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Love Is the Journey

Days I’ve driven around the city
because I came too early to pick you up from work.
Sitting in an idling car, running in place,
waiting, didn’t seem an option.
I needed movement, action
on a small scale. I circled blocks,
listening to music, smoking out the open window, 

observing joggers, dog-walkers, drug dealers
leaning against parked cars to offer the sly handshake
or the sudden drop. How often
was I nearly blindsided by a bus?
How many times did I pass the same house—
cracked brick, one boarded window—&
wonder were there ghosts inside? 

Here is my love poem for you:
not the words I’ve written but the pause
between departure & arrival.
It’s then I’ve felt centered, certain.
Farther out I spiraled, the closer I came to you,
counting minutes, singing along
to a happy song about someone’s desperation.

Unseasonable Warmth

Japonicas bloom as the temperature drops,
lipstick buds stretching toes into frigid water. 

Year after year, they do this too early,
race to flame at the first pre- 

spring blush before a chill returns.
Soon, they will lean forward in ice, 

their rosy faces peeking out
from a crystalline lattice of snow. 

We fear the worst as if for trapped koi
frozen in a pond. Yet they go on. 

Photos will be taken, snapshots
of contrast: rebirth, miscalculation. 

The hedge will blaze in embers
already wasting to ash—my god, the absence.

Burning the Worm

Snuffing my cigarette. Didn’t see it
there in dark, in the rain-gray mirror.
Two halves arced in sync
like glow-stick dancers at a rave,
like a nighttime Landing Signal Officer
waving fighter jets around the deck.
Water put both pieces out,
each vanishing into an abyss.
I felt sick about it, despite that I’d done
much worse to worms, serving them
on a hook for sport to frenzied sunfish
in a river niche. I thought
I should be charged with Reckless
Endangerment by the arthropod police,
thrown in a dirt cell, dank & chthonic.
Lord, it was an accident,
but does that make me innocent?
How might one rescue the invisible?
It’s like the old riddle about
what I would save from a house on fire.
I know the correct response & know my heart.

Goodbye, Julie Adams

Didn’t know you were still alive, & now you’re gone.
92—good age to die, as good as any. 

After so many years, how did you see your history,
your figure that inspired love from monsters, 

one Creature? He swam beneath you
in murky undercurrents of desire, 

a timid stranger drinking at the sludge bar,
followed you into the next film hoping you’d save him, 

except you weren’t there. I don’t recall
much of my childhood beyond late-night movies, 

Chiller Theatre with Bela, Boris, Lon, & you,
bathing suit bright like a fire shot in black & white. 

You went by Julia then, a role
you played within the role you played. 

Did you watch yourself on screen?
Did you own every format—Betamax, VHS, laser disc, 

DVD, digital? Did you mourn the Gill Man
as he would mourn you now, 

grieving, raging, & destroying? Or was that
a moment like a brief embarrassment in college, 

something that happened to you once
that you no longer found significant? 

As you please. The myth of you illuminates my screen
when I watch again, am watching, 

voyeur of melancholy, creature as well,
observing you since youth & loving still.

What I Remember

Security guard more than private wing or the one
priceless painting it sheltered. Manet,
I think. Or was it Monet? Don’t recall the face,
flower, female form. There was blue, 

maybe—a lot of it. Cerulean. Could be.
We walked in & out, past the hired muscle
who looked like John Belushi in a herringbone suit.
He was art, standing out as intended; 

art that says something about human nature,
even if we fail to comprehend or pay attention.
In J-school photojournalism, my professor said,
If a picture doesn’t have a person in it, 

then it isn’t news. I remember that &
the guy in the suit: bas-relief against a sterile wall,
his earpiece coiled around the horns,
hands cupped as if a stone St. Francis shone in prayer.

When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems.

Here are five of the fifty poems:

1969

Our telephone rings.
Neil Armstrong on the line. 
He knows I stole the Earth’s only moon. 
“Give it back,” he says.
I watch him step across the lunar landscape. 
I thought we could be friends.
He turns to look at all of us
(from the moon) 

I am the only one who sees his sadness.

1974

I see him running naked
on the university green
streaking
and then again, the same guy in a shopping mall parking lot
his floppy folds
the soft calluses on the bottoms of his feet.

At night
our slumber party
becomes a midnight snack of truth or dare treats.
We seven copycat girls throw off nightgowns
and run into a suburban field of telephone poles and feral cats
praying someone
anyone
will see us.

1982 (for Ira, my brother)

The gypsy women of Paris go by in groups of five
while I am in worn jeans, a pair of pumps, and a paisley blouse.
Each rain floods the sidewalk with a stream of green and brown,
like a studio of an Impressionist painter,
curious brush strokes,
relics of the Jardin des Plantes.
I’m a tired college student
napping in an empty Sorbonne classroom
late-to-class bus rides
crumbs from my morning baguette ground between threads.  

My evening phone booth call catches my brother
as he prepares for school at home, 4359 miles away.
His hello transforms this dirty glass box
into four dynamic movie screens.
I see him clearly
at home with Mom 
eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a small glass of juice.
I see a new diamond stud in his left ear,
Mom at the sink, a confused look on her face,
wondering how to read the placement of his glistening gem.
What we share and still continue to hide. 

Raindrops slide down the fourth window pane,
framing him with a man I can’t quite see.
In a dark parking lot behind a downtown Memphis bar,
a secret cameo of infatuation.
I wipe away the condensation
to get a better view
as the screen goes dark on Boulevard Raspail.

1999   

In our front yard now, Columbine grows wild.               
With each bloom, I think of her, a mother too. 

She feeds her son, knows the fruit that makes his lips pucker, the sheet that pricks his stubbly cheek, the grade he received on his biology test, how often he hiccups drinking a Coke, which ride scares him at the amusement park, how he conjures an obscure spelling word, how long he takes to shit, the moment in a day when he is most likely to be kind. 

I doubt he ever told her about the night his skin touched skin, or the day he skipped school, or how many guns he hid behind the broken sewing machine table that she refuses to throw away because one day she hopes to have the time to sew again.   

2010                                                               

In the eventuality that preparation for security advanced
signatures obtained life jackets confirmed permanent medical
records sealed pharmaceuticals delivered weather reported
batteries checked tires filled expiration avoided warnings
acknowledged wills signed if-and-only-ifs collected and still
no one anticipated the return of my brother-in-law’s cancer.                                                                         

A friend forgot to send her payment — a single check
she never put in the envelope, hidden under
a stack of receipts, appointment cards, and electricity bills.
The check, never arrived.  Her policy, cancelled.                   

She who had already given up her ovaries and come
face-to-face in the ring with illness, won that round.            
Now no rope to hold onto, no pillows to fall back on.           

We two friends of more than twenty years sit at a table
in a café talking of our homes, books we’ve read,    
people almost forgotten, purses with zippers, jump
ropes, kitchen counters, projects abandoned. 

I ask her about her health. She’s crossing her fingers.
That’s all she has until they pass that bill.

(Editor’s note: for the best reading experience on mobile, hold phone horizontally) 

Macanudo

Perfect innocence is not my game
Through smoke rings on the
desert broadcast street.
I have a list of names—

I’ll continue to get involved
in Arabic in English in
carcinogenic provinces of mind
and flourishes of bow
condemned by Ravi Shankar as
satanic. Moth crowding my
eyebrow. Torch itching my scalp.
Shaking the branch for tomatoes
on volcanic islands at the rim
of computation.

Jauntily over the edge,
cigar in my mouth.

Tragedies like the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton bring everything to a stop. As we read the details and look at the pictures, we all pause, look around, and take stock of our priorities and what we hold dear. Writers are no different, except for the work we do. We’re often in the middle of describing a particular part of the world—when another part is suddenly falling apart. Jon Roemer and David Winner polled a handful of active writers and asked how public tragedies impact their current and future work—projects that may or may not portray mass shootings. We aimed to gauge how writers deal with such landmark events in practical ways and how, if at all, their writing engages with violence in America.

QUESTION 1

In The New Yorker last year, Masha Gessen described the difficulty of defending the values and institutions currently under attack, because it requires “preserving meanings” and is “the opposite of imagination.” She aspired to “find a way to describe a world in which… imagination is not only operant but prized and nurtured.” On Facebook the Monday after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso, a different writer, Grant Faulkner, simply posted two words—“another killing”—over and over, hundreds of times. Gessen described traditionally crafted work, while the Facebook post is visceral and immediate. Where do you think your next work will land?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer The Facebook post reflects what I was feeling the Monday after the shootings. But the fiction I’m writing now probably won’t be read for a year or more. So I think hard about its relevance, especially if we keep rushing toward more violence. Part of the job is to be forward-thinking. Just wish I could write and publish faster.

