Category: Uncategorized

A note from Buku Sarkar.

In a new poem by Elizabeth Acevedo, a voice from the record player summons memories and unresolved feelings about the speaker’s father. Introduced by Margarita Engle.

A duet by Andrea Boccelli and Sarah Brightman punctuates assorted events in the life of a refugee family in Faruk Šehić’s “Women’s War.” Introduced by Aleksander Hemon.

Tope Folarin’s “The Goat” concerns a boy in a poverty-stricken family whose insatiable appetite threatens his household’s already precarious stability. Introduced by Helon Habila.

Vamika Sinha’s three poems depict speakers taking in the sensual joys of an open city, breathing air into the open mouths of dolls, and using pens filled with syrup. Introduced by Tishani Doshi.

Tiziano Colibazzi’s “Shoes” cover lots of territory: Italian footwear etiquette, Amsterdam’s Homomonument, and a Berlin pilgrimage. Introduced by Zia Jaffrey.

In two poems by Quenton Baker, nightmares fragment into law, flesh becomes lexical, and the dirt a dialect. Introduced by Ada Limón.

“The warmth that my lover left in my hands turns to ice as soon as they touch the first fish of the day”: unexpected transitions and sensations populate every paragraph of Birgül Oğuz’s “Revol.” Introduced by Victoria Holbrook.

Amidst the pedestrian layout of Prague, perpendicular to the winding cobblestone footpaths, busts are inlayed into the streetscapes of the city. Out of the building walls, metallic heads of figures from prominent poets and illustrators to scientists and activists protrude onto the sidewalks, introducing frozen avatars of contributors who stand memorialized amongst the fluid mosaic of passersby. Below the slopes of Petřín Park, one subtle facial lieu de memoire of the Malá Strana district alludes to what functioned as an artist’s space encased in a courtyard between several apartment buildings. Affixed to a smooth, rectangular plaque juts a craggy, low-eared, periorally furrowed bust of a late Josef Sudek. The monument to the Czech photographer indicates not only his mortal timespan, but also a place whereby an extant individual could pace a few steps northward and ring a buzzer. A reciprocal buzz welcomes the pushing of a door, the passing over a threshold, and the strolling down a pair of dim corridors before stepping upon the stone-tiled ground of an outdoor enclosure lit relative to whatever level of natural light the firmament permits at that very moment.

Inside the edificial well and behind bounds of shrubs sits a diminutive wooden structure that evokes a single-story cottage: Atelier Josef Sudek, the former darkroom and domicile of the local artist largely known for his depiction of light. Sudek portrayed a Prague in greyscale, arresting the brilliance of rays beaming through naves, the incandescence of street lanterns cutting through fog.

Within the small, twentieth-century pavilion in which he rendered the chiaroscuro effect, the biotic buzzer who commands the interior button circuit is never staffed by the same person, yet she or he programmatically adds the same value upon greeting: “Deset korun.” Ten Czech crowns: the price to pay to view photographic specimens in printed form.

Two Spartan gallery rooms showcase rotating exhibitions: Central Asian rodeo games in action, contemporary pictorial commentary on data collection, overexposed white light obfuscating facial profiles. Sometimes Sudek’s prints furnish his old darkroom’s space from whose steamy windowsill he captured a glass-cum-vase holding a rose triad leaning leftward.

Other Prague places besides the Atelier Josef Sudek pay homage to him and his oeuvre. Across the river Vltava, the Prague House of Photography periodically exhibits his work (not to mention pictures of him at work). One such instance encompassed Sudek’s recordings of WWII destruction circa 1945 in parallel to Timm Rautert’s portraits of Sudek active during the pre-Prague Spring atmosphere of 1967. Rauert, then-student, showed Sudek, one-armed veteran photographer, lugging his large-format camera across the footpaths of Petřín Park’s hills, as well as sitting in his still-functional studio, crammed with lit lamps shedding light on boxes of photo paper lodged in disarray, curios around jarred chemicals and flash bulbs weighing down the shelving’s capacity to maintain its horizontal integrity.   

A peculiar mystique had magnetized me to study and stay in Prague for over two years. The hands-on experience familiarized me with the vital personalities of the endemic culture together with how their creative manifestations reflected the charming location and its mysterious layers. Josef Sudek was a permanent fixture in the artistic canon, referenced in university seminars and included in museum bookshops for his spectral, black-and-white images of lonely streets, bare branches, and still lifes. 

Monuments and mementos pervade Prague. Although aging and temporality inform the evolution of reality, a certain agelessness of the cityscape’s spirit may be articulated via the language of light.

INTRO: A re-launch featuring current and former curators; intended to stoke inspiration from the past and exhibit commitment to the future of the literary community that’s developed within the walls at 85 East 4th Street. It will be organized by genre then chronological order of each contributor’s timeline in programming.

On “Funhouse”

Everyone knows Shanna McNair is one of the great citizens of NYC writing circles, an indefatigable leader of workshops and a thinker about how to publish, where to publish, who’s good in publishing (and who’s not), a thinker about how to conceive of the writing workshop, about how to make it do something useful, a leader of the community, a generous and selfless person. I think there is nothing more important, really, than being a leader in our community, and so when I think about people I admire in writing circles, Shanna McNair is at the top of the list. But like many people who are really good at the community piece of being in the literary world, the danger with a Shanna McNair is that we forget she’s a really great writer too.

And “Funhouse,” as the title would suggest, is the proof of that, that she’s a really great writer, too, as evidenced in this truly moving and refractory account of love and self-destruction, a story that bends back on itself about a half dozen times before the pages are through, forcing us to revisit our presumptions about the main character, Mary, over and over again, as she appears to get herself, or to have gotten herself, into worse and worse scrapes. I have to admit, I loath the Gary Wright song that “Funhouse” uses as its epigraph, but it’s a sign of the great wisdom that McNair brings to bear on this vulnerable, broken, longing protagonist who is her first-person narrator, that you don’t know at the end whether the character knows how murky and woebegone is her conception of love, and, further, whether we should think of this story as confessional, or the furthest thing from confessional that we might find in a contemporary realistic short fiction, a post-modern story of love, an anatomizing of poor choices, refraction of a story of love, a story that may have some actual appropriated non-story material in it, or, maybe not, maybe all those tape recorded voices are invented, a story of recursions and regrets and repetitions! A story with a really bad song as its epigraph on purpose!

The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God. You feel that in “Funhouse,” that all of the good times that were not good at all are such that a protagonist can manage one split second of saying “I’m sorry,” and really meaning it, and thus making good, at last, however briefly, redeemed at the last moment when redemption counts. I always sympathize with a character like this, with my whole heart, and evidently McNair does, too, because she couldn’t tell this much truth without sympathizing, which is probably why she’s such a good citizen, too. She has the really, really big heart.

Now’s your chance, therefore, to read the work of the really great writer, Shanna McNair, and if you want I can tell you about some other stuff she does that’s really valuable too.

—Rick Moody

Funhouse

My heart is on fire/ My soul’s like a wheel that’s turnin’/My love is alive, my love is alive, yeah, yeah, yeah. —Gary Wright, “Love Is Alive”

There is no limit to the kindness two people can show one another when love is alive. My love was burning and burning but my lover had left me. There I was, shooting fire out of my fingertips. My hot hot soul was a madness of overlaps. My deep tunneling eyes, agape with loss. Me, a smoldering afterthought, awash with ash. No. I would rise, goddamn it. I would not become one of those perfect fossils that lava burns and leaves for dead. Rise up and keep burning. Lovers have only one heart, one heart with no spares; must save it for loving somebody who cares.

And I had to move back home. I had to drive all those miles home, from Seattle to Maine. Alone. Hello, heart. Hello, travel. Hello, addiction. I created a little project to do, on the road. I called it “The Lovers Project.” The Lovers Project would be a thing I would publish, I told myself. Was I a writer? I imagined I was. I’d been a reporter before for a paper back home. Reporters could be objective. Reporters were like anthropologists, studying culture from the outside. I’d report on the whats and whys of love. Me, just a nodding interviewer, not a lover at all. I could yes and no and commiserate. Forget all my lava and fire and burning. Love was what people wanted to talk about and I would simply listen. I bought an Olympus mp3 voice recorder. My plan: talk to twenty strangers as I drove from the West Coast to the East Coast. It was a June afternoon in 2002 when I twisted the key in the ignition and fired it up. I was 31. I had eighteen hundred dollars. I’d ask each of my interview subjects to tell me about their greatest love story. “The One,” I’d say. Was I collecting fossils? No. I was collecting fire.

When I closed my eyes and asked my heart to tell the truth about my own greatest love story, Leo was The One. After decades of friendship, we became lovers. We moved from Belfast, Maine to Seattle. He had a one-year contract there as a project architect. It would be like a kind of romantic vacation for us. Who knows, we might even stay in Seattle. Our apartment overlooked Puget Sound. I was a barista down the street at Pike Place café. What gorgeous first days there. Leo was the best friend I’d ever had. He loved to play and was up for jokes and food and drinks and adventures. He was voluble and sensitive and held my hand when we went on walks and cooked me things like garlic scape pesto with cavatelli. His marvelous laugh expanded with such exultation that it felt like imagination with a capital “I” had come to roost. I felt a great trembling need boiling in my soul and it was Leo and just the sight of him set me buzzing and glowing. His smart dark eyes flashed and seared and left brilliant light-marks behind my own eyelids, as if I’d been staring at the sun; and I traced those bright maps of possibility. I longed for him so absolutely that the dam of my sanity broke and gushed and kept gushing. But nothing could put out the fire inside. It burned deep, deep, deep. And then the fighting started. The contests of wills. And finally, Leo told me he couldn’t stand it anymore.

