EMMA AYLOR
with commentary by
JAKE BAILEY
KATIE PETERSON
EMILY FLAMM HAILEY HIGDON LISA LEVY J.C. PETERS SARAH STICKNEY VANNI THACH CAROLINE WAMPOLE
The Carolina Quarterly
MATTHEW BRAILAS
MATTHEW WIMBERLEY KELLEY WHITE
Vo l u m e 7 1 . 2 Winter 2022 VOLUME 71.2
PUBLISHED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
WINTER 2022
S
M A
E L P
Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O R T H C A R O L I N A — C H A P E L H I L L
Winter 2022
V O LU M E 71.2
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Contents
Winter 2022 | VOLUME 71.2
POETRY EMMA AYLOR
Acreage · 8
Incomplete List of Items in the Yard · 9
JAKE BAILEY
The Unfolding of Treatment ReZistance · 11
The Molecular Structure of Ziprasidone · 12
Schizo and the Vibration of Atoms · 13
I Eat Bear Like This · 14
MAT THEW BRAILAS
Curse · 16
Love Poem with a Prayer · 18
Camping at Pharoah Mountain · 20
Bottled Water · 21
Poem to My Mother · 22
KELLEY WHITE
Bucket, wood, braided raw-hide handle · 24
Frame of Shaker Painted Labels · 25
Applesauce maker, pine, tin cover · 26
FICTION EMILY FLAMM
Are We in a Fight? · 28
J.C. PETERS
Deathbed · 36
VANNI THACH
Blue · 44
NON-FICTION LISA LEVY
"You Were Always Such a Happy Child": Seven
Unhelpful Things to Say to a College
Student Contemplating Suicide · 55 HAILEY HIGDON
Visit Eastbourne—Because It's You · 67
CAROLINE WAMPOLE
In Lieu of Flowers · 72
MAT THEW WIMBERLEY
Writing All the Great Territories · 75
THE FRIEND KATIE PETERSON
On Sarah Stickney· 86
SARAH STICKNEY
Earliest Conversation · 87
Freudian Aliens· 88 Rye Flip · 89 The Wishing Well· 90 Wood Burning · 91 The Definition of a Cocktail · 92 The Present · 93 Persephone · 94 Avery County · 95
REVIEWS DYLAN THOMPSON
Future Feeling by Joss Lake · 96
K AT H R Y N T. B U R T S
The Renunciations by Donika Kelly · 100
HANNAH SK JELLUM
Alien Stories by E.C. Osondu · 104
E M M A AY L O R
Acreage We woke up refulgent, the sopped air scrapping like cicadas up bark, the wild roses three-glass wine-rosaceal, like cheeks. This is a sense memory we share: A city of alfalfa yellow with August. A graveled road past the swarming pond. A way of aging houses by counting rings of red mud spoored up the brick, mortar blushing. I misunderstand what I need— waking up in the grass, chest warm as vined tomatoes, and knowing what’s that one something I can’t use anywhere.
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Incomplete List of Items in the Yard An item, I’ll say, can be organic, so long as it’s no longer alive. If alive, it’s the living, a crowded cell moving against what’s inside from in— east wind the former, bone and water soon—and so I’ll count the cicada wing, filigree-veined, something of cellophane to the reflection of the clear wrap between; I hope it’s periodic. I’d like for it to have kept this ground these thirteen years. A carapace clings at the stunted palm on the front walk out. Pieces of glass lay close-broken and left. Not much, otherwise, of the human hand but two dropped pennies, so long exposed they’ve corroded dateless. It doesn’t matter which year they were pressed, which year dropped from faulty pocket or thrown, which known manner of loss. Precisely how ruined the face. That doesn’t pull the memory back, though we could make one (ours a material culture); there’s no knowing safety, in bodies blurred borderless the minute they cross thresholds away from the few known doors. E M M A AY L O R
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If thinking of this, cross the palm, there, for luck. Its tellings are small. But go back— these open eggs are everywhere. I imagine they’re doves’.