Zachary Lazar I’m writing the most traditional novel of my life right now (though that isn’t saying much). I simultaneously have no faith in the power of novels and total commitment to the novel as a thing, an art form, something I like. Mass shootings seem to me to be one symptom among many of our culture’s failure to address meaninglessness, to create meaning, and even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as meaning, the active pursuit of it is essential to sanity. I just don’t give a shit about social media. I guess it did good work during the Arab Spring, but I think the role it plays in the U.S. right now is more or less comparable to the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. It makes TV look nourishing.

Alice Stephens: While Masha Gessen talks about a literature of the future, I think Americans must still contend with the past. From Plymouth Rock to George Washington to Donald Trump, the history of America has been a narrative of white supremacy. I write to give voice to those people who have been erased from popular history, who have been sacrificed to the myth of Manifest Destiny and The World’s Greatest Superpower. Even before Dayton and El Paso, I knew it was important to dismantle the white supremacist version of American history and to tell the real story. My current project is a historical fiction novel about the six months that Japanese American artist and visionary, Isamu Noguchi, spent in an internment camp in Arizona. By rewriting the past to give voice to the marginalized, we can take the future back.

David Winner: What inspires us as fiction writers can be confusing, incoherent, and often unrelated to what goes on around us, but after 9/11, when the skyline changed and the smell of burnt electrical equipment and corpses was in the air, the line kind of disappeared. After Trump’s blatant racism, a massacre of mostly Latinos/Latinas (which has a long history, I’m just learning), and another massacre in Dayton, I don’t know that I can have anything to say except to yell in a pain that feels a little like bullshit because apparently white people like me aren’t getting targeted or told to go back to our country, which for me, like so many fellow mongrels, would involve hacking myself to bits and shipping myself off to different places. To answer the question, my dream is to find some sort of story to tell about all this that would be visceral and immediate, but my only writing about it so far has been shrill, foolish, and on that tool of Russia and Cambridge Analytica known as Facebook.

Christopher Brown: I try to use the tools of speculative fiction to tell truths that realism cannot. Or at least put a mirror up to the world that alters it enough that people can see those truths unmoored from the easy anchors of established partisan identity and biases. I think it’s an important part of the literary toolkit, especially in politically charged times. If you can write the alien, you might be able to hack the mind of the shooter—or imagine a real change in the system.

Phong Nguyen: In my own writing, I tend to do as Robert Olen Butler suggests and to write “from that white hot center,” utilizing the subconscious and manifesting it rather than overtly tackling issues (although I respect how well it works for others).

Grant Faulkner: I can’t remember who said it, but he/she said that creating/writing is a political act unto itself. I haven’t viewed my writing, and especially my fiction, as political in a long time, but since the primary way we connect with others, understand them, and understand ourselves is through stories, then I think that stories become more important than ever in divisive times. The “another killing” “poem” that Jon mentioned, which I posted on Facebook, could be viewed as overtly political. It could also be viewed as a jaded response to another killing. A deadening repetition that wasn’t making a political statement at all.

Andrea Scrima: This is an issue I’ve thought a good deal about in my work. Every country harbors its own particular brand of craziness, and seen from the outside, it’s easy to detect irrational, potentially psychotic phenomena when they belong to someone else. I haven’t resided consistently in the U.S. in many decades, but where I live, in Europe, the fact that America has suffered under and will continue to suffer under a shocking and relentless onslaught of preventable mass shootings by assault weapons manufactured for military purposes is one of those oddly “American” things, in other words, one of those many phenomena that defies reason. Surely there are steps that can be taken to prevent mass shootings; other countries, for instance Australia, have introduced strict gun regulation and seen violent crime drop dramatically. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the so-called Port Arthur massacre of 1996, in which a man with a semi-automatic weapon mowed down 35 people in minutes. Overwhelmingly, Australia decided it had seen enough carnage and deemed the event intolerable enough to change its gun laws, and did so pretty much immediately; after the Christchurch mosque shootings earlier this year, New Zealand followed suit. So why haven’t we?

As an American living in Berlin, I’m not only seeing an increase of racism and bigotry in the U.S., but a rise in right-wing populist movements across Europe. I’m currently finishing a second book in which each of the young characters is traumatized in a different way. These are very personal, psychological stories, set against the oppression of the East German communist state, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the misguided policies put in place after German Reunification. The social and political realities of contemporary America, however, are never very far away. You can shed new light on things when you deflect attention to another time and place. And so I’m using a diptych structure, fragmented narrative, and interwoven timelines to reflect both the larger dire realities that determine our lives and the interiorities these give rise to, the places we escape to in our minds.

QUESTION 2

On what level does the epidemic of American public violence affect you as a writer? Is your writing engaging more with public violence and its consequences or the social divisions around them? Or is it more important to you to explore less public realms?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer: Evoking less public realms feels more important than ever. I think the trick is imbuing them with the horrible new normals without being ham-handed or narrowly dated.

Alice Stephens: In a very quotidian way, the epidemic of public violence has made me feel more vulnerable. I was at the Asian American Literary Festival the day of the Dayton shooting. Even before I heard the news of this second mass shooting a day after El Paso, I remember thinking that the festival was the perfect target for a high body-count hate crime: a large gathering promoting diversity, celebrating ethnic identity, and dedicated to intellectual thought. All things white supremacists hate.

It’s not hard to see how mass shootings have become epidemic in a country that has long fetishized guns and vigilante justice. The American—and indeed the human—story is essentially a narrative of violence, with the victor typically depicted as the hero. As a writer, I am interested in telling the victim’s side of the story. I find much more power and beauty in the narratives of everyday resistance than those of glorious conquest.

Zachary Lazar: Violence (and public violence) have been main themes in my work for a long time. I think one of the things I’ve been trying to do in my writing is to remind people that America is actually a violent place, whether it’s people killing each other for money or alienated white men shooting people for no reason at all. But violence is fundamental to ancient stories like Greek epics and tragedies, Shakespeare, the Bible, etc. Central. We experience violence in a way specific to our culture, our time and place, and I think one of the problems we face is that mass shooters are using automatic weapons in an irrational, maybe even erotic way, while people who use guns as hunters or hobbyists might not really even understand what I mean by that. I mean that a gun is a tool for most people who use guns, while for a mass shooter a gun is a fetish. They don’t use shotguns or grenades. They use the most phallic weapon available.

David Winner: Well, the violence in El Paso and in Charleston several years ago was about social divisions involving race, and, as a white writer, I’ve tried to sort of turn the volume up on the white racial conversation that I sometimes hear around me so more people can tune in. In my last novel, Patricia Highsmith appears as a character along with a version of Ripley, and I tried to expose their imbedded racism. In our weirdly bifurcated era, some get away easily with sexual abuse, violence, and extreme racism, whereas books and speakers get “cancelled” for relatively minor offenses. Writers like Highsmith are still widely read, largely without comment or criticism from their readership, and I don’t want us to forget that emblematically in one Highsmith book, a “sympathetic” character bemoans 70s New York City being somehow destroyed by the same people of color now being driven out of historically black neighborhoods by real estate speculation.

Christopher Brown: My writing has always engaged with public violence, through a dystopian lens. I think that lurking behind the Second Amendment debate is the third rail of our politics—the way our national creation myths founded on armed revolt infiltrate our heads at an early age and pollute how we think about our politics and our communities. Exploring those themes through fictional laboratories is a healthy thing. But I don’t know if it offers much of a fix for the immediate insanity.

Phong Nguyen: I think my engagement with the epidemic of public violence in America is more evident from my editorial work than my fiction-writing. I am working on an anthology tentatively titled “Best Peace Fiction” that compiles literary responses to acts of war and violence (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press), and I have put together features on Morality and Fiction, as well as Fiction in War, for Pleiades. Anne Valente or Wendy Rawlings or Rebecca Makkai are good writers to check out. They have written explicitly about mass shootings in their fiction.

Grant Faulkner: In my fiction, if violence or commentary on divisiveness enters into the story, it’s via the subconscious and in a somewhat random fashion. I remember an era, way back in 1989 or 1990, when Thomas Wolf wrote his big piece on the need for great social/political/realistic novels in The Atlantic and Harper’s, and it seemed like novels could and should be part of a contemporary political conversation in the way they were in the time of Zola. But Wolf was wrong. Times are different and novels serve a different purpose. Violence and the need for violence, the celebration for violence, are all great topics, but they have to be told slant.

I recently heard someone say that what made The Godfather great was that it told the story of America as a gangster story. We are a nation of gangsters in many ways. I can’t write novels like that, but they provide a better lens on American history than most novels.

Andrea Scrima: Yes, the United States has always been violent; violence is what we, in effect, hail from: violence against the Native American population, violence against slaves, the violence of Manifest Destiny, violence against the working poor, violence against people of color. We glorify our outlaws, all our Bonnie and Clydes, Billy the Kids, and Jesse Jameses; our culture celebrates those who go out in style. The epidemic of mass shootings is a part of our heritage. The man who carried out the mass shooting in El Paso admitted he was targeting Mexicans; he sees himself as a patriot, a lone hero, and whether he denies it or not, he is a vigilante in the service of Trumpism willing to pay the price of incarceration or death to fight for what he believes in. And in this he is no different from the fundamentalist militant, the terrorist jihadi.