Said we were over. He didn’t love me. He didn’t want to feel such complicated emotions. He said my real love was drugs, anyway. And I was too much. Too stormy. He said that. Stormy. Seattle, where the rainy weather read like some pathetic fallacy—I was crying and the sky was crying. Can’t you see the tears run down the road. I begged him not to leave me. Leo was resolute. His job contract was complete. He got a U-Haul and went back to Belfast.

It was time for me to return home, too. Escape the rain. I held a sidewalk sale out of our apartment and got rid of the big stuff. I packed the rest into the car, in a fit of triumph, executing a miracle of spatial relationships, with the sightlines clear of boxes and bags. And then I went downtown and scored. Pain pills this time. I’d gotten off the heroin some years back. Being a junky is a losing game.

There I was, driving my car back home to Maine, popping them all the way. My manifesto: anything goes. Dull the agony of defeat. You could say I was following him. I was definitely following him. There were friends to visit on the way back home, too. Friends in SF, LA, Omaha, Columbus and New Holland. AAA mailed me a hard-copy map, built around those stops. A folded booklet with highlighted routes. I went south through Washington and on through Oregon toward California, tall trees lofting high. I took my interviews along the way.

I paid cursory attention to the profundity of the landscape rolling by. I was off-grid. I had a flip phone with limited minutes. I was the picture of wild, at least to myself. I wore thrift store dresses or jeans with my cowboy boots. It was me and the map and my pain and cigarettes and CDs and the radio’s endless love songs and the people I met and their love stories. And love. Love. Love without swipe-rights or internet porn. In 2002, selfie millennials weren’t dolling up like Disney princes and princesses. Love was love was love and risk was risk was risk and my car was my universe.

The car: a second-hand gray Toyota sedan, a ghost of a car, an Everyman car. The only tell about who I might be, inside the vehicle—was the “HOWL” bumper sticker on the rear. I’d attempted to remove it and now it read “HOW”. HOW played in me like a poem. A loss, a longing; a question with no answer as I drove.

It was an impossible wish, this love I’d yearned for, and when my love for Leo finally rose into being, it presented as a hunger, awesome and infinite. The shift in me and the power of my need for him was terrifying. My love was alive. If he was gone forever, I was gone forever. I’d been living for years in the white light of that final crossing-over, anyway. Drugs imbue a person with death. To hell with me. I had fucked so much up, why not let it all go for good. I had a price to pay for all the bad I’d brought into the lives of friends and family. I couldn’t stand it. I kept on with the drugs. The drugs roared and I let myself be wild. World, here is my take on loathing and barbarism. Drive that car until the wheels fly off. It’s a limbo-la of live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse. So-what, to the tits. Or whatever horsemonkey I was telling myself back then.

My desperation was toxic. Static energy crackled in my ears—loud, arena-static loud, as though my soul were translating the torture of the ages, as though my soul itself was a Colosseum entertainment. Leo. Lakes of lava reverberating with cannonading salvos. Leo. And now so much burning, burning. I placed a tall, lighted jar candle in the cupholder of the car console, a “Mano Ponderosa” prayer candle. The flame was for Leo. For our love. For my hope.

Oh, Leo. Why did he give me the gift back. The gift was an oversized green vintage Collier’s World Atlas and Gazetteer, with a graphic of a golden spinning globe imprinted on its cover. But it was more than that. The gift occupied the passenger’s seat. I started talking to the gift somewhere in California, before I hit San Francisco. The gift held my soul. My soul and my regrets. The gift was alive.

The gift was a flip-book I made using photo booth pictures. I found a curio shop that had a booth in the back. The cashier let me take hundreds pictures of myself with props—a boa, sunglasses, different outfits, pinwheels, wigs, bubbles. Stop-motion is perfect for a flip-book. I’d put in the money and four photos would come out. I held up four signs in one cycle of four, “You/ and/ me,/ Leo!” In another, I spelled out L-O-V-E in letters I pasted over my eyes as though I was winking the letters. I glued the photos along the outside pages of the atlas. The pictures really did “flip”. My best love letter ever. Two-by-two-inch pics started at the upper corner of the front page and ran all the way down the side to the bottom of the last page. Because, see, Leo? An atlas! We would travel the world together.

My love had swollen great as a hot air balloon. Friends thought I’d lost it. I had. I had become a pathetique, a joke of myself. I’d become something of an absurdist’s performance piece. As though someone had written me into a one-act play. At the end, maybe I’d cue at the deli of death, take my number and eat that final slice of ham. Such zizzing mania. I was a spooky live wire, snaking and sparking. I was a fissure of light wiggling just over there, barely noticeable. Giddy little seam. Widening steadily. Blinding vision.

I knew what Leo told me when he left me was true. He didn’t love me. But my heart was burning so bright. A bonfire in the darkness. The loop of pain I would have to travel to recover myself—seemed eternal. A Venus ring of sorrow. I couldn’t possibly cover all of the miles in a single lifetime. The man I loved didn’t love me. My chest ached from the swallowed tears. Daily machinations became nonsense. A wasteland of thoughts playing double-dutch. All those fleet thoughts, too fast to keep, shooting like stars. I was heavy on heavy ground, arguing with the staggers and the jags.

I drove and I burned. I burned and I drove. I talked to myself and talked to the gift. I followed the AAA map and I smoked and listened to music and talked to myself. Whole conversations, all the voices. Told off all of the offending people of my memories. Said what needed to be said. Impassioned speeches for Leo and why our love was real issued from my lips as though my words could reach his ears. Radio love songs came and went and I cried and doubted and drove and burned. And when I had enough gregarious energy to suppress my viscerous black static, I parked the car and found a bar. And in that bar, I found a new lover to interview. They didn’t know my secrets, my madness, my burning and burning. When all was aligned, I’d ask the person to tell me their greatest love story.

I sought out men and women who had a particular atmosphere of fear in their eyes. People who were soft in a way I recognized. People who were fallible enough to trust me. Then again, I did convey an air of seriousness. And I bought them drinks, which helped. Your story is important, I would insist. I believed this and my conviction shone true, unmistakable. I could spot a lover from a mile away. Takes one to know one, as the saying goes. Lovers and junkies, we breathe a rarified air. My lovers were full to the rim with their stories. I sensed their readiness. They were dreamers, idiots, fools, lovers. Drug addicts. Fuckheads. Bad people and good people.

I relished the danger of the situations I put myself in. There was the obvious physical danger of approaching a stranger alone in a bar and getting into a volatile conversation like this one. I drank with them all, did drugs with a few. I always left it at the bar. If I needed to, I got a hotel room, or—stupid as it was—I slept in my car. I listened and they all talked to me and gave me their secrets, open as God, each telling their guarded passages with what seemed to me to be sweet, terrible relief.

*

Lover: I was just a kid. I was six years old. But I loved her. I never had that feeling again. She kissed me behind a tree. My mother caught us and yelled at us. That’s all. Her name was Susan.

*

Lover: I met her at my cousin’s wedding. We danced to “You Make Me Feel So Young” by Sinatra and we were flying. Such a big wedding at the Fairmont Hotel. There were photographers and everything. She had a blue taffeta dress on. She was the most exquisite girl there. I gave her my number and she folded it and folded it until the paper was tiny and put it in her shoe. She was on a date with a family member. I never saw her again. She never called.

*

Lover: I was traveling in Spain with my mother and father. Granada. I was in tenth grade at the University of Granada. All of us American kids hung out around Plaza Nueva at night. City center. There were lots of travelers living in Granada. I fell in love with a man from Gambia. So tall, so dark. His laugh sounded like a kind of extravagant hiccup. He and the other Africans living in the area would take turns hosting dinner. He was such a good cook and sweet, sweet host. We ate with our hands and told jokes. I would give anything to go back there and be with him again. He told me he had three gifts for me. If you are hungry, there is my food for you. If you are tired, there is my shelter for you. If you are lonely, there is my love for you. He asked me to marry him. Make a compromise, he said. Come to Gambia. Work on his farm.

Me: What happened?

Lover: I was too scared.

*

Lover: He was a monster when he was angry. Just a really bad guy. I don’t want to get into it. He was in prison off and on. You love someone in prison. Because they keep fucking up. At some point, though, you have to let it go. He didn’t care, is what I found out. Damn, it was so fucking hard to leave. Because when he was good, he was a different person. He was nice. I miss that.

Me: Where is he now?

Lover: I don’t care. I can’t care. I guess I don’t let myself. There were good times we had. Like when he brought me a candy necklace for a treat. He looked like a boy when he gave it to me. I got that feeling like we were two kids playing in a sandbox. He ate the little candies off my neck. We had PBRs. The sun was shining on the porch. I don’t know. There was a sweetness to him. His love was so big when he was good.

*

Lover: I think of her every single day. I wake up thinking about her. Sometimes I cry myself to sleep thinking about her.

Me: How long has since you saw her?

Lover: Eighteen years, three weeks and twelve days. Nine hours and some minutes.

Me: Have you looked for her?

Lover: She lives in Greece, as far as I know. She’s living with a man named Greg. She went straight on me. I don’t think she exists as I knew her anymore. She’s gone. She was more beautiful than you can imagine. The whole sky. All the stars. She’s still mine in here. In my heart.

