. That nothing is final until it is. But you don’t feel like nothing. You feel like everything that isn’t happening. Every answer withheld. Every future I can’t reach until someone else decides I’m allowed to. You sound just like those rejection letters. Wrapped in soft language, promising clarity but delivering none. Please. Don’t tell me the writing was strong. Don’t tell me you admired it, that it came close. You all say that, as if the no hurts less if it’s padded. But no is still no. If it mattered that much, things would be different. I would know your name. I try not to check, and then I check anyway. Inbox, spam folder, Submittable, muscle memory. Maybe if I look hard enough, I’ll catch you blinking. But you never blink. You never flinch. You just keep being not-there, and somehow that becomes presence. Weight. Pressure. Proof of something I can’t name but feel everywhere. And the worst part is how you make me complicit. How I start thinking maybe I deserve you. That if I were better, louder, sharper, you’d have left by now. That you stay only because I keep inviting you. I hate how convincing you are. How reasonable you sound when you say nothing at all. I start rewriting things in my head. Not the proposal. Me. Who I am, what I’ve done, how I measure up. I shrink to fit the silence. I reshape myself around what you might be withholding. And I know that’s the trap. I know you’re not even real. You’re just the space between two events. But that space is where my worst thoughts live. And you leave the door wide open. I don’t need you to say no. I've practiced. I’ve made peace with it more times than I can count. What I can’t live with is you. You, with your formless waiting. Your smug little nothing. You’re not a wall. I could hit a wall. You’re a hallway with no end. Every maybe stretched too thin. Because the truth is, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s me. It’s who I become inside you. The version of myself I can’t quiet. The one who keeps inventory of all the things I’ve failed to become. The one who whispers this is what I’m worth. Not a rejection. Not even a response. Just this. Just you. Maybe it’s not healthy, this waiting. Maybe it’s practice for something worse. For silence that won’t end. For becoming invisible. I don’t know what you want from me. Maybe nothing. Maybe that’s the point. You’re not a verdict after all. You’re what’s left when no one bothers to offer one. Still I brace for impact. Still I wait for something to break the spell. A ping. A line. A shift in the air. Anything. But nothing comes. Just another hour. Another breath I didn’t realize I was holding. You again, pretending you aren’t here while I pretend I’m not waiting. But I am waiting. Stretching into your shape. Opaque, then translucent, then gone. Not absent. Just unseen. Pressing refresh again. |
Ryan T. Pozzi is a nonfiction writer whose work also spans poetry, hybrid forms, and short fiction. He explores legacy, failure, and the tension between myth and reality. His work has been accepted by Rattle, Fjords Review, Northern New England Review, and Ponder Review, among others. Find him at ryantpozzi.com or on Bluesky @RyanWrites.
ESSAYS - May 2025: Claire Helakoski & James Lowell
Claire Helakoski
|
Coda
My friend has been dead as long as he was alive. A school hallway stretching behind and Matt stands at the center, laughing, long-haired, eyes hidden beneath his transition lenses, shaded with an Irish cap. The last day I saw him we hugged goodbye in the cafeteria. It was after a band concert, my flute case handle pressed into my palm. I'd see him next week in band or AP history, after school for musical rehearsal. I wasn’t around on his last day. I was crying during my wisdom tooth surgery that morning. I was propped up on the couch waiting for my friends to bring me a slushie when he finished working on sets for The Wiz. He drove past my house on his way home, but never arrived. He died half a mile from the cemetery where we buried him, all while I sat on the couch, high on Vicodin. The rest of that year I replayed pieces of him, a coda: penguin, clarinet, Apples to Apples, fleece zip-up. Our last day of Senior year we brought him a picnic in the cemetery and it’s the only time I will laugh there, freezing in the May sunlight, sitting on towels and eating Twizzlers, choking down Mountain Dew (his favorite). When my parents still lived nearby, I would nod, look, or salute any time I passed, pulled like a magnet to his song and my grief’s refrain. He greeted me in a dream the night he died. We stood together in a field of daffodils. It was February–there were no daffodils yet. I researched: they symbolize rebirth. When I stared down at him in the funeral home, I hoped rebirth was real. I wanted to scream, to never have seen him like that, the not-him in the casket, looking so wrong with makeup and glue and pvc pipe and anything else they used to hold him together long enough for us to look at, his clarinet tucked beneath his arm. Who would he have become? Graduated from U of M. Kids? Travel? Would I even know? But he’s standing where I last saw him, barely eighteen, with a Mountain Dew in his pocket, paint on his arms. The first concert without him, tears splattered my flute as I played. Behind me we left his chair empty except for a red rose. Can you still hear his voice? a friend asks years later, and I gently shake my head no. But I can hear his clarinet, feel his hug, see his hands on the wheel of his car as he gives me a ride home. His mother gave us all jars of potpourri from the flowers—I still have mine. I accepted it sitting in the living room where he downed hot sauce and milk before prom, photos of him on every surface. In choir weeks later we sang do not stand at my grave and weep and I sprinted, lungs heaving, into the hall, throat frozen on the sound of clanking as they lowered the casket, gripping my friends’ hands so hard it hurt. When I stopped to visit him, there was garbage and detritus all around his headstone. I pulled weeds, threw out flowers and candy wrappers bleached and crumpled from winter snow. I let the sap from the plants coat my hands, dirt digging under my fingernails, to make it right, to make it look nice here, in the furthest row of the cemetery. His the newest addition. And I hated that I didn’t know if he would have cared, laughed, or just shrugged and told me not to waste my time. The coda is fainter now and I return to it less often as the bars of my life spiral forward, separating us in ink and white space. Eighteen years and I had to look up the date because I forgot. Eighteen years and still, I can’t quite believe life is so brief or can be over so quickly. Eighteen years and it still hurts that a beautiful, kind, funny man only got eighteen years to be alive. The circle and cross of him are pressed into me, even faded as they might get with age. Sometimes I flip back a page, remind myself how to play that part again. |
Claire Helakoski is a writer and educator currently living in Hancock, Michigan, where she teaches writing courses and acts as Assistant Writing Center Director for Michigan Technological University. Claire has an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in Creative Writing and French Linguistics. Her poetry recently appeared in In Parentheses, Thirteen Bridges, and Panoplyzine. Her nonfiction recently appeared in OxMag.
