The Problem Now

 

The problem now is not only do we not have the right answer, we’re not even sure we have the right question.

—Richard Berendzen, astronomer

  

While the discovery of a seemingly ageless universe occasioned the remark, it reflects the disorientation I experienced in trying to explain God. I did not have answers to questions I wasn’t sure were right. The main point of inquiry was how could God be personal. I stumbled along a road of platitudes centered on the vanity of any attempt to personify a supreme being.

As my catechism taught: there is only one God—a supreme being who is omnipotent. In a word, almighty. A word used to describe that which we cannot conceive, a wonderment, a bewilderment, something without shape or face or speech. God is an amorphous something, a something which probably is not living or breathing. And yet we wish it were a father, a father with a face. We wish it were alive, we wish it were breathing, of body and soul, walking among us, conversing with us. We are desperate in our want to belong to it and it to us.

In the face of this facelessness, man attempts to create not something out of nothing but something out of everything. Why it may take on many looks can be answered by the man who sculpted a dog out of wood; when asked how he did it, he answered simply, I carved away all that didn’t belong to my dog. This idea may go a long way in explaining the variety in religions: Catholic icons, Hindu cows or craven images.

The form invariably dictates the character of our faceless God and likewise the steps required to worship it. There is all manner of ritual and sacrifice, some conducted in unfathomable crazes and rages, all an effort to understand why we are here and for what purpose. To answer these enormously troubling questions we ascribe to God certain traits—again depending on the people and its temperament; implacable and cruel, noble and gentle, all knowing and all enforcing, benign and merciful—or merciful and yet vengeful.

Certain quarters assure themselves that the Bible is the bedrock. This supreme being spoke, someone was listening and happened to have a pencil. Please strike that; it reflects prejudice. Amend it to read: God spoke and someone heard. And now we are the keepers of the word of the supreme.

The universe, as best we understand, is 18 billion years old. So I asked myself is God’s message comparable to the travel of starlight: uttered millions or billions of years ago and only now reaching us? Or have we looked inside ourselves and seen part of the Big Bang, part of the Word? The news article suggests as much, for its claim is that the universe is older than its stars. But such a statement lends credence to the notion that God first created the word, then the other stuff such as the sun and the earth. Were we known before we ever were?

No, we are here, illusion or no. It is just me, just you. And what we do matters. Why? Not because of any cosmic cop. No naughty or nice syndrome in the galactic. Because there are others ahead of us whose lives will be directly affected by what I do or don’t do or deny or uphold. Inasmuch as I am part, I am the whole—the whole of mankind behind me, the future cascading before me. It is for me to determine the course of mankind. I am influential, if not powerful, both in word and deed. What I say to myself in my darkest moments, all men will hear, what I do in the darkest corners all men will eventually see. My temptations are all men’s, my victories belong to all, for I am one who came before and part of those who will come after.

I once thought that we, all of us, were God. Write such nonsense off to the struggles of youth. Now I see that we, all of us, those before me and after, are history, we are a story being told and retold, one that goes untold and at the same time is unfolding. We are players, we are parts, and we join in the whole.

Once in the ardor of my rebellion against the deity, I prayed for an extraterrestrial visitor. I wanted to ask the alien if Christ had ever come to live and die among them in order to free their souls from an original sin. I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in to have them answer no, so then I could challenge the testament in its entirety. Now I understand the alien could answer yes or no, and it wouldn’t matter. We still face the same condition—lost subjects of a supreme being that is omnipotent.

How can I be sure there is a God, after all it wasn’t long ago that I denounced the concept and discovered that I lost the fear and loathing that accompanied it. Lost the fear but the terror remains.

To paraphrase Rand, God is a terror because we cannot know it. It is closed to us, mindless of us. And since it is absolute, it is absolutely closed, absolutely inconsiderate. We stand before it unable to divine our way, much less a destination we cannot reach even if we knew it. Without purpose and intent, we face the horror that is ourselves, we confront but cannot communicate, we speak but no one, not even ourselves, hears. We cannot fathom or discern so even our actions become suspect. The terror is within and without, at all times relentless. We know God by the terror and in just the same fashion, we know life by suffering. Unamuno said as much.

But let’s take a more practical tack. Obviously we had no hand in nature, the construction of its laws and its obedience to the flow of evolution. What we create only destroys nature, be it intentional or inadvertent. We stake no claim to creation; we know only too well we are the results, albeit misguided and forlorn. So we harken back to the astronomers’ calculation of 18 billion years; even before the Big Bang the universe existed. Who or what introduced elements into this limitless vacuum? Who or what set in motion this enduring march toward human life so long ago? It is the height of understatement to say it was something greater than us, something far more powerful, and something that knew everything at once. God. This monosyllabic utterance will do as good as any, but never do it justice.

And now to the issue at hand. How to personalize this God, this cause? We are given to make-believe—out of the terror, the desolation, the dire need for the strength to live together and the stability to stand alone. At their core, all religions are the same—a statement of awe and the conditions which will allow us to live in awe. Since no one is successful in abiding by these conditions, there are mild prescriptions for forgetting the constancy of awe.

Concepts such as omnipotence are not readily grasped. In order to make God discernible we attribute to it certain human traits; thereby subtracting from infinity. The math aside, let’s take mercy. In our thirst for eternity we grant God the capacity to be lenient in the face of our transgressions. Likewise, we offer ourselves the chance to exercise mercy amongst ourselves since we strive to emulate the divine. The connection here has a clever duality—us to ourselves and us to God. Once connected, we are now associated. Associated, united. United, kin.

Now that God looks like us and acts like us we will know God when we see God. This goes to the heart of the adage—seek and you shall find. We don’t know what to look for unless it resembles something we have seen, something we know. When Lawrence of Arabia showed Arabs pictures he had taken of them, they did not know what they were looking at; they had never seen their own image. Given the ability to see God we can pursue God. We can search for it in the hope of finding a reason for our being here, our primary purpose. For man it is imperative that he understand why, that his presence has meaning. Who better to answer such soul-seated troubles than the one that made all things?

(One of the difficulties in writing the paragraph above is the pronoun—it. My tendency was to use—him. Why him, why not her? Again we have added a human trait, a He-God, not a She-God. By doing so, we reduce God’s stature. And ultimately the possibility of mercy.)

Other properties we ascribe to God are thought and actions. We say God thinks and acts, or that for God the two activities are one and the same. Additionally, we claim that we exist because we are in God’s thoughts. If we weren’t, we would die or far worse, never have been. What all this points to is our quietly raging dependency. It has been argued that dependency is the essence of religious sense. Once dependent, we are susceptible. Now the situation is right or ripe. Let’s play this card known as religion, for we are supremely capable of tricking out God in all manner of lore and luridness.

Dependency may not capture the entirety of the religious sense. Add to the mix the idea of wishing and willing. The wish to be known by the divine, the willingness to believe this is not only possible but very probable. One of the most accepted ways to accomplish this is to pray. Prayer in and of itself is a very humbling experience because you surrender your freedom to God in the hopes it can change your fate. Examine the idea closer and you can easily substitute praying to God with rubbing a rabbit’s foot. Each seeks the same end: a turn of events in your favor. You look for assistance and support. If what you pray for or rub the furry foot for happens, you are at a complete loss to explain how or why. You simply trust, perhaps in the furry foot or prayer. Does it really matter which?

The idea of an answered prayer bores in on the essence of a God that presides over us, that nurtures us, so much so in fact that God gave us its son in order that we might kill him and thus rid ourselves of the ultimate divine offense. This strikes me as nothing short of Pre-Copernican: the sun does indeed revolve around us, the universe orbits us. We are the center of it all. By extension, we are the focal point of God. In the center of this seemingly infinite maelstrom, this behemoth that has lived for 18 billion years, is the Earth. More important, the Earth’s occupants. We are the bullseyes in this galactic whirligig that we can scarcely comprehend. This is vanity of divine proportions. It is only outdone by the fantastic notion of in-his-image-and-likeness.

Are we capable of being everywhere at once? Are we capable of a cognitive process that exceeds thought? Are we capable of infinite mercy? Are we even capable of forgiving the slightest transgression? No! No! And hell no!

To add us to the equation, to couple our characteristics to that of the infinite, is nothing short of arrogance. More to the point, by our ascription, we weaken the idea of God. Is God arrogant? When you are the only one who is and all else exists in time, what would be the point? No, the point is that there is grave danger in anthropomorphism. We can make an arrogant God, we can believe in something akin to a cosmic cop. We can have a God who condones many wives or just one or none at all. We can have a God who says if you sin you will burn in hell or if you sin you will be born again under less than satisfactory circumstances. By and large, the gods we conjure are dangerous, very dangerous. Proceed with caution.

In the end, we are the children of creation. We act in earnest, for we want to survive. Survive our own death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy L Rodriguez has published in English and Spanish. His novel—Guess Who Holds Thee?—is available on Amazon. His fiction and poems have appeared in over a dozen national and international journals including New London Writers (UK), honorable mention in an international short story competition sponsored by The Writer’s Drawer (Israel), Main Street Rag, Heyday Magazine, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. His novel—Never Is Now—was serialized at www.newlondonwriters.com.


Tent 4: Towards a Theory of Home

 

I’m not Canadian. I share with Justin Trudeau a past as an English major, but that’s where my connections with Canada begin and end. I’m not Canadian. I’ve told them this now three times in three different tones, but they don’t stop: “We love Canada. It seems like such a peaceful place and we are peaceful people. There are many opportunities there to pursue education, and there is also a lot of land, and Canadians are such lovely people. Like you.” Yes, Canada is lovely. But I’m not Canadian. Wallahe, I explain, I’m really not Canadian. I’m just here to ask you a few questions about what it’s like to make a home here, in these tents, in this camp, not knowing when or if you’ll return to Syria. “We won’t. We are happy to make Canada our new home.” A refugee in a different tent had explained to me that there was a rumor going around that Canadian relief agencies would interview refugees that were being considered for settlement in Canada. As hard as I try to redirect the conversation, the father of this family continues to turn it back to Canada. Finally I acquiesce, in a way.

I’ve actually been to Canada. They perk up. Once. Just once. It was as nice as you describe it—as peaceful. I went to Montreal, where there are many Lebanese who resettled there during the civil war. And now Syria is having its own troubles, which bring you here. Can you tell me when you started decorating your tent? What made you begin to treat it as a home?

Silence and looks. What was I doing? Flying into Amman as I’d done every summer of my life, this time two things were different: I came with a mission, and also a baby. And they were intertwined. My not yet one year old son deserved a mother who took all that supposed firecracker energy of hers and did something with it; helped the world in some way slightly bigger than sharing a good poem with a good group of well-meaning, comfortably raised, 18 year olds. So what was I going to do? I was going to just walk into the refugee camps, and ask the refugees themselves what it meant to them to be homeless, and then I was going to fly back to my concrete, well-powered, well-watered, well-air-conditioned, house, mortgage, car, family, job, and write all about it—theorize it even. That’s cute, my mother, daughter of refugees, says, attending a “teach-in” about the crisis. That they think they can talk about it that way, with all that theory, that they think that does anything.

The father in the tent returns to Canada. “So you’re not from the Canadian government?” No. Wallahe- I promise, I’m not. “Do you know anyone there?” No, I’m sorry, I don’t. He turns to his wife, frustrated and embarrassed, wipes his face, and begins to speak “I thought finally…” She places her hand on his back. Syrian wives, known throughout the Middle East, for their ways of quietly controlling home situations, of being “the best” wives.

I ask her now, directly, “What is it like being a mother here, a wife, a sister?” We are sitting in the middle of the expanded tent—they have attached three tents together with corroded metal to create a sort of courtyard of their own for their family and their brothers and sisters who have also come from Syria. A village within the village that is Zaatari’s west side. The frustrated father takes this as his out.

“They know all about the raising of children, I’ll leave you to speak with the experts,” and walks out. My guide, also a man, walks out too, and I’m finally left as I wanted to be, mano a mano, madre a madre.

“You’ll have to excuse him,” the mother explains, “we thought you could help us out. We have been here almost 4 years now. We still think of going back every day. We left everything there. We expected to come here for a few months. We’ve been here for three and a half years. We still think of going back there of course. Most of my family is still there and nothing is complete without my family. We have freedom here, inside the camp, we can roam freely. But we don’t leave the camp. We tried, once, but they raised the rent in Amman and it wasn’t possible for many refugees to live anywhere but the tents. But they have been kind to us here. We are free to roam within the camps. Holidays feel like holidays. The schools here are not the best and we want an education for our children. For our sons. We hear that in Canada…”

If the tent had a corner, the teenage girl who is quietly watching me would be standing in it. There are sheets of cloth creating the semblance of a doorway between the metal and the attached tent, and she is standing in it, herself in sheets of cloth, like every single other woman here, hijabed, warm to me, and tending toward the plural pronoun. I ask her what she’d like me to write down, before I leave, back to the states, not to Canada. What she’d like for others to know about her and their lives here.

Her mother chimes in, “We want them to feel with us, and to think about us. We just want to go back home.”

I promise to write that down. This is a story—a very short one—not even a story really—the introduction to a story—that hasn’t been written yet, that aches to be penned by someone better than me—but can’t yet figure out how—can’t yet find a place for itself—is afraid it won’t—before it’s too late. I have spent two years theorizing, academically, professionally, socially, pedagogically, lyrically even, about why it is important to share the real story of the refugee camps. I’ve been asked by the world’s experts what this is that I think I’m doing. Is it an oral history project? Is this about testimony? Is this for American audiences? And when I am pinned and wriggling on a wall I just say well it’s all of those things, but mostly it’s real. It’s important.

Ma tinsounah, she says in that plural again: “you all, just don’t forget us.” She is engaged at no older than 15. She says this warmly, strongly, sadly, seriously. “They are already forgetting us.”

Not everyone is forgetting, I say, quieter than her. I have wavered today between insisting on not being Canadian, and echoing the century of camps mantra to never forget. I want her to know she is not forgotten, alive, in the cloth, but I also need them to know I am not Canadian, that I’m not the way out.

“If they aren’t forgetting then how are we still here? We must be forgotten.” How can I make a cowardly amends. For what she has said to me? We’re not all forgetting, I say, quieter than her, because she, 15, engaged, living in all kinds of cloth and no walls, no way out, no Canada, deserves the last word.

I thank them for their time, and look back at the girl in the sort of corner. “Zhoorouna,” she says. A single word that means, “come back and visit us when you’re next passing through.” “We will be here.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yasmine Shamma is a Junior Research Fellow at Durham University, where she is completing her second book project on Refugee senses of home. Her first book, Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry, will be published with Oxford University Press in Autumn 2018. She is also editor of The Aesthetics of Joe Brainard (EUP 2019), and creator of the poetry mapping mobile app, Stanza. She has lived worked and studied throughout the (east coast) USA, Middle East, and UK.


My Trump Journal

 

Soon after the 2016 election, I began keeping a journal on the Trump Crisis. Excerpts appeared in the Sun magazine in August, 2017. Here are further selections. (Some entries are tweets, for which I have retained the original capitalization.)