*

I listened and witnessed. Love is not for resolving, I would say to my interviewees by way of encouragement. Love is not a problem to be solved. This helped them take heart. I assured them that I would faithfully transcribe their story. Each knew their puzzles would remain incomplete. It comes with the territory. There were emotional paradoxes and tricks of biology and always, always, there was great and palpable longing. Some lovers were passionate about what they knew to be true; all a’thunderclap they were, ablaze with sureness. Most everyone was pining for someone, someone who was gone or lost. Some were agapes and bore the pain of unrequited love in bitter, gorgeous duende. Some were angry about sex, or loss of youth, or about being rejected, cheated on. Undervalued. Some told me, at first, that their real love was the love relationship they were involved with in the present. Usually over a few drinks, their story would change. Most big love stories lived in the wayback of memory.

*

Lover: I met a man in my 20’s. He was a comic. A brat. I really hated him at first. He was, I don’t know. Caustic or something. Hateful or something. But, as time went on, I saw him differently. He grew on me. He turned out to be my clarion call. My everything.

Me: Why did it end?

Lover: We got married. I hate him again. He does his thing, you know. He’s a cheater. He’s The One. I wish he wasn’t. This interview is stupid, by the way.

Me: But I’m listening.

*

Lover: She tried to destroy me. She took every last thing I had. My bank account, my car. She told my boss I did bad things I didn’t do. She set my friends and family against me.

Me: When did this happen?

Lover: Last week. I don’t have anything left.

Me: Why do you still love her?

Lover: I don’t know.

Me: You said she tried to destroy you.

Lover: She did and she didn’t. I have hope. We’ll get back together. We’re supposed to be together. This will all pass.

*

There was another part to The Lover’s Project. This didn’t get very far. I imagined a perfect love, not Leo, not anyone I’d ever met or known before. I had a friend set up a mailbox for me in Maine, so that I could mail letters this imagined, perfect love. I called him “Vaughan”. I kept trying to write a letter to Vaughan. It wasn’t working. Dear Vaughan, I would write. Today is a terrible day. You’d understand why, since you know me so well. I never finished a letter to Vaughan. I never wrote to Leo, either.

In San Francisco, I drove all of Haight Street, eying myself in the rearview. I’d lived there in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Ten years. I left to go to rehab in Maine, where my parents lived. I went to college in Maine. I had two bachelor’s degrees; one in writing, one in art. And look at me, driving old haunts. Skinny, freckled, wrinkled. Needing a haircut. What a fucking idiot. I blew out Mano ponderosa as way-distant clouds slipped and boiled. I used to say, cheerfully, that there was a new perspective on every San Francisco street corner. Huh. At a light, I thought my foot was on the gas when it was really on the brake. What a grotesque living metaphor. I hated myself intensely. The car was full of snuffed candle smoke. I decided I’d skip seeing the SF friends. I couldn’t manage it. Heroin triggers were everywhere. I didn’t visit the Mission district, didn’t have a drink at The Casanova, the old poetry slam hangout. I sailed through town and escaped.

Adrift in the relative silence, me, a woman in her thirties with no savings, no career, no kids, no house. If there were prospects, I wasn’t able to grock them. Nothing was adding, not quite. Life-questions ignited and re-ignited in my mind. What do I want? What can I actually give back to society? I painted and made art projects and I wrote. How can visual art or writing ever make any money? Does money matter? Do I want kids? Do I know what love is? Will anyone ever love me again? Will they at least pretend to love me? Who cares? What if this journey across America is a Shamanistic journey, what if I am looking for those lost soul-pieces to pull back into my soul? Are the pieces the love stories?

I occasionally ran my questions through my guardian angels, my Shaolin Kung Fu movie monks I imagined were guiding me. The mega-stealth kind that can fly and are enlightened. Fine, they were not real guides, more like magic eight-ball guides. I’d ask: Shaolin monks—good or bad? Shaolin monks gave me a good or a bad. They didn’t like me driving across country. That was bad. They didn’t like Mano ponderosa, either.

The monks had nothing on my pervasive regrets. This is what grief shakes loose. Regrets. My regrets were legion. A seemingly endless supply. I felt great tape of my consciousness winding down. I heard medleys of songs and they stuck in my head. Like the emblematic line of “Welcome to the Jungle” paired with “Superstition”: Welcome to the jungle, wash you face and hands! Or, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette” paired with “One Way Ticket to the Sky”: Tell Saint Peter at the golden gate that you hates to make him wait, ‘cuz I gotta one way ticket to the sky! And here and there, I heard a laughing tribunal in my mind—a chorus of laughter. Once a cycle of regret finished, the laughing might start. I kept driving, even though the movie monks told me not to, and I heard this one:

You should have stayed in San Francisco when you were 27, instead of going back home to Maine with your tail between your legs. You could have kicked heroin in SF. Who wanted her parents instead of staying strong? Now look at you. No way you could ever really be here again, huh? No way you could ever rejoin the slam poets, right? No more art shows at SFMOMA. No more working at City Lights Books. The city spit you out, didn’t it. You’re worthless.

—Chorus of laughter.

Steady, now. This is a funhouse. Many faces. Many rides. Zoltar and the monks, telling fortunes. Me, riding the rides. Whose circus is this? My circus. My monkeys:

Maybe it’s true that junkies become junkies because of raw beginnings. That’s what the statistics say. Maybe Mom and Dad harmed you when you were growing up. Maybe that puts you at a disadvantage. It’s okay, Mary, so what. Maybe you dodged another bullet. Maybe you have an advantage, after all. You do have advantages. US citizen. White female. Skills for labor. Decent health if you could take care of yourself. Tall. Always poor me, huh. So you just didn’t get the easiest childhood. You’re an adult now. It’s over. They are just people, Mary. You big stupid baby.

*

Morris X. The haunting brown eyes of Morris. He called you when he was performing his final act of auto-erotic asphyxiation. His voice was wheezing into the receiver. Remember the sound? And how he begged you to visit him the next day. You said what he was doing was disgusting. He said he loved you. He said he was sorry you couldn’t be together. He said it was his fault and he was sorry. When you hung up the phone, he hung himself.

*

You couldn’t even go home from SF to bury your grandmother. Junky. And what about what your grandfather, her husband, said on his own deathbed when you were a child? Said: Mary, please keep playing the saxophone. Remember? Tubes coming out of his face. Promise me, he said. Promise me you will. What happened to the saxophone, Mary? Gone, right? Junky. Nobody on planet earth will ever care for you like he did ever again. Where’s you’re grandfather’s sax? Where’s his honor? Where is yours?

*

You begged Rail X for the number for the dealer. He fought you. His roommate fought you. Punched you. They were trying to protect you. You didn’t give up. You kept going back, days and days of this. You insisted—because Rail X was the one who first shot you up and got you in this mess. You knew you could work on his guilt. Manipulative. Finally, he gave you the number. The dealer would say, “15-20 minutes” when you called. You junky. Three years. You got off it, but you dragged your family into it, your friends, everyone you ever knew and loved. You hurt them all. And now, it’s pills. What a waste of life. How dare you squander the magnificent gift of life you were given.

— Chorus of laughter.

*

I stopped and visited my friend, long tall Tim X in LA, many years my senior. His cherishing, familiar face was open and empathetic. He saw my pain, slowed me down. He took care of me, if only for a few days. I had forgotten what real friends can do and the warmth between. His love story was about people he called The Underdogs. He said they were the least and the best of us all. He played me songs from his new album and we ate tacos and laughed and he showed me Watts Tower and took me to the horse stables in Athens. I sang my song I’d made up in the car about Jesus, Walmart and Disney. And then it happened. He told me I was one of The Underdogs. He told me my tits were like two happy cheerleaders. We laughed about that. The cheerleaders.

I told Tim my heart was reeling. He told me he could help. Maybe he could fix it. That wasn’t true. He didn’t know about my burning and burning. He didn’t know about the drugs, or if he did, he didn’t say anything. He probably didn’t, in fact, know me at all. I wasn’t one of The Underdogs. On our last night, he put earphones on my head and played “The Greatest” by Cat Power and rocked me like a child. He said there were things he knew that I might not know. Maybe, maybe. HOW. I wished good over him and he wished good over me.

*

I had nobody to see in Las Vegas, but I went anyway, consulting the AAA map outside of the marked pages. I splurged and stayed at Paris, Las Vegas and ate dinner in the Eiffel Tower Restaurant and swam in their ridiculously ornate pool room. And in the neon glow of night, along the shouting streets, in bars crammed with people who had daydreams in their smiles, I found my lovers.

Lover: I don’t have a “The One”. I’m still looking. Might be what I’m here in Las Vegas for.

Me: I have a “The One”. His name is Leo.

Lover: Okay. Okay. There was this one girl, she visited me and my dad on the lake one summer. So my dad was after this woman, he was single. The woman brought her daughter along and I fell for her in a second. We were teenagers. We went out in a rowboat together one afternoon. Her skin was brown and soft and sweet. I’m still there. The water was lapping at the boat and we were kissing and kissing. She was the best kisser. Like a dream. Nobody has ever kissed me like that since. I’m in love with that kiss.

*

 Lover: I’m married. He’s married. I can’t even tell what’s a lie anymore. All I know is I love him and my heart beats for him. We’ve been having an affair for six years now. I believe we’ll be together again, just us. Some way, somehow, we’ll be together. I don’t even care what happens. There’s just no comparison. The sex. He’s so playful, you know? And his smell. Like warm grass. Grass in the sunshine. My husband knows. We do fight about it. But I don’t care. The heart wants what the heart wants. There’s nothing I can do.