James Lowell
|
The Golden Road
I hope to return down the Golden Road that ends on a fossilized shore where the Great Northern Paper Co. used to smash forests to pulp. I’ll aim to arrive when the Strawberry Moon is ripe. Listen to spruce boughs sweeping the forest floor. Breathe pine-deep air so pure only starlight diffuses its atmosphere. And I’ll cross the shining expanse of tin foiled water, following a moonlit path body and soul. Before I get there, I’ll swing into Pray’s General Store. There, I’ll dust off a yellowed box of Row’s Spruce Gum, heft an Estwing hatchet (creaking leather sheath and all), try on a coonskin cap, imagine I’m holding a powder horn and musket. I’ll have my embossed Boker Tree Brand “Remember the Maine!” jackknife where it has worn a hole in a lifetime of jeans’ pockets. Mr. Pray himself selected that knife for me from his shelf of mountain man dreams. The blade is a ghost of itself—whittled reed thin by countless sharpenings—still, this knife is better than any wand from Ollivanders. *
Across the road from Pray’s sawdust-floored store, his crude cabins’ sibilant siding will whistle in a breeze, lantern lit interiors hum with May’s clouds of blackflies and swarming les moucherons. And then, I’ll be on my way to the dead end, where Ripogenous Dam swallows the guttural lake and hocks it back in a foaming loogy on Big Eddy below.
I will put in my canoe above that dam, leave Pray’s astern, paddle the 15 loon-echoing miles to a one room cabin built in a wilderness where skinny-dipping was de rigueur. *
There are next to no other cabins on the vast lake, except at the far cry where an old boom house welcomes seasonal hunters amidst a few makeshift A-frames. There’s the derelict Priest House and a nearly abandoned church whose congregation is a hibernating black bear.
Packed tight in a wanigan, I’ll the feel the weight of my own freight: transporting a weeks’ worth of Lapsang Souchong, Bisquick, Wasabröd, Jiffy, Smucker’s Concord Grape, SPAM, and Deviled Ham. Nevertheless, paddling to that lone cabin without seeing a soul, I’ll feel spirited. *
Despite a mutiny of wind-capped waves, I’ll remain steadfast; globed biceps burning with every stroke until the wind-boosted relief of a makeshift poncho sail makes my canoe glide like jam on bröd.
I’ll glide past Togue Ledge thinking of their landlocked silver sunk below, skirt the moose-tracked Sandy Stream, push along the frayed hem of the forest to a fringe of a wild blueberry meadow, birch trees dappling a bygone boom’s dri-ki bones. I’ll nudge the bow on the gravelly shore, haul myself out where towering old growth firs will have reclaimed the sky, making the cabin look like a dollhouse, and me appear to be doll sized. *
That solo journey by canoe, bow over stern, clement calm or inclement blows, is still my favorite way to travel in what I call the Algonquin Shuttle—hurtling through a reflection of stars.
My favorite canoe? My mother’s cedar-ribbed, cane-seated, whisper quiet canvas Old Town: “This Name Plate Shows This To Be A Genuine.” No other Hatfield compares to its real McCoy. I wear that brass bow plate in my heart: to be or not to be “Genuine” has been a lifelong passage. My signature stroke and even my literal signature reflects this mantra: a classic J that propels and guides me onwards. Of course, I felt like post-Eve Adam the day I arrived at the cabin to find the place turned inside out by the predator I feared most in that wilderness: man. The beloved canoe stolen by a featherless biped who ransacked my innocence’s storeroom. *
Now, paddling in my rocking chair with my favorite bent-shaft, knowing myself as cliché and borderline pastiche, I’m heading to the place that became my past after being my future.
And you needn’t waste a prayer on me. My body and soul are already too far gone—down the moonlit path that begins where the Golden Road ends. |
James Lowell spends most of his time on a remote two-mile island (winter population, 10 souls), recharging his batteries with the brio of Brickell. His work was most recently short- and long-listed for the 2024 Fish poetry prize and has appeared in journals like Canadian Literature, The Caribbean Writer, English, Fortnight, O Miami, Martha’s Vineyard Times, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Orchard Poetry Journal, Gramercy, The Fourth River, The Sandy River Review, and The Milk House.