 

11/11

Academics must be excited about the Trump Presidency. At last, they have something truly new to study. I imagine researchers choosing their subtopics this week: “Neo-Fascism and the Postal Service,” “The New Authoritarianism and Walmart,” etc.

 

11/16

Tweet:

Hey, you fucking fascists! I’m a Jew! Come beat me up!

 

11/18

Hillary wasn’t running for President; she was waiting to be President. She thought her election was inevitable, like the iPhone 7.0. The voters punished her for hubris.

 

11/19

Trump is our first post-literate president. He writes tweets, which are all correctly spelled (mysteriously) but he’s never been known to actually read. Though he kept a copy of Mein Kampf next to his bed during his marriage to Ivana, she defended him by saying he never read it.

 

11/24

Meditation for White People

Close your eyes.

Pay attention to your breathing.

Listen to the sounds around you.

Continue breathing, aware of your inbreath and outbreath.

Now think of your own body.

Imagine that you have dark skin – brown, deep brown, even black.

Imagine yourself walking down the street, in the body of a black person.

Imagine how the world looks if you are African-American.

Imagine how the world looks at you.

Return to your breathing.

Slowly open your eyes.

 

11/30

“I’m glad I’m old,” my 97-year-old father said to me. “Hopefully I won’t have to live through eight years of this bastard.”

 

12/1

Trump’s Cabinet appointments are a juvenile attempt to demoralize us. Don’t fall for this! Remember the Trump Era Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the Fascism I cannot change, the strength to fight the Fascism that I can, and the correct political analysis to know the difference.

 

12/5

Plus I’m dusting off my most successful bumper sticker slogan:

I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR

 

12/6

Explosion

The Bible

blew up in

my face.

 

12/7

When Trump shuts down Saturday Night Live, pack your bags.

 

12/9

It may be said of Trump, without irony, that he has a genius for stupidity.

 

12/12

In the 1960s they used bullets. Now they assassinate you with WikiLeaks.

 

12/25

Future White House sex rumors:

Trump’s a hermaphrodite.

Mike Pence is gay.

Melania was born male.

 

1/15

Racism is an addiction, like methamphetamine. There should be a 12-Step program for racists.

 

3/16

Misread headline: “Trump Budget Seeks Big Tit to the Military”

[New York Times; the word was “Tilt”]

 

3/23

Homework assignment: Civilian crime is down, but government crime is way up. Explain.

 

3/27

So far it’s been winter throughout the Trump administration – and it feels like an eternal winter.

 

5/12

I thought Trump was impersonating a half-mad English king – but no, he’s a fucking ROMAN EMPEROR!

 

7/10

One good thing about Trump being president: the stupid debate about whether racism still exists is over.

 

8/10

The last 17 years of the American presidency have proved that 1) black people solve problems; 2) white people fuck things up.

 

8/26

Actually, I’m for an ALL-transgender army!

 

8/30

Trump is making narcissists look bad. There have been great narcissists in history: Mick Jagger, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo da Vinci…

 

9/25

Trump is exactly like a Marvel supervillain: boastful, cocky, megalomaniacal, obscenely powerful. I just hope the Fantastic Four can defeat him in time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sparrow is usually reading Freud and Shakespeare. (He recently finished Totem and Taboo and The Comedy of Errors.) He lives in Phoenicia, New York. Sparrow’s latest book is On Certain Nights Everyone in the USA Has the Same Dream (Inpatient Press), a journal of his campaign for President in 2016.


63 Cantos

 

“the clocks spell time nonstop”
Jean Arp, 1938

 

Sanguine taint of time, despite the bright
Tempo, brevity remains the order of each day.
Go bless the blander corridors. Hang the pennant
Firm, despite the flapping, broken cup of wind.
So much can be said for this dose of dank ink.

During the days, weeks, and months we walk.
Often seen thieving, seems an eternity ago—
When the vizierial, the milieu venereal, time
Funereal, how it sprints past dismissive!
Noggin sozzled. Large yellow skull a labratory.

Today’s oilgopsony is a raw tobacco appeal scheme.
As we dig we bury. Our pencils are old. The paper ever
Older. One feels the blood boiling underneath, like as
A lover under crumples, abed. There’s always some
Things to whisper about, if you listen soft enough.

That lump that rests beneath your heart—there
Is where the timepiece dies every day. Where the sleep
Stops every other broken breath. Tactus, minim
Crotchet, nonce, evaporation around a bunch of quavers.
So the crowded stroll on a pattern of narrow pavers.

Old time cracks the path, and such is the cosmic engine
Idling all alone and hulking in the frozen street.
Cams on the automata, buried by snow each night.
Seeds are bones. Bones are broken near-Eastern dreams
Of taking stock of stars to know how old we’ll be tomorrow.

Sexagesimal dictates be damned. One eye on the calendar
And also a foot on the calendar and an empty string
Around each finger to aid in recalling what repdigit
Means if all you’ve ever known is the bijective base
Which balances your statue on one marble foot.

The corner holds a spacious bone room full of no patterns
Just red and blue and (randomly) the blue turns into
Green and the next time the green one goes, it’s white.
Such is the staccatissimo this afternoon.
My earliest memories will remain forever uncorroborated.

So data becomes time as light becomes time
As time wavers never and that’s a good no call
As the Quarterback Poets always say of a Sunday.
A blind spot echo dot, every day a carvery—
We slice and we layer, stroke upon stroke, like butchers.

Do more than sleep. If bones are dust and dust
Is glass, then what of flesh? Like when yours
Were naked nostrils, no dark, brown hair, no crisp
And brittle snips. But what then of bones if this is mere
Sleep without the outer crust of time as flesh. None.

As we dig, we balance, densely imbricated, because more.
Otherwise, always, somatoform, this mnemosyne atlas
This catastrophe in the rectangular rain, contrapuntal
Cloud pump, bedside, born in five different places. Not
Including Rome, where this luckiest spolia was born.

As if the building’s brick’s a skin, what is the heart? Toilet.
Take the “i” from “toilet” and you’ve a flat to rent.
And if time was flat, we would be broken, methodical animals.
And if rent was time, mine would be a palace at 4AM.
And if time was a palace, the decor would be angular and abrupt.

As such this train is time, a hurtling forth reflective
Of nothing so little as progress. The route is frayed
From to and fro and dithering hither and yon. Train
Is time, the table, the arrow—charts and chugging.
The surplus of words, too, needs a man and a wheelbarrow.

Contrapuntal Cloud Pump! Once (ago) one called
And bottles, cans and smokes appeared with sandwiches
From a small boy in a cotton apron down around his roll
Of ankles. His nickels for Archie. His dimes for The Bird.
Once (ago) we took the neighborhood for granted.

When smattered, time is pyroclastic, runic ribbons
And beam tactics of imbalance—the eldest duo clock—
With tortoises for slow days and sparrows for fast—
And over the slobber job of lunch the carver eyes
Your corpulent neck, slicing it into second helpings.

Pay with each moment’s penny, every nickel
Is a minute, the hour’s a dime, the day’s a dollar—
You do the math, which never adds up, no merit
For the agglomeration of dollar models for if time’s a film
The week’s pass—just smash cut upon smash cut.

And say heat was such as time, you’d be the coal
Man’s wobbly wheelbarrow. If heat was time
Last Wednesday was a match-stick-head in the rain
And you would be the runny rivulets in a just
Above frozen gutter, played as it layeth.

The staves make the man—same tinted in hints
Of pink, chartreuse, lapis and their equally soft uncle’s
Bent out belts and padded layers. Softness
As the president said above his tenor where
The city manhandles the cloud pump, flooding flatlands.

So time, too, like the ladder as the higher you climb
The harder it gets. If rungs are staves then your boots
Are cellos. Death is for dinner. Break off a slab
Of the bread ring, but leave some ham for the little ones—
Their loaded map unlucky, one street sickly, a one siecle sickle.

Did you water the stone this morning? That way the news
Fuses with the concrete. That way the sage sand collects
In evaporation, the water disappearing like a siren, solemn
And sibilant, a loudness turning to a loneliness, cindering
The family shoes, the family wine, the family blanket.

We require no action, no drama, not ever any dancing
And certainly no spinning, only to walk a straight line
To the honest core of whatever matter remains to hand
And if matter was time, so the globe could be ours.
A declaration of intent, half slag-heap, half sylvan asylum.

Verdant and good as green as the path of a chimney
Sweep to start the morning is good luck or so
Says good Goop Joe thumbing through the almond
Almanac, soiled only by his dusty thumbs
Known best by his frosty, unfrisky forebears, blessed.

So time’s a gulp of fuel. So time’s an Archipenko.
The clock’s a goblin; the goblin’s your great uncle
And Archipenko will always remember when you
Captured the flag. Watch the numbers glimmer.
Watch them flicker for a minute in the crepuscular mist.

Remember it, probably the last of this bitterest
Winter. Watch the face of the angel, split by a fist.
Sad little laughing wet nurse of wine, see it weep as well.
Witness to the greatest grimace—who in hell can make
This cohere? Time is not a memory game.

Digression from the platform does a body good.
The clock’s a gorgon. She’ll eat your face off. Fly
Off the rails for her. Both arms are dangerous.
Consider nothing too reprehensible. Time’s a raging
Nerve ending and remains, as ever, never ending.

The dainty bloat of time—fat twins, conceptually
Concurrent. The slim slob, turbulent and trim, fit
Into a corner, a trouble of mud, another ham in the ether.
Another crumb of erasure. Time’s a heartless concierge
Giving nill with an eloquence of starry cloudiness.

All abud is the banter about burials.
Of the binds and the butterflies, the watermelon
In Easter hay, the very old book cellar called Ye Olde
Cheese Factory. With a similitude within you, leap forth.
Radio telegram your gusto code, your gusto cadence.

And would that time was the side of a truck, painted
Dark blue first, white second, light blue third, white again
And each time with differing lettering and logo
And baked a decade in the bitter city sun and blasting
Sands and thus skinned alive by nature daily.

This impulse is imperial, the laboratory empirical.
If time was a bridge, each brick would twitch willy-nilly.
Marchers traversing would do a shimmy in between quadrilles.
It’s a game that requires the hourglass to kneel
And just as the old nut pronounced, the breakers set to keel.

And so below—time’s a dray-horse clomping cobbles—
Smidge of snow, pavers smoothed in endlessness.
Sonny on the bridge in the snow all alone. The trance
Of river air, precious gibberish, quivering tides.
Ask the box of god who retells the tale in zenith and nadir.

The faster smoke advances in a blue shirt, staveless.
Distraction knit a sweater with two pencils, weaves now
Of warmth, the shape of heat to come, yarn that swings
Writ large on a body made largely of vapor. Weightless
As the wind what propels it forth with gusty ankles.

Hemorrhage in the wrinkle, fissure in the lacunae, glut
In the clefty folds that spin away centripetal. The dervish
Crouches in whiskers and silk and says make this sound
Like it’s floating as the wind makes the wood work while
The thickest string quavers like a feather not yet frozen.

Time is a slipped constrictor knot, tied by an anti-salt
With boards for fingers, mostly callous, harsh as hail.
One never sets sail with this mooring the keel
To port, not with this implausible hitch. And so
One never strays, but treads the moment, silent, vibrant.

How much for the flugelhorn? It might voice this outrage
Nicely without niceties. Time is a naked sneak thief
In the pawn shop window, jingling nickels, old as the drum
Beat night, buffalo smooth grit in every groove, dread
In the clink of tintinnabulation, such stinging musics.

If only time was an incomplete open cube avail
On Tuesday! If only dark broadness, surrounded
By women and a grey cur growling under hunger.
All dogs are preludes to the next dog’s day.
Dogs sleep, humming along with the thermometer.

Elsewhere, time’s a feisty list of necessities.
Bright list tells us how to tackle the canzone, the tenson
Or the triolet with our fist of thumbs and just a nub
Of Dixon soft between them. So, smudged, we go, so
Let’s to prayer as follows—with rancor and sorrow.

So we are sixty in a sequence of glistening sixties.
Some days the whole damn things dances left and fro
Right and untoward, like Monday the unguent, Tuesday
The slurp, Wednesday land-lubbing, Thursday a stitch
Friday an itch, Saturdays don’t exist, Sunday smothered.

Winter is a snitch, the game’s gone, but was a box-set
Complete—an earwig of pianoforte parabola torque.
Great changes afoot in the world of war! Rise!
And shine and praise the yellow Rhine from your distance—
Through salt and sugar, brine and dill and vinegar.

Over hill and lane, dell and dale, formerly eager
Ever after amid the gillyflowers, pot of glue, lot au feu
The cartoon tuba, the complete etudes, Newport
News to Perth Amboy, there is no ice in Italy—
All melted quickly by Greenwich Mean.

As any lucubration on the matter’s adherence to the form
Of time must surely delve quickly for to capture even
Its subject, much less any essence soever, so slather the mother
Of this, your bath, so cold in of doors, imagine
The out! Such a mincing jibber from the banderlog!

Towards a middle road, so says the oldster on your shoulder
With a snicker and ham-fisted finesse like a top-heavy
Boxer with fancy footwork as early 20th century
Eastern European folk music pours from an open window
Of an afternoon in New York City, late winter.

How many horses need we beat? Keep our thoughts
In our shoulders, hug our loupe with balance and tact.
Such the web, such the snare, such the traps
Of time, what whirrs, and dings, what slurs and sings—
Such hurtling ‘mongst the pennant and bunting.

The cluster of nerves, a knot, besotted. Announcer skis
With a gun, racing toward seventh place. Some bitter
Solace for a love of snow. Truck trails lace the medium
Backdrop, a skein of blinking, lambent and persistent.
Your weapon is but a spoon, sharped on a cell wall.

It is not absorbed, not this reflection, but stills
Upon the skin and lips and fingertips, such is
The hiccup, a standpipe, out front of an otherwise
Flawless mid century façade. So time is a list
Of torpedoes, a dragnet for aficionados.

How quickly does the frost melt in slalom
Down the window, avid window, averse to sweetly
Heated family-scapes, pencils brisk, tapers blazing
In vapor quenched, but time is thick ice regardless—
With a bright, melodic music drenching the trick.

Braces on a billow-shirted brickman in sturdy bootwork
Is the clock and the clock is a man of the world
Despite his collar’s middling browning among the black
Shoes he’s still but a medium stain, like a dance
Darkened carpet, well sun trod, well wine trod.

We slide and they slide and he never uses
Her eraser, sooner his shears or a quick blade—
Time skates a short track, nearly sideways.
Time is a brown-skinned middleman, foxed like paper
Under light and moisture, scripophily under a microscope.

Humongous switch double rodeo Japan, all caterpillars
Are lavender. All brads are hammered. Such is the dark
Night full of crumbs from the tooth of a drill what bores
Through pulpy knots of old growth turned sturdy into tables.
Turned tougher into rough-housing chairs under children.

Harrowing prayers, metal plated, who sleeps on a rock
Under a sharp burlap sack is a visionary instead
Of a technician. Hands off Des Moines! US out of Iowa!
The signs read over bones melting in an unforgivable siesta
Sun, deep as a mouth, gillyflowers in grisaille, they smoke
Like jalopies—a run with the bulls has its perils.