*

Lover: Well, I’m into BDSM. I’m a freak. Once you go BDSM, you don’t go back.

Me: Yeah, I heard that saying.

Lover: It’s true. Can you guess what I am? I’m not a dom. I’m a submissive. But I like some things my way. I like all the dress-up and the toys and                stuff. But I like having a husband to come home to. My husband doesn’t play. My needs are incredibly specific. Very, very particular. All I can say                is, husband is really patient. Really patient.

Me: Who is The One? Is there one?

Lover: Well, if I’m being honest. I hate to say it. Probably me.

*

Lover: I’m fifty now. I work out, the boys love it. All the 20-year-olds call me Big Daddy. It’s the best. Ha-ha! I have a lot of fun with that. We do crazy things. It’s like they can’t touch me. My heart was taken a long, long time ago. My lover died. He had lung cancer. We had such a life together. The white picket fence—we had it. We were in love. We met in high school. He died August fifteenth of last year, in hospice. I still have our house. But I don’t have anyone to come home to. There aren’t those long talks by some hearth or anything. What I have now, is I have sex now.

I drove hard toward Omaha, to spend time with Alice X. I’d lived in Omaha for a few months when I was twenty and worked at her bookstore. Omaha, a six-month stay for me with a friend attending the university there. Some kind of adventure. At age eighteen I had moved away from my parents in Maine—took whatever path I could to leave. My two brothers, Hark and Roy, were all for the move. Hark lived in LA, so my first stop was LA. Then, Omaha. After that, SF. In SF I became heroin addict, and then there was the inevitable rehab. I tried to go to rehab in SF. The lines were three months long. I waited and waited. I tried an outpatient clinic. That was a failure. Finally I called my oldest brother Roy and told him what was going on. Roy still lived in Maine, and had an okay relationship with the parents. He was kind about my predicament, which shocked me. I had expected anger, a backlash. But Roy was warm. He told the parents and the parents called me. They said to get on a plane and home home to Maine. They said they didn’t want me to die. I didn’t want to die, either. I went home.

*

I traveled over twenty four hours from Las Vegas on through the exquisite and fearsome orange and red and purple mountains and ranges of Nevada and Utah and on through the cool national forests of northern Colorado, stereo blasting, Mano ponderosa burning. I could barely imagine Omaha and Alice. The regrets churned and churned:

You think you’re smart. You think you’re an artist. A writer. Who knows you? Nobody does. You’re a hobbyist. Artist is a praise-word. Writer is a praise-word. If you made real money, you could donate to the SPCA. Or you could volunteer, you know. Find a way to help gestating pigs get pens they can turn around in. Help baby chicks on chicken farms keep their beaks. Baby seals, Mary. Bear-baiting in Maine. Mary! Those animals need you. You’re unbelievably selfish. Remember Carrie X’s sick kitten, Asa? Your friend was feeding him with a bottle every hour and a half. He was very sick and so tiny. You said Carrie could come out with you and get lunch. That Asa would be okay. He died a few days later. He died. His death is your fault. Carrie said it wasn’t your fault. Guess again. Your fault.

*

You sent Ricky X a note and told him to meet you at the front of the school. You said in the note you were going to kick his ass. He showed up and you grabbed him by his hair and swung him in circles until you couldn’t hold him anymore. And then you dropped him, right there in front of everyone, on the grass. Why, because he tried to be class clown? Because he smelled and everyone hated him? No, because you are bad and you are rageful. Don’t say you did it because you got hit at home. You did it because you are full of hate. That word Aunt Laura has for the devil, the one she can’t say out loud? That’s you.

*

Just over the Nebraska line, I stopped at the Flying J in North Platte and filled up. They had a game room. I went into the game room for an interview but lost my nerve when I spotted a haunted-eyed man with thick hands and a quivering mustache, watching me as he hovered over a pinball machine. I retreated, got a cold sandwich, chips and a coffee from the retail store and went back to the Toyota.

*

Alice was in her late sixties. A rangy little lion of a person with short red henna hair and oversized glasses. Her apartment walls and ceilings were busy with color, with her collage-work. If she liked a picture, she’d cut it out and stick it to the wall. Forty years years of collages. Political scenes and romantic scenes and jokes she liked, inches thick. She’d been doing that since her engagement was broken off, way back when, in her 20’s. She’d never had another lover. We drank Veuve Clicquot and she told me about John.

Lover: John X. I don’t like telling this story. But I’ll do it for you. The stupid pigfucker left me for my best friend. I had been trying to find him all night. I finally went to work and saw him driving his motorcycle—it was a twist of fate sort of thing. I flagged him down and he crashed into an oncoming truck. I thought he died. But he was okay and the ambulance took him away. He wouldn’t let me visit. He returned my letters. And then he married my supposed best friend. And I was beautiful. Prettier than you. Prettier than all of you young bitches. I am tout seul. Like Garance in “The Children of Paradise”. Tout seul.

Me: I love you, Alice.

Lover: Fuck love.

*

I was tired when Alice and I parted ways. Very tired. My yearning for Leo was becoming heavier and heavier. My regrets were wheeling nonstop. There was a traffic jam on I-80 East around Des Moines that had us all idling for an hour and a half. In this slow crawl, I saw a long-haul trucker with a vacant stare—a carful of arguing children—a sad woman in the passenger’s seat hugging a dog in her lap—a man smoking and rocking out to music—and on and on. All horribly impatient. The whole primitive populous, endlessly individual, all needing and doing and going. Stopping and starting for hours made us all angry. Drivers were laying on the horn and flipping each other off. The seemingly endless confrontation of the American crowd. And people looking inquisitively at me inside my car kicked up yet more dust inside me. My regrets crossed over and become a chorus of my secrets, surfacing in my mind, speaking clear, plain English:

You missed Grandma Dixon’s funeral because your habit was raging bad back then. You couldn’t even get on an airplane without being arrested. Mom hates you for that. You deserve it. Couldn’t go to Maryann X’s wedding either for the same reason. You’re a terrible aunt. Bad sister. Bad daughter. Do you ever give anything back to anyone? Ridiculous.

*

You were raped at age 14. You never told. Why didn’t you tell? You could have had a different life. Someone would have helped you. No, you kept the poison to yourself. And maybe if you weren’t anorexic, you could have kept the baby. Maybe if you didn’t ask for it, maybe if you didn’t like that older man and go on that date. You wouldn’t have been raped then. You would have kept your innocence. It’s your fault. All yours.

*

Nobody will ever really love you because you are a junky. Not ever. You’re human garbage. Lucky break getting out. Lucky you don’t do heroin anymore. What don’t you do. Just anything else, right-right? Why can’t you stop? Human garbage. Just try to reason with yourself on this one. People like winners. Firsters. Inspiring people, in first place. They don’t like second place, especially. If you’re close to first place and don’t make it, they’ll deride you. Heroin puts you in last place. You’ll just be forgotten. No first place for you. No second place. No third. Last. Not even last. Garbage. Not even garbage.

*

Don’t you know that global warming is happening? Look around. Why aren’t you helping? What about generations to come? And human beings are hungry, all over the world. You get to eat. You even get “free time.” Recreation, soul-searching, time for art, time for an existential crisis. You have endless nonsense time, you lucky asshole. You don’t act lucky. You don’t even recycle, not enough. What about the fish in the ocean? The worldwide garbage dumps full of plastic waste? You’re a terrible person. You get to go to college if you want. Live in a house by yourself, if you want. All you need is a job. You can have these things. Yet, you choose to remain ungrateful. You don’t even know how to pray.

*

I drove four hours. That was plenty of navigation for the day. I got a room at The Graduate in Iowa City and slept. When I awoke I was crying and had been crying in my dreams. The pathetic fallacy of rain and tears had followed me. Outside, thunder and lightning were raging, and rain fell loud as trauma. I holed up for the day and then stayed another day. Ordered room service. I slept and dreamt.

I dreamt I was following Leo in the woods of Maine. He was always many, many agonizing steps ahead. I couldn’t find him but I saw him with my heart, walking away, going somewhere else. He was happy without me. He was walking steadily over the soft leafy floor of the woods, a song of himself playing in his face. He was on his way to meet someone else. His steps were natural, careless. He was enjoying the woods, unaware of my running and how I ran, desperate, determined. We were paced apart. And then the woods became hot. And in the heat, the trees fell away and become desert. And the desert opened and expanded and became a dusty city, hot in the sun. And I was riding in a Jimmy army truck, packed with people. And there were Jimmy army trucks as far as I could see. There was a war and everyone would soon be killed. The dust was cloying as the Jimmy trucks drove the streets. A feeling of terror abounded, thousands of us trapped in this place and no way out. I screamed for Leo, screamed for Leo, until I woke up, sweating and shaking.

I looted the mini-fridge and called Leo from the hotel phone. He didn’t answer. Called again from my flip phone. He didn’t answer. I waited a while, turned on the TV. Drank to replace my well of tears with alcohol. Popped more pills. And when the dimension of my emotion went flat enough, when I was good and slick with alcohol and pills, I went out to find my lovers.

            Lover: I’ll talk to you about this, but my husband is right over there. Really my soulmate is not my husband. I think he knows. People know, right? I think he does. My real soulmate is my mother. She’s gone now, rest her soul. I mean this in the platonic way, the normal family way, of course, of course. Nobody loved me like my mother. And I will never love anyone else like I loved her. I still love her. Always will.