ESSAYS - February 2025: Julia Rudlaff
Julia Rudlaff
Notes from Nowhere
“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wildness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
Edward Abbey, “Monkey Wrench Gang”
Do I even exist? The thought weaves through time, memory and the clouds. There are long stretches without seeing a person outside the geologic field station, which houses myself and my partner, the winter caretakers. In a world where existence is defined by what you do, what you make (financially), where you live, and what you own, I may not exist. Does it matter that I do? Not really.
I live far away. Away from what? Take your pick: the mailbox (3 miles), the nearest paved road (7 miles), the post office (11 miles), the gas station (12 miles), the grocery store (16 miles), the library (17 miles), the supermarket (55 miles). On a map, I live within a circle of roads surrounding the Tobacco Roots Mountains, in a place where no one would seem to live. I am communicably invisible. There is no cell phone service and patchy WiFi. I walk six miles round trip to the mailbox to converse with people elsewhere.
Comparisons to “The Shining” are abundant. Winter caretaker (yes), at an abandoned hotel (basically), living with partner (yep), working on a novel (not a novel, but writing something). The only thing missing is the madness (and it is only missing for now, one month in). It would be easy to lose one’s mind out here, misplace it like the car keys or a wallet or the one good spatula. One day, it’s securely in your hand, and the next, you are frantically tearing the poor house apart, reaching behind every book, under every chair, and within every cupboard, hoping your fingers will feel the texture of what has disappeared. On a walk back from the mailbox once I watched two clouds merge into one and bring snow that fell in heaps and heaps. A few days later, most of the snow disappeared into the river. Gone with the sunshine. It is easy to forget it was ever here at all.
Do you see me? I ask my neighbors: the ermine, the deer, the American dipper, the trout I catch and eat for dinner, the rose hips, the radishes growing in the windowsill. None of them reply with words, but they do. I know this because they look at me. They notice my presence, like a rock splashing into a pool of still water. Here, the ripples of my being are not defined by spoken language.
What’s it like out there? My sister asks in a letter sent from Boston.
The dawn is increasingly delayed. I don’t set alarms, so I have been waking up later and later each morning, shifting with the sun. I record the morning temperatures and cloud cover in a blue notebook. The precipitation section has been empty since the big storm in November. I tend my garden while drinking tea. Water for my friends the radishes, kale, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and myself. I tell them they are beautiful and we all hope for sunshine or snow. I wear muck boots everywhere – checking on the buildings, cleaning the shop, patching the concrete, fishing, walking up and down the road, gathering firewood. What’s it like? It’s just right.
Where do I live? I wonder, from time to time. Southwest Montana, to be sure. The geologic field station, of course. In the Tobacco Root Mountains, I suppose. More truthfully, however, I live on the river banks. In the forests of lodgepole pines and sagebrush. In the little yellow house surrounded by twenty five empty buildings. I live miles up the unplowed road, between counties. I live in the cradle of winter. I live somewhere suspended, in the place where addresses mean little and the clouds mean everything. I live half a mile north of Cone Hill. I live in the recesses of memory. I live in a place that is hard to find on the map and impossible to reach telekinetically (or, via online modes of contact). I live where time, like all other animals, bows to the sun. I live in my own little heaven Earth, I suppose.
I am beginning to feel it, I wrote in my journal, when I was here during the summer for a field geology course, the shiver of the end. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be back in Michigan,“home”, or something like it. And what’s next? After this? After graduation? Who knows. Wide open plains. The garden. Shortening days. But for now, the final project, the exam, the last school work maybe of my life. Times like this are when the premature regret seeps in. I have not explored enough. I have not seen enough. I have not laughed enough. But I’ve had my fun: Brownback Mountain, Lake Louise, Yellowstone, Hidden Lake, the rodeo. There is so much time in life. As much as I may ruminate on the receding slip of time here, there is expansive time still left. Even if I only have a year, remember how long a year is. I choose to feel expansive time instead of dwindling time. I bask in the glow of time as it recedes, like the light burst forth on the horizon from the sun as it sets. The secret of time lives in every sunset. It disappears quickly, but with artistry. And how long can we live in those moments of peak brightness, under the red-golden hues shining down on us? Forever and ever and ever.
Three months later, I was back. This time, without the caravan of other students and professors. Without the hundreds of cows grazing on the surrounding State land. Without the area’s summer vacationers. Just me and Reuben and the empty field station. For five months. All I regretted not doing, I would soon do (or choose not to do). The sun, back again.
What do you do each day? My friend from the summer asks in a letter sent from Indiana.
In a day? In an hour? In a moment? In a night? What do I do, what do I do, what do I do? Well, anything my heart desires. Fish and whistle, garden and read, rock hunt and sun bathe, write and love, cook and feast, work and play, sit and think, dance and walk, wonder and dream, skip and stroll, climb and hover, peer and revere, bask and notice, admire and question, feel and touch, hope and pray, smile and breathe. The only thing here that may induce madness is the sound of the refrigerator buzzing and the scritch scratching of a critter in the night.
Why?