In my first book, A Lesser Day, one of the leitmotifs is the narrator sitting at a desk and cutting photos out of the newspaper. It’s the ’90s: the photos are of Bosnian refugees unearthing their dead to take them with them as they flee; Indonesian riots against the ethnic Chinese population; a group of young Palestinian boys holding up a sea of identical posters of Arafat. The narrator is an artist; she describes the photographs painstakingly in words. The implication throughout the book is that a nearly unrelenting human history of violence determines the essential context in which our psyches form and in which any art is conceived or made; the only thing that’s changed is our immediate electronic access to it at all times, and the danger that we will eventually become so numb to atrocity that we’ll no longer recognize ourselves.

QUESTION 3

Do you think violence in headlines impact readers’ sensitivities in fiction? Are you trying out different modes or styles as a result?

ANSWERS:

Jon Roemer: Not sure at all about readers’ sensitivities. I always think my assumptions are old-fashioned. But I like the idea of experimenting with styles, especially if it brings a different contour to assumptions. I might not be the right guy for that, but I might try anyway.

Alice Stephens: It’s amazing to me how people who enjoy a good evisceration in a superhero action movie can be so deeply offended by real-life violence: the people who write in to the paper to protest the photo of Alan Kurdi’s tiny, lifeless body washed up on the shore; the parents who want to ban I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from school reading lists; the readers who complain that a description of plastic surgery in my book Famous Adopted People was gratuitously violent (ok, that’s not real life but the depiction of rhinoplasty was accurate—I did the research!).

I’m fascinated by the self-serving lies people tell themselves as they go about their daily lives. Of all the species on this teeming planet, human beings are the only ones endowed with the capacity for introspection, and yet most people prefer to look everywhere but inside themselves. In these turbulent times, when humanity seems to have lost its collective mind and the dire effects of climate change haven’t even started to kick in, it is more urgent than ever for writers to hold a mirror up to society and ask that people take a good, hard look. Of course, you can’t force people to read your work. But at least you know that you weren’t silent. You’ve broadcast your truth, and it’s out there for readers to find it.

Zachary Lazar: Along the lines of my last answer, I think my writing has often been an attempt to render violence in language that reminds people that it is shocking and ugly, not romantic, as in the movies. I also try to explore the psychology of people who commit violence, so that the reader has to see the perpetrator of violence as a recognizably complex human, not a “monster.” I’ve spent a lot of time with incarcerated people, some of whom are close friends, and it has taught me how little choice some people have when it comes to perpetrating violence, as well as how unusual it actually is for someone to become a mass shooter. On the latter subject, I want to just give a shout-out to Deb Olin Unferth, whose short story “The First Full Thought of Her Life” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read about the alienated young men who find themselves pointing a rifle at strangers.

David Winner: A recent Hollywood shoot-me-up got delayed in part (I would imagine) because the violence has reached so many people that many of us are probably only one or two steps removed. (A dear friend’s mother taught a child murdered in Newtown.) In a work I’m just finishing, one of the characters enjoys gun ranges. Having never shot, I went to one in Manhattan. The really unpleasant place with NRA stickers everywhere implied to me that the large-seeming gulf between shooting your BB gun at some cans out back and mass murder at the mall may be smaller than we think. Affected by the Trump administration and the shooting, my already dim view of guns is growing ever more vitriolic, and my character is changing along with me.

Christopher Brown: I think we all hunger for more hopeful futures, in fiction and in real life. The novel I am working on now is my attempt at an American utopia—a compromised and imperfect one, built from the ruins of a nation torn apart by fights over diminishing resources. And part of the key to making a world like that work is bridging the gaps in understanding between members of feuding factions. Writing stories about peace is challenging in a narrative form driven by conflict. I suspect that at the heart of these incidents of real-world violence one would find a more internal kind of conflict, problems of profound alienation. That’s something contemporary fiction is uniquely well-suited to explore. But that territory is a scary place to go, kind of the dark web of human empathy, and I’m not sure any of us really want to visit it, when we can fight it in real life. And perhaps the real place to start would be a literary takeover of the first-person shooter video games that are the training grounds for everyday American evil—hack those narratives, and you might really be onto something.

Grant Faulkner: Yes, I think violence in the headlines affects many people’s sensitivity to violence. One of the best books I ever read about violence in art was a critical theory book on violent dialogues. Can’t remember the title of it, but it analyzed the strains of violence in the dialogue of playwrights like Mamet and other contemporary playwrights. The speeches in Glengary Glen Rossare as violent as any mass shooting. The words are meant to humiliate and kill in a way bullets can’t. I love how stories like that take a cultural emotion and dramatize it without having to name the catalyst for it all. Any of those washed-up salesmen could grab a gun and go into a mall because they’ve become so helpless and without recourse.

Andrea Scrima: I don’t think any of these events or anything we say or write about them will affect readers in the thrall of guns and what they represent in our culture; while literature can do an enormous amount to shed light on the darkness of the what and why, our books are simply not read by the kind of minds we’re talking about here. Indeed, modern America’s quasi-religious adherence to the firearms provisions of a Constitution written in the immediate aftermath of the colonies’ liberation from British rule is reminiscent of the Christian fundamentalist belief that every word in the Bible is literal truth. We are a country not of rational thinkers, but of believers. And given the divisiveness of the current political climate, we have far more to fear than the inevitable and miserable continuation of assault-weapon massacres in America’s shopping malls, clubs, schools, and other public spaces. If the day arrives when lone white disaffected—and poorly informed—young men feel the call to unite and form militias in a more organized, disciplined, and concerted effort to “serve” their homeland—and if the violent undertones of the current administration’s Delphic utterances persist—I fear we will witness even more extreme consequences of what it means to adhere to the provisions of a document for whose periodic updating its authors made explicit provisions to meet the challenges of a future they could not, in their wildest dreams, imagine. Because while the US Constitution is a marvel of political and revolutionary will to create a democratic, more just society—these were, after all, minds honed on the principles of the Enlightenment—the political geniuses of the thirteen colonies could hardly have foreseen present-day America: its gigantic wealth, gigantic waste, or its deep, and possibly incurable, psychic wounds. The authors of the Constitution did not envision young men purchasing war-grade weapons at their local Walmart; nor, for that matter, did they envision Walmart. Yet while Article Five provides for altering the Constitution, given the power of the gun lobby and the NRA in the U.S. today, it is unlikely that an amendment proposal would receive the two-thirds majority it requires to be ratified. Thus, while it’s theoretically possible to alter the Second Amendment to reflect the reality of 21st-century America, in practical terms, at least in the current political climate, the country will have to look for other, legislative means to amend a political system in stalemate and to dig its wheels out of the bipartisan muck it’s stuck in and restore the government’s ability to serve a deeply divided country in the way its founders envisioned.

Excerpt from OFF THE YOGA MAT © by Cheryl J. Fish

Forthcoming from Livingston Press/University of West Alabama, pub date Oct. 20, 2022

January, 1999

Chapter One “Inflexible”

Nate

“When others achieve success, how does that diminish you?” Nathaniel Dart didn’t care to consider this question from a talk-radio host. He was about to leave the apartment with a spasm in his back. His friend Gil, and his girlfriend Nora, had finally convinced him to take a trial yoga class in a studio a few blocks away. As he walked down Second Avenue with a slight shuffle, twinges running upward from his ass, the success of others gnawed away at him. A cash bonus Nora received at the end-of-the-year—she deserved the money for a job well done—but he hadn’t grabbed her around the waist or smiled in a swell of support. Nor had he taken her out to celebrate. And when Gil won a lottery for affordable housing nearby which meant more space and rent stabilization, of course Gil had the gall to rub it in his face, mentioning Nate’s dark studio apartment with moths burrowing in the closet. Nate had no choice but to resent him. One other victory throbbed against his bony vertebrate.  

His old study-group mate Monica Portman landed a teaching job in Boston, a position that Nate should have applied for, could have applied for, if only he’d finished his thesis. He struggled to accept Ralph Waldo Emerson’s credo that “envy is ignorance.”

He stopped suddenly on his walk to watch dumpster divers pick through garbage bins outside the supermarket. They’d cook what was still edible, and someone shouted through a megaphone about the futility of waste in New York City. Determined to find freshness in what had been declared foul, the freegans sorted through packages past expiration dates, found perfectly decent bags of bagels and cookies and cut-up carrots. He heard them complain about tossing food with hungry and homeless folks everywhere. Nate felt disgusted by the vast inequalities in society; they mattered more than revising his thesis on jealousy as an evolutionary trait in humans.

Nate’s research combined a trifecta of disciplines: science, literature, psychology. It sounded loopy when he claimed the existence of a jealousy hormone. Not only did it benefit species studied by Charles Darwin, like those blue-footed boobies on Galapagos, but Homo sapiens as well. Envious rage might motivate men and women to loosen their desire for control. The result could turn out for the better. Yet jealousy was no walk in the park—it caused primitive rage and destruction which Nate witnessed everywhere. In his thesis, he proved his point by examining jealous characters in Shakespeare’s Othello and King Lear.