Old anew through hoarse basso, the new meets mythos
As avuncular legerdemain and legend alone
Without so much as a slurp of doubt, riding
An unknown river to a lesser known port
And always warmly welcome.

Terrify your way to the task past the cemetery
Where every day is a pile of fertile dirt
Full of lower orders who chew through
Solid rock like silt. So the globe won’t tilt.
They believe the wind can be hurt.

Mirth in helmets, mirth in an extra twenty minutes
Subtracted from the animal of your afternoon.
If time is a planet, be it Pluto—
Hurtling fast and tiny. New muscle, new memory—
Clanking like a hinge-flap on a sacred codex.

If time were space and heat, we are standing in swift
Back-draft, full immolation, utter despond.
All might and main to reach the golden Greenwich Mean—
Pig cheese and jollity of spirits. If architecture was time
You had a damn good run on the parlor floor.

So the eldest ring rides off kilter, wracking the axis’ brain
Glitter in a puddle, wreaking havoc nigh unto paroxysm.
Fish in the folds of the flag saw death’s last crust
Of sandwich, last huff of turtle soup. As hangs a darkness
On the mill-wind, so does this heartless grace, good as a girl.

Her bottled foot, her skirt flights. Her bellows.
Her smoky soot, her drab grab, a splash and a soak—
Faster scat than the lamp ever hangs.
If time’s a singer, her blue is old and slow, bitter
And low—a country window full of smoked meat.

The verge escapement, lso crown wheel, the gear train
Dark as Trubshaw, and clock is also watch, same
As fob is chain, is canonical as the sun, that time itself
Be hands and hangers, gaskets, washers, hex nuts, cap nuts.
Wrist and pocket, glass and face, sprint and pace, excelsior.

As the egg drips and, so, dries on sleeker marble
The same skein as the milk in man, white
Flake, only warm a moment, no more, and done in—
By air, tired iron or the endlessness of death, what happens
All the time—and if it were an egg, time would never.

Because he was dust, there could be no flesh, there remains no
Film in heart or air, no acetate of his brittle voice’s echo.
There is no dowsing ace of twigs discovering a small trove
Of objects he was known to handle, both because such ephemera
Was built to be buried and no one’s memory sealed this hole.

An exacting standard in the sun dries out such juice
As the nonce of inspiration—covered, now, in large, wet snow.
And cold, again, for the trillionth time, consolatio, so
Apropos as to add the chills to an overwhelming
Coolth, so the wild oil dries into a photogravure—astute.

Propelled, by force of place, by spondee swerve—
Hand over foot, head over hind leg, spring and hurdle—
Medallion and memento, sinewy mnemonics—
Spontaneity and pageantry in vocabulary. The haggle
Is with the arms and hands of time, not the feet of verse.

Because the gods are men and women, always have been.
So the type case is empty, save the short
Sibilant chorus of wrinkled leaves what dance randy walls
As the pugilist eats the turnbuckle, with a difficulty
Known in some more strident circles as impossible.

For who stands by still while ticking the chits?
To be sure, the trickster hangs nine whole days
On the globe’s over-arching tree? A cement mixer
Gets the drift—you swirl around proudly—
The mimicry of amelioration.

We grind in the round, humid room.
So time is a termite with a belly full of knotty pine.
Time is a sorrow of smoke, the remnant of ash.
The silly crook, the sillier cant, we spruce up
The façade in the deliberate breeze of time’s waving arms.

Because behind even the most mediocre of men
Stands a phalanx of women urging his betterment.
As he dries his eyes on the bloody wipe, his final arms
Around the shining of this hard won gift
From an unseasonably cloudless sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Zieher is a poet, artist and co-owner of the contemporary art gallery ZieherSmith. His 5th book of poetry was published in 2016 to coincide with a solo exhibition of collages at Ampersand Gallery in Portland, Oregon. He lives and works in New York City with his wife and three children. With AMERICAN CHEESE & HAM, (A DRAFT OF 63 CANTOS), New Theory continues the serial publication of the sixth of Zieher’s proposed 13 volume, book-length poem project, TRISKADEKALOG. The work herein consists of lines composed in an original 1892 “Condensed, Comparative Record For Five Years” printed by Samuel Ward’s Company in Boston, and bound in maroon cloth. The volume consists of five lined entries, and a prefatory note urges “suppose, out of the multitude of matters that crowd each day, you jot down in a line or two those most worthy of remembrance.” These are 63 such daily efforts, un-retouched.


Ham & Cheese Appendices: Being Three, Unretouched Notebooks with Provisional Titles Containing American, Ham and/or Cheese

 

(BOILED HAM)

And all the many helmets of elsewhere—

Statues also die.

*

The godforsaken workaround on the broken path

To October—

Elsewhere, a habit is formed.

*

Ne’er broke.

*

Stand in contradistinction.

*

FIFTH AVENUE

THUNDER FUN

*

BOX & GLOM

*

Today’s tools include—

Ella Swings.

Hawk Flies.

Monk Stews.

Miles Cooks.

*

Brick & Mortuary

*

Robot Sliced Noodles.

*

Somehow summer.

Summer somehow.

April— nuggets from Das Vaterland

Mit Monsieur Arp in untranslatable concrete.

*

Here’s another dime for you, Mister Songman.

*

COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY BREAKFAST

*

Groinal— tight pants

On tasty ones.

*

Downtown breakfasts of long ago.

*

That is not the actress—

Disastrous as a dime.

*

Today’s family’s many splendored

Fingertips— spread wide across

The wooden keys.

*

THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE OF ALL TIME

*

One eyed hot dog vendor winks hello—

Seeking lucrativity among the metallurgists.

*

The boys can live awhile

On cinnamon and macaroni.

An occasional onion

For some good measure.

*

Round up all the gents

With drinking problems

In the Composition Department.

Have them convene

With the delivery fellows.

Give them punch, should

They require it and they will

Require it.

*

Not as if love was as easy as capitol T.

Because everyone knows that love

Is the difference between blue and green.

(Add your mother)

*

Often, after

Reading awhile

I put my hand

Under my chin

For a little

Sleep or some such.

*

My horse is a bird.

So over the snow

And next week

Will be warmer

The songbirds

Are saying

That next week

Will be warmer

With a droopy groove

It’s a droopy groove

On the double tome time.

Look! Drunken lesbians

Leaving the strip club!

Times change daily!

Blowing into the valley

In midtown all the backdoor

Balconies.

*

That’s so funny!

You’re laughing me!

*

The rigorous filth.

*

Jazz bone behemoth.

*

The snow peas of thirst.

*

VICTORY HAS A HUNDRED FATHERS. DEFEAT IS AN ORPHAN.

*

Homeless Los Angelino on Grand Street in the pouring rain—

THEY GET TO SLEEP ON THE BEACH FOR 30 YEARS!

*

Day laborer

Tamale lady

Empanada lady

Iron worker

*

The conversation

You’ve requested

No longer exists.

*

Look!

I’m in the rectangle of New York!

*

These are animals.

I am an animal.

*

Off book—

In this cloak

I always feel awesome.

Most high, unholy

Hymning—

A snack in grandaddy’s hat.

The porcine portrait side panel

Of Flushing Meats’ delivery truck

Avenue D of a Thursday.

Crown Chicken

Church Chicken

King Chicken

*

Fragile compassion

Hymn plaque.

Hymn plague.

Hymns from the homeland.

The tomb

From Friday

Forward—

Homemade ham salad

And black coffee.

Like a grandmother

At Paul’s Diner—

Downtown

Homeland

1974

Tuna fish

And coffee.

Paul was not

Only the best Tuna

Sandwich in town

He was also the mayor.

Only twenty years later

Did I realize how good

The combination was—

*

British

Third Grader

Brandown

Butterick’s

Big Sister

Brenda

& Her

Gigantic

Bosoms—

Their father

Was a chain smoking

Lyric poet

Of some regard

In the north

Of England.

*

Second impulse to poetry— 1981

Super tight, dark brown corduroys.

Double date including Jimbo Durns, who became

A religious. Can’t remember her name.

Needed to fluctuate the entire date.

*

Flatulent “STEMS” of drums.

*

Third airline beer $18 left.

Airplane sausage

Airplane cheese.

Wind warning.

*

Empty Tuesday

On scaffold street.

*

Irregularities in screw & bolt fabrication.

We bend.

*

Almost feel

As if I’ve

Spent most

Of my life

In mourning.

*

Listening

To Canadian girls sing.

Listening

To bongo and banjo.

Eating cheese

From a far.

*

Dog named Barney.

*

CAPSTONE

*

ERSTWHILE

*

C: Is that the wonderful bridge?

T: We are monsters! We are important!

*

Blood Thinner Alert!

*

Is the money obscene in baseball?

Is the money obscene in the movies?

Is the money obscene in politics?

Is the money obscene in celebrity?

Is the money obscene in reality?

Then shut your yap hole about art.

*

I’m not the least bit disenfranchised.

*

At this level of acrimony.

Air fluff. No heat.

*

It’s not his fault he’s from Toronto

And the wind is brown with Adriatic teeth.

*

NULL SET

*

He rented a room

To draw in the dark.

That was his idea

Of shore leave.

Lucifer shone the light—

Torch-bearer, luminescence

Divinity in the latrines

Of Rome, the grip

Of a great white rock

Of a light that grows.

Maybe he played

The radio, perhaps

He blared the radio

Loudly. Only

The drawings can tell

And they are mutually

Uniformly

Unimpeachably

Mute. The news

Relates a crash

In oil prices.

He drinks a bowl

Of milk in the dark.

Other parts

Of the kingdom

Require robes.

The sagas relate

That way before

Leif Ericson, way

Indeed, before

Columbus discovered

Canada on my birthday.

*

Separating iron

From rock

Is called SMELTING.

*

They die too.

*

Nobody quits

While they’re ahead—

This isn’t France.

We toast

With distant Pabst

As well as the immediate

Future.

*

I chew my bloody Mary

Like a nook midget.

*

EKPHRASTIC TRIPTYCH

LEFT PANEL— where a large, bearded man

Halves a loaf of cheese and then halves it again—

Dirty hands leaving deep, groovy, prints

In the loaf’s malleable surface and edges.

*

Manual as a tube of royal blue.

*

The result being a painting

Worth retelling with words.

Echo Niner says the pilot

Through his relentless, static stutter.

*

Northern men in southerly climes—

And the difficulty of their times.

*

Solid like spring

Time when the water

Is a wall. When you know

The morning’s broken

In a sack full of plastic

Circles.

*

Perpetual trouble

Shooter’s manual.

*

Pile of plastic.

Big bag of wigs.

The children of sleep

Are cheap and the books

Of Jersey City are safe

As the central stairwell.

Stop at philopater.

Stop at wisdom.

Be better.

*

Got his in Michigan

From above, when

The clouds break

And a shore appears

Out of nowhere—

Like a zip line through

The evaporation of milk

That the sky was when we

Were struck rough by indignities

Of the old east flying fast

For a foreign sun, knowing full

Well it’s been dead the while.

And again an hour

Later, a new shore wavers north

In order that wheelwrights

Might steer their handiwork

Toward an end

To the argument of water.

*

THREE STANDING WOMEN

TWO SQUATTING WOMEN

SEATED WOMAN

GIRL BY THE BED WITH GLADIOLAS

*

And so it is that after

All these years

The light up high

Becomes a miniscule

Orange ribbon

Like one sewn

Into the oversized sleeve

Of a simpleton’s ceremonial cloak.

Stuck between the sweat

Of earthly cares and the bruising

Weight of smog from our supposedly

Spiritual delights.

*

That’s a lot of dead passengers up there

Says Mitch from under his moustache.

And that tiny wisp turns into a smart

Weft of tensile threads and disappears.

Abundant as the box

Of jack threads what fell off the truck

And just as suddenly the charm

Of color outs the sky

Leaving dust and sleep and a blue

That is widely described as black.

*

And so we rose west regardless

Watching clouds rolling west

Fast and toward the sun—

Knowing still the sun can’t run

But stands still amid the pile of white.

*

Billy Dollar on Juanita Street.

*

JOKES ABOUT BACON

RAINBOW ON THE CULVER LOCAL

JOKES ABOUT JEWS

JOKES ABOUT BEER—

I’ll have the Ass Burger, rare.

*

Coat smells like Hood River wood smoke.

*

T: Your treasure is our light.

C: So put this in mine treasure.

*

Eat a canoe!

Eat a surf board!

Eat a ski!

*

REMOVING INTACT ALL FOUR CORNERS AT THE EAVES

*

EVERY DAY DREAM OF AIR RIGHTS DASHED

*

Among the footmen

Among the many

Amidships, aplenty.

*

Velocity, volume, veracity—

Mannahatta.

*

Hand me that granddad-made spade.

*

Miguel! Bone to see you

Last son soon sir!

*

1965 club—

Empty can of bitter rain.

*

This I have seen

Dripping.

This I have seen

Dimming.

This I have seen

Sniveling.

This I have seen

Careening.

There I have gone.

*

Abby versus Abe

Lincoln.

*

JOSEPH CORNELL— THE TRUFFLE PIG OF FOURTH AVENUE

*

MAYHAP

*

FOR LOVE OF THE GLOAMING

*

Manhattan in May—

300 slate blue

Jerseys fell off the truck.

Dog sniffing decades

Of piss rusting on the hunter

Green RELAY MAIL box.

*

White man in a black shirt

Emblazoned TCHAIKOFSKY

*

Very white man—

As in translucent.

*

The world is Robert’s toilet.

*

Woman with a box

Of lemons, seeking

Fourteenth Street—

One station late.

Hikes her Husker shirt

Gets up so she can sit down.

The sailor’s face is rubbery.

The student flicks her proof.

Fire stops.

Green spots.

All along the bus route.

*

The amount of hard rubbish on a single

Street in Manhattan, walked twice daily

Thrice or more some days, could house

A village if repurposed. Today alone I saw

Four perfectly functional, full-length

Mirrors leaning against a dumpster

Near Eighth Avenue. That dumpster

Is always full due to the college dorm

It functions for— college kids— whose

Lives and reflections are disposable, apparently.

*

ELDERHELMSMAN, DUNKED

*

THINK

Hard as the sun

On skin.

Mean as the old

Old wind.

*

Young and naked

As the night.

*

Watch the workmen peregrinate.

*

That condo’s grown a helmet

Made of clay. The hut next

Is dormant with two ears

Of greener wood steam.

*

Wooden Manhattan (before electricity)

*

Or we could be in Italy

With all the others.

*

Gene Kelly’s greatest role—

An American Embarrassed.

*

Ah! Spring!

Stink-hole of seasons!

*

Walking the dog—

And there he was—

The devil in the front

Seat of a Pontiac sedan

Of some sort—

I was never good with models—

Only the make.

***

(THE DIMPLING CISTERN)

or

(MORE CHEESE PLEASE)

 

The dimpling cistern’s quivering meniscus—

The quarter moon drips like a sleeve—

Flimsy as the thermostats inside him.