I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the strange. The things that require follow-up questions like, Why would you want to do that? And Will there be running water? And Won’t you be lonely/sad/afraid? In truth, I need this way of life. I need to feel living air on my skin. I need to breathe the sun. I need to hear water running over rocks. I need to be able to play. I need time, endless, unconstrained, bountiful time. I need space to write. I need freedom to feel. I need love and lust and vitality. I need hours to cook. I need a place to be alive, which often means a place away from the smog and traffic and demands of the clock. But if you’d like the answer I give to my Uncle, instead, it’s this: I like not paying rent. It saves a lot of money.
“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wildness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
Edward Abbey, “Monkey Wrench Gang”
Do I even exist? The thought weaves through time, memory and the clouds. There are long stretches without seeing a person outside the geologic field station, which houses myself and my partner, the winter caretakers. In a world where existence is defined by what you do, what you make (financially), where you live, and what you own, I may not exist. Does it matter that I do? Not really.
I live far away. Away from what? Take your pick: the mailbox (3 miles), the nearest paved road (7 miles), the post office (11 miles), the gas station (12 miles), the grocery store (16 miles), the library (17 miles), the supermarket (55 miles). On a map, I live within a circle of roads surrounding the Tobacco Roots Mountains, in a place where no one would seem to live. I am communicably invisible. There is no cell phone service and patchy WiFi. I walk six miles round trip to the mailbox to converse with people elsewhere.
Comparisons to “The Shining” are abundant. Winter caretaker (yes), at an abandoned hotel (basically), living with partner (yep), working on a novel (not a novel, but writing something). The only thing missing is the madness (and it is only missing for now, one month in). It would be easy to lose one’s mind out here, misplace it like the car keys or a wallet or the one good spatula. One day, it’s securely in your hand, and the next, you are frantically tearing the poor house apart, reaching behind every book, under every chair, and within every cupboard, hoping your fingers will feel the texture of what has disappeared. On a walk back from the mailbox once I watched two clouds merge into one and bring snow that fell in heaps and heaps. A few days later, most of the snow disappeared into the river. Gone with the sunshine. It is easy to forget it was ever here at all.
Do you see me? I ask my neighbors: the ermine, the deer, the American dipper, the trout I catch and eat for dinner, the rose hips, the radishes growing in the windowsill. None of them reply with words, but they do. I know this because they look at me. They notice my presence, like a rock splashing into a pool of still water. Here, the ripples of my being are not defined by spoken language.
What’s it like out there? My sister asks in a letter sent from Boston.
The dawn is increasingly delayed. I don’t set alarms, so I have been waking up later and later each morning, shifting with the sun. I record the morning temperatures and cloud cover in a blue notebook. The precipitation section has been empty since the big storm in November. I tend my garden while drinking tea. Water for my friends the radishes, kale, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and myself. I tell them they are beautiful and we all hope for sunshine or snow. I wear muck boots everywhere – checking on the buildings, cleaning the shop, patching the concrete, fishing, walking up and down the road, gathering firewood. What’s it like? It’s just right.
Where do I live? I wonder, from time to time. Southwest Montana, to be sure. The geologic field station, of course. In the Tobacco Root Mountains, I suppose. More truthfully, however, I live on the river banks. In the forests of lodgepole pines and sagebrush. In the little yellow house surrounded by twenty five empty buildings. I live miles up the unplowed road, between counties. I live in the cradle of winter. I live somewhere suspended, in the place where addresses mean little and the clouds mean everything. I live half a mile north of Cone Hill. I live in the recesses of memory. I live in a place that is hard to find on the map and impossible to reach telekinetically (or, via online modes of contact). I live where time, like all other animals, bows to the sun. I live in my own little heaven Earth, I suppose.
I am beginning to feel it, I wrote in my journal, when I was here during the summer for a field geology course, the shiver of the end. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be back in Michigan,“home”, or something like it. And what’s next? After this? After graduation? Who knows. Wide open plains. The garden. Shortening days. But for now, the final project, the exam, the last school work maybe of my life. Times like this are when the premature regret seeps in. I have not explored enough. I have not seen enough. I have not laughed enough. But I’ve had my fun: Brownback Mountain, Lake Louise, Yellowstone, Hidden Lake, the rodeo. There is so much time in life. As much as I may ruminate on the receding slip of time here, there is expansive time still left. Even if I only have a year, remember how long a year is. I choose to feel expansive time instead of dwindling time. I bask in the glow of time as it recedes, like the light burst forth on the horizon from the sun as it sets. The secret of time lives in every sunset. It disappears quickly, but with artistry. And how long can we live in those moments of peak brightness, under the red-golden hues shining down on us? Forever and ever and ever.
Three months later, I was back. This time, without the caravan of other students and professors. Without the hundreds of cows grazing on the surrounding State land. Without the area’s summer vacationers. Just me and Reuben and the empty field station. For five months. All I regretted not doing, I would soon do (or choose not to do). The sun, back again.
What do you do each day? My friend from the summer asks in a letter sent from Indiana.
In a day? In an hour? In a moment? In a night? What do I do, what do I do, what do I do? Well, anything my heart desires. Fish and whistle, garden and read, rock hunt and sun bathe, write and love, cook and feast, work and play, sit and think, dance and walk, wonder and dream, skip and stroll, climb and hover, peer and revere, bask and notice, admire and question, feel and touch, hope and pray, smile and breathe. The only thing here that may induce madness is the sound of the refrigerator buzzing and the scritch scratching of a critter in the night.