How does their success diminish me? He wished he could put that thought out of his mind. Nate spent countless hours in his swivel chair; one could say he lived where he sat.

In the yoga class, a tingling numbness ran down his legs, pain and trembling too. He stood in a darkish room with a yoga teacher asking them to bend from their core towards the floor. He couldn’t reach past his knees, his whole upper body as stiff at age 39 as if he were 50-something. I am not a yoga guy, he thought—I have more in common with the freegans. I should have never set foot in this dusty old hovel. He felt others staring at him.

Nate contemplated his future on all fours doing cow and cat, rounding his back like a feline, or should he flatten it like a bovine? Who named these postures? The students stood in unison, placing a bent leg along their thigh for tree pose. He grabbed a beam.

“Focus on one point on the wall,” said the teacher, a strikingly fit woman named Lulu Betancourt, who welcomed them warmly and insisted they obey their own bodies. “Take a three-part breath and be mindful. Let air seep out like a leaky balloon.”

Nate smirked. He visualized a giant balloon emptying with farting sounds. He filled his lungs then exhaled as told. Relaxation could wash over him.

She soon introduced them to the series “salute to the sun.” A set of flowing movements that started with standing, progressed to rolling to the floor, then rising into the cobra and plank positions with a rhythmic grace, ending with an upward curl, palms pressed together in gratitude. A subtle choreography he punctured with jerking motions. If Nate could reach an inch nearer to his toes and roll down without collapsing, he felt like he would celebrate. His version might be called parody, not salute. He was determined to modify his moves, like the barnacles, finches and beetles Darwin observed.

“Melt into the earth with a rushing sensation, rain drenching fields,” Lulu said in a soft yet determined voice. She leaned against the wall, bowed her head.

Nate tried to experience rain. Instead, he thought about money. He benefitted neither from the loopholes in capitalism that let the richest prosper, nor from a critique of its corruption. I am an academic serf living on rice and beans, he thought, and no one could care less. He was deep in debt from loans. He should apply for another fellowship or take an adjunct position at a City University campus. He wondered about the job referred to by his advisor Offendorf in his recent nasty note. Offendorf had scribbled dismissive comments on the pages it took Nate many months to write, and even more months to find the courage to mail to the university down in Maryland, with Nora’s goading. Offendorf had the nerve to reply:

WAY TOO MUCH time spent on Darwin. It may be trendy to consider evolutionary theory, but I don’t care for that approach. Take out feminism and limit psychoanalysis. You’ve inserted too many footnotes. Let’s put this baby to bed. When are you coming to campus? Bring the revision−we’ll talk defense date. Oh, and I might know of a teaching position.”

As Nate considered whether the job was real or just another one of Oppendorf’s bluffs, he was instructed to twist his torso, knee cutting across his folded leg. That evoked the twists and turns of Nora’s desire.

“Let’s conceive a millennial child,” she said. Nineteen-ninety-nine high stepped like a marching band through her ovaries. Fear of her upcoming, their upcoming, fortieth birthdays felt like annihilation.

“Nora. I can’t give you a baby now.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Nora said. “There’s never going to be a perfect time.”

 “I’m not in the position to be a dad.”

“You’d be very loving.” She stroked his hand. “My salary can tide us over.”

His inability to care for a child felt like a character deficiency. He must finish his degree before procreating, not focus on the milestone of age forty. When his mom visited from Long Island the other day, she slipped him a wad of cash.

 “Don’t say anything to your father.”

“You don’t have to keep doing this,” he said, feeling sheepish and small. 

**

Nate’s spine cracked. Lulu headed over to his side during dandasana, a forward bend that segued into a seated wide-angle pose. She crouched. “Breathe into your stretch.” He noticed a beady-eyed frog tattoo near her shoulder—green and black, sinister. Lulu smelled of rose-oil.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I can’t concentrate.” What made her want to ink a frog into her skin?

“Observe your thoughts. They’ll dissipate.” She touched his head. “Probably.”

How should he respond to Offendorf’s reign of terror? Say “I need Darwin like Shakespeare needed Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” the source material for some of the Bard’s plays?

While Nate rested in child’s pose, head on mat, arms and legs compressed like a floating fetus, a surge of energy ran from the tips of his toes into his calves. So, what if Offendorf demanded he cut one-third of all he had written? How did their success diminish his? Disappointments acquired territory. One negative experience attracted others, expanding into new fiefdoms.

His old study group mate Monica Portman applied for everything. “I invented personal literary criticism,” she said, convinced of her pioneering role. Wasn’t she coming to town? As Nate struggled to pick himself off the floor for the next posture, it occurred to him: send her the very same pages Offendorf trashed and ask for a second opinion. Monica’s instincts resembled a baby sea turtle’s—born in sand, hurdling towards the ocean. He should trust her to guide him to safety.

Then yogi Lulu announced to the room “return to downward-facing dog.” He bent over, and placing his hands flat, stuck his butt in the air.