Riding a small tractor, waist-naked

Dented helmet, cocked and dusty

From the dormant orchard and gullible

Garden grit—

The smithy cooling newly

Wrought wares in a barrel sawed in half—

Barrier full of rain, the bone mayor’s

Quarter moon dry as a plaster trophy.

Rent by the virid middle-far, afloat

In its own cyanosphere.

Over the river was a paper mill—

A paper will, paper nil.

Storm. Drag. Stroll. Hay road.

Lid. Waffle. Another waffle.

Batsmanship among tall trees

And balls. One should be prone—

Of the warmer holidays. One

Should allow the scud of alto

Cumulus in sky blot-hot—

Between lungs and terror.

Ducks eating dumplings.

*

Darkness and a mist settled grim

Upon the green. It was morning when

The dogs came smitten by their visage

In pools clustered low behind fell trees.

It was noon when the silhouettes appeared—

Black one in front and the darker in back.

It was after when the slight light torpedoed

An otherwise blue room all but slatternly red.

It was dusk as the rain began again in earnest.

It was night when the dogs left with both legs

Limping.

*

Checking today’s idle hour

For Vienna Sausages

An overhearing

That went a little some

Thing like he was a forge

Now eating ham

In his dotage.

*

In your brother’s basement

Bedroom, such and such a so and so—

Small, red guitar in flames, under a throne

Of falcons, under a three of door-fogs.

The drapery’s industrial mustard

Short as the window well it balconies—

Memorization of birds, pipes of famous

Men, wilted Hampshire cabinets in the steam.

As for lunch? All flesh. His stack is stag—

Up-rearing stallion in a world of mere horses.

*

Words were windows—

All lighted.

*

Also, being lost, without

Windows— words, light

The pier song’s way.

In an old tin bowl that held

Our potatoes like a hug.

Summer squeezed us too, a warmth

Like butter on corn, and welcome

As such delicacies in the bitter

Heat. Rages blazed with char

And wiped by sharper knives

Of meat. We’ve gone from bitten

Winter rumpus direct to these—

Boiling fumes.

No longer any

Spring, just hell freeze and hell

Fire. We’re still hungry. We’re

Still hunting while the train snorts

Not very far away from here at all.

Every train is a-hurry just like every

Bowl sings her best song with a spoon

Inside her belly.

*

The radio is broken— poor fool.

The yelp accompanying a triple.

Congratulatory minor-league wide-bands.

Helicopter ponds and awkward hawks.

Rat in the hopper of a chicken-bucket stop.

Healthier specimen of the genus—

Of the family, of the gene-pool, of the chain

The kingdom, phylum and class disorder.

He feasts on what the infirm and hungry

Let remain. Change your flag, old man.

Be wise, down deep, be wise. Get gas

With your chicken. Let the vermin rest

As the sky loosens to the flight of a knife

Through the soupy aires—

A millionth tongue, a tabernacle’s

Pageantry, a rich caress of cares

And a gout of kisses. Gallantry, snorts

Chortles, a nearer moon. Flash. Dapple.

Sweet ducks! Derriere. Sloop. Thunder

Blooming the Sunday room, decided

Darkness, then pouring the streets

With salt. Drum reports twice across

The echo floor, loose bureau, cavernous

Davenport. Puce bureau. Porous

Davenport neverlasting—

Grief as thief— blue

Ink common as a robin

In the deep, old grass

Of a summer’s middle—

Belly full of worms

And sturdy as the chalk

Brick buttress of below—

With a sharp fork

Inside the calm comfort of her mouth.

*

At the touch of a broken button—

So says the smoke in the rain—

Anything to see you naked again.

He hangs his nasty hat on the bannister

Against her wishes.

*

Steeled by good, crooked clay—

The cool rooms each born skew

In different bricks just past

The brush line in the window—

There is where a carnival

Does its parking. You can

Hear the music and cackles

Prim as the sticks

In this wall full of nestlings.

Lost music putting purity

Backwards. Imbrications.

Vortices wayward forward.

*

The mailman is a little old lady.

*

A basket full of babies— bright calls—

Trains are clear. Partly that they are so

Rarely seen, as much as heard, as clear

And partly cloudy is the enchantment of darkness.

*

Letters add up to sideways cartography—

Pure pyre meaninglessness. Robins mock

The venerable window wells which were

Swollen by the flood and brought the cellar’s

Eyes to pour forth lachrymose, copious

Horrible, silty rivers. But the babies bounce

Back, noggins of bedrock, ensconced in rubble—

Dreamless yet, despite the disposition of bliss.

*

She hammers the keys, an ivory saunter.

Her boutonniere itches menthol. Lime

Dangles in her gin soak, several days old.

She gave up prodigious for a gory life

Full of dropped kerchiefs, straps off

Smooth shoulders, bruised gropings.

Seven suns dot the micro-sky. The heat

Vectors, like knuckles on an owl—

A stray horn’s clarion din.

Taciturn terns at the taco shack

An honor of fossil fuel.

Cushions moist— of aging ocean done.

Deep sleep like syrup over the whole—

A drowsy dowsing.

*

Butterfly lost in the vestibule.

Hot dog. Dray horse. Dread nought.

*

Mountainside knife works of Pigeon Forge.

Come hear (from here) the jolly

Cries where folly lies—

Both ways down and dirty.

*

At men and their harms

I mumble. No charms, nor

Pipers neither.

*

Jesus Is Lord = Pother

We Buy Guns = Proof

*

Well-worn hill home

West of famous grass—

Head of a youth in profile—

Inside stands a vexed man

Who wants to cut

The hair of his first

Born son.

*

He needs a Getty martini.

*

Whoso is the god of this?

Wind splats the frontage.

Wind is fuel for the furnace—

The holy hallway full of uncles.

Tectonic, terrific, tricky.

*

Meats Cheeses Pickles Bread Chicken

Changed my mind but quick

She’s my buddy’s chick

Meats Chesses Pickles Bread Bacon Beer

Anchors, screws, nails, magic.

Magic, anchors, screws, nails.

Pastor with two different shoes.

Heart-shaped shorts. A bit of toasted

Pig and some liquid cow on bread

Or pain as the French talk it back

In the long gone away before good

Bye Brokeneck, before good bye fatso

Before good bye lispy, good bye other

Fatso. That is when the rocks were piled

High on the pillow dust called once.

Shrikes in flight surround the eagles—

A bell-tower claiming noon.

*

By comparison— there is none.

*

Value at half staff.

*

His boat is bigger than the sun.

&

Blue scape                   Stone boats

Sand scape                  Salt pillows

Green scape                Rock water

White scape                Cream stable

We mull the berries in the not sun.

*

Groan beds rolling

Like an ocean gone

Coaster. Rogue, sage

Booze or death—

Black Port end.

*

Wads

Worth—

What

You

Are not—

DEAD HEAT.

Bright as new lung.

We could weed it purple.

Bone chance.

Rustic as Rome.

Whereby the sky

Splits into arrows

And planets beam forth

As leaps across empty

Caves of teases

In starlight harking.

*

Violins and cheese.

*

Looking up a word

In the dictionary—

Haven’t ever heard

How knuckles grow hairy.

Wasting time, a dally

A tarry.

*

Two truck drivers eating

Salads at a gas station.

*

A plain explained— very

Mischief. Tesla at Sweaty Rock.

*

Sky bream

And grunty sleepeth—

At last.

*

PELLUCID

MANUMISSION

ISTRIA

*

The limpid reflection off cold

Water onto hot brick is the same

Visual as the rise of waves over

Boiling pots of water. As air, so

Water.

*

Brick-smack.

*

The honeybee that hovers

Over lavender, heavy

As the smell of children

Laughing.

*

Hill idyll.

Love lyric.

Dance across.

*

Guns are contrapuntal

Punctuation. Green gone

Grey. There’s a trio

And a wonder star.

*

Starlings dash the valley silly.

*

Just a touch of bloom sleep

Juice through a Slovenia of peace.

*

Garage jolly.

White, fresh seaside

With decrepitude

And gull-savvy boat

Scrotums float—

Escarpments bent

Around cement silos—

Cloud-ward glades

Over milky turquoise

Streams, remaining

Cloudless.

*

The castle was very beyond.

*

The water man eats a dozen peaches

For his breakfast. Lion

Says put your pants on.

*

Tingle tango.

*

Marble belly up, sleeps on a pile

Of coins, watched by a two-headed

Eagle.

*

Of yore.

*

Blind girl

With broken

Toe.

Thanks a thousand

For the happiest hunter

Green barnacles on the canal

At six of the clock—

Two gulls eating a pigeon.

Or as the songstresses

Of Calle del Cimitero

Always said— if life

Gives you lemons

Smoke a cigarette.

*

Hover over the pitkin ingle.

*

Doused in Greece

We misunderstand

Rome squeaky

As a daydream.

*

Thigh-bone skull cup like

A world class trombone

When all you want to do

Is play the trumpet.

***

(BROWNSVILLE)

or

(BACON)

So dangle delicate decades

Behind on the straight-aways

Just ahead on the curves like nuptial cans

Clanking with bent abandon’s microgrooves.

Blistered by hungriest sun bleach

Yawning, gaudy, exhausted ever after.

So we swerve onward and forward, on

The nose of same and the factory’s Russian

Enclave keeping poetry 900 years

Ugly. Super Eye with spent boat

And flamed out China bomb

Across the subjacent street where

Two boys bully a junkyard dog

Who stares through the pig

Worker fence-bulge in shame.

All nineteen men on the street

Are scavengers. At home again

The smell of Brooklyn halls

Has not changed these twenty

Five and counting quickly.

Yankee ninety nine give me

The Triple Animal (a sandwich–

Local pig, chicken and cow

Dash of salt with pepper) and smile.

That lump in your drum roll

Is bacon. That beggar is no

One’s brother. Liquored formica

Like a foot path to Shandaken

Circa 1929, in a poet’s tarnished

Pants, pants of worn tarnation.

Speaking of blemishes, the box

Of books, the box of books

The box of books. As such–

Whomsoever’s grief ever enters

Exits un-retouched in gelatin grays.

Howsoever their Koran stammers

Through in Spanish, howsoever

Their Torah knows of Zola or Lorca’s

Foible of fountains making

Mist from the tears of jilted retirees

Long departed these old breweries

Of Bushwick yon, the one nobody

Remembers. The rankled, dank

Brown stink hole and the like.

We mean 1929.

Rock Dove loose underground

At Broadway Junction. Lamp loose

Too bent for attention. And on

The return leg realize I like a little white

Lip or gully around and image

Because of stickers from the sport

Hood of childscape. Recall

Always also Throop like Norman

Like Alabama Avenue now.

Salvage yards mostly, exhilarate.

Abound, the flatbed, the open

Summer farm, gut north. Builder

Roman. News from Paris as regards

Boris on a cool and drizzly Sunday

Indoors, sorting at home. An American

Embarrassed. Coffee and cream

Salami. Interior with outré jazz.

The list is long of artists writing

Poetry and poets making art.

Their waiting room is crowded

And the lobby at their Hall

Of Fame is full to bursting.

How then to proclaim one’s tiny

Territory, blanched already

By middle May, buried by empty

Boxes. After a spank of flooding

The wood still un-warped. Stay

On top of your Stanley Dance

My son, keep the Duke in your

Front pocket. Wear your billfold

Like a middleweight on fight night.

Keep the muscles in flex, in situ

In excess, the maximal answer

To manhood. Keep the iron pigs

At bay, the tire fellows too are poison

To your sculpture, albeit golden

For your poetry. Go forth like a third

Baseman batting third in the order

With a count of two balls, two strikes

And if there are two outs Grandpa

Is happy in a heaven made

Of cotton flannel and chino.

Be a gong at the end of a long song

Whensoever of a Monday afternoon.

Ever the time, ever the day, ever

The month and if whenever only

Imperative the year, because

If it’s now it’s then. Blasé heat

Loosens minty back spasms.

Tiny empire full of windows.

Welladay! Welladay! Welladay!

Wellaway! Wellaway! Wellaway!

Oh Yankee Captain Beef hat

And ankle to hip adoration

On the west bound elevated

Day all fond and done unto dusk.

First there is a probing, akin, say

Perhaps to the opening salvo

From the expulsion of Ezra

From Pennsylvania proper

Boots caked with sewage raw

Gloves caked, each septic paw

A ruddy pummeling of oil, gas

Liquor, jazz, grease and charcoal.

Also a box of sepia chalk upon

The occasion the King’s been

Dumped on our streets again

Fat as the pigs yester-breakfasts

Pimped by groovy-aproned grannies

Grinning big for a decent duck egg

Once in a market while away.

Ice cold can of pants. As anchor

Leans gentle ‘gainst the iron wheel

The whole shack bolstered

By several dozen disused tires.

As the fence, so the swamp.

As the Bayou, so Brownsville.

Meanwhile and meanwhile

And meanwhile does the digger

Do its duty on the avenues.

Does the steamroller on its sag

And sloppy diligence jag.

Does the kerchief waver, bull-horned

Into corners made of tar and feather.

Furthermore and furthermore

And furthermore clanks the empty

Bullet, gold and silver slivers.

Look at Myrtle’s girdle if you can.

Clear spot a solace for this orchestra

The fidelity of originals, being Bingo

Mingus, and that’s why we hired

A sculptor, for his uncanny sense

Of space and all the records

He has on the skronk Actuel label

And his orange shoes, which match

The master’s old Mayday angles

From Snedicker and Van Sinderen.

Oh Atlantic dawn. Half tank house

Half bladder spasm. The cartographer’s

Poem to your name, your Monday name.

And then Mungo amid the yarmulkes

West bound full of beer and thick

Russian ankles, thick Chinese thighs

With an apostle’s holiness, goes

Through the gritty gorse of East New

York. Such coasts are storm drenched.

High test rain dog with a blue haired

Girl, so the muse arouses the siren

Who kicks the groin of morning.

To the end of the line, we take this

Train to be self-trained and take us

To the end of the line today.

Enter the green bump on a wave

Scented smoky like the cold hair

Of lanky, limbless dancers with heart

Cans in both hands. Crooked

Like a turnpike, limping like a punctured

Dirigible, like a slumping, tangled

Turnbuckle singing duende

On a Yankee dis-harmonica. Spank

Herman’s lobster sauce. All you

Jersey douche-nozzles. All you

Bitchy dolphin flippers. All you Florida

Tourniquet softies. Green bump.

How easy it is for the salient man

To hate the man eating an apple

In public like an animal. Mango

Leather. Even if that man is a woman.

Even if that woman is a manatee.

She eats the apple like another animal.

The peach inches. The travelogue

With a book per diem. Call it a sawbuck.

Call it a wooden book and a wooden

Notebook and call it a wooden watch

Made from benches of the 1923 Yankee Stadium.

New corridors between under

Ground and the ever loving street.

Good morning bright windy Monday.

Dolorous drear and endearing Thursday.

Wilson Avenue’s skinny ankle of sun.

Aberdeen dunks again. Dirt under.

Plod we our arduous way. How-so?

This same through movements south

And/or abroad? Naked Memorial

Sailors, that’s not music, it’s Althea.

All the goddamned gods laughing.

More balloon fire. Booming home

Barrel merging left says he doesn’t

Have any physical symptoms, just

Bad blood, an American embarrassed.