*

Lover: I think if you really love someone, you hate them, too.

Me: I don’t agree.

Lover: Doesn’t matter if you don’t agree. It’s just the truth. Even if you’re not trying to do anything. You get that close to someone; all of your emotions are involved. They just are.

Me: Are you saying—you sabotage things?

Lover: I manipulate things. Manipulation doesn’t have to be a negative thing. I do some mean things on purpose. Trivial things, really. To keep her with me. I’m not proud of it.

 Me: I would never do mean things on purpose to anyone.

 Lover: You don’t know what you’d do. Different loves bring out different things. I’m bisexual. I’m totally different when I’m with a man than when I’m with a woman.

Me: Are you more satisfied with one or the other?

Lover: I like sex with men more, that’s for sure. But my heart wants a woman. Women are more complex than men are. It’s just my opinion. I like their energy.

*

I was on I-80 East in Illinois, near Naperville, when I determined I would not stop in Columbus to see the friend there. Fuck the whole state of Ohio. Fuck all of this. Fuck The Lovers Project. I pulled over on the highway. The sun was bright and loud. Clanging loud. Hard light. It seemed like a good idea to turn my phone on. Leo might call. I reached for the Olympus, which I’d set in the cupholder. I pressed the record button and my finger slipped. I pressed the record button again. “I’m going home,” I said into the recorder. This statement was definite. Real. I set about rejiggering my map route to drive along Lake Erie. I folded and re-folded the AAA booklet until the route was all set. I needed to get home. I burned and burned for Leo. And I was very tired, indeed. I felt as though my human electricity was slowly going out. A dangerous turning for a junky.

That’s when I saw the blues flashing behind me. A cop. I extinguished Mano and hid it and rolled down my window. He was a state cop, all dressed in brown. He tipped his hat when he asked for my license and registration. A sweet face for a cop, though I knew that didn’t mean anything. He could be as friendly as an asp, for all I knew. I was confident because there were no illegal drugs in the vehicle. Just pills, which appeared to be mine. I wouldn’t be offering those up. He looked and verified and asked where I was headed with all the stuff in the car. I smiled and we chatted. I told him home was Maine. Maine, the cop repeated, nicely enough. The cop warned me not to stop on the highway unless I was having an emergency. He smiled and let me go.

I navigated off the shoulder and joined the flow of traffic. I was strangely calm. The cop followed me for a few miles; then peeled off. Lucky break. I reached for the Olympus again. It was time hear the stories. I hadn’t listened to them in full, not yet. I hit “play” and waited. My voice came on. “I’m going home,” I said. I hit play again. “I’m going home,” the recorder responded. “I’m going home.” I checked the file folder button. Empty. Impossible. All of the interviews were gone. Lost to all eternity. My tears must have been all spent. I couldn’t cry. I knew I would fuck the whole thing up. The sensation was one of an odd vacancy of being. A quiet in my center.

*

I was eating fried chicken at Waffle House in Austinburg, Ohio when I saw a message blink on my phone. My friends from New Holland, Pennsylvania. I listened. They had a daughter. A toddler. The best thing I ever did, my friend Christa X said in the recording. I can’t wait for you to see how beautiful Mia is. When are you coming? We’re all excited to see you, Mary. A tiny reserve in me mustered a response. I’d go.

I visited a Kroger grocery store in I-don’t-know-where Ohio, along the way east to New Holland, somewhere off the turnpike. I got lost along the way. I had to pick up some things. Toothpaste, snacks, stuff. And if there was a little girl for me to meet, I better not smell too much of cigarettes and bad news. I bought my things and went to the single-occupancy handicap bathroom right there in front of the checkout lanes. I set to work giving myself a wipe-down; I took off my clothes and got to work using the bathroom soap and paper towels. I sighed. I put one of my feet under the tap in the sink and scrubbed with my hands. The warm water felt pretty good. Then the door opened. I had forgotten to lock it. It was a girl of maybe ten in a striped t-shirt. When she saw me naked and hunched like that, she swung the door wider, onto the checkout lanes. “Mom?” she called out to her mother. “Mom?” I leapt to close and lock the door, and as it shut I caught sight of the horrified checkout shoppers in line.

When I slunk back to the car and shut myself in, I had accepted something. I would never be a mother. I probably wasn’t even equipped to be a friend. I was very sick. I also understood, very keenly, that other people needed me. For now, I could pretend. I would just pretend.

*

It was the late afternoon of a clear and sunny day when I reached Christa and Martel X’s house in New Holland. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt and sandals. I made sure the outfit was as normal as possible. I got out of the car and closed the door. Stretched. The burning and burning, would they be able to tell? I had done my best to wash it away. Mia was too young for all of this. I checked myself in the side mirror. I dug in my jeans for Chapstick and applied it, watching myself.

Christa, long hair flying, came running out onto the lawn with a rapturous face. Such glee, what a wonder. Another pathetic fallacy, but not a cheap one. One for children’s storybooks. Ah, children. Her daughter. Christa had been waiting for me by the window. Sweet and sure as friendship. Christa was not an abstract. There she was. I felt a rushing chill sweep over my arms. Goosebumps. Christa. Hope lit her skin. For some reason, I looked over my shoulder, just quickly.

“Christa,” I said.

We hugged.

“How was your drive? Well, forget that for now. I’m so happy to see you! You’re looking quite slim.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Are you ready to see the best thing I ever did?” There it was again. What she’d said before. “Are you ready to meet Mia?” Christa held out her hand and I took it. We went inside.

NON-FICTION

Radical Lives in Contemporary Europe: Ghédalia Tazartès and Jim Haynes – by James Graham

The Wall Makers—I Muratori – by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

REVIEW

KGB Homecoming Feast – by Randi Dickson

INTERVIEW

An Interview with Colum McCann on his Novel, Apeirogon – by Ru Freeman

DOCUMENTARY REVIEW

What Lies Above, Beneath, and Apart: Hemingway and Hemingway – by James Phelan    

BOOK REVIEW

A Review of Whereabouts: Jhumpa Lahiri Discovers Freedom in Exophony – by Uzma Akhand Hossain

FICTION

Mister Brother – by Michael Cunningham

Oxblood – by Ava Robinson

POETRY 

Five Poems – by Ruth Vinz

Three Poems – by Jason Irwin

Eight Poems – by Alina Stefanescu

Four Prose Poems – by Sylvia Foley

Three Poems – by SK Smith

Capstone – by James Croal Jackson

Box – by Julia Gerhardt

The Spaces Between – by Holly Day

 What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire
What is it women in men do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire

– William Blake

Declan sits facing the speaker on what we call judgment row, his back to the wall. The speaker is earnest and funny. We fellow survivors laugh with her as she tells her story of descent into penury and madness. The little room, a former storefront on a side street in the West Village, is full on this cold Friday night, everyone eager to share. Declan has his hand up. He starts talking about a course he’s taking at Brooklyn College with Allen Ginsberg. They’re reading Frank O’Hara. The class is opening him up, he says. He feels vulnerable every day. Declan is fairly new to this particular meeting, having driven over the bridge to see a cousin. He’s wearing jeans and a strange kind of red acrylic sweater with a lightning bolt or something down the middle. He has a Brooklyn accent. I don’t even (consciously that is) take note of whether he’s actually good looking. I’m just intrigued.

After the meeting, Declan is standing outside against the wall, smoking a Marlboro. I walk over and start talking to him. I can see the whites of his eyes, or at least that’s how I describe it later. It’s a biting, drizzly late March night, and I’m wearing a heavy slicker—nothing come-on about the outfit, but for some reason he seems afraid of me. He’s almost vibrating. ‘He’s a little bit shy,’ I think to myself.

Shades of those rare days to come when, for instance, Declan tentatively holds my hand while we’re walking in Central Park, testing romance. Suddenly his hand alights on mine, as erratic as a butterfly on a leaf, and then, before I can settle in, it’s gone, as if intimacy were, after all, too big a risk.

We stand out there talking in the cold drizzle for a while before he invites me for coffee. I’ve had several boyfriends and one husband from (old-time) Brooklyn, and each of them mysteriously shed his accent along the way. Declan clearly has not. He is soft-spoken, but it comes through all the same.

He takes me to a little café, gone now, in the West Village. A woman we both know from the Program—pretty blonde—is working there. Something about the way she serves him his herbal tea. She’s attracted to him. Then I realize why: he’s good-looking. The sweater, the Brooklyn accent, and the old pockmarks got in the way for a minute. Blue, blue eyes. That, and he’s disarmed me with his sweet reticence and charm. I don’t even realize I’m falling in love. Not then. The next day, after we’ve been up all night talking, sitting across a small table in my tiny garrett, is when it hits me. It hits me. No ambivalence.

Does anyone still write about passionate, romantic love? It’s difficult for me. I’m confounded now that I once adored this emotionally abusive dinosaur. But I want to understand myself, or at least who I was then. What keeps coming up is passion—the importance of it.

Declan tells me I’m feral. We’re sitting outside my apartment in his old, beat-up Brooklyn car that smells intoxicatingly like him. He grabs my face, looks in my eyes and says, “feral.” That is recognition. Most people I know think I’m very nice. It’s convenient for everybody, including me. No need to look past that. Declan takes me on, all of me.  He grants me my humanity, satisfies me as I have never been satisfied before, tries like hell to subjugate me just in case it can be done, attacks me as he does almost everyone who closes in on him, and ultimately leaves me, or I am forced to leave him, because he’s brought me down. Repairs take years.