And I, an everburning pilot, 
Lead forth the exhausted people, 
And neither peace nor battle 
Can I foresee ahead.

~~~

I started this review before the Russian invasion, so in avoidance of tone-deafness, I’d like to suggest you seek out humanitarian anti-war efforts.

I first came across Leonid Schwab’s poetry on the Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation site, wherein his first line is “I’m made out of cheese my head is that of an old man.” I immediately knew I was dealing with something special. Although the rest didn’t prove to be so surreal, I embraced the themes of the weary travelers and forgotten details. Schwab’s work embodies the open lens state while travelling, how we notice more as we journey through new territories.

When I heard Cicada Press was putting out a book of Leonid Schwab’s work as the collection Everburning Pilot, I quickly followed the trail. I can already say this is a great achievement, triumphant klaxons for all involved. The translator’s list is a long one, nearly 20 translators are credited here, for about 75 poems. From the translator’s note, these translations have been refined and discussed with great care during the Chicago Translation Workshop as well as the Your Language, My Ear workshop. I love reading about the path these translations took, the culmination of individual and group efforts. We can be sure that Schwab is in good hands.

The introduction to this book is a treat all by itself, In Memory of Memory’s Maria Stepanova (here translated by Sibelan Forrester) offers us “CELESTIAL ARCHAEOLOGY: On Leonid Schwab’s Poetry.” I have always enjoyed poetry intros, with their framing of frames, and Stepanova’s is no exception. Stepanova gives us poetry about poetry: “the powers of language, all its smart machines work to establish a particular temporal state on their own territory, to condense each line into a radiant amber concentrate of that very happiness.” The intro is a loving summary of Schwab and his milieu. Stepanova explains how Schwab’s work is emblematic of his group, the “new epos” poets, while being mechanically singular.

From a bird’s eye view, Schwab’s poetry concerns the traveler, locations, destination, and the moments of rest along the way. Schwab’s narrative moves along an undisclosed journey, noticing people, buildings and landscape, how they all form to create the voyage. This is a 20^th century Bashō moving through Bobruisk, Jerusalem, Russia, Mongolia, Pakistan and Manchuria. Zooming in on the lines themselves gives us brushstrokes of moments, modernist jump-cuts and all manner of temporal shifts. Some characters are zipping around, some are steady movers, and another is stuck at the airport.

These translations are finely wrought and attentive, with syllabic care throughout: “And supper, like the surf, comes over them” or “Dinners afield are no big deal”. I want to quote this whole book to you; every other line could be its own poem. Having this many translators on one collection gives us a full toolbox of techniques and diction. For example, I learned the word “violaceous” from this line:

Суп фиолетов, сельдь поет на блюде, 
Мужчина вилкой трогает укроп,
The fish is singing, and the soup – violaceous, 
The man pokes at the dill weed with his fork,

The above quote shows one of Schwab’s brainteasers, I find myself drawing crisscrossing lines between each noun. The many relationships of objects action and people create a blooming flourish in my mind: fish-pokes, dill-soup, man-fork. The temporal quality of Schwab’s work is also worth mentioning. At moments, a piece will feel timeless and then a cola will appear. Or a modern jet, helicopter, or cosmonaut pilot becomes the eponymous everburning pilot who is the eternal warrior defending the people.

Most people in this collection are named by their occupation; these are poems of house painters, wood workers, station clerks, subcontractors, and builders. As every object is in use, so are the humans. Schwab shows motion through the interconnectedness of action and movement, even locations are action-oriented: fenceposts, cellars, reservoirs, and a museum bench. There are no useless vistas, flora, or virtues; everything is employed. I’m also impressed that this collection spans from 1987 to 2016; Schwab has been putting out amazing work for four decades. Despite this, the collection is cohesive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me they were written all in the same year.

The spheres of poetry, translation, and contemporary Russian literature can rejoice in the arrival of Leonid Schwab in English. If Stepanova says that Schwab’s influence is now permanent on contemporary Russian poetry, I hope that we see that influence on more poets. Schwab, like Osip Mandelstam, writes poems that are both contemporary and timeless. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and look forward to returning to it for years to come.

Thank you to KGB Bar, Anastasiya Osipova at Cicada, and Olena Jennings for being ever supportive.

It didn’t sound too promising at first. The man on the other end of the line said that he worked with dancers, and he wondered if I might like to come over and maybe dance for him. Our terse conversation on the phone felt guarded on his end and measured and suggestive. We talked about beauty, and the voice said that he had been beautiful once but that he was “a ruined beauty” now. This intrigued me, as did the roughness of his authoritative voice. It was not the sort of voice you usually heard on this phone line. Everybody tried to sound butch-er than they actually were, and I was no exception to that. But if this guy was also masquerading, it was one of the more convincing attempts.

My dance man and I made a date to meet at his apartment. Again, I wasn’t expecting much. I had already met a lot of people in Manhattan who claimed to be directors, photographers, actors, designers, and they were anything but. They were just poor, neglected people who had hung on tight and who might have wanted to do something in those areas twenty or thirty years ago and had made a few stabs at those treasured dreams, but it all came down to a review in the Times from 1986, or an extended run in 1973.

So I entered the building after my dance man buzzed me in, and I went up in the elevator, and then I saw the name on the door. I didn’t know anything about dance then (I still don’t know much), but even I recognized the name on the door. This was not just some dirty old man who had once directed a terpsichorean evening at P.S. 122 in the mid-80s. No, this was a man who was among the few famous choreographers of the day.

The door opened, and the man who had opened it acted like he did not want to be seen, but he did want to be heard. He gave me commands; go there, move here. The apartment was smallish and dark, a large studio, with windows that showed off a view of downtown. There was very little furniture, but it was handsomely appointed. It was immediately clear to me that this wasn’t a primary residence but “a place in the city.”

“Take your shoes and socks off,” the voice said, and I obliged. The hardwood floors felt good under my feet. “Now your shirt,” the voice said. I was breathing heavily and I pulled my shirt over my head, and my heart was pounding because I was so excited. “You’re very thin,” he said, impersonally, appraisingly. “Take your pants off.”

I took my pants off fairly fast and stood there in front of him and I was very happy in the dark and the silence. I was so at home in this situation. “You have big calves,” the voice said. “Your legs are good.” The voice was far less impersonal now, almost excited, and it wasn’t really a sexual excitement but more of a feeling of possibility.

“Now, if you want to get into my company, you’re going to have to show that you can take direction,” he said, sitting down on a low couch. I could feel him staring at me intently, and I started to make him out in the dark. He had longish hair and a leonine kind of head, and a quality of nobility. He was set apart. He was a king. 

He just looked at me for a moment more and then got up and put on some jazz music, Duke Ellington. I started to move—I had taken dance classes before—and he stopped me right away. He was so totally a choreographer that he took everything related to movement seriously. This was just a sex scene role-play we had set up through a phone line, but he took the time to explain certain things to me about dance.

“You’ll be my pony boy,” he said, and this made me smile. He started the Ellington music again, and then he came back over to me and showed me how to move subtly against the rhythm of the music. His hands were around my waist and then on my shoulders and he was gently moving me like a puppet around the darkened space of the studio, and I let myself be led, because I was obviously in the hands of some kind of master. 

Finally he sort of tipped me over and pulled my underwear down and got on his knees and went to work, and this was as extraordinarily awkward physically as the dance and dance direction from him had been so very graceful and suspended in time. I had to position myself in totally ungraceful ways for him to get what he wanted, but I didn’t mind, for I liked and trusted him right away.

When he was finished with me, I put my underwear back on and draped myself on a chair with my legs stretched out for him to see, and we talked for a time as the light faded and faded until we were really sitting in the dark, and all I could hear was that low, rumbly voice of his. I pretended I hadn’t seen his name on the door, because that’s what he wanted, I could tell.

He talked a bit about former lovers, with an appealing sort of reticence. I had listened to so many drunken guys at bars babble about past loves; they wanted to tell me everything all at once, and they ruined whatever might have been interesting about their lives by being so unselective, so garrulous. My choreographer held things back, to be protective of himself, to be mysterious. I tried to be at my best, high energy, lyrical. I told him about my writing on the theater and on film, and a little bit about my photographer friend Ben Morrissey. He knew Ben’s work, and he knew the photos Ben had taken of me. “They’re everywhere, aren’t they?” he asked, kindly.

He got up and enquired if I’d like a glass of water, and I said yes, and I watched him move through the space. It was clear that he had been and still was a real dancer; it was a pleasure just to watch him walk across a room. He was rooted to the ground and moved decisively, like very masculine men do in bars, right shoulder forward, left shoulder forward, almost like a sailor, a rolling walk, but the difference with him is that his knees were slightly bent at all times, so that he might take off and spring into the air or sink down to the floor at a moment’s notice. 

After I left and went home, I typed his name into Google and found out that he had lopped almost twenty years off his age on the phone line, but that was to be expected. He was an exceptional person, and so what was twenty years? Especially if you could control the environment in a darkened apartment. Why not? Nevertheless. I have sometimes taken two years off my age, as Katharine Hepburn did most of her life, for Hepburn was sensible or right about most things. Knocking off more than two years is pushing it, I think; lopping off twenty years is nothing if not bold, but he was so dishy still that he got away with it.

I had gotten a pretty good look at him in the light as he opened the door of the studio for me to leave, and he wasn’t a “ruined beauty” as he had said, at least not to me. He was the most attractive, magnetic older man I had met at that point, and his charisma was very different from any I had encountered before. This man was a closed fortress, with armored guards. 