Weird American Wednesday. First

Taste is like spaghetti and meatballs

Second tastes like Orange Ceylon.

Just another long holiday weekend

Celebrating our pre-eminence

And no garbage men on Tuesday means

Just that kind of American Wednesday

Stench. We dance a fancy line. Give

Us this day our daily Drambuie.

Larger jars across the mahogany slide.

Old shenanigans of the morrow, the eager

Morrow, microgrooves of jazz-land.

The endlessly dented morning rhapsody

And the long night’s brutalist threnody.

Horse shit that’s a strike. What say you

Of the sharp end of the tournament

In Paris? My money’s on the young-blood

From Latvia. The green of goodness.

Such dreams whole cities scuttle for.

Such blown bridges, such clay-stained

Knickers, nothing dainty.

Nothing done.

***

SPRINGS & SUMMERS 2015, 2016, 2017

New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Portland, Nashville, Brownsville

 

Scott Zieher is a poet, artist and co-owner of the contemporary art gallery ZieherSmith with his wife, Andrea. His 5th book of poetry was published in 2016 to coincide with a solo exhibition of recent collages at Ampersand Gallery in Portland, Oregon. His latest work, HOLY DADA HOLY DAD was seen at Usable Space in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in May, 2017. With AMERICAN CHEESE & HAM, New Theory inaugurates the serial publication of the 6th of Zieher’s proposed 13 volume, book-length poem project, TRISKADEKALOG. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1992.

 


The Doctor as Reluctant Actor in Six Acts

 

“The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.”

     H.L. Mencken

 

Act I:

After knocking on the door and entering his room with my team accompanying me, I saw him sitting comfortably in bed over the sheets and covers flanked by his parents. His hospital gown was on, a rather obedient move for a 14-year-old adolescent. He was neither skinny nor fat– rather, he was in the midst of the mid-adolescent, unpleasantly swollen stage, when fat deposits in the breasts, hips and thighs making certain boys more gynoid in habitus. His face was triangular, boyish, with wisps of thin facial hair on his chin, upper lip, and sideburns that were still tentative, only vaguely implying a future need to shave. He had a basin in front of him on the retractable table above his bed and spat in there every minute or two.

“Chief complaint–inability to swallow/intractable vomiting” it said on the census sheet.

As I proceeded with my interview, his disinterested replies to my open, deliberately non-binary questions didn’t exceed one word grunts. Digging further for somatic clues as to what was bothering him was to no avail. Shifting focus to the psychosocial aspects of the history, he continued to nonchalantly and curtly answer all my questions in the negative– no to bullying, no to sex, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, no to issues with sexual identity, no to any form of abuse, no to increased stress at home or at school.

His physical exam did not help either since it was completely normal. When I examined his abdomen, though, his eyes followed my hands carefully and he moaned ever so slightly, as if on cue.

I attempted to involve Mom and Dad in this crucial information gathering process, but due to their poor English it became immediately clear they were immigrants. They looked to their son for help describing what they thought he was experiencing. He refused to help his parents, and his disdain for their inability to communicate was obvious. I asked if they would like me to get the translator phone–dismissively they replied “We understand, we understand!” Despite my better judgement, I continued without the phone.

I noticed throughout this initial encounter the odd looks Mom and Dad had on their faces, looks that were disturbing in their affectation and the rapidity with which they changed. Depending on whom they addressed in the conversation, their visages switched between the Thalia/happy and Melpomene/sad masks of the theater, smiles of earnestness and obsequiousness when addressing me, and pouts of utter despair when addressing their son.

During the interview, when I mentioned the word “school”, his parents in unison looked at me with the happy theatre mask face and said “Good in school, good in school. ‘A’ student!”, to which my patient gazed at his parents with barely suppressed disgust. It wasn’t clear to me whether my patient thought his parents were feigning their linguistic shortcomings, whether he was bothered by the sycophancy his parents were displaying, or that he was just a regular, surly teen embarrassed by their parents no matter how they behaved. I felt sorry for Mom and Dad, but didn’t understand why their behavior was so melodramatic.

While I was reassured by the lack of any findings arguing anything life or limb threatening, I was quite disturbed by la belle indifference displayed by my patient. At this point certain tests were needed to definitively rule out any somatic illness, but I felt in my gut that this patient was suffering from a conversion disorder, the underlying psychopathology of which I had only scratched the surface. With this came some anticipatory tension on my part—a difficult conversation was in the offing.

After finishing the physical exam, the time came to communicate to the patient and parents my thoughts. My tension was peaking now. To allow me a moment to adjust and further formulate my rhetorical approach, I asked my team to offer their thoughts as to the patient’s diagnosis.

“Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome?” said one intern.

“Hiatal hernia?” said another.

“Mallory-Weiss tear?” chimed a medical student.

I solicited a few more possibilities from my team and pondered out loud their relative merits while adding psychogenic vomiting, cyclic vomiting, and some form of eating disorder as other remote possibilities. For teaching purposes I hid my baseline skepticism that this was an organic problem at all.

Then the senior resident asked me, “So what do you think?”

I answered, scanning the eyes of my team, then turning to the patient and his parents as I enunciated the words–“globus hystericus”.

The patient did not stop rolling the contents of his spittoon around as I communicated this diagnosis—his parents, on the other hand, listened intently to every syllable I uttered. I explained the reasoning as to why I thought what their son was experiencing was not due to anything physical, but simultaneously admitted I could not be sure without certain tests being done. Instantaneously after mentioning the word “test”, Mom’s eyes widened and her brows lifted—she hurriedly found her purse and produced a manila folder which she gave to me.

Inside the folder were the results of blood tests, imaging, and of an endoscopic examination, the bulk of which I was contemplating having done as part of the work up immediately following our conversation—every solitary result was normal. The doctor who previously saw my patient not two weeks before being admitted to the hospital had done everything needed to rule out any somatic problem. It was now my job to address the problem that did exist.

I explained to my patient and his parents that with this information in hand I was now quite certain that what he was experiencing was psychosomatic. I continued and related that I would not repeat any of the exams already done and that I expected him to eat and drink normally, in addition to tolerating his own saliva, all of which he had not done in the last two weeks. Lastly, I was going to bring in a psychiatrist to help expedite a transfer to an eating disorders unit.

Mom and Dad looked relieved—my patient stared at me unflinchingly and spat into his basin.

 

Act II:

The next morning, Mom and Dad asked me if I could speak with a family member about their son’s case, and I agreed wholeheartedly. I was paged by a nurse a couple of hours later to speak with this family member who was demanding my immediate presence. I was nettled at being summoned in such a way, but complied. As I approached my patient’s room this time, I was assaulted by the smell of cigarette smoke, the intensity of which increased logarithmically with each step forward. Upon reaching the patient’s bedside, I introduced myself to the source of this smell, the great-aunt of the patient, while stifling a most intense gag reflex. She was in her mid-sixties, about 5-foot-six-inches tall, thin and wiry, with masculine clothing hanging loosely over bony protuberances, sporting a boyish haircut, and bellowing a fetid stench consisting of coffee, cigarettes, and halitosis that challenged my ability to remain conscious while in her presence. She shook my hand strongly with her large, bony hand, and proceeded to make it eminently clear that she ran the show in this family and that she was confused and unhappy with how things had proceeded until now. I spent the next twenty minutes recapitulating the case while navigating random jabs and editorial comments that obliquely pertained to my patient’s predicament. On a dime, her attitude changed to one of cheery thankfulness and proceeded to take on the role of facilitator and translator for my patient’s parents, for which they were appreciative. We all (re)agreed on the plan for a transfer to an eating disorders unit, and I explained that I would try to speed up the psychiatrist’s arrival to push this along.

At this point, I saw a pattern forming—the overdone, exaggerated, and rapidly changing behavior was a form of manipulation this family seemed to have developed to a fine art, and I was going to have to navigate this as best I could in order to optimally benefit my patient. I mentally prepared for anything.

 

Act III:

The next day, late in the morning, the psychiatrist arrived, sauntering in with his $500 attaché case in tow. He was youngish, athletically built, impeccably dressed and coiffed, with one eye permanently inwardly deviated enough to be unnerving. As I explained the case to him, his responses were uniformly monotone, bereft of even a smile, despite my attempts to inject levity into the conversation. After I finished explaining the case and my need for his input, he agreed with the diagnosis without qualification and agreed to concur in writing to this effect.

I continued with my task list for the day and circled back to my patient’s chart in the late afternoon. The psychiatrist’s conclusions read: 1) Adjustment Disorder NOS, 2) Continue medical workup, 3) Reconsult as needed—in English, there is nothing wrong with this patient.

I called the psychiatrist up and made sure by my choice of words and tone of voice that I was in no mood for dilly dallying. He showed up several minutes later, and I sat him down.

“What part of our discussion earlier today was unclear?” I queried.

“I don’t understand your question,” he said.

“Were we not in agreement that the patient is suffering from globus hystericus, or at the very least, some form of psychogenic vomiting, eating disorder, or other somatoform disorder?”

“Yes.”

“Do you agree with this diagnosis?”

“Yes.”

“Do you agree with the need for a transfer to an eating disorders unit?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you write this in your consult?”

“Oooohh…. well…. I didn’t want things to get complicated medicolegally in terms of the papers needed for the transfer, so I thought it would be better to keep things out of the psychiatric realm.” I bit my tongue and did not respond immediately to this gibberish—a few hours earlier we had just agreed that this case was most definitely within the psychiatric realm!

“Well, if you agree with me diagnostically, I will need you to say so on paper as well so we can move forward with this transfer. At this point this will be a voluntary admission, but I envision the possibility of this becoming an involuntary one. In that case, you and I must be on the same page as the two physicians recommending the transfer. Are you OK with this?”

“Yes. Surely.”

“Great. Thank you.”

I never understood why the psychiatrist didn’t help move this case forward the first time he was consulted and I made sure before leaving for the day that he followed through—he did.

 

Act IV:

Once we got word that there was a bed available at the eating disorders unit, the next step was to get the parents to fill out the paperwork to effectuate the transfer. I gathered the parents and the great-aunt along with the psychiatrist, our head nurse, the intern and resident taking care of the patient, and we went to our conference room.

There I recapitulated the results of the medical work up and the evidence arguing for a psychiatric diagnosis being the explanation for my patient’s inability/unwillingness to swallow (he still refused to eat, drink, or swallow his own saliva, and had lost 6 pounds since admission to the hospital). Regardless of whether the precise diagnosis was globus hystericus, an eating disorder, or some form of somatoform disorder, I argued the utility of the transfer to the eating disorders unit. Mom asked about the nature of the treatment that their son would receive in this venue, which I addressed in detail, with the great-aunt translating everything (while I held my breath). The parents consented to the transfer and signed the papers. I let the social worker know the papers had been signed, and she informed me a little later that the transfer would happen the next day in the late morning.

Later that afternoon, I received a frantic phone call from my patient’s nurse—the family was refusing the transfer! When I arrived to the floor the great-aunt was accusing the psychiatrist and me of forcing the parents to sign the consent for transfer. Before I had arrived on the floor, she had bellowed to the nurses that she was going to sue us for keeping the patient in the hospital to run up his bill, given his good insurance status.

Back to the conference room we went, Mom and Dad, great-aunt, and me, with the consent forms that they had signed only a few hours ago. I started by saying that I was unclear as to why there was an issue with the consent, and followed by asking them if there was anything they wanted to ask or anything that I could clarify. The great-aunt grabbed the papers from the table, read them for fifteen seconds, scribbled a few indecipherable words on the forms, showed them to the parents who nodded, and all three signed the forms again. Satisfied, the great-aunt stood up and adjourned the meeting and walked out with the parents.

Thespianism, I now realized, ran deep in this family, and I was just privy to a grand performance. However, at this point, as long as the consents were valid, I would put up with any amount of grandstanding on the great-aunt’s part. It was academic to me who the family thought was running the show—I resented being manipulated, but I needed my patient to get the care he needed.

 

Act V:

The next morning, the time arrived for the patient to be transferred. The EMS personnel rolled the gurney onto the floor, and as I accompanied them to my patient we kibitzed about the traffic. As we entered the patient’s room, his parents and great-aunt were there. The parents had their Melpomene/sad mask face on, the great-aunt, playing her part, was stoic and strong. The patient had an untouched breakfast tray on his table next to his spittoon, and was initially oblivious to what was transpiring in front of him.

Several seconds later, my patient’s brow furrowed—he made the connection between the just-arrived gurney and the techs unbuckling the belts in preparation to have him climb on. Immediately, without hesitation, he proceeded to eat his breakfast–eggs, toast, hash browns, sausage–quickly, washing it down with the orange juice and milk on the tray. No theatrics– no gagging, no vomiting, no spitting.

I looked over to the EMT’s and said, “We won’t be needing this transfer after all, but thank you for battling the traffic anyway.” I turned to Mom and Dad and said, “I will set up a follow-up with our psychiatrists on an outpatient basis for your son–you can go home now.”

 

Finale:

About half-an-hour later I was sitting at the nursing station writing my notes for the day. I noticed out of the corner of my eye the patient, his parents, and his great-aunt walking together off the unit. The patient had his head down, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. His parents flanked him, their hands on his shoulders. With their Thalia/happy face on, they smiled at me. I smiled back politely. The great-aunt was behind them with a hand on each parent’s outer shoulder, looking down as she walked with them. I went back to my work and looked down. Once they passed the nursing station, I heard “Psssttt”. I looked up instinctually, and there was the great-aunt, head turned around, with a big nicotine-stained, partially toothless grin, winking at me and whispering “Thank you!”

I couldn’t help but think that those thanks were not for my services as a physician, but rather for my function as a supporting actor in the drama that was this family.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Sidlow, MD, is a practicing pediatric hospitalist and seasoned medical volunteer whose essays have been previously published in Intima: The Journal of Medical Narrative, Blood and Thunder Journal, and Narrateur.


Another Distraction

 

My bladder is full of beer. It is an early Tuesday eve & already the sirens are loud. There is no reason for fire. A white French bottom scuttles away. Distraction is a daily nemesis of distortion & destruction that crumbles into wanderlust in all direction but south. Mystery is nowhere to be found outside the books of curiosity. It hides itself in the lines and letters without thought matter. A world charged with electricity runs through you, through your wild ideas, through your receptive eyes, through & through… captured in a rapture of rootlessness, you belong nowhere but also everywhere. It is a matter of choice to light up tobacco & inhale into a chest weary & consumed by excess and complication. Success is timing my uncle tells me. Do things at the right time & success will come your way, so how come my time is lost in the wet forest of memory and belonging?

 

 

 

 

 

Zen Shwery is a PhD candidate in English Studies and currently teaches 20th Century American Literature & Poetics to undergrads at the University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (http://zenpoetries.blogspot.ca/)

 

 

 


Untitled (Photographer Unknown)

 

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These images were acquired at a second-hand art supply and crafts store in 2015 in Nashville, TN. They are all 4×6″ color photo prints, all most likely shot on 35mm. Some of the images are dated on the back: “AUG 1989”. One is dated on front: “5 23 ’98”.