Why?
I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the strange. The things that require follow-up questions like, Why would you want to do that? And Will there be running water? And Won’t you be lonely/sad/afraid? In truth, I need this way of life. I need to feel living air on my skin. I need to breathe the sun. I need to hear water running over rocks. I need to be able to play. I need time, endless, unconstrained, bountiful time. I need space to write. I need freedom to feel. I need love and lust and vitality. I need hours to cook. I need a place to be alive, which often means a place away from the smog and traffic and demands of the clock. But if you’d like the answer I give to my Uncle, instead, it’s this: I like not paying rent. It saves a lot of money.
Julia Rudlaff is a writer, geology-enthusiast, and seasonal worker from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Their work has been published in Canthius Magazine, Deep Wild Journal, and on Terrain.org. Julia is currently the winter caretaker of a geologic field station in SW Montana. In addition to writing, Julia enjoys rock hunting, fishing, walking, making tea, and looking after an indoor garden.
ESSAYS - November 2024: Allison Field Bell & Sabrina Hicks
Allison Field Bell
|
Habit
Every morning, she’s up before six and driving to Roasters, where she orders a spelt muffin and black coffee and tries—usually unsuccessfully—to get a window seat. The men are always there before her: white-haired and with newspapers in their laps. Not that they ever read. They’re too busy gossiping but not calling it that of course because they’re men and this is Prescott, Arizona. This is 2009. Their gossip is about hunting and guns and that latest thing the president did that pissed them right off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps her memory is wrong—as it often is—and these men mostly speak of their wives, the way one wife insists on cooking some meal one man definitively doesn’t like, the way another wife booked a plane ticket for the wrong wedding weekend for a dear niece. Either way, she’s there with a computer, typing away. Trying, unsuccessfully, to write something brilliant. Or at least something decent. But she’s twenty-three and what the fuck does she know? Every morning she’s at it again, shaping words into stories. And then, when the morning is spent, she’s in class. College. And when that’s over, she’s at her house with the astroturf on the patio and the big thin sliding glass doors that let in all the heat in the summer and let out all the heat in the winter. She’s there on the orange paisley couch she found at a thrift store for five dollars. Or maybe it was ten. That’s not the point. The point is: it was cheap and orange and she’s sitting on it with a glass of gin. Or arak. She persuaded the liquor store down the road to order in some bottles. So she’s on the couch with gin or arak, and if it’s gin, there’s soda water and lime, and if it’s arak, there are ice cubes that turn the liquor milky, flakes of it catching on the edges of the glass. She’s drinking, and she drinks until she sleeps. Usually. And she’s alone, usually. And it’s fine. Usually. And usually, she looks out the window above the sink in the kitchen as she pours her refill, and she sees an array of trees out there—ponderosas shot through with orange bark. And she laughs because there’s the orange bark and the orange couch and the gin or the arak and she is not happy exactly but not not. But then, if it’s Thursday, the whole night transforms. Thursday every week in the basement bar of some weird building off Whiskey Row, they host 80’s night. And all the other kids from her college are there in bright colors and spandex. Dancing. And sometimes, when she’s drunk enough, she makes her way there too. Sometimes, she dresses up—she’s got a whole bag full of costumes because she’s twenty-three and has been to burning man so of course she does. Of course, picking an 80’s outfit is easy and fast and then she’s out the door. Maybe walking. Maybe a friend has picked her up. Maybe biking. She can’t remember her mode of transportation, but it’s not driving. She doesn’t drive in the evenings because she’s drunk in the evenings and she’s not that kind of drunk. At 80’s night, she’s a bubbly bright drunk of a dancer. She orders gin after gin. She owns the dance floor. With her long blonde hair tied up in a high ponytail. Her neon spandex. Or maybe a polyester jumpsuit. Or maybe she didn’t dress up at all because she was too drunk at home and now she’s at 80’s night in jeans and a tank top just floating around. One thing is for sure, she’ll pick a man. It doesn’t much matter who. She’ll take him home with her. They’ll have sex, and it will be—well, she won’t remember—but probably bad. She’ll want him out of her bed before dawn, lying there wide-awake with his hot heavy breathing and his sweat-sticky body bare and half out of the covers. Once it’s six, she’ll get up, kick him out of her house, shower him off her skin and start the whole day over again. Roasters, the men, the muffin, the coffee, the words. Or maybe not. Maybe she’ll just lay there imagining she’s left already. Maybe she’ll be too polite or too hungover to make it to the coffee shop at that time. The time she loves best. When the light is spilling in through the window and you can see all the particles of dust like gold flakes in the air drifting, drifting. |
Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming 2025 from Cutbank. Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, New Orleans Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Sabrina Hicks
|
Preskit