I went up to the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and asked for a video of his work, and I sat down in a cubicle and put some headphones on, and then there he was in a black leotard in 1968 performing his first dance. First he was down on the floor like he was about to do push-ups, and he did do a push up and lifted his legs as high into the air as he could get them in back, and from this position he fell gracefully down onto his left shoulder and somehow got himself instantly back up on his knees, as if by sleight of hand. He did not have long legs himself; in fact, he was somewhat short. He had been wiry as a younger dancer, and the man I had met was stocky and barrel-chested.

He reached up and up with his arms in this 1968 dance and then seized back into himself, as if he had been mortally wounded, and then slowly he opened his arms back up and stretched his arms and legs out, trying to get upright again until he did a neck stand, and then suddenly he was standing, and I have no idea how he got up off the ground to a standing position so quickly. He was like this beautiful toy that could do anything. I later saw the French dancer Jean Babilée do a similar neck stand in filmed bits of the dance “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort,” and I wondered if my choreographer had somehow seen this. 

At the end of this early dance, he swung around with his arms out in a quasi-Chinese manner, and then he fell to the ground and did a backwards somersault onto his left shoulder—his perfect little body shot right up into the air from this left shoulder—in a straight line!—and then he collapsed to sit on his tailbones and extended his pressed-together-legs and moved them right and then left…right and then left. This movement with his extended, closed legs was so don’t-touch-me sexy that I got hard right there at Lincoln Center, where erections are frowned upon.

I went over to “audition” again, as soon as I could. He put on Debussy this time, and we talked about Nijinsky. He showed me how Nijinsky had “humped a scarf” during his notorious dance to Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” I was in my underwear (green print Lycra from H & M, $12, and worth every penny) and bare feet, and he started getting really into my Nijinsky impersonation as I undulated around the space with my palms up, like the Nijinsky photos I had seen. He got up from where he was sitting and said, “Now move your hips in slightly wider circles, can you do that?” I moved my hips more decisively. “Huh,” he said, studying me. 

He barreled over to me quickly and roughly pulled down my underwear to my knees and I took a sharp excited breath and my erection throbbed, and as he was walking away from me he turned his lion head slightly and grunted, “Take those off,” over his shoulder. I did as I was told, and I stood there naked and very very happy. He went into a closet and he came back out with some emerald green tights and a cunning little hat with all sorts of thingamabobs hanging off of it, and he placed the hat on my head so that my face was framed by green fringe, and I sat down and put the tights on; they were sheer and almost see-through, but not quite.

When I stood back up in these tights, I felt different, like some sea creature. He was seated, watching me intently, ruminatively, as if he were smoking a cigarette without a cigarette. I stayed upright and moved my arms a lot and rolled my hips in ever-widening circles to the Debussy music, and he just watched me.

“Okay, this is good, actually,” he said, like he was somewhat surprised. “But you need to think about working on different levels. You need to be able to work on the floor.” I tried to sort of float down to the floor as I had seen him do in his dance, but it didn’t quite work. “Here, you’re not trained, that’s OK, but let me show you some tricks,” he said, getting up again and coming over to me. 

He guided my body down to the floor and told me to think of myself as not solid but liquid. He said that I didn’t have any bones, not really. I found myself down on the floor, with his strong hands on my neck, and the tension that I always carried in my shoulders began to disappear. I was on my back, moving instinctively to the Debussy music, with the rhythm and then against it, and I lifted my legs as high into the air as I could get them and then closed them tightly and made the movements I had seen him make on the tape from 1968 at Lincoln Center.

It was dark in the studio as always and getting darker, and I let the coaxing of the oboes and the muted horns in the Debussy piece lead my body all around the floor, with his hands sometimes guiding me. I slipped far, far away from him down the floor and extended my legs and my arms in a very angular position, and he cried, “Hold that! Stay with that for a few seconds! Let me look at that, that’s unusual!”

I did as I was told, and I felt that I could hold this pose on the floor forever because it felt so right, so decisive, so theatrical and aggressive. “Now get up onto your knees and extend your left leg out for me,” he said. I did this and held my balance. He crouched down and ran his hand up my leg, from foot to calf to inner thigh. “Slide back down onto the ground on your stomach,” he said in his lowest gravelly voice. “Now lift your chest off the floor.”

I did that, and it was a yoga pose, almost, and his hands lifted my torso as far up as it would go. “Stay like that for me, just stay there!” he cried, and it sounded like he was trying to restrain his excitement, and I found this extremely attractive, both the excitement and the attempt at restraint. 

He roughly yanked the tights down in back to my knees. “Stand up and take those off,” he said in a very heated voice, and then he went back to his closet, and I heard him saying, “This dance should really be done with almost nothing on, just your cap and some glitter and body make-up and something in front to cover your cock,” he said energetically, as if he were creatively as well as sexually stirred. “Put this on, it’s a posing strap,” he said, handing me a tiny bit of material.

I put on the posing strap for him, and it barely covered me. I loved that he was dressing me up and treating me seriously as a dancer. He dusted me with a little gold glitter all over my chest and my legs. “Can you repeat what you just did, starting on the floor, with your legs together extended and move them like you did?” he asked, very seriously, all business, professional.

Did he realize that I was repeating one of his moves from his 1968 dance? Maybe he sensed it as I got back down and repeated this move and did the angular position on the floor that he liked with my legs extended and my arm in a claw-like pose, and then I got on my knees and extended my left leg. “That’s good, but you don’t know how to get off the floor in one movement,” he said. “Here, let’s practice that.”

And so we did, over and over again, until my slight awkward fumbling up, with its wobbly stages, became a much smoother transition, not as smooth as a dancer’s, or as smooth as his in 1968, of course, but smooth enough. “You’re as good as anyone in my company,” he said, off-handedly, but his impersonal tone let me know that he was actually being somewhat serious about this. I think. Then he got out a long scarf from the closet and staggered the material in the middle of the floor.

“Okay now, lower yourself as slowly as possible onto the scarf,” he growled. I sidled over to it and tried to kind of relate to it in an animal way, and he let out a light chuckle. “Good, you’re a horny little faun, now lower yourself down onto it…that’s it…stick your ass out so that the audience can see it…it’s a nice little ass, let them look at it.”

I was very hard in the posing strap; the sound of his voice was so arousing to me. I got down on the scarf, like Nijinsky had, and he said, “Now hump it…really hump the scarf….” I was close, and he knew it, and he tipped me over and jerked me off into his hand and then smeared the result all over my chest and picked me up and dropped me in a chair and tied my legs up on the chair and my hands on the arms of the chair and put his mouth on me, making little growling sounds. It took a while, but I climaxed again, and then he left me there, tied up, for a little bit. He walked around the space with his sailor walk, looking at me, and then he put his mouth on me a second time. I could barely stand it, it was such fun.

I was more than spent when he untied me and I stretched my legs out for him over the arms of the chair. He got me some water, and I put my shirt on. “Leave your pants off,” he said. We talked in the dark, and he was still very guarded. It was clear to me that he had been through a lot, and he had a stoicism, a dignity, that I found extremely winning. He was the opposite of a complainer. Keep things to yourself. But if you have things to give, give them selectively. Don’t be stingy, but don’t unload everything onto people. Don’t be needy, be a warrior, and you’ll have a better time.

He talked about a few of his major relationships. “Don’t ever be competitive with each other,” he said, and this thought landed with me, for it was the useful advice of someone who usually didn’t give advice. When I got up to leave, I spilled water on my shirt, and he went into the bathroom and got a hair-dryer and dried me off with it. This felt like a romantic moment to me. It was intimate, almost domestic.

He wrote me an email the next day, and he wanted me to come over again right away. He had one of those anonymous accounts for sex stuff that I never bothered with. It was artdad at something dot com. He was the sort who had an enthusiasm and wanted to go as far with it as quickly as possible. So I showered and went over to his studio in the evening again, around 6PM.

“We need to test your flexibility some more,” he said right away as I came in. He was still doing our agreed upon role-play, me as a dancer auditioning, he the dance master. I stripped to my underwear again (this time an almost see-through blue print from H & M). He put on the jazz again, Duke Ellington. That must have been what he was working on at the time, and I think he might even have been working out ideas about it, using me as a model.

I did my best. I moved against the rhythm of the music, which suited my instinctive perversity. He let me go and go and go. I was up, I was down, my legs were in the air, extended out, my hands fluttered a little but then made decisive stops, and then I got down on the floor and stayed down there, making movements as if I were trapped but didn’t give a damn. “That’s right,” he said finally. “You can stay down there. No need to get up. Stay down there, on the floor, use the floor.”

I moved and moved, and I felt that I could continue for as long as he wanted me to as the music got sexy. It was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and there was good humor in this Ellington sexiness. He got up and pulled me off the floor and stood behind me and put his hands on my hips and we moved together slowly for a bit, against the rhythm of the music. That dark studio of his, always getting darker. He let me make my own movements, but he also maneuvered me into his headspace for the movements that were his. It was a kind of breakthrough in my mind, my body (they were the same thing right then). It was what I was looking for. I was in a euphoric state. Sex wasn’t the whole answer to what I wanted, but sexual energy was.

Eventually he sat me down in a chair and tied my hands and feet to it and went to town on me two or three times, and it did nothing for me one way or another. He liked it, I suppose, and I liked dancing for him and with him. I liked learning. As I looked down at the top of his lion head, I remembered the exceptionally beautiful boy I had seen on the tape from 1968, and it gave me a thrill when I thought, “You’re doing this with that guy.” I found this double consciousness—my attraction to him now and my attraction to his 1968 self—enormously exciting because it was so erotically mental, like I was getting two very different hot guys in one.