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JAKE BAILEY
The Unfolding of Treatment ReZistance I drained the sea to find my body a mouthful of words I didn’t own faded chest fills with worms monks along the bank hide their shame from the maw of God, saliva baptizing the waters that swallow I’ve never understood why an adolescent Jesus blinded those who couldn’t see why emptiness fills my belly to the brim where shepherds herd rodents in sacks of meat the faded greens give rise to amber, the breaking of the last bough now all I have are hands cracked from salt-caked air— they say death isn’t a final rasp but a forgetting I’m forgetting who I am a scarecrow without a post these things aren’t easy but I find that it’s better to be a whisper than nothing at all
JAKE BAILEY
11
The Molecular Structure of Ziprasidone
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I Eat Bear Like This I eat bear like this, I eat bear like this, raw form gnashed into molar paste, sinew stripped of blood, sinew stripped of bloodshot iris contracting as wave, contracting as schism. I eat bear like this, like this, like the rawness of a wound can peel paint from signs, “Only trust the written word!” The letters spell reprieve from culpability, from the maw of the martyr eating sacks of eggs. I eat bear like the end is stones in a world of stream, I eat bear like the tailor can mend without a seam, I eat bear like gangrene ghosts can pierce the septic night, I eat bear like stained-glass mind is only solid light— The dim draws in, palm becomes fist,
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I eat bear like this, like this—
JAKE BAILEY
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M AT T H E W B R A I L A S
Curse I spit this at the night. The bird limps by on its good claw. The jug pours into the cup. The cup pours into the dirt. The sack moans when the wind curls through it. I yank this from my throat like a long, slick ribbon. When a boy I climbed the cliffs around the creek bed and looked across, it was good up there, and the sun fell in long dry sheets over the stone. A bloom too high even on toes to pluck. Now there is nowhere that isn’t ringing. I want to be not here in the tall grass
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where the gadflies light. I am sick of death and its thousand peeled fruits.
M AT T H E W B R A I L A S
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Bottled Water The last time we went to Nacogdoches together a fire had just finished burning Bastrop down. Cracked stone, red smoke, everything charred ankle low, like we were driving over a cattle brand. The stumps seared a name into the clouds. We pulled the car over. Our mother had packed the trunk with pallets of bottled water. She said the tap would make us sick. I ripped the translucent sheath. In the distance, someone tramped through the ash, holding a gray rag across his face, his steps high and slow like he was fording a river. Where his foot landed, a black cloud rose.
M AT T H E W B R A I L A S
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KELLEY WHITE
Bucket, wood, braided raw-hide handle 18” deep, cedar slats.
$275
It begins in dust. In light spinning across chaff in the chinks of knot holes. And the sound of a bird I do not know across a twilight harrowed field. Sowed with winter’s hidden seed. I am instrument only in my 87th year, 68th reborn in mother’s hands, carried to her breast and cries silenced in her bounty. Given. Forgiving. Mother’s work. I saw Abigail with a burden of cream spilling cool. My ministry silence and pictures of praise. Dearest chosen daughter dragonfly and horsefly, sweat bee and bumble and what I saw in stone the last berry the sweetest berry before an earthly death. By the village by the people released as a basket is wrapped for cold in shadow and opened for sunlight but shielded from wind. Seen and received.
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Frame of Shaker Printed Labels Fifteen labels and a tape printed “I Grew at the Home of the Lebanon Shakers,” including “White Hellebore,” “Low Chamomile,” “Rhubarb Chutney,” “Parsley Root,” “Sweet Marjorum,” and “Motherwort,”,12 x 10″ frame. $270.00 As if every scrap, every leaving, is a bit of our spirit to be bought and traded. Brightly print papers, perhaps they think that a bit of our saliva stays behind in the glue—spit, that they think that carries a prayer from our sainted tongues to some fiery place that may await them. Please let children shred them into the wind. Let birds gather thin strips to line their nests. The plants we grew are gone. Perhaps they nourished some creature. these sad new people have forgotten their uses for healing. What sickness do they suffer now for which Hellebore is a cure? Can Motherwort calm a spirit carried on ethernet or stored in cybercloud? Perhaps these are faster ways to spirit than those we imaged. Or have they put spirit aside until another time and life.
KELLEY WHITE
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E M I LY F L A M M
Are We in a Fight? I was number four, four of six, and it was easy to wander off. I liked to walk up and down the main road, which was lined with gas stations, discount stores, chain restaurants, copy shops, and dry-cleaning emporia. I knew the details of this road: the stiff dance of traffic, where the trash scent would peak. Occasionally I would duck into a business, but never one where I might do actual business—not the corner store that sold ropes of candy and pouches of gum, not the dollar store with its bins of plastic delights. I would slip into the dry cleaners, unnoticed, to sit in the corner and eat my bruised banana and watch the carousel of starched shirts. Or I’d find a chair at the nail salon and watch people poke and clip and shine each other up for some presumable showtime. Sometimes I came home and hid in the shed behind our overwhelming house, writing my full name over and over on blank pieces of paper, willing it to shimmer with some kind of unburied signal. As soon as I could, I left, camouflaging myself in the folds of a slightly different landscape, answering phones and taking out student loans and fumbling at love and friendship. I didn’t ever know what I was doing with dating or money. I didn’t ever know, but I knew what felt better than what, and Cory loved me, he was sure. For one strange moment at our wedding, my family came together to unveil their relief, and it was only then I sensed I had been under anyone’s watch or care. One Friday, Cory presents me with takeout and the news that we are leaving the country. Someone left, someone passed over, unexpected vacuum and he, he, is being massively promoted. Improvements to title and income, from products visionary to solutions architect, bump for this, bonus for that. When he talks of his work, a thing for which I have managed to cultivate respect but little interest, like kidneys, I manage to grasp only the parts that directly implicate me. “Well, we can,” he says, thoughtfully boxing up his enthusiasm. “We can leave.” The news crashes upon me like an ocean wave, luscious and cold. Our union had gone stagnant, withered by rational thinking. We had sanded off our edges in order to live together more gently, but this also made us dull. We passed the weeknights clicking our various buttons and the weekends devising plans to conceal our various wads of cables. The math is the math. I offer x, he offers 4x, and then think of all the debt I brought to the table that he erased in a year.