My mother kept a room in our house dedicated to her grandmother, a woman who’d helped raise her. On the dresser there was a large black and white photo of her grandparents, two stern looking Italians fresh from the old country. Thin lipped, eyes sunken, hands folded in their lap, giving off a defiant obedience. The room was a throwback to another era, with lace curtains, a collection of antique pieces adorned with handsewn handkerchiefs her mother and grandmother had made, and my mother’s wedding slippers oddly in the corner under a nightgown she wore on her honeymoon. She wanted a room of artifacts, it seemed, a before, when she was a girl in Connecticut, raised in a neighborhood of poor immigrants with vegetables gardens and clotheslines threading backyards and families. It was at odds with the rugged individualism of our ranch in Arizona and the land outside, filled with cattle and acres of junipers and scrub-oak. The ranch house sat at headquarters in a place called Skull Valley, just outside of Prescott. My two older brothers tended the land and cattle. I’d tried sleeping in the room of artifacts one summer when I had an English course in town at the local community college. I’d just graduated high school and was looking to build credits before heading to the university in Tucson. My parents had been gone and the house was empty. I had my pick of beds, but it turned out I could only sleep on the couch, over a high, peaked ceiling. I feared the crawl spaces above the rooms. At night, the country mice would scurry overhead, chased sometimes by the wild cats meant to keep their numbers down, inducing dreams of rodents raining down on me. The house was old and creaky. It moaned and moved with the winds coming off the mountains. It didn’t help it was branding season for the calves and they were kept separate from their mothers. Outside I could hear them bawling, loud and mournful, a call and response from over the pastures. If I thought too hard about their separation, I was afraid I’d become a vegetarian and never be allowed to step foot on the ranch again. There was no air conditioning so all the windows remained open and their cries filled the house. Moonlight spilled across the floors, casting a blue light upon the paintings of cowboys and cattle—the outside bleeding in. I would drag my feet into class, sleep deprived and achy from the soft sofa, while the professor dissected WWI poems about mustard gas, green fogs, and fields of death. The classroom on the Yavapai community college campus sat up high so you could see the tops of the ponderosa pines in the surrounding forest. We’d break at noon, make small talk about our plans for the future and stand outside staring out at the wilderness. There was a pregnant woman in the class who’d use the break to smoke. It was the early 90s, passé even then to smoke while pregnant, but this was Prescott, or as locals pronounced it—Preskit—an eclectic town of cowboys, hippies, artists, rednecks, retirees, and a growing number of recovering drug addicts—and she was young, around my age, which was 18 at the time, unconcerned with the effects it might have on her baby. I remember watching her so intently she offered me a cigarette one day. It was summer but there was always cool air coming off the mountains, shifting the wind, shifting my mood, reminding me of the past, about my great great grandparents and WWI. I thought of the poet we’d just studied, Wilfred Owen, the way he described the mustard gas as a sea of green and I pictured the ranch at night filling the fields with a haze of toxic air, coming for me. “No thanks,” I said, when she held out a pack. It was an honest offer and I felt conscientious of my disgust so I overcompensated with faux indifference, which had been my way then, paralyzed by judgment and protest and a need to overlook them both in order to survive in a world that seemed indifferent to my own sensitivities. I was not from Prescott. I’d been born in Phoenix, resided mostly in the rural outskirts of the valley, and always driving from one place to another so that I felt anchored more to mountains and roads, specifically to the Carefree Highway those years. I did not like the idea of place defining me the way so many people seemed to relish. Land, in the true western sense, was claimed and coveted, making people resistant to movement and change, perspective and growth. “How do you like the professor?” I asked. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, surprised by my question. I think she thought I was going to ask her when she was due or what baby names she was tossing around. But I viewed pregnancy as the worst thing that could happen to a young woman and avoided acknowledgement, though she seemed content. We were in a conservative town where boys got girls pregnant in high school with stunning frequency and the girls had to live with the consequences. “He’s all right,” she said. “He asks a lot of questions.” Wasn’t that his job, I wanted to say. Why are you even here? But I couldn’t shake the feeling of the poem we’d read, the sea of gas, the loneliness of the ranch, unable to sleep in a room I was convinced was haunted, my great great grandparents staring back at me as if to say, this is where you ended up? “What did you think of the poem?” I said, aware I was possibly annoying her with more questions. She smiled, drew in smoke with one hand while the other rested on her belly. “It’s all right.” But it was more than all right and it struck me I was beginning to fall in love with language. I’d taken my reading and writing assignments to the town square across from the saloons called “Whiskey Row” to read poetry and watch the parade of locals and tourists mill about the day. Our professor had printed out a small biography of the poet and I stared at Wilfred Owen’s face trying to picture him in modern day, the way I did with all old photos of young people captured long ago. He was handsome, with full lips and a strong jaw. I could see him walking by me right then and there more than I could my own great grandparents, who would have been in their early thirties during WWI, just ten years older than Owen. I’d finished a poem he’d written touching on the coping mechanisms he struggled with in war to reduce the fear of feeling too much, thinking too deeply, and does the price of that outweigh numbness. All around me were Victorian style houses. Prescott is one of the only places in Arizona reflective of the wider influences of American culture, unlike the valley surrounding Phoenix. I’d grown up in an adobe house made primarily of mud, a style of Native American architecture that understood the desert and made use of the arid land. Our house preserved the cool nights in preparation for the hot days. But Prescott is considered high-desert, 5,300 feet in elevation and is more indicative of a Mediterranean climate. All around me in the Plaza was grass and trees, Victorian peaks on storefronts, a town square that seemed plucked from the Midwest or East, a rewinding of time and place. I remember, aside from class and going to a few of my brother’s rodeos, the feeling of loneliness or maybe quietude, a stillness that comes with no distractions and spending time with oneself, understanding that words could conjure up parallels and patterns in life. I became aware of my own unease, a feeling that plagued me, walked around with me like a shadow. Aware, too, that our connectedness is everywhere, embedded in our DNA, our land. I would learn much later that I was tethered to the land in ways that would only present themselves upon leaving, upon an absence. We are always trying to get back to something. |