As I thought more and more about this, I began to imagine being with him at many different ages…at 16 at school in the hallways, where I took the lead with him…at 21 after a dance class, where we struggled for dominance…at 28 very drunk at a bar…at 36 in a dance studio (he was at his physical peak in his sea-green tights, and he let me take full charge)…at 42 in our apartment as boyfriends…at 48 at a hotel when his body had gotten thicker…at 55 in the middle of the night at his dance studio, and somehow this was melancholy…at 60 in a hotel after some grand reception for the sake of nostalgia…and then I was with him now in his apartment, young me and older him, and all this began to feel like an orgy with one supremely attractive man. At the same time, I knew that if I had met him when he was my age my choreographer wouldn’t have given me a second look. My youth and his age were the only things I had going for me in this situation.

He was done finally, and he untied me and my legs ached. I love a sore, worked-out body, because that’s what a body is for, not to workout at a gym but to be tied, moved, posed, displayed, felt, desired, thought of in its absence, then thrown on the trash heap when you’re all worn out and done. He was sitting opposite me now and saying that he used to be able to see those buildings from his windows, downtown. He said it the only way you should say that, gruffly, respectfully, moving right along, let’s not linger over it. He talked about Isadora Duncan. He said that the New York Times had it in for him, but he said it politely, reasonably, as he said everything. The Duke Ellington music was playing on repeat. 

I went over a fourth time, and it was much the same, Duke Ellington, tied to the chair, and so forth, and he said that he’d like me to come see one of his dances at some point. I was excited by this prospect. I wanted to see what he worked with, and whom he worked with. He sent me a discreet email invitation to his latest evening of dance, and I went by myself. 

There were two programs on the bill. The first was an old dance of his for nine male dancers, and it was easy to follow the theme—the men would group together and whenever one of them did something different or out of step with the others, this difference would be squashed and the dancer would be brought back into line with the group. The dancers were a bit older than was usual; most of them, I think, were in their mid-forties. They might even have danced the premiere of it, several years before.

There was one dancer who was younger, close to my age. He was dressed in a rather bulky black t-shirt and black pants, as the other eight dancers were. This was not a sexy dance, not at all. In fact, he was not a sexy choreographer, as a rule. His personal reticence kept his dances chaste, shy. You forgot that you were looking at bodies that might be sexual with each other.

The second dance was new, and it was between a man and a woman, and the woman flopped around in what seemed like drunkenness, and the man kept trying to catch her, but she got pulled away from him in the end by a well-meaning, repressive crowd. His work was filled with well-meaning, repressive crowds. He was intelligent enough to know that, though he was cursed, or blessed, with being well-meaning and repressive himself, it also had its uses. 

There was a reception afterwards in the lobby with champagne, and I downed three glasses in quick succession. Whenever there was free liquor, my thirst was not easily quenched in those days. I got that dispersed, fuzzy feeling from the alcohol and weaved slightly as I walked, but I was careful as I moved, in the time-honored overly careful drunken way as I downed two more glasses of champagne. I saw him enter the lobby. Everyone applauded, and he accepted their applause graciously. He was in figurehead mode, the director of a company, and I got self-conscious and didn’t want him to see me.

For about an hour, I kept grabbing more champagne and avoiding him, which wasn’t hard to do. Everybody wanted to talk to him. I slipped along the walls and into corners and hid behind the dresses of women and the shoulders of tall men and the hubbub of it all, but then the crowd surged a bit, there were more people coming in, and I was swept along until I was face to face with him, and I grinned, helplessly, and his face was set in a granite smile. He looked at me but didn’t seem to see me. After a moment, with courtly charm, he reached out and patted me on the shoulder and then moved along to talk to a group of dressed-to-kill moneyed women.

I wrote him an enthusiastic email the next day, and he sent me a very brief email back saying that he was done with me and that he had had enough of me. It was pretty brutal. I was in my twenties then and looking as good as I ever would and he was in his late sixties. Being rejected by a man so much older really stung me. But he attempted to console me slightly when I expressed my surprise. “You do something like this, and then you move on…aren’t you like that?” he wrote me. I sensed a kind of paternal kindness and perplexity in this.

Years went by, and he got even older, but he still and always looked great. On Facebook, I kept seeing info about a fancy retrospective program he was doing, and I saw that there were ten-dollar tickets available, and so I bought a ticket and went. I was in a good mood. I was in a good place in my life, and so I enjoyed the dances, and the dancers, two of whom were very sexy. And I looked with what felt like love of some kind at my choreographer as he entered to sit in the back of the theater. He seemed a little smaller physically somehow, out in the open, in the light. I was happy to be there with him.

Afterwards there was a small reception, but much more modest than the one I had been to before, and everyone seemed to be over the age of sixty except for the dancers. I screwed up my courage and slowly made my way over to him. We made eye contact, and I could not be certain if he recognized me. I don’t think he did, but maybe a little. There was maybe a little bit of recognition in his eyes, but carefully repressed. “I loved it,” I told him, and I meant it with all my heart.

These remarks were written for a memorial service for Kevin Killian, which took place on August 19, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. — Robert Glück

I suppose I have known Kevin longer than anyone here except for his siblings.  But 40 years turns out not to be such a long time.  I am older than Kevin by five years, and it was fully my plan for Kevin to speak at my memorial, rather than my speaking at his, which still is shocking and unreal to me.  Like most of us, I have been rereading Kevin’s work in the light of his death, amazed that a consciousness of such splendor and exuberance has been stilled.  The death of a loved one strips us of the notion that our present life is a dress rehearsal rather than the one and only performance, though I think Kevin was always aware of the shape of his own life in his grand gestures and also in his scrupulousness, like his attention to archives.  

I spent the most time with Kevin during the era of my workshops at Small Press Traffic, where he met Dodie.  He says he joined them in 1982.  Of course he must be right, though it seems a little late to me.  In his vast generosity, he proposed other projects through the years.  He offered to edit my collected essays for example, and he offered to work on my archives.  He did come to help me with it just three weeks before he died.  We went to Office Max.  I had to say Enough, he would have worked on them forever.  Another time he said Bob, I have an idea—let’s write a story together, both of us completely naked in a room.  The most pressing of the insecurities that proposition called forth was the awareness of how slowly I write.  It seemed like a very long time to be without any clothes.  

Through the years, Kevin would sometimes say with a wave of his hand, “Bob taught me everything I know about writing!”  It created in me—as it does in this moment—the feeling of anxious hilarity.  “God bless you for your enormous, skilled, intuitive intervention into my life.”

Did I ever teach him anything?  Or, more to the point, what did he mean?  In the workshops, I would make a few comments and suggestions about some brilliant poem or story.  (For Kevin, pleasure and safety were opposites, and his work turned on the moment when our hero sees the broader perspective of someone who wants to damage him.  Then he gains, not value, but lack of value.  Sexual invasion and danger are accepted and the little that remains is ready to be entertained by death or romance.)  The next week, Kevin would exclaim, Bob I followed your advice exactly, but the improved piece, equally brilliant, would be totally different from the one he’d read a week before, unrecognizable.  Was this sincerity, ridicule?  Where is Kevin coming from?—I often asked myself.  In fact, I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.  He seemed to possess the secret of happiness—maybe that’s the meaning of his work: that meaning is not in short supply—there’s meaning everywhere, everything is somehow connected to everything else, and you must surrender without restraint to the matter at hand.  Even that is too prescriptive—because Kevin delighted in possibility and the penetration of all kinds of barriers, including the body itself, the mind itself, and our culture itself.  

A few sentences from “Santa,” my favorite story.  “I’m content enough, like a bubble envelope.  I lie down on my back and my hands are taped with black stickum gum, “relax now.”  I tell them where I live and how I used to watch Santa Barbara every day.  On the ceiling there’s some famous stars or windows of the far night.  I’m breathing in, not breathing out.  The air’s a faint blue, the color of speed and peace.  I did not write this, this was my life, or vice versa.”

An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. – Henry Miller 

Ella is sitting on her couch with her iPhone, researching venues for her show before finishing more than one painting for it. There’s no excuse why she can’t do more. Work has been light at the boutique media agency in Soho where she acts as Head of Sales. She’s in her living room taking up space, “working” from home. The blank canvases are right over there, leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base. There were lines of coke on it last night, which could’ve been used to fuel her creativity. Instead she opted for the routine paranoia trip: staring through the peephole in the front door every ten minutes to check if someone was outside—cops or some sort of sexual predator. With sweat-soaked straight black hair and bulging eyes, she sustained her manic watch till the wee hours of the a.m., which resulted in zero home invaders, per usual.

This has been going on for months, dare one say years. The Boyfriend learned long ago to refrain from protesting his girlfriend’s temporary schizophrenic actions, let alone trying to comfort her physically. Like he did on countless other weekend nights, he simply sat on the couch thumbing through Instagram (and, occasionally, secretly sexting a coworker, having once been too loyal to act on it in person) till daybreak when the coke was gone and Ella had no other choice but to come down and eventually fall asleep beside him.

Ella, now in her late thirties, realizes she can no longer blame anyone but herself for her bad habits and creative block. When she was in her twenties, she covered the familial inspiration in her raw, visceral paintings. The uncomfortably personal themes of her shows (with decent reviews and nonexistent sales) came from stories about her alcoholic dad who’d been imprisoned for murdering her mom and her older brother who’d been killed attempting to break up a drunken brawl, as well as the escorting years, an endless string of bad relationships and an assortment of mostly self-inflicted abuses. Nothing in her present life is inspiring her, but she still feels compelled to paint… something, anything.

During weeknights after work and every weekend, she can only focus her tired and/or hungover body on the couch, what’s new on the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and which Grubhub meal to complement it. Or when the next cycling class is scheduled at Flywheel, offsetting the overeating and keeping her body lean and toned. Or whether she has enough funds left to buy yet another pair of shoes from Vetements or Off-White (her favorite designers) after paying her quarterly dues to Soho House and the monthly fee for an all-access membership to Equinox, among other bills and whistles. And cocaine. She loves cocaine more than she cares to admit to herself and others.