Declan may not fit the usual definition of a hero, but he did have a genuine appreciation for my sexuality. In light of the times, when all kinds of men are getting their comeuppance, I have to ask, who are these guys who seem to lack basic male pride? Bonobos know better. Do they honestly think women are incapable of desire and therefore have to be coerced? Is that it?  I hear talk of the abuse of power, but when it comes to sex, there is no genuine power where there is no seduction. A woman in lust is beyond willing. This other thing—coercion is how it’s most often described—must feel empty. In cultures where women are genitally cut, the commonly held belief is that male pleasure is fleeting, superficial and easily dismissed. But when, in the act of sex, only one person experiences pleasure, that has got to be lonely to the point of alienation, and frustrating—for both.

Declan wouldn’t dream of imposing himself. On the other hand, it never would have occurred to him to ask beforehand if he could kiss me. Ask? By the time we got around to it, I was dying for it to happen. The sexual tension had to build and build first. When we finally kissed, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. I was standing on an ottoman to reach his height. We held each other and kissed fiercely. In spite of that, we didn’t have sex right away. On his way out the door, Declan, while kissing me again, gently reached behind and grabbed a cheek of my ass and kneaded it a little (with long, elegant fingers). The gesture was slightly lewd and proprietary. It left me breathless.

I’m still in the West Village, in the same nice-sized, rent-stabilized apartment we originally took together; he’s retreated back to Brooklyn like some monster of the deep, where he’s hiding out with his ex-wife—who seemed to linger at the edge for all the years Declan and I were a couple, even when we tried living together. She bided her time. Made me feel like Circes, or worse, Calypso. I resent good, repressed women, which is what I imagined her to be (I have no idea really). I always think of Penelope, waiting chastely, barely leaving the house, weaving, for twenty goddamn years while Odysseus is out having adventures and getting side-tracked by passion. I want to know more about the Minoan Age, the civilization that came before Homer. Almost ten years have passed, and I still think about the beautifully preserved murals I saw on the ancient walls of the Palace of Knossos, where strong and agile adolescent girls are grabbing bulls by the horns and jumping over them. What happened to that sport?

My mother believed sex is natural and wholesome. She liked that the Greeks built temples for Apollo and Dionysus side by side. Somewhere outside time, the two gods of mind and body are best friends. She brought me up in that spirit. And there was no father around, so patriarchy was one removed. Then, as I reached puberty, the sexual revolution began. That helped, too. Although I didn’t escape entirely right away. I had a fair amount of the usual bourgeois, white-girl inhibition to throw off, but I started early and kept at it. By the time Declan came along, I was ready for the real thing—if you call the real thing being reliably satisfied. And I do. At least, I don’t think it’s a minor part of it.

Honey baby, won’t you cuddle near,
Just sweet mama whisper in your ear
I’m wild about that thing, it makes me laugh and sing,
Give it to me papa, I’m wild about that thing

– Bessie Smith, “Wild About That Thing”

Declan wanted me to come and held back not simply out of generosity, but because, I’m guessing, it made him feel powerful. Maybe that’s why it was sometimes difficult for me to give myself up. His prowess belongs to a tradition we aren’t featuring much lately, that of the man holding on, waiting for the woman to give it up. Nothing to do with equality. In fact, he reigns supreme. But the act itself was for me. He was plugged into me, lighting me up. His orgasms, while assured, were not the focus—and, as he later explained, were invariably heightened by mine.

Declan also got inside my head. He intuitively understood the way to free me was to spur the fantasy that I was his tool, that we were doing this dirty thing for him. “You’re my vessel,” he’d whisper.  In fact, it was the other way round, but as long as we weren’t allegedly doing it for me, as long as I could mindlessly abdicate all responsibility, I could let go.

Yes, it’s long over now, but I don’t want his particular valor to go forever unsung. He wasn’t often thoughtful or even kind—except there in bed. Outside of it, Declan was a prisoner of that terrible male ego. “John Wayne ruined my life,” he used to say. I colluded though—I fed the myth. I wanted to walk next to the baddest guy in the jungle. Not that Declan was anything approaching that—he was too stuck inside his head—but he looked the part. My ex-husband truly was fearless and violent and, unexpectedly, kind and warm-hearted too. Declan, on the other hand, was a master of illusion. We both fostered that illusion—wanted it to be true. We liked to romanticize the class thing, the princess leaving the castle on the hill to join the peasant in the field. Except I will never know what it’s like to be born poor. You can commit suicide, but class suicide is nearly impossible.

As it happened, my family no longer had any money to pass along, so I did have to work. And working on the white-collar version of the factory floor stinks—it’s desensitizing and mostly unrelieved, punctuated by tiny intervals of abbreviated pleasure, those infrequent, stolen minutes outside on the street. This didn’t stop Declan from zeroing in on whatever idea of privilege I had left. For instance, he tended to be almost deferential to waiters. If I simply asked for a table by the window, it would be enough to elicit, “What a sense of entitlement!” C’mon, really? He had his own version of entitlement, belonging as he did to the last generation (let’s hope) of men who expect women to do the housework.

I was not about to come home to Declan, after a long and miserable day writing pharmaceutical advertising copy, and pick up after him. I stupidly did do all the shopping and the cooking, because I wanted to please him, but I stopped short of cleaning up his messes. He deliberately tested me, one time spilling both his ashtray full of cigarette butts and a mug of coffee on the floor and leaving that soupy concoction for me to find. There wasn’t much hope for us after that.

I grew up in a strange kind of a home, an apartment on Park Avenue, with my mother and our live-in maid. No man lived in the house, not even for the occasional night. In those days, my free spirit of a mother was nevertheless very proper about certain things. She would get up and come home in the wee hours—that’s how demanding the mores of the fifties and early sixties were. There was no benevolent or otherwise higher-up for my mother and me to serve, and the live-in maid served us, saving her pay to get back to her own son in Rutherford, New Jersey. I never even learned how to wash dishes until I found myself, (long before Declan) at the age of nineteen, living with a man for the first time. He was the one who taught me how to wash dishes and hang up my clothes, but he certainly didn’t expect me to do all the housework. In fact, neither one of us felt equipped to do any housework at the time; it interfered with our drinking. While I’ve lived with more than my fair share of men since, the only ones who assumed I would clean up after them were solidly working-class. There was not going to be any other maid. Too bad I am so often drawn to these men, because our fundamental disagreement over what the woman’s role should be is a lot to overcome.

I can’t defend my belief that working-class men are sexier. Of course it’s not, objectively speaking, true. Even my own experience gives the lie to this prejudice. Nevertheless, it persists. One reason could be an early, formative experience: To celebrate my thirteenth birthday, my mother took all the girls in my class and me on a boat up the Hudson to Bear Mountain. We shared the front deck with a bunch of high school kids from Brooklyn. The boys had ducktails. The girls had teased hair and wore tight, black capris and ankle bracelets. Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” his latest hit, was blasting from a speaker. I watched the boys making out with the girls, grinding. I didn’t know how to feel about it, I only knew the older high school boys at Rudolf Steiner (where I went), didn’t behave that way in public. The older girls I knew didn’t even come close to behaving that way.

Sexism exists in every class. Only the style differs. Bourgeois men are complacent; working class men, what’s left of them, are traditionally more direct and often unapologetic. In lieu of self-awareness, which barely exists, I prefer the latter. In other words, when it comes to sexist acting out, I would much rather be confronted than unwittingly patronized. Catcalls don’t bother me at all.

You have to be conditioned from early childhood to wait on a man, day in and day out, for no pay. Taking care of little children is another matter. The idea, though, of doing it for a fellow adult! The beginning of hegemony, Engels said. And then I’m supposed to love him on top of it? Honestly, no. But the power Declan had over me can’t be overstated. While I wouldn’t clean up after him, I was willing to do a lot even my libertine my mother never taught me. I did my best to come down off the hill and toil in the field by his side—and be satisfied. That is the kind of rule I understand—give it to me, papa.

A candid, young gay friend told me recently the reason it can be hard to find a top is because the orgasms are so much stronger for the bottoms. I hadn’t fully understood this about gay men until he explained it to me. “The only men who want to be exclusive tops are the ones with macho hang-ups,” he said.

So it’s not strictly female desire—maybe it’s explicitly the desire of the bottom. What I (and my friend) experience isn’t a brief spasm; it’s a total corporal response, a tidal wave. Satisfaction runs correspondingly deep.

Germaine Greer wrote fifty years ago in her masterwork, The Female Eunuch: “If we localize female response in [the head of] the clitoris, we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male’s response…when the release is expressed in mechanical terms, it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina…if women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.”

This kind of ecstasy is still taboo, possibly more than ever. I don’t see passionate sex scenes in movies anymore, and they seem to be missing from a lot of contemporary literature. Only the music gets to it. Justin Timberlake’s mildly subversive lyrics in one hit could be a manual for not stopping too soon—which he equates with generosity. Exactly. I’m glad somebody’s talking about it. The old blues singers—Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker—were preachers. Just listen to the lyrics. They were instructors. And we do need to be taught.  Those lyrics are not meant only to titillate, although I’m sure any discussion of sex has that in it. They’re more about the fundamental, largely unacknowledged importance of desire, of passion, generally forbidden because it defies the social order, because it’s transformative and a legitimate claim to freedom.

Sexual love is the movement that breaks the rules; an uprising of the senses that abolishes propriety…It is unpredictable, disorderly, and bad for industrial relations. — David Widgery

For the sake of this freedom, I want to formally acknowledge a crisis of female desire and the satisfaction that is its due.