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Cleaver, Reckon Review, Split Lip Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
ESSAYS - August 2024: Paul Hostovsky
Paul Hostovsky
|
|
|
LAST WORDS
When my mother learned that she would be acquiring a Deaf daughter-in-law, she tried to learn sign language, God bless her. But she had a hell of a time with the pronunciation, i.e. the manual dexterity involved in articulating the signs in ASL. She got her Ds and her Fs mixed up. She got her dominant and her non-dominant hand mixed up. And also her clockwise and her counterclockwise. Her palm orientation was, well, disoriented. And most frustrating of all was the fact that, as poor as her expressive skills were, her receptive skills were even worse: when it came to reading sign language she was downright dyslexic. Nevertheless it came in handy in the end, when she was dying, when she was lying in the hospital after having been intubated because she couldn't breathe on her own. And she couldn't talk because of the big ventilator tube in her mouth and all the surgical tape keeping things in place. It had all happened so quickly―one day she was fine and power walking around the track at the JCC and eating organic and being healthier than thou, and the next day she was in the hospital dying of a pernicious infection that had somehow invaded her lungs and completely overwhelmed her system overnight. When she arrived at the emergency department, the doctors didn't yet know if it was a bacterial or a viral infection and within a few hours they had intubated her, and now they were pumping her full of meds and hoping one of them would do the trick and reverse the downward spiral. And all this within a matter of 24 hours. So while she was lying there in the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and family, unable to speak for the breathing tube, she dragged her right forefinger up her left arm, from the wrist all the way up to the shoulder, then back down to the wrist, tapping it twice: “Long time.” Actually, a more accurate translation would be “Very long time,” because while “long” occurs on the forearm, the farther you extend the sign up the arm (i.e. to the elbow, the biceps, the shoulder) the longer the “long,” which is just one of many ways of modifying adjectives in ASL. So she signed: VERY LONG TIME, which may have meant: This is taking a really long time, how come I'm not getting better yet? Or maybe it meant: I've had a long life, time is an illusion, and I'm ready to go. Or maybe it meant: Long time no see, Uncle Hank, what are you doing here, I thought you were in Tel Aviv, thank you for coming to stand and watch at my deathbed while this nightmare keeps unfolding. Maybe it meant all these things. And more. Or less. They were her last words. She died a few hours later. They say that fingerspelling, or the manual alphabet, was invented by Spanish monks in the 16th century. After taking a vow of silence, they used it for communicating with each other. And with God. I imagine them lying on their deathbeds, like my mother, too sick for words, holding up the first letter only of the prayer they wanted to recite but couldn’t. And those handshapes, each representing a whole passage, were lifted up to God and since God knew all the words by heart anyway and only needed a hand—a finger, really—to point Him in the direction of an intention, I guess He heard their prayers. And like the mythological Phoenix, those handshapes rose up like smoke from the burning sickbeds of the monks, up through the chimneys of the centuries, and have turned into the birds that build their nests in the hands of the Deaf, flitting and darting from sleeve to sleeve, where they sing to this day. Sign language teachers will tell you that hearing people who like to dance, or who know how to play a musical instrument, have an easier time learning how to sign than those who don’t dance or play a musical instrument. Go figure. My mother never learned to play a musical instrument. And I have no memory of ever seeing her out on the dance floor. Except at my wedding (see above) when I married that Deaf daughter-in-law of hers. But she had always been good at languages. German was her first language, then Dutch, then English, then French (she spent her junior year abroad, and eventually became a high school French teacher), a little Czech, and a little Danish. But in her 60s, when her only child informed her that he was going to marry his sign language teacher, and she ended up with a Deaf daughter-in-law―and two years later, a Deaf granddaughter―she had a hell of a time learning ASL. To her credit, though, she gave it the old college try: She took an ASL class at a local college. She studied hard, did all the homework assignments, made pages and pages of notes, had perfect attendance. But when it came to remembering the signs and trying to produce them on her hands, she was all thumbs. After she died, I found the notebook in which she kept a vocabulary list, approximating the signs with glosses and pithy little descriptions of the hand movements (“HAPPY: The 5 handshape tapping the chest upward in a circular motion. ANGRY: two bent 5 handshapes at the chest “ripping” up and away from each other; UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.”) I knew her ASL teacher, a Deaf guy named ALB. He’s a great guy, I told her. You’ll love him. But she didn’t love him. Because having been a French teacher all those years, she had some very definite opinions about how and how not to teach a language, and she did not approve of ALB’s teaching methods. As a matter of fact, she blamed him for her lack of progress with the language, saying all he ever did was stand in front of the class and sign to them, expecting them to learn it by osmosis. What’s