FRIDAY

The Boyfriend already left for work, and Ella is waking up again from another micro-nap. Moseying into the kitchen, she pours herself a hot cup of coffee—he makes six cups: four to fill his to-go mug and two for her—cooling it with a healthy splash of almond milk. Holding the cup in her left hand, she sips the lukewarm drink while perusing Instagram on her phone with her right. She fingers the profiles of gorgeous male models William McLarnon and Matthew Noszka and influencers into extreme sports such as Dylan Efron and Jay Alvarrez, wondering if she’d be happier with a man like one of them: otherworldly sexy, superhero strong and Insta-famous. I’m still beautiful, she tells herself in the mirror, checking to see whether the Botox that’s been hiding the wrinkles in her forehead is wearing off (not yet, thankfully). If I were in some sort of social setting with these guys, I’m sure I’d catch their eye. She considers the fantasy for a few more seconds, an even mix of the familiar guilt for superficial, adulterous thinking, an always-on ache for what she can’t have and the growing unsurety of her love for The Boyfriend (very good-looking, much younger than she and great in bed when she’s in the mood) overwhelming her physically like the freezing Peconic River on Shelter Island in early June—their first vacation nearly three years ago (they stayed at the very chic Sunset Beach Hotel).

On the kitchen counter lie a bunch of bananas spooning each other inside a clear plastic bag with the Chiquita logo. Dressed in perishable goods, Miss Chiquita smiles festively, ready to perform the calypso dance leap. Once vibrant yellow, the fruits’ skin is now dull and freckled, foretelling their rot. But The Boyfriend’s ask via text remains unfulfilled: Would you do me a big favor and peel the bananas I left on the counter and put them in the freezer? That way they’ll keep for his weekday (and semi-weekend) smoothies. The making of which are an ongoing, unwelcome wakeup call for Ella prior to one of Amazon Echo’s more appealing alarm sounds. That unnerving jackhammer noise of a “Magic” Bullet Blender pureeing assorted fruit, ice and almond milk is anything but enchanting to her ears.

They live together in Williamsburg in a two-floor loft with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The luxury building includes amenities such as a state-of-the-art gym with indoor rock climbing, simulated golf rooms (plus a mini-golf course on the roof), a bowling alley, two pools, three hot tubs and much more unlisted here. Some of their neighbors have children and dogs, both of which The Boyfriend wants too. Ella doesn’t think of herself as motherly and has never been a big fan of animals. This isn’t to say she’s a bad person, just selfish, and at least she knows it.

But lately she’s been struggling with her somewhat lavish, arguably heretical lifestyle, thinking she should be spending her money and time with The Boyfriend in healthier ways. Perhaps it’s biological; her birthday is around the corner, as is her body’s inability to make babies. Despite The Boyfriend’s smoothies and other behaviors that only annoy her because she’s irritable from the coke comedowns, he’s kind and understanding of her idiosyncratic, addictive and neurotic personality. Lovers of the past provided an obsession and coinciding rush similar to the drugs (a TV actor, a banker, and a lawyer, all of whom were a year or two older and a zero or two richer than she), while never showing her love, which is what she thought she wanted for oh so many years. But when The Boyfriend came into her life unexpectedly and gave her just that (after hitting her with his bike as she ran into the bike lane rushing to the office one sultry afternoon), she accepted it begrudgingly and has been battling herself from rejecting him ever since.

She finds herself more preoccupied with the fear of his imminent departure now that she’s hungover again, nearing old age and getting crazier by the nanosecond. Moreover, her name is the one and only on the lease and other legal agreements tying her to this time and place financially. He could just get up and go anytime. A slice of her, the demon inside, craves this, as it’ll allow her to fully revert to the life of the manic art slut: hard-working by day; partying with a different “date” every night; painting her lonely paintings during tear-soaked, suicidal in-betweens. But the rest of her is well familiar with how that old song and dance eventually ends. Peeling and slicing The Boyfriend’s bananas, she prays un-denominationally that she can sustain her current commitment to him. She stores the mushy fruit in a plastic container and tosses it in the freezer.

SATURDAY

The Boyfriend keeps three tabs of acid in an empty dental floss case on the bottom shelf of his gunmetal nightstand. Each piece is the size of Ella’s pinky nail and advertised by the dealer as extra strength. Flashbacks of her goth-girl-teens arise whenever The Boyfriend tries convincing her to trip with him; while hallucinating, she’d learned her life’s vocation is to paint, accepted the deaths of her immediate family, fallen in love for the first time and realized her best friend was anything but (swiftly thereafter ending their toxic relationship). Consequently, she’s fearful of an LSD-laced epiphany that their relationship isn’t for the long haul. But her intensifying self-reflection is prompting her to finally discover the truth her own way.

She rises early on this sun-drenched Saturday morning, slipping out of bed softly to avoid rousing her recovering lover. He spent last night drinking with old college friends till the wee hours of the a.m. anyway, so it’s unlikely he’ll wake easily. These circumstances are usually flipped: traditionally she’s the one sleeping off a night of indiscretions while he’s already up and at ‘em, starting the day right with a smoothie and two-mile run to the waterfront and back, then gently nudging her conscious at about 3:00 p.m. with three Advils, a tall glass of ice water and no questions asked (her last time out was less than two weeks ago). But lately he’s been gradually assuming her behavior. Seems the end may have begun, and she needs to act now to ensure their best possible future, whether that’s together or not.

Once soft, the bananas are hardened when she pulls them from their cryo-slumber along with a bag of generic-brand frozen berries and two handfuls of ice, placing them on the crowded, coffee-stained kitchen counter. A collection of half-eaten takeout and countless empty beer bottles dominate its marble surface. Shaking a near-empty gallon of refrigerated almond milk, she’s pleased there’s enough left for two smoothies. She tosses everything into an oversized blender cup and switches on the “Magic” Bullet Blender with its familiar, unnerving jackhammer noise that’s anything but enchanting to her ears.

As she pours the mixture in two glasses and tops off each with one-and-a half tabs of acid, she hears sheets rustling, a snorty mumbling and the creaking bedframe. The door to the bedroom slowly opens, The Boyfriend emerging naked with a yawn (he overheats at night, no matter how high the AC), his average body exposed and dirty blond hair disheveled. Hey hon, he greets her in a throaty voice. Whoa, you made us breakfast?! Thanks, sexy. Just what I needed. He gives her an alcohol-and-rotten-fish-smelling kiss on the cheek. She stirs each glass with a bent spoon (they’re in dire need of new silverware), allowing the secret ingredient to fully envelop their healthy meal. Yeah, well, I didn’t break up the fruit enough in the blender, she white lies, handing over one of the glasses. Drink up! It’ll help with the hangover. Take these Advils too. He chucks the pills down his throat and chugs the smoothie. A burp, then he’s off to the bathroom for a shit.

Quickly slurping down her serving with a stainless-steel straw (plastic ones are hard to come by nowadays, and the cardboard kind on her lips gives her the chills), she uses her pointer finger to pull out the soggy tabs stuck on the side of the glass. Sucks them off and swallows. The only thing left to do is wait, so she flops down on the couch and ignites the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and the latest episode of Euphoria.

The faint sound of a toilet paper roll rattling around the holder means he’s finishing his business. Materializing again, he lets out a deep sigh, dragging his body next to where she lies, bringing with him a waft of Febreze and the stench of a hangover shit. He burps again and chuckles. There was this homeless dude inside the bar begging everyone for money, so weird, he shares randomly. Oh, I’ve been thinking we should go to Portugal…

SUNDAY

An impressive Sunday sunrise. Life has already moved on from yesterday’s trip, but Ella’s certain she never will (not completely, anyway). Via the bedroom window blinds (she desperately needs to buy blackout curtains), the 6:00 a.m. daylight bleeds into her eyes like a vampire’s worst nightmare. Sleep is always brief for her the night after taking LSD; the overwhelming visual effects she experiences while high never disappear when it’s time for shut-eye. Instead they’re more intense. For an hour or two before dozing off half-conscious till the a.m., she’s stuck watching a cartoon of Dante’s Inferno on her eyelids, starring characters from The Simpsons.

She rises unconcerned with the sound of sheets rustling and the creaking bedframe. The reason to keep quiet has been eliminated with her relationship; The Boyfriend left her yesterday. He didn’t take too kindly to her dosing him. At first, he found it arousing, achieving perhaps the biggest erection she’d ever seen him have. He was giggling uncontrollably at the second episode of Euphoria, during which Nate (played by the gorg Jacob Elordi) beats a guy to a pulp and rapes him. As the visuals kicked in, so did her libido and the realization of how much she loved this man, how passionately generous and unconditionally accepting he’d been with her for years. All her bad habits and emotional baggage, the bold selfishness, ignored. While he looked the other way on countless occasions, she was searching for fulfillment in every direction but his. How insanely mistaken you were! she scolded herself. Rushing to her knees, she yanked down his sweatpants and devoured him. The howls he made as she orally coaxed him to completion were magnificent.

Holy shit, hon, oh my god. That was so wild. What’s going on, everything is vibrating. Barely pulling on his sweatpants, he darted for the bathroom and knelt over the toilet puking. She walked to the sink beside him and rinsed her mouth. Checked herself in the mirror. Watched as the wrinkles in her forehead became white worms, slithered off her face and flew away. Feeling beautiful and perfect, she finally divulged she’d dosed him.

We’re on the acid, hon! I put it in our smoothies. I’ve just been so horrible lately, pushing you away. You know I’ve been scared to take it because of the revelations I have on it. But it was worth the risk! I now know I love you so much and I’m so sorry. I’m going to be better to you, to us. He looked into her with incredulous eyes. You did fucking what?! Are you kidding me, Ella! My parents are coming to the city today for my dad’s birthday. What the fuck is wrong with you?! 

And that… was that. A few more harsh sentences (one of which was We’re done for good, you crazy bitch!), a packed bag, his snubbing her pleas not to go out in public high or leave her there alone and on drugs, an exit with a slammed front door. Sobbing and hallucinating, she texted him nonstop for hours (but never called for some reason). Eventually the blue iMessages turned green, which meant he’d blocked her or shut off his new iPhone (he’d just gotten the 11).

Ella enters the living room overcome with sadness and regret. She glances at the blank canvases leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base, then texts her coke dealer.

THE END