 

 

 

 

 

Zack Rafuls is an artist and curator currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN (2015), and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, through the AICAD Mobility Residency Program (2014). Recent exhibitions include solo show Tracings, at The Browsing Room, Nashville, TN; the 2016 Atlanta Biennial, at the Atlanta Contemporary, GA; As We Dig We Bury, at ZieherSmith, New York; High/Low/Middle, at Museum of Wisconsin Art, Milwaukee; I Wish I Felt This Way At Home, at Torrance Shipman Gallery, Brooklyn; and Anthology, at The Frist Center For The Visual Arts, Nashville. Rafuls is also co-director and curator of Mild Climate, an artist-curatorial collective and alternative exhibition space in Nashville, TN. zackrafuls.com // mild-climate.net


A Nanny’s Need

 

Before we had our driver’s licenses, my sister and I used to go for whispery cruises in my parents’ cars at night. There lies a letter somewhere, documenting her last gift, but too many cigarettes and probable fires have obliterated all that once was kind. We liked to step inside our shadows to sip the refreshing clean night air. Beside the wishes of sinking cans, starfish, and the ink of octopi. Beside you, Jennie. And all the streetlights still muted and secure. On a lonely little suburban street.

We can never be rebels again. But the rebel costumes were always ill-fitting anyway, the eyeholes beginning to droop.

I guess that was also the only summer when I actually had a male friend (i.e. we didn’t actually fuck!).

We must’ve looked funny shrunken behind the dash and steering-wheel, sitting on pillows. I’m still running inside somewhere. If I’m remembering the times: swans would fly over green velvet dresses. Then I still have to ask myself for a confession about the differences of friendship and love.

Sometimes a guy friend makes a move on me and I complain to my girlfriends about it (not like I had to kill the kids). I’d become a heavy drug user in the mid-70’s–which is something you’d tell your shrink to get his attention, then watch snake-bites blur in his bangs as I stir one hot finger in my cocoa. The shoelaces untie and put the broken children holding hands back together again. I’m a nanny. Did I mention that? But there are horrors somewhere, spiraling around at the bottom of the pond and untying my shoelaces to set me free of the drowning.

Were they ever really my friends? Not John. With John and I, he was always platonic. Evil wasps stirring in his pants; that was just my phantasy.

I shut myself away for the whole three years in Istanbul. And as I pack my bags to leave, I see the bridge shadow of no return. I wake alone and frightened, a blood-fattened mosquito hovering beside my split chin as the prayer call echoes out-of-sync across the Bosphorus. But I’m getting ahead of myself yet again in the thorns of thicker shadows.

Call me an au pair. That sounds such a candlelit mystery when standing beside the shrunken head in my nightie negligee.

That’s something you should tell your psychologist, I point out. But when my girlfriends aren’t there, I wonder why I was really complaining. Is it just that girls like to bash guys? Three felines come together in camaraderie. Treating them like an inferior segment of the species, and always only after one thing. It all sounds so stupid in hindsight.

Just one compliment: you were really a ferocious ghost chewing up the scenery of a telephone call forever shuttling back and forth through the dead television forest of nowhere.

A storm started up and my sister told me “quick, turn on the windshield wipers!” I leaned over and found the switch. They worked for a few minutes and then abruptly stopped, making a sound like a battery had died. She pulled over and panicked. I told her to turn onto a side street, massaging her shoulders as she wept. It wasn’t as though we could call our parents.

We’d been coming back from Phoenix Records in Dirtywater, listening to “Reel Around The Fountain” on the first Smiths record, stunned by the unique way Morrissey intensely warbled. I remember the cover with the jacked, half-naked guy in maroon sepia who looked like maybe he had been lifting while growing horny and contemplating a self-suck.

Jennie jumped out and fiddled with the windshield wipers, whapping them while kicking the bumper. I tied one of my shoelaces to a wiper and tugged it back and forth and back and forth.

There was a house to our right with all the inside and outside lights on. Two Dodge Neons were parked in the driveway and a brand-new jungle gym glowed.

“Or maybe we should just call mom and dad. The rain will hurt your hand if you stick it out the window when we drive.”

I can still smell my sister’s strawberry gum, her clove cigarettes, and the coconut oil she would put in her hair. It was like I was with her ghost, even then. I light another cigarette while swinging on the porch.

The nanny ignored our insistent knocking at first. Her eyes looked bloodshot as she cracked open the door.

“What do you want?” The nanny said. She gripped a crucifix around her neck intensely.

“…to use your telephone,” my sister said in a desperate, shaking voice.

“What…did your car break down or something?” the nanny said, sneering while lighting a cigarette.

The nanny motioned toward the rotary telephone on the kitchen wall. The wall had height marks and the names of children with cute misspellings, but my sister made no move.

I walk downstairs to the familiar breathing of the fireplace. The thing is: I don’t recall picking up the kids from summer camp today.

The kids at the house where I work as a nanny now are asleep and their parents are away. But just long enough for me to pull the nanny costume off. The tights. The negligee. The nurse mask with the droopy eyeholes. The bats swoop within the batting of an eyelash and I go dark, finally.

I never became like that nanny so many years ago as she went over to a squealing baby in a crib and aggressively quieted it by sticking a pacifier in its kisser. And nannies can’t nurse, but at least wet nurses can still drown in their sister’s tears.

The nanny turned to us sharply.

“What’s the problem? If you want to use the phone then use it.”

My sister explained to the nanny about how we were far too young to be driving and that she didn’t want to call our parents. She broke down and blubbered.

I will never forget the blazing smirk of recognition that then passed over the nanny’s face. She was the first and last person I’ve come to know that admitted to driving a car well before the law allowed it.

“I guess we’d better have a look-see then,” she said.

The nanny had me hold an umbrella over her after she’d popped the hood of the car and made my sister point a flashlight. She bent over and quickly pulled out a black elastic thing that was sooty and thick.

“Well, here’s your problem,” she said, trying to sound like a seasoned mechanic. She held it up to the flashlight, stretching it this way and that, and then said, “Hold on, I know just the thing” and then motioned us over to the garage.

She pushed the garage door button and then went straight to the back where she began to rifle through some cardboard boxes containing an assortment of little boy’s action-figure toys.

“Ah ha!” She said, lifting some kind of army propeller gizmo with a thick brown rubber band encircling it.

She forced it to fit with a few grunts and swears. Then she shrugged and said, “should work for now, but you really oughta get the proper part soon.”

My sister and I thanked the nanny as though she had saved our lives and performed a miracle. She was so tickled, in fact, that she couldn’t resist adding as we opened the doors of the car to leave:

“You can come inside now.” Only there was something about the way the nanny said this that made it seem more like a demand.

I am only a nanny and the children’s parents could turn on me and fire me in an instant. I could live under a bridge, forever running from a frozen forest and doomed to make love to the trolls for all eternity. It’s like a stake in my heart, but that’s what separates the flower petals from the rain.

I looked over at my sister in delight. She gave me a beaming look that seemed to say, why haven’t we tried this before?

We couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the nanny was about to giggle and make fun of us. She sat back confidently and acted like she had all in the power over us in the world.

John emerged from floating embers and thyme, but we don’t like to repeat that part of the history. Just as we will never speak again of the evil owls in the frozen forest. The air around him sparkled like maybe we’d just got stoned.

He brushed snow off his woolen trousers and walked over to the nanny. He unzipped his fly and pushed her head into his crotch. Her tongue slithered in the shadow on the wall above the cradle. After a little while he said, “ah jesus, you’re getting it all bloody.”

Jennie, can we tear down this scenery and run? We’re being hunted in the forest. They want our blood. Smeared on the petal of every flower, we left our scent. I froze the last meal that you made, Jennie. I eat a little bit day after day, sucking the freeze from the frozen you.

He zippered himself back up and pulled my sister by her hair from across the room. Rubbery hair can stretch for thousands of miles. They waded into the snowy forest closet with stacks of towels on shelves and a light bulb with a string hanging down which he yanked before slamming the door.

My sister didn’t talk about it on the way home. We got lost awhile in the snowy forest, but when we came back out there were rain clouds like before. I guess that night comes to mind when I think about losing her…the little voodoo dolls; the bloody bunches of hair (this was all before Narragansett). She dated him all through high school, actually. No, not the criminal. The crime itself. Like a locket stuffed with a fossilized child. That’s why nannies puzzle all the others. And why it’s so easy to remember all the bad times. When did the good times happen, Jennie, like in all those rock n’ roll and pop songs? It’s a rain that tears our hides apart.

It’s easy as clams when you brush there, which I can easily do all night. I don’t let myself grow comfortable. I guess that’s when you get hurt like a nanny. She just mumbled to herself and kept cooing to the baby. She even changed it twice like she had done it wrong the first time or maybe just some of the diaper got stuck to its skin. I remember many rashes, little cuts, welts, and red marks here and there. Of course I was one of the bridesmaids at her wedding and of course I had the most to say at her funeral. That’s something the love of her husband or the friendship of even her most long-lasting friends could never touch: our bond.

I wish I only remembered the best of times, but I’m a nanny too now. I guess that night was one of those impossible nights that you run from and get all torn up inside about when you feel yourself re-approaching it, losing control of that life you wanted to live, the sister whose hair you didn’t want to be pulled, the playing-house nanny you didn’t want to be, the bond you wanted to break free of now that she’s not there to support you with that look of the peculiar and the melodramatic, the inherited and the disinherited, the wise and the impure, the gelatin and rainbows, the bird cookies with funny faces, the breakups and makeups, the lost touch and touch-ups of quickly get in touch, the hometowns and last towns and lost towns and ghost towns, the look of camaraderie that didn’t make the moments sink so fast, always enough.

 

END

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholaus Patnaude grew up in the haunted woods of Connecticut. His illustrated novel, First Aide Medicine, was published by Emergency Press. His second book, entitled Guitar Wolf, was published by Eraserhead Press. He also serves as editor-in-chief at Psychedelic Horror Press.


Where All the Elephants Lie Down: Chapter 3

 

In the kitchen slurping cereal from plastic bowls shaped like Viking helmets, Shannon leans against the unused stove top, the little girl scoops with a spoon half the size of her head, her sprig ankles wrapping chair legs like creeper plants.

“I know what you are,” he says mid-bite, milk dripping. “You’re a memory I chased decades ago; an apparition, a compensation—you’re not real.”

She ladles milk back and forth. “I’m not real. But I am true.”

He snorts, she looks up.

“Or maybe I’m a necessary lie.”

“What’s the difference.”

She stirs, “One says, Look at me. The other says, Look away.

Putting down his bowl, “Well I’m looking right at you.”

She glares back, “So look away.”

He doesn’t. “Are you here to chaperone me.”

She considers, “No. I may not have your best interest in mind.”

They stare. She slurps.

“‘If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.’”

“Who said that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Lenore.”

“Lenore did.”

“Lenore is my right name.”

“Quoth the raven,” he whispers.

She blinks.

He waits. “Lenore. Got it. After breakfast, Lenore, I like a morning walk. Join me if it suits you.”

“It isn’t morning, it’s midnight.”

Over the sink he reaches to pull at window blinds. The backyard is a bijou of shadows.

“Join me anyway,” filling his bowl with tap water.

“I can’t. I can’t leave the house.”

He turns, “Why not.”

“Because I’m a secret.”

He blinks, “You’re a secret.”

“I’m a secret.” They both blink. They both wait.

“But if I’m the only one who can see you”—

“I’m still. A secret.” They leer longer.

He turns, “Can you read.”

“Yes,” joining him in the main room. It’s tall bookcase is empty and they stare at it as if the emptiness is in error, to be remedied with a moment or two of patience. There is, however, a book of music on the piano.

“Can you read music.”

“I can read whatever you can read.”

He opens the book of Chopin’s Nocturnes to Opus 27 number 2 in D Flat. She sits, closing the book, hovers her hands over the keys in suspense. His eyes close. He imagines her fingers sinking down the keys and they do. She plays with elastic ease the quiet crisis of the piece, stretching it thin, relaxing it back, her one hand mumbling steady under-notes, other hand spry, brightening bolder ones. He stays to the wall listening, but the melody subdues him to the floor. On his back envisioning stars through the ceiling, he trembles as the nocturne trembles, and trundles on and Lenore lies down beside him. Together they imagine-off the entire roof, sky cold and immediate, flickering its lanterns into their open mouths.

He frowns. “There are parts of me that will never light up again.”

She does not roll her hand to touch his. They listen tranquilized as the nocturne lifts their weight into firmament; sky tracing them in among its celestial beings and beasts, until Chopin tiptoes off the piano into breath, leaving their bodies somewhere, surrounded by stars.

Shannon pauses in the dairy aisle of a nearby grocery store trying to discern what happens next. Go for the obvious. And selects strawberry-chocolate milk, fried cheese curds, honey butter, rice pudding, a carton of eggs, hefts it all into a shopping cart and notes a young couple further down the aisle scowling. Possibly at his orange windbreaker pants and pastel flannel button-up with “Sugar Mama” arched in red and green gemstones across the back, all buttons missing but the top one, his belly less hollow than before, though still shrunken enough to make the couple nervous. “An outfit like that could bring down property values,” they might be saying. “He couldn’t possibly be a Pieces.” Or, “Even Versace wouldn’t dare.” Most likely they are saying nothing at all, exchanging only looks, abruptly holding hands, straightening their posture, reviewing the items in their cart—which thankfully are none of his.

Shannon studies them back. Then takes out an egg from the carton, nimbly tosses it over the tile toward them like a bowling ball. It veers to the side, hits a shelf. They all watch it crack and ooze a dazzling marigold orange.

“DAMMIT,” he chides aloud, “I’M OFF MY GAME.”

And plucks out another egg.

Lenore at the apartment’s front window sits in sunlight, glass skewing her face into resemblance of an oncoming headlight. Shed like that, he thinks, I bet she would, and forgets to tell her. Instead he lumbers in with a boisterous greeting, unloads the groceries to the counter, into the fridge, then swings open the front door to smoke cross-legged in its frame. Lenore hasn’t looked up.

“Where’d you get the books.” Three or four are piled beside her in the sun.

“You got them. At the library.”

“I did,” lifts an eyebrow.

“You did,” turns a page.

“You know what I do,” taking a drag.

“I do.”

I don’t know what I do.”

“This is often the case with most people,” and reads to him a poem from John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, I Am a Little World Made Cunningly.

He takes a final drag, flicks the butt across the yard.

“You can’t be more than seven years old, yet you speak like an adult, why is that.”

“Because you need me to,” flips a page.

Nettled, he rubs his head with both hands, “I have a piano student coming by soon. So if you could, you know,” his hands frothing air.

“Be a secret,” she says, watching the shadow of her own hand on the page.

“Precisely.”

“Welcome,” Shannon opens the front door, escorts Jim’s neighbor to the piano. She is lithe and vibrant and over-earnest, encased in a floral bodice blooming into an opened umbrella skirt.

“Thank you, Mr. Wolf,” she says, “I’m Heather,” putting her wicker satchel at the foot of his bed, which Lenore has made. Badly. “I remember you’re playing from Jim’s last dinner party. I’ll be leaving for college in the fall and I hope to brush-up my piano skills before I leave.” The formality in her speech does not disguise the sly suggestion in her voice this is not the plan at all.