Various younger female friends (not the broadest consensus, admittedly, but still informative) tell me the bedroom protocol these days is that a gentleman takes care to go down on his partner first, bringing her to orgasm before he enters. The understanding is his penis (not to mention his entire body, all of that skin that could be electrifying hers), won’t be the instrument of her satisfaction. It’s almost as if her orgasm is a minor, inconvenient obstacle that has to be dispensed with first. A society of wankers is what we have become. “Well, at least now everybody’s getting off,” could be the reply.

The general assumption is that intercourse never worked; however, not until the nineteenth century, in British and North American culture, was the vagina (which, incidentally, is surrounded by clitoral tissue) ruled out as a source of satisfaction for the woman. Our subsequent accommodations based on this relatively recent notion aren’t as liberated as we like to think.

By the time middle class boys and girls start experimenting on each other, the majority of them already believe only the male comes during intercourse. Both sexes have given up on the possibility of the female coming that way even before they’ve started doing it. Mainstream pornography reinforces this prime example of cultural hegemony, focused as it is entirely on male pleasure, culminating in the male orgasm. Since the women on screen are clearly faking it, there is nothing for women watching to identify with and therefore get aroused by.

A heterosexual friend of many years and I have developed the habit of being frank with each other, and we can sometimes breach the great divide. He is handsome and therefore got laid a lot in his twenties, when, for a while, he preferred one-night stands. It was never about pleasing the woman, he confided in me years later. In fact, he wasn’t sure why they were so willing. He figured all they wanted was a boyfriend.

“Why else the three-date rule that seems to be in vogue these days?” He asked me. Proof for him that we don’t have the same kind of urgent need.

“A woman is always risking the ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ kind of night you describe, which is one good reason a lot of us have learned not to jump in the sack right away. No matter how urgent the need, hooking up with a complete stranger probably isn’t going to satisfy it. Furthermore, try to imagine having little-to-no expectation of achieving orgasm during intercourse itself, and you begin to get an idea of the source of confusion on this end. Not so straightforward then, is it?”  

I continue to educate my patient friend, lecturing him on contrasting attitudes toward female sexuality in different epochs and other cultures. In ancient Greece and throughout the middle ages in Europe and the Middle East, for instance, females were generally thought to enjoy sex a lot more than men. “Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men,” the founder of the Shiite sect and husband of Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, wrote around 500 A.D.

My friend is hardly alone in having thought that the female of our species, unlike the average male, can effortlessly rise above the demands of her easily tamed libido. But hard science has begun to challenge this broadly received opinion. Daniel Bergner discovered this in the course of his research for his 2013 book, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. He quickly learned, “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction.”

For instance, recent data debunk the long-cherished idea that heterosexual women are naturally monogamous because they require security and affection more than sex. Several clinical studies have established that, to the contrary, women in monogamous relationships commonly experience a waning of desire, primarily because they are bored. Men, on the other hand, adapt much better to the everyday sameness of sex with one partner. Monogamous women’s lack of desire is attributed, therefore, not to negligible libidos, but to predictability.

To this I would add that inhibition brought on by low expectations might also contribute to waning desire among monogamous women. The sublimation of our physical responses while being penetrated, not wanting to get too aroused, knowing that our partner won’t hold off  long enough (and having been taught it is castrating to make demands), accompanied by the embarrassment and even shame surrounding our inability to achieve a timely enough orgasm, may eventually lead to an unconscious association of frustration with the partner, which could be a major cause of repression generally, but especially where lack of fulfillment has become institutionalized.  

Once, a long time ago, while visiting a commune, I watched a tiny baby crying in its mother’s arms in a room full of stoned hippies, while Hendrix blasted from giant speakers. After a while, the baby realized that neither its mother nor anyone else nearby could hear it and, suddenly, instead of trying to cry louder, it just stopped all together. When an emotional or physical need goes unmet long enough, sometimes, mercifully, it dies.

Because when I looked at Declan, I associated him—his body, his penis—with intense satisfaction, I couldn’t help but yearn for him in the uncomplicated way a man typically does for the object of his desire.  Predictability was part of the allure in my case. Declan was a kept promise, a long, tall frosty glass of beer on a summer afternoon. He liked to needle me, accuse me of being with him only for the sex. Not true, I would protest.  He was, after all, brilliant, funny, handsome. The sound of his low, inflected voice sent me. He made me laugh! ‘I’m in love with you,’ I insisted. But how does anyone distinguish between love and that palpable need?

The gentle devotion of orchardists tending trees and watching them grow slowly over seasons—I concede the long-time companionship of a happy couple wins, and passion, especially one as corrupted as mine, ultimately loses. But I will always have that experience. I have had that remarkable, crimson adventure. I know what it is to be in the thrall of someone.

The first night that Declan and I spend together, he takes me back to his small one bedroom in Brooklyn Heights. The neighborhood is a hermetically sealed enclave of gentility, and Declan has landed one of the last of its old-time, blockbuster apartments for a song. Not unlike my situation across the river, where I occupy a tiny garret in the soon-to-be one-percent West Village. We both have that specialized New York skill of being able to find a cheap place to live among the swells. His has character, even a degree of charm, right there on the main floor off Montague Street. There’s an actual foyer, a bar with a few stools marking off the small kitchen and a window seat in the living room. There’s a comfortable old couch and a rocking chair, a TV and a bookshelf full of Thomas Merton, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. A bare wood floor.

The bedroom is tiny—just big enough for the queen-sized bed. We pile into it. The air-conditioner is old and loud. He establishes a custom by reading to me. This first night it’s a letter from Kierkegaard to his fiancé renouncing their engagement. A sacrifice, Kierkegaard laments, he must make for the demands of philosophy. I find it wildly funny that Declan reads this on our first night together.

I don’t come that night, not until the next day. We’re going at it in his tiny bedroom, missionary style, skin-to-skin and slowly, which suits us both. No foreplay to speak of, which suits us both too. I prefer the fucking itself to be the foreplay. I know I’m in the minority, but it’s all about what happens there. And I’m so hot for him, it’s not like I have to be primed. Even so, I’m amazed when I begin to realize this is happening—that he is staying with me, and, together, we are going all the way. Orgasm during intercourse—I’ve experienced it before, sporadically. I’m not a complete stranger to it, but I sense this is different. This is the way it is going to be.

Afterward, I am beaming, crazy in love. Declan is so ebullient, he can’t resist crowing about it to a few of his Brooklyn friends whom we meet for coffee nearby. We’re all sitting outside at a big, round table on that brilliant early June afternoon (it takes a while for the affair to begin—a few months in fact.) One doleful woman plainly has a crush. I can see heartbreak in her eyes, like glass shattering. Declan is oblivious. He is just overcome with pride.

Declan understood from the outset that I was capable of the same kind of lust he was, and that it is a human, not exclusively male, trait. I am continually surprised by the number of worldly, educated men who think otherwise. Take the powerful, fallen men in the news, who seem unaware of the potential of female desire. These guys are no Don Juans, that’s for sure. I truly don’t get what motivates them other than a failure of imagination. I am, and have always been, insulted if there is even a suggestion I could be manipulated into having sex. Of course seduction is a form of manipulation, but I mean when a man tries to talk me into it, as if I don’t know my own body and mind. Or when it is assumed to be always, on some level, a cold, antiseptic transaction, and it is only that he knows how to drive a good bargain. His pleasure in exchange for some kind of false security or even, simply, trading on my possibly fear-induced inability to say no. Dehumanizing. I would far rather get out-and-out paid than bullied.

On the other hand, lately, it seems, we’ve been attaching all kinds of significance to even the most casual and forgettable acts. My mother used to say, and she sounded genuinely bewildered, that she didn’t understand what all the hoopla was about, it’s just a natural, bodily function. I cannot reconcile my experience, what I know to be true, with what sometimes sounds like prudery. Women deserve to be treated with respect, but not at the expense of our full humanity. We shouldn’t have to be traditional nice girls in order to qualify for it.

For instance, I read somewhere that a grown, presumably heterosexual woman was traumatized by a man exposing himself. Seriously? After one memorable occasion between the sheets, Declan said, “Well, that explains phallic cult worship.” Not always a welcome sight maybe, but traumatizing? (And, by the way, when did we forfeit our birthright, the ability to say, with panache, “Put that thing back in your pants, boy”?) Was the woman not aroused at all or aroused against her will? Either way, if the sight of a physically excited man is, by default, triggering, this smacks of Victorian hysteria—it’s unwholesome. When any inadvertent exposure to eroticism is, ipso facto, a terrible affront, then something is fundamentally wrong.

Rape is different—different even from coerced sex—it is a purely violent act.  I wish there were some way to talk about the various forms of unwanted aggression without lumping them together. Meanwhile, please understand that I second every woman who speaks out against violent abusers and those lesser shades, boorish incompetents. Men who know only their own pleasure are useless wankers.

While we’re outing and renouncing them; however, I hope we also remember to teach them that they, too, could be desirable. Men’s understanding that women are capable of independent, possibly at least as compelling, desire leads to the recognition that we are autonomous beings. Such understanding may even influence the way men behave. In Egypt, where ninety-seven percent of the married women surveyed have been genitally cut, the percentage of of women who have been sexually harassed is as high as ninety-nine percent, according to a 2013 report by UN women. Consider that there could be a buried element of frustration in all of this puerile acting out. I’m not excusing it; ignorance is never an excuse. Let’s try to banish ignorance nevertheless. Give the men in our world, at least, some idea of what they’re missing.