wrong with osmosis? I asked her. Wasn’t it kind of like immersion? Wasn’t that how she herself learned French when she was living with a French family during her junior year abroad in Paris? She allowed that language immersion had its advantages, but she felt ALB was gearing the class toward the better, more fluent students and leaving the slower ones behind in the dust of their incomprehension. Plus, she said, she was the oldest student in the class at age 63 and her facility for learning new languages wasn’t quite what it once was. ASL, she said, felt like a magic trick or disappearing act. Now you see it, now you don’t. Voila! A sleight of hand that she couldn’t seem to get a handle on. But within a year, when she was in the hospital, unable to speak, unable to breathe on her own, with all of us standing around watching helplessly as her life was rapidly, inexplicably slipping away, her last words to us were in sign language. And her pronunciation was absolutely perfect: one expertly modified adjective (right forefinger tracing a path all the way up the left arm to the shoulder) and one abstract noun (that same forefinger tapping an imaginary wristwatch on the left hand twice). VERY LONG TIME. There was a tiny interfaith chapel off the main hallway of the hospital. No religious symbols or iconography in the room, just a simple tapestry on the wall with these words sewn into the fabric: Be still and know that I am God. It’s from Psalm 46, though I didn’t know that at the time. And I didn’t know how to pray but I prayed anyway. I like the first part of that quote better than the second part. Be still. I think that’s good advice. As for the second part―know that I am God—I don’t know anything about God. And neither does anyone. No one knows. Be still and know that you don’t know. That’s how I would have revised Psalm 46, if King David had asked me for some feedback on his psalm. I think there’s great comfort in knowing that we don’t know. That we don’t know anything. That we’re wrong about everything. The good news is not what we thought. The bad news is not what we thought. That’s the good news! And it’s greater than we know. And it’s greater than we can imagine. Because we can’t imagine being wrong about everything. Understanding is overrated. I don’t understand how or why my mother got that infection and died in less than 48 hours. And I don’t understand exactly what she meant by VERY LONG TIME. It broke her heart that she couldn’t understand ASL in spite of trying valiantly to learn it. And it breaks my heart to go back and reread those ASL vocabulary lists in a little notebook in her own hand. A hand that I’d recognize anywhere. A hand like a kind of face. The face of her writing. “UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.” |
Paul Hostovsky has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.
Website: paulhostovsky.com
Website: paulhostovsky.com
ESSAYS - February 2024: Okbi Han
Okbi Han
|
Tenno Heika Banzai My maternal grandfather is a man who adds jazz and classical music to his iPod Nano. Listening to Rachmaninoff, he cuts up newspaper articles to make a scrapbook. He is a sweet old man who appreciates Frida Kahlo and tells me to become an artist like her, an artist to be remembered even after death. Once he discovered a strange tattoo on his granddaughter’s neck. He thought she loved Vegemil so much that she inscribed it into her body, and he decided to send her a box of Vegemil. The truth, however, is that I am such a big fan of Britney Spears and got a bottle of poison tattooed, not a bottle of soy milk. My grandfather loved his wife so much that he couldn't even set foot at her funeral. He is a war hero of the Korean War, and a burial site is reserved for him at the Memorial Hall in Seoul. After hearing that his wife could not be buried with him there because she had died before him, my grandfather was furious. He was literally jumping around the hall. In his military years, he used to be a trumpeter. His band played for the US Army. My grandfather would send me letters on my birthday and some short English phrases were included in them. I believe his years spent in the US Army base are the reason for those phrases. My grandfather is a Japanese collaborator, though. A few years ago, my whole family gathered for a Chuseok evening out. On the way back, my grandfather declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. My aunt, busy with driving, did not seem to care so much. She simply mumbled something like “yeah, sure” without understanding what he was actually saying. In his loud angry voice, my grandfather again declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. He attended a national people’s school when he was a boy. That was what the elementary school was called when Korea was under the colonial rule of Japan. Every morning at the school, he was forced to cry out “Tenno Heika Banzai!” Long live His Majesty the Emperor. He confessed that he screamed harder and louder than anyone else because he was afraid and did not want to get beaten up by the teachers. Sometimes he would also shout three times in a row, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” My grandfather concluded that there was no way he could be exempt from being a collaborator with such deeds and that he deserved to be purged. “I am no exception. It was never a right action, no?” He asked my aunt and umma in the car. I believe my grandfather wanted to hear back from us that it was not true. I told him that he was not a Japanese collaborator. The reply made in haste, however, did not leave my grandfather relieved. While the whole family went to a café to have coffee and dessert, he went home alone. Splitting a matcha macaron into halves for my nephew, I was still thinking about what my grandfather had said. Maybe I should have told him that a young child does not know anything, and he is unable to do something so bad. On the other hand, I thought there was something farcical about how he remembered his boyhood. Dessert time with a young nephew was not the best occasion to ponder on a colonial memory, nevertheless. The next moment, I was reminded that I prefer matcha from Japan, as Korean ones tend to taste bitter. |
Okbi Han is a poet, painter, and video editor. She lives in Seoul and can be reached at [email protected]. She is also a professional french fries craver.