She sits comfortably, fanning out her petticoat into crunchy dunes slopping over the bench’s ends.

“Shall I begin with scales?”

Shannon nods in agreement.

Her fingers slither up the keys, she draws-in breath enough for a cake covered with lit candles, and leans the chords methodically, arching herself with each resonant press. Lenore approaches demurely, circling—hands clasped behind, eyes downcast like a humorless instructor listening for talent. And shimmies onto the bench beside Heather, hands courteously to lap, and tips in to sniff Heather’s petals. Shannon, too, can smell the lavender and cobalt blue Hydrangeas of the taffeta print.

Heather quickens into melody, Vivaldi’s Spring—notes dappling about the somber room like a cool brisk rain. And now he can smell the warm black soil between her Hydrangeas, can feel his hands gurgle deep into the grub and touch hot oxygen ruffling out. Hands to his nose, he can smell the mulch of rotting branches and compost; varnishes his face with the thermal mud, epoxies his arms and chest with gritty earth gumbo. Decomposing leaves clot like membrane on his neck and mouth. He stands, a swamp scarecrow waist deep in a kettle pond, sendimental sewage thrombosising his feet further and further into the waterhole’s suction.

He looks around—the woods are bouncing sun nimbly from leaf to limb to total light. He bends back into the pond and floats like a lily-pad. In the water pressure encasing his ears there is Lenore’s voice reading Donne, Pour new seas in mine eyes, so that I might drown my world… his face is covered over by the lake’s face. Or wash it, if it must be drownd no more, he bursts up, flopping back again, smashing the water with awkward desperate flaps like a bird washing up in oil sludge. The mud is heavy like a harness. With surface water he rinses his arms and face, his torso, and there under the smears are the Hydrangeas, in sooty blue storm clouds slick on his stomach.

He’s wearing the dress. Her dress.

Floral dunes on the piano bench. Reaching down into the muck, he pulls up the skirt, the closed umbrella skirt.

He’s wearing the dress.

And lunges for the embankment, trips on her hem while crawling up the ridge. The dress barely fits him and he can barely tear it off. He thinks of burying it, here, beneath the rocky clay. And scrambles to the dirt path, taffeta still in-hand. He thinks of dumping it, here, in the public trash bin. But grabs a balled-up grocery bag instead and crams the dress inside. Then walks. An hour or more. Back to his neighborhood, the apartment, front door slamming behind. The bagged dress at his back, Lenore tabled, they look at each other in mild alarm.

“Where’s the girl,” he pants.

“What girl.”

“The girl who was here,” points to the bench, “Right here, playing.”

“When.”

“The girl in flowers.”

“Heather.”

“Heather, where is she.”

“She’s gone.”

“Where.”

“With Jim. He fetched her.”

“When.”

“Yesterday.”

“How do you know.”

“We watched her go.”

“HOW DO YOU KNOW.”

“Call her,” pointing to his cell phone atop the piano.

Patting down his mud-stuck pockets, “Why don’t I have my phone.”

“You didn’t want to be found.”

He touches buttons for her name, makes the call.

“Hello? Mr. Wolf?” voice shining.

He ends the call.

Lenore grunts, “That’s not her dress.”

The crisping bundle betrays him, dropping to his heels.

She looks at it grimly, mutters, “It’s not what you think.”

“So why. Why would I think it.”

Watch beeps.

She looks away. “It isn’t noon. It’s midnight.”

Bathroom cabinet shuts, dress left to calcify in the sink. Wearing only damp trousers he sits in the tub’s far end.

Above it the moon shines through a moth grey veil the shade of bone on an X-ray screen. Why would I know that. And lights a cigarette.

Lenore sits on the toilet lid, “What are you doing.”

Shivering, he takes a drag, “I don’t know,” blows it out. Again. Then again. “You know things I don’t,” he wants confirmed.

She modifies, “I know things because of you,” swishing her legs.

“Do I know things because of you.”

“Yes,” legs stop. She holds her breath. “What do you want to know.”

“There were…” takes another drag, “But I’ve forgotten now.”

“Pervert, she heckles, “Monster.”

He ashes in the tub, not looking up, “What do perverts do.”

“There’s no statute of limitations.”

And the words, these specific words, propel the turbine in his chest to breakneck speed. His fist beats against it, to knock it loose.

“That won’t help.”

“What will,” cringing.

Her singing voice is young, very young—timidly touching air, straining to draw out a note, a word, sometimes off key, and is the clearest sound he can remember. Though with a hint of sorrow, is matter-of-fact, without vibrato, haunted with a knowledge all other voices lack. And will lack from now on.

As she sings she carefully climbs into the tub to sit across from him. A solemn boat forgotten at sea; an outlet in the middle of a shared private wilderness.

“Like
a
bird
on a wire,
Like a drunk
in a midnight choir,
I have tried
in my way
to be free.

Drawing up her knees,

“Like a worm
on a hook,
Like a knight
from some old-fashioned book,
I have saved
all my ribbons
For thee.”

With cigarette burning down between his fingers, he draws up his own knees and tries not to wonder what unspeakable need in him has conjured her, made her this way—so slight and secretive and lonesome.

“Oooh like a baby stillborn,
Like a beast with his horns,
I have torn everyone
who reached out for me.

“But I swear
by this song
And by all
I have done wrong
I will make
it all
up to thee.”

And suddenly the scene is too forsaken for him to accept. The moonlight on his skeletal chest, the tousled, neglected child with a lullaby in his bathtub, the bigness of her words bending the smallness of her voice, the stench of open earth with no flowers to be seen. Where is the shower curtain. The danger he might reach out to hold her, to make her stop, is compressing him like an aluminum can under a merciless boot—he almost lurches forward as if to vomit or cry out—his blood vessels all breaking at once, his mind like a flashbulb, finally popping, he collapses back to the tiled wall. Black crossroads of mildew embosses his face. He stares hypnotized at this inexplicable creature. Summoned by its rightful name. Neither demon nor angel saint. But with a will of its own, choosing him. How could he. How could he possibly know until here, right here. That whatever has made her so cunningly, is easily now unmaking him. Without malice, without remorse.

Thomas and Shannon sit in the afternoon sun in full tuxedos on Jim’s front stoop licking vanilla ice-cream cones covered in sprinkles. Shannon’s bow tie is undone, still looped about his neck. Thomas has sprinkles stuck to his cummerbund, bleeding specks of color into its white canvas.

“You know what it is about you, Shannon.”

If the man had not continued Shannon would not have noticed. Tipping up his face, squinting into the sun, Lenore. Shed like ice-cream. I bet she would. The folds of Thomas’ aged face pull back into fine and finer creases, his nose settled in amid the high thread count of his lived in skin.

“You’re like a recording device,” Thomas continues. “You sit there without coyness, flattery, or complaint. I feel like I could tell you anything.”

Shannon faces him, “The kind of things you might… tell a piano,” he proposes.

Thomas smirks, “Perhaps. If I played.”

Shannon licks the ice-cream. Licks it again.

Thomas laughs, shakes his head. “And the tape just keeps on rolling, doesn’t it.”

Brunch guests’ costly shoes clack the stone steps, passing the two men, a dozen voices fluttering various departures above their heads. A young woman dressed in a field of sunflowers squeezes Shannon’s shoulder with her lace-gloved hand, wicker satchel in the other.

“Mr. Wolf, I loved your playing this afternoon. You’ll have everyone ringing your bell for lessons,” a teasing wink.

I don’t have a bell.

Jim descends behind her, polished cufflinks glistering like direct light. “Now where did you lads find such a great idea.”

Shannon looks to Thomas who holds up a finger, signaling for silence. In the distance a sparkling solitary tune plays, distinct to weary tramp ice-cream trucks.

Jim laughs. “Next time we shall have an ice-cream bar at brunch.”

“King me.” Night shadows yawn across the butcher block table, the slant of streetlight neatly cutting up the shadows into repeating frames, piling them unto the square board where Shannon fastens a checker atop Lenore’s triumphant black one. She takes the last bite of ice-cream from her Viking helmet, waggles her feet under her chair. Crickets coo through the open windows. He thinks, Ice-cream trucks… are noon-day crickets. And slides a red checker down the board.

To Lenore, “What else does a bird on a wire sing.”

She considers. Then holds up her bowl like a challis and swallows down the warm pool of cream, wipes her mouth with a sticky hand, grandly places the bowl upside-down upon her tangled hair and sings with a voice more confident than before, still willowy.

‘“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. You were talkin so brave and so sweet. Giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousine waited in the street…”’

He stares widely.

Sitting up on her knees, bowl listing to one side, ‘“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. You were famous, your heart was a legend…”’

Taken by surprise with recall, Shannon sings on, ‘“…You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception.”’

She raises her gooey mitt as if in pledge.

He sings, ‘“And clenching your fist for the one’s like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty, you fixed yourself, you said—”’

‘“—Well, never mind. We are ugly but we have the music.”’ She straightens her helmet.

He slouches back. ‘“And then you got away, didn’t you baby, you just turned your back on the crowd. You got away, I never once heard you say—”’

‘“I need you.”’

He leans in, ‘“I don’t need you”’

She leans in, ‘“I need you”’

‘“I don’t need you”’

She sinks back, ‘“And all of that… jiving around.”’

She slides a black checker from one shadow to another, sighing, “Next time, Chess.”

He lifts his empty bowl, turns it over on his own head. “Agreed.” And slides over a red checker. “King me.”

The public library’s lights have an undertone of pale seasick green; mint ice cream on its way back up. It’s minutes before closing—the tired, oblong voice in the tele-speaker has said as much several times. Shannon has been here all afternoon, a stack of books up to his chin, crowned with a plastic bag of chess pieces. He now stands at a CD rack studying a song list of Leonard Cohen. Each title reads like an omen: “Is This What You Wanted”, “Why Don’t You Try”, “There Is a War”, “I Tried to Leave You”, “A Singer Must Die”, “Take This Longing”.

 A man, the other side of the aisle, flips through records and EPs, glancing up at Shannon between the swish of a record landing in timber. Carelessly groomed in a meticulous way—two days of stubble and waxed eyebrows, clothes untidy but clean—he’s amused, and slinks over to Shannon, who looks up. “I’m Rob,” he says, looking at Shannon’s mouth, “And you should hear that man on vinyl.”

Up the porch steps early morning Shannon bounds in blinding canary yellow—T-shirt with silver sequins blinking “Prima”, buoyant sweatpants and beech flip-flops, several sizes too large like islands strapped to his feet. Onto the butcher block table he pours a brown paper bag of library goods—poetry, plays, music books, CDs, chess pieces—like legendary treasure, overflowing the table.

Lenore watches from her perch at the window. She hasn’t seen him since yesterday.

Flatly, “You’re in different clothes.”

Even flatter, “And you aren’t.”

From the table he gathers the goods, lines them up on the top shelf where Lenore cannot possibly reach, even standing on the bench.

“Why,” she asks darkly.

“It’s an experiment.”

She waits.

“I read one of these books walking here this morning. Which one,” he challenges.

She turns her head away as if in defiance, to square the sun full on her face, “He spat in my mouth and gave me visions of the future. Zeus did, to Cassandra.”

He pulls down the correct book, amused.

Do you see the future,” she asks.

“Do you.”

She looks to him, “I see what you can’t see.”

Closing the book, “Show me.”

Like a released slingshot, he turns, book in hand, and chucks it at the opposite corner of the room, smacking its plastic-wrapped against the wall. They watch it slide to the ground. A rather large spider on the wall remains, stunned but alive.

She fades her gaze out the window, “A neurologist once told you arachnophobia is a fear of being in one’s own skin. The spider with its eight legs touching the human body in so many places at once.”

He scoops up the spider, lets it crawl out the window, saying “I don’t dislike them.”

“I do.”

He watches the spider, she looks at the table. “Are those chess pieces.”

 Well into the game, both look as though it’s mind control that will move the pieces—unblinking scrutiny caged behind fingers cramped around their craniums like fossilized spiders holding up their faces, now sinking lower and lower to the board.

He moves a piece, “Would you want a doll.”

She moves a piece, “What would I do with a doll.”

“I don’t know.” He moves a piece.

“Maybe you want a doll.” She moves a piece.

“What would I do with a doll.” He moves again.

“What does anyone do with a doll.” She moves.

They study the board.

“What about crayons.” He moves, “Or paint.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what I would draw.” She moves.

“Yes.”

Lenore is once again attempting to make the bed, unfurling the top sheet like a wild sail of navy blue, only to have it furl back as a reservoir of waves beneath her hands. She has tried this from several angles around the bed. Shannon, standing hands on waist at the window watches her jerky figure’s reflection in the dusty glass, the night hanging like another solid blue sheet on the other side. He can hear her usual calm tightening emphatic sighs.

“I want to hear you laugh,” he says suddenly, gently. In the glass he can see her flinch, drop the sheet to the floor. She looks caught. He turns to catch her caught.

Her “Why” is almost a gasp.

He turns back to the window, unable to say it to her face, a face so startled and for the first time afraid.

To her reflection, “Today I heard children laughing in the street. And I wanted. I wanted that for you.”

Her shoulders twitch as though something is crawling between them. She shifts, shifts again, now frowning. “Do you know anything funny.”

He looks around the room, to the kitchen, out its window; opens the closet, ogles under the bed. Then sits down on the piano bench.

“No.”

Tucked in bed, bolstered up against the headboard, Shannon writes and erases in a book of Leonard Cohen sheet music, transcribing them from guitar to piano. He wears a pair of found reading glasses—lenses thick, doubling the size of his eyes; notes paddling around on the page while he mutters the melody, marks, remarks, erases, hums, shakes his head, begins again. At the foot of the bed is Lenore in a wood chair soldiering through John Berryman’s poetry book “Dream Songs.” She is reading aloud. Very aloud. He glares at her; she too is swimming around in his glasses like a fish in a bowl.

“When do you sleep.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“But you eat.”

She turns the page.

“Do you also”—

She amplifies over him.

“Maybe you should sleep.”

She pulls down her book, “Why would I do that.”

“Because. I want my dreams back.”

Like a released slingshot, she leaps at him so quickly with her hands now at his throat tipping back his head, he has no time to protest, to make a noise, before a crystal ball of her saliva is lowering down like a spider into his mouth.

The sound of her voice reading aloud wakes him. He’s still bolstered, music book in hand, Lenore is still reading aloud at the end of the bed. She stops to looks up.

“I WANT MY DREAMS BACK,” he demands, taking off the glasses, folding them up to the side, to show how reasonable he’s being.

“Why. Is something missing.”

He frowns, set off-course. “Yes.” And pads down the comforter about him, gets from the bed, a slow-moving panic stiffening his arms. “I can’t see it.”

“Take away what you can see.”

He pulls off his t-shirt, drops his pants, tears off each sock, pulls down his skivvies, punts them away, stands bare before the mirror.

“Eyes closed,” she prompts.

A moment later, “The watch,” he mumbles, clasping his wrist. Eyes open, “The watch, where is the watch.”

What is the watch.”