After all, isn’t that what we all want?

Headliners:

Thoughts on Masking by Ruth Vinz

Three Poems by Ace Boggess

Atmospheric Perspective by Richard Helmling

 

Fiction:

Belly by Andi Grene

Little Dalmatia by Madeline Cash

Blight by Jeb Burt

Gravity by Nicholas Rombes

For Love of Stalin by Frederick Frankenberg

 

Reviews:

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

The Chair by Pat Zumhagen

 

Nonfiction:

Me and Bobby Kennedy by Steve Slavin

Rose D by Steve Slavin

 

Poetry:

Six Poems by Tobi Alfier

Three Poems by John Grey

Four Poems by Lisa Simmons

One Poem by Mary Jane White

Six Poems by Jared Beloff

Six Poems by Bernadette Bowen

I’ll look like a cunt if I take off now. So I have to stick it out. Keep my word. Hold this fat bastard’s pungent wheelchair underneath him while he stands on shaky legs. Grasping the escalator handrail so tight his knuckles whiten. Until we get to the top. 

Or his knees give out and we both come to our end. 

From over his shoulder he barks at me. You got that fucking thing ready ‘case I fall? I hear the worry in his gravel voice. But there’s something else. I recognize it. I’ve heard it before. But I can’t figure out where.

Because I lose my thoughts in a good-looking woman coming down as we go up. Her sweet face turns pure hate as she sees the dirty old lowlife I’m aiding. She leans towards him as they cross. Finger pointed in full rage. Vas te faire foutre! Conard!

I like her style. 

A friend of yours? I ask as the escalator carries us away. But he chooses to ignore me. Everyday trifles or bigger worries I don’t care. Because the end of the ride is approaching fast. He snaps at me again asking if I’m ready. Unsure of who he chose to help. 

I shout false confidence.

A cold sweat runs down my brow. 

Fear of death in overdrive. 

His back falls forward in slow motion. There’s still time to drop the chair. Sidestep the slob as he goes careening by. Disappear into the clamor. But I was raised better. So instead of giving up and facing murder charges I brace my arms and legs. Then whisper 1 more pep talk before I probably die. 

You can do this you fucking pussy.

He hits the seat. Him the chair and I we all groan under the strain. But I manage to hold my ground. Every muscle in my body tight. My lower back about to burst. The last of what I think I have. A final shove up over the lip. The chair jumps. He starts yelling. 

Take it easy man! What are you fucking stupid?

Aha! That’s it. Where I’ve heard his voice. Seen his greasy hair. Out front the corner store. The door to the metro. Harassing everyone. Especially the fine looking women. And I’m certain he fits the description of a man who called my wife a whore when she declined his offer to fuck her in the ass. 

So without saying a word I start pushing. Faster and faster and faster. I veer our course towards the gate beside the turnstiles. A hip-level plexiglass door. The old creep is on to me and drops his feet like brakes because he can see his future coming. But we don’t even slow down. He yelps 1 final call for mercy. 

Nothing can stop us now.

His knees hit with a bang. He groans like a dying beast. The gate opens like a gunshot. The latch breaking off and hitting the ground is the greatest joke I’ve ever heard. I’m laughing like a madman. Name a better time than revenge and I’ll call you a liar.

I give him another push with everything I’ve got. Let go. He rolls away at top speed yelling words I’ve been called 1000’s of times so they don’t hurt. People all around stare in shock. Never guessing I made a promise to the woman I love and all they witnessed was me keeping it. 

Choosing Water 

The first time I went in a boat, I was about four years old. It was in Maine. I was in a tiny sunfish and I was terrified, afraid of falling out and drowning, but my aunt held my hand as the boat bobbed near the shore. With her touch I knew everything would be alright. At that time, the water was a source of fear, because even then I understood its tremendous power to take life. At home, there was a brook where I pretended to fish and watched the rushing water drag fallen leaves through its current, twisting them up in its own churn.

Years later, I attended college along the Connecticut River. We were required to take physical education classes, so I threw caution to the wind and enrolled in whitewater kayaking. I marvel at how unafraid I was of the rushing river and the rocks I could be dashed against, the sharp surfaces that could break my bones. I was keen to absorb the instructor’s directions about how to right the single-person kayak if it capsized, but instead of being scared that I’d be trapped under the boat, I was exhilarated that I could maneuver inside of it, shape its direction, change its path. The water was alive and so was I and together we could move objects. 

Soon after, during my junior year abroad in Glasgow, Scotland, I eschewed an umbrella, leaning into the rain that fell every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for fifteen minutes, absorbing it like a refreshment even. Again, I felt the reminder of being alive as the drops of rain caught in my hair and fell into my eyes. The rain changed something, even if slightly, about how I moved through the streets, making things different than they would be if it never existed.  

More than a decade later in NYC, I developed a habit of swimming laps at the local YMCA. In the water, like nowhere else, my mind could be soothed but invigorated: all the detritus clearing out, leaving nothing but taut, logical thoughts like the numbers I counted to myself as I went up and down the lanes, methodically, rhythmically, weightlessly. In the pool, it seemed I could swim forever without tiring. During the pandemic, the pool closed temporarily and I lost access to the liberating sensation of doing laps, the repetitive invitation of the movement. 

Movement, and the freedom it offers, has always been important to me. As a toddler, I would spend time in a playpen. When my mother discovered I didn’t like to stay inside it, always asking to be taken out of it, she came up with an innovative solution: she cut a hole in it so I would know that I had the freedom to leave whenever I wanted. With this adaptation, she says, I was content to stay inside the playpen for hours. 

When I stayed in the psychiatric hospital in my thirties, movement was tightly restricted. The unit was locked and, for the majority of our stay, we weren’t allowed to leave its confines. Visitors came to us at specified hours through the locked doors. Getting too close to the doors was a violation that would result in confiscation of your street clothes, which would be replaced with flimsy hospital apparel. One evening, I took all my roommate’s velvety dresses from the hangers where they were carefully arranged and piled them on the floor next to the window, in what I thought was preparation for tying them together to climb down the side of the building and escape. My efforts were interrupted – with no one to open the window to offer me the knowledge I could leave should I wish to, which, according to the logic of my early childhood, might itself have been enough to convince me to remain inside where I belonged. 

Close to the end of my three months’ stay, we were allowed to take short, supervised walks outside. But on our journeys beyond locked doors, there were no bodies of water to promenade alongside and no rain fell overhead. Cold, immobile concrete surrounded us as we squinted in the sun, unaccustomed to its brightness. Inside the unit in art therapy, I painted a beach bucket, full of hermit crabs, set before a background of sand and waves. 

Making choices has always been difficult for me, but like water, they are vehicles of power.  My neighborhood in New York City is along the East River and, in 2020, I could visit the nearby riverside park. A fence separated me from the water itself, the life-giving source. Still, during those lonely pandemic days before the vaccine, visiting the waterfront helped give me a kind of peace I could not find elsewhere. Every choice that I made seemed full of the possibility of life or death. I could get sneezed on at the laundromat, so I started using drop-off service. Someone could cough on me at the deli or grocery store, so I began ordering my groceries online. Meeting men in person could result in a painful death, so I held phone and Zoom dates. 

The pandemic took away my chance to go to the ocean in 2020, so when I returned there in 2021, I was ecstatic to bop up and down in the waves, letting my long hair drag through the water. At my favorite beach, I reminisced about my girlhood, spending hours in the tide pools, watching the paths in the sand that showed where snails had crawled.

Most of our bodies are made of water and perhaps that is why I feel so at home in it. Every summer since I was ten – thirty years now excluding the year the pandemic stole – I have visited my godmother in Maine and spent time at the ocean. It could be that this consistency is also what makes water feel like home, like a natural place to return to again and again.

Water is an instrumental part of the story of Jesus, from his baptism in the Jordan River to his turning water into wine to his preaching on the shores of the sea. And for me, water is the grandeur of God, the vast wonder of the universe, the amazing properties of a substance that is life-giving, the molecules that hold my body up.

But water can also take life – and that is perhaps what instills respect and fear. My father, nearly 75, almost drowned as a young man and for this reason he won’t jump off the diving board of the pool in his backyard, not even wearing a life vest. Every summer he says this is the year he will and every summer the life vest remains hanging in the pool room, unused. 

While my mother may have given me the opportunity to make a decision when she cut the playpen during my toddler days, sometimes my parents have feared the choices I’ve made. During a study abroad program in Argentina, I planned to go to Patagonia with two friends over spring break. My parents were concerned about the safety of the planes we’d be flying in – imagining them crashing –  and warned me that they did not approve of my decision. I remember being on the other side of the equator from them and hearing the anxiety in their voices, as they tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me from the adventure. 

On that trip, we experienced amazing horse rides with legitimate gauchos and clear natural lakes on the Camino de Siete Lagos or Path of Seven Lakes. The water was bluer than anything I’d ever seen. It was as if my parents’ worries had sunk to the bottoms of the pristine lakes, forgotten, unheeded. What replaced them were vistas of clarity and beauty that I remember decades later.

As a child I believed I’d be a famous writer and live by the sea in Maine. That hasn’t come to be, not yet, but when I think of the dream, it’s mostly the ocean that I see, taste, and hear. Once I rode the Staten Island Ferry in my thirties for fun with a friend, there and back, not bothering to leave the ferry terminal when we arrived, simply turning around to board the boat. The ride, moving along the water, was the experience we were after. 

Given the opportunity, I’ll always choose the water.