He rubbernecks, scraping every surface of the room with eyes, sharpened to see the small shape, calling to it with an empty open mouth. “I don’t, I don’t know. WHERE IS THE WATCH.”

What is the watch”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

He searches. Between, under, atop the few items on the nightstand, on the shelves, in the kitchen cupboards, the closet, knocking over the bat—Thatcher’s bat. “WHERE IS IT.”

What is it.”

In every limb of his body is rush hour traffic jamming at his chest where the motor wheel is spinning at a speed that will kill him, he’s sure of it, he’s going to combust. His torso contracting until his knees buckle, he falls to the floor, coughing out drool, body cramping again and again, tears from the pressure jetting from his eyes. He roars, is almost barking in pain. Brain hissing steam like a radiator, his numb arms hold tightly his whole howling form.

Lenore steps near, stands over his naked shaking frame.

“What is happening to me!” he croaks.

“Something beautiful,” she says without admiration or pity. “Now get up.”

And he does.

 At dawn Jim arrives and Shannon wears only a dressing gown. Tied in front, hanging to mid-thigh, not made of anything impressive—cashmere or silk—but terrycloth and second-hand, the color of well-chewed bubble gum. And the tie is slipping.

 Jim is also in a dressing gown—linen pajama’s beneath; button-up and draw-string, all pin-striped, scornfully coordinated. His Mercedes trunk is opened wide. Shannon would like to curl up inside that hatch, ride around for hours. How to ask it. Jim rattles a small cardboard box between them. Several watches scratch around inside, the watches are multiples. Jim pulls out one, hands it to Shannon, “How long have you been without it.”

“A day. More. I’m not sure,” strapping it on.

“Has anything. Come back to you.”

“From where.” Shannon is earnest. Jim is exhausted.

“Never mind,” Jim sighs, hand on Shannon’s shoulder, tossing box into trunk, slamming it. Another sigh, “I know.”

Shannon glowers, “What do you know.”

Jim stops.

What do you know.”

Jim stands stupid.

“You know I dont know. What don’t I know.”

Jim circles to the driver’s door.

“WHAT DON’T I KNOW, JIM.”

“You know… you really ought to find a more sizable gown, that’s what.”

Mercedes drives away. Shannon stands, robe opening completely. Uneven burn lines fractured across his body. Like that nude descending a staircase.

Now inside, Shannon thrashes through the nearly empty wall closet to pull out a red vinyl poncho, wrenching it over his head with vigor, throwing up the hood for emphasis. Squirms his feet to fit on the yellow flip flops. Lenore stands before him, timid, waiting.

He leans over to shove his face in hers, eyes snarling.

“Trust your anger,” she whispers, “Follow it.”

He blinks. Then leans his forehead closer, her’s, then closer, until she stumbles back. He stands, satisfied. Puts on black sunglasses, stomps out the backdoor.

Marching down the sidewalk, it seems to him all that is important to know is hiding, only to be called forth in the dark, by some special bidding, a language—no, an encounter, an impact. Shutting his fists, he spins as if the unknown were right behind him. “SHOW YOURSELF!” he thunders. A beige sedan drives toward him in the street, at twenty-five, thirty miles an hour. With expert timing and no hesitation, he steps out in front of the oncoming car.

In his robe, poncho off, swaddling petunias and dirt, Shannon stands in the front door of his apartment, weary tramp ice-cream crickets cooing behind him announcing his return.

Hanging from one hand are two small cans of paint, from the other a small CD boombox, freckled with layers of dried paint.

His knees are torn open and packed-in with earth, shins a melting fresco of blood and soil. His forehead is lopsided with swelling, a stain of blood forming like a lake off the side of his hairline; chin missing skin and nose split across the bridge, blood dried beneath it and on his lips, between his teeth. He smiles, holding up the gifts.

Below him on the floor is a life-size likeness of himself in bandaids. And the chalk body outlines are back, all of them the littlest body. In the midst of them, Lenore, lying on her back, hands as a cot for her head, stares poker-faced at the ceiling.

He lowers the loot, “What do you see tonight.”

Flatly, “The ceiling.”

Even flatter, “We can fix that.”

Through the boombox on the piano bench, Leonard Cohen tells why A Singer Must Die in tender tuneful laments while Lenore and Shannon sweep about their arms, their paint-soaked hands and bare feet in pistachio green and olive drab, marking, remarking the limits of the shower curtain, laid flat as a canvas. Their bodies circle around and around as tiny sleepy tornados, then swerve and drift more.

She murmurs, “I’m forever-ing in here bumping into walls then moving through them rolling on the shiny floor no trace of me.” He stops, nauseated, and repeats under his shallow breath, “the taste the first time I threw-up and couldn’t swallow and had to wash the shiny shiny floor no trace of me.” To quell his biliousness, he collapses along the rim of the shower curtain, pinching the edge. He turns over and over, until he’s spooled into a tight tube, head and neck out, feet kicking.

He sits—is precariously propped—upon the reading chair’s seat, when he asks—to see if it matters, if it makes any sense—to have a head, a body, a front and a back.

She slaps him. Hard. For a seven year old.

With her other hand on the other side she caresses his cheek.

“To experience pleasure and pain,” he says dryly, unimpressed.

“To experience somebody elses. Is to experience somebody; someone.”

He frowns. “What if the pain is bigger than my body is.” His eyes follow her’s over the burial ground of silhouettes. “Oh god,” blurting out the mathematics, “Is that why you’re here?” She won’t look up. “Is that why you don’t laugh?” She won’t look up. “NO!” writhing in his restraints.

As he struggles she walks to the kitchen, returns with a butcher knife drooping from her hand like a doll, and stands tranquil, as if awaiting instructions; they stare at each other thinking of all the unthinkable possibilities. And the thinking feels like a caress.

She slashes the curtain down one side, the other, up the bottom to his knees; arms and legs can bend now; points to the piano. “Play it.”

Beside each other on the bench, his hands poised and delayed on the white lake surface of the keys. The bottom three notes she presses—one, two, three. And it begins, Prokofiev’s “Suggestion Diabolique,”what he can remember of it—a ferocious tantrum boiling on the keys that springs up into sharper prancing, leaps into midair, stomps on thunder, bounds off to sprint at terrifying speed.

But now the piece is tripping over itself, tangling, rolling into something unprepared, something that snags like a claw down a curtain, the piece falling so far and so fast she covers her mouth with both hands not to beg him to stop, clenching shut her eyes not to see the piano.

Finally the piece catches on something in the dark and swings by its neck, slowing as it loses air, the swings echoing in the distance they have fallen, and in the boundless-below.

From there the piece digs sideways, face first, sucking down shadows until the dark loosens and collapses around one repeating note in F sharp, the F scattering flecks of light, flecks that shred the piece into a dozen hearts beating at odds, hurtling toward one pulse that will not hold before it spills over into laughter, into lavender, into relief.

In reverential shock he slowly removes his hands, as if not to disturb the air, the very liminal space they could be passing through. Watching the impossible, he thrived; watching it begin, she had drawn back, but now they both stare in idiotic wonder—ear-splitting red is glazed in fingerprints across the entire keyboard; sepia smudges drying on the keys’ curled lips.

They inspect his hands for injury—there are many. Palms, knuckles, backside—cuts and missing skin, but all marks are scabbing over with no fresh glinting dew.

“You made it bleed,” she whispers with dread, and does not rest her head on his shoulder.

His hands now hidden, “How do we make it stop.”

“We don’t,” bowing her head.

“Because it wants everything.” Bowing his.

He sits up, breaking through thin skin of a sleep with no underside. The wood chair is empty and the room dark. Above he can vaguely see the paint-marinated shower curtain hung flat along the ceiling as a tapestry of a busy, lathering sky.

Trying to slide himself up the pillow, he can barely move his torso without an accordion of pain squeezing into one stabbing throb in his chest. And it makes him wonder—if there isn’t a way to open up his chest like window shutters and reach in, jerk it out. He lifts the sheet to see bruises and claw marks haloing his lower ribs. Maybe he’s already tried.

He can remember the animal cry of the car’s breaks and the driver’s face through the windshield when his own face punched into it—a Goya portrait. When the driver incoherent with questions and curses had helped him to stand, Shannon had silenced him with two words. “Car keys,” hand outstretched.

Two small paint cans rolled back and forth in the passenger footwell, a sandy boombox in the front seat, glasses and sunglasses in the burst-opened glovebox.

It hadn’t surprised him then, the driver’s willingness to forfeit his keys at mere suggestion he do so. The man had seemed grateful. Perhaps it was stolen.

His head feels like a kicked-in soccer ball, his mouth rusty, still tasting of the watering can. He reaches for a pack of smokes on the nightstand. They are gone and his hand is shaking. A match strikes across the room, in the front door frame a flame and Lenore close in on a cigarette. Her first inhale is long and savored with the measure of a consummate smoker. Her stem of a wrist shakes out the flame, drops the match. Another full drag flows out her elfin nose and he can see her eyes get lost down an ally on the other side of town, eyes glowing with a danger she sees there. And a sadness. No. More than sadness. Devastation. Can a childs face show such comprehension and still remain a childs. The spread of nicotine in his body smoothes the shaking. And she turns to watch him, her face solemn again, completely child. Blowing out smoke through her nose like a baby dragon, “I can touch your soul now if you want.” And before there is an answer, he is asleep.

“Field Commander Cohen he was our most important spy…” Sunday late afternoon brunch at the grand piano, with patched paint like camouflage molting off his skin, collar unbuttoned and raised, blazer sleeves rolled and no bow tie, Shannon sings playing barefoot an arrangement of Leonard Cohen, his voice low, melodious, crackling like the paint on his neck, flaking behind his ears.

“…Wounded in the line of duty, parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties….”

The guests are listening only because their eyes can’t seem to stay on him. Something like car wax, something that coats over time and keeps out weather is slipping their stares off him onto the polished lacquer of the piano, onto their own bare shoulders just as polished, onto the strenuous whites of each other’s athletic eyes.

“…Leave it all and like a man,
Come back to nothing special,
Such as waiting rooms and ticket lines,
Silver bullet suicides,
And messianic ocean tides,
And racial roller-coaster rides
And other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.”

It isn’t his lack of couture that seems uncivil; that could be forgiven if there wasn’t so much blood. Dried trails of it down his ankles, wrist bone nearly skinless with an aura of angry red around exposed cartilage; forehead blackened with clots, and his hands. What starving beast has feasted upon those hands.

“I know you need your sleep now,
I know your life’s been hard.
But many men are falling,
Where you promised to stand guard.”

Only one person is wholly facing him. A muscular young man with a tree trunk face, hard angles with soundless staying-power, a face that can be climbed. Oak strength is everywhere in him but his eyes. They are misplaced, wrong-headed; defenseless, openly suffering, unable to look away from Shannon.

“Ah, lover come and lie with me, if my lover is who you are,
And be your sweetest self awhile until I ask for more, my child.
Then let the other selves be wrong, yeah, let them manifest and come
Till every taste is on the tongue,”

Jim sharply sits beside Shannon with a slice of cake on a plate. Holding it up, “Shannon, have some cake!”

Shannon smacks it to the floor, passionately clutching Jim’s face, kissing him full on the mouth. Jim pushes back, pulls him to stand, “Let’s get some air,” leads him to the kitchen.

“Can we have the room.” Brunch folk apologetically disassemble.

Shannon is growling under running water at the sink faucet, soaking his head. Jim yanks down the faucet handle like a driving clutch, throws a towel over Shannon’s head.

Shannon stands.

“You missed your doctor’s appointment,” Jim begins.

“My what,” rubbing himself dry.

“Shannon, this isn’t negotiable.”

Shannon shrugs.

“It’s my fault,” Jim sighs, tossing his hand, “I’ll drive you next week myself.” Then points to Shannon’s wrist. “Where’s your watch.”

“It clashes with my feet.”

“GODDAMMIT SHANNON,” lowering his voice, “This isn’t a joke, it’s the goddamn law!”

The incomprehension in Shannon’s face is extraordinary to Jim. It’s mesmerizing.

“If you want to stay living on your own there are rules. Look, tomorrow is my mother’s piano lesson—”

“Not a good idea,” Shannon interrupts.

“And you canceled on the twins too, I hear.”

“Did I.”

“You were doing so well, Shannon. What’s happening to you?”

“Something beautiful.”

Jim could spit. “I’m driving you home.”

“I know my way.” Towel drops in sink on his way to the patio doors.

Whistling Beethoven’s Fifth, barefoot, past twilight, Shannon—taking his time like a bachelor on holiday at the beach shore— untucked, facing the wind, faintly grinning, without pain or fear or guilt. Unaware of the man following him a block behind. Who is also seeing Shannon on a beach, leaning on wind, face in stars.

Walking up his porch steps, Shannon hears first the soft rhythmic clicking of the bike spokes. The voice turns him.

“I didn’t appreciate your playing at the party. It was gruesome.” The carved man of oak from brunch is walking a bike, stops at the porch stoop to make it clear to Shannon.

“You look awful.”

Shannon’s face illuminates in the fire of his lighter. He takes a long and savored drag. Squints, waits.

The man continues. “They’ve been hiding you.”

Shannon grimaces.

The man cannot stop himself now. “They’re ashamed of you. But mostly they’re ashamed of themselves. Because they failed you.”

Shannon stops.

“I’m Roger Pearce. I was once your intern. Back when the city sung your name and wanted you sainted. Now we want you forgotten.” Shannon takes another drag, a hard, hasty drag. Even from here he can see the man’s eyes brimming with watery light. “You taught me truth at all costs. You gave your life to know. If you want to know what you got for it…” he holds out a business card, Shannon doesn’t move to reach it. Laying it on the bottom step, “…Talk to me.” He walks on, bicycle beside him like a small obedient pony. Shannon doesn’t finish the cigarette, flings it to the street, a new coldness in his chest, an electrical storm flashing in his forehead.

Shannon inside can barely close the door before Lenore tumbles into him, unable to breathe well enough for words, her body so convulsive with panic, it tears from its own silhouette again and again, multiplier her like an image in a flip-book.

“I’m not a secret anymore!” she wheezes. The comprehension in her face is extraordinary to him. Mesmerizing.

“What. Why?” Trying to block her body in it’s tumbling.

“SOMEBODY KNOWS ABOUT ME!”

He looks over his shoulder at the window then back to her.

“Who knows about you.”

“SHANNON! SHANNON KNOWS ABOUT ME!”

Squatting to grip her shoulders, “TALK SENSE TO ME, LENORE!”

“The swamping room!” she gasps.

“The what?”

“Ask him what happens in the swamping room!”

“What happens in the swamping room?”

“EVERYTHING! IT WANTS EVERYTHING!” Throwing her head back, wailing inconsolably, “HE’S GOING TO GIVE AWAY THE STORY.”

 

 

 

 

 

Kat Mandeville graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, is finishing her PhD in Philosophy & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School, and with Atropos Press has published her Master’s Thesis, Seduction into Life, Revelation with Strangers: Could Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspace Answer Badiou’s Call for a New Philosophical Tradition? She’s published two books of poetry, with various poems published in various journals. She lives in New York City.