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I take the sweating container from his hands and set it down. “We can leave,” I say, the words attracting heat. Finite housework is joyous. Disentangling ourselves from our vicinity turns out to be far easier than the work of rooting down. We complete the paperwork for our visas and apply fresh caulk to the perimeter of the bath. I go to Mr. Inspach, the principal, who has ten years on me and still works hard at his job, to submit my resignation. He adjusts his position in the chair and nods slowly while contemplating a printed page that sums up my history. I tell him I have taken only four days of leave in so many years of teaching, and there’s enough in the basket to zip off now and get paid through the rest of spring, summer, and most of fall. He nods, says “looks about right,” and his envy briefly hums and flows between us like power surges through an aging lamp. Hurtling towards our new life, Cory and I talk and talk about the house we left behind, how clean it looked when we walked out of it, how wonderful that you can just apply paint to smooth over a fat chunk of years. We talk about the friends we left, people whose good intentions had made us feel packed on all sides with bland, Styrofoamy decency. Collectively, our story became the lack of story. Even our deviations held fairly standard: kitchen upgrades, spontaneous travel, expensive therapies. My disenchantments erase with the rising altitude, the stretching distance. We can return, Cory says, when we’re old, and those other old people will have new things to say. Later, while the sky darkens and sunlight condenses into a potent red layer between cloud and sea, we are served complimentary wine and tea and spiced nuts. I have never flown like this before, but Cory is at ease. He talks about his new team, his ecosystem. As he talks, I retreat and recognize that faculty gossip with all its dreary power is henceforth irrelevant, and so are the days of the week, and really also the hundreds of children I’d taught to read are (for me, for now, from here) irrelevant. Line items, cells in a hollow file. I bind myself up inside the airline’s blue blanket. The first days are a cool fog. We have landed on a free space. A length of time, a week to acclimate, has been awarded to Cory, and he has also been given a matte black credit card we’re not responsible for, named after some scarce metal. We are supplied a flat with two pleasant windows in the main room. The kitchen contains a miniature washer and dryer and a sleek fridge. When we first walk in, there is a dark bottle of wine and a black velvet box on the counter. The box contains chocolates E M I LY F L A M M
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flecked with salt and rose petals and tinted sugar. The flat smells lightly of perfumed disinfectant. It is like we are a museum exhibit. We peer at each other like curious animals. Are you this? we wonder. Are you that? Jet lagged and giddy in the flawless environment, everything we say is hilarious, each sleepy utterance standing up on its hind legs. We laugh and laugh, and for a full day and night we strut around like celebrities on a private island. We bury our heads in each other’s bodies, and we offer up more pleasure, more access than usual. Hold on, I want to say to everything, but the week passes, the treats are consumed, and the soft, feathered edges of the scene around me turn worryingly crisp. I hang some things in the closet, place some things in the drawers, set things out in the bathroom. After work most nights, Cory puts on big, padded headphones at night and converses haltingly with other language learners across the wires. He is often described, professionally, as a translator, but not in the usual sense. He translates “architectures supporting capacities for automation.” The company’s website explains it: he examines the blueprints of a nascent technological hub, and then he articulates a cultural framework to lay the foundation on which said hubs are built. And what can I do, what are my skills? My expertise is in sharing, playing, consonant blends. I can repeat the same small word one hundred thousand times any way you like it—spoken, written, or in song. I try walking to the main road, a thoroughfare lined with butchers, bakers, places of worship, a pharmacy, a bar, a spice shop, a print shop, a day care, a bank. I slip into these places, touching the pamphlets and business cards, shrugging at the lilting, undeciphered questions, and I come home wishing I were brave enough to buy bread. On weekends, we try to navigate the new country together, which is to say we try to communicate absent legible context. Sludge has entered the bloodstream. When we are together, our insecurities mesh and compound into an impenetrable weave of failure with debts on all levels, from atom to institution. Each step on the pavement is wrong. He picks up an eggplant at the grocery, and his movements appear poorly acted. He feigns interest in the eggplant for whom? Not me. I dumbly finger the eyes of potatoes. Our sense of space is off—his shoulders bump my shoulders; I kick at his heels. It is not easy to see us completing, from here, a sex act. We stab the silence with ideas, options that sound, against the opaquely stubborn mood, like mockeries of themselves.
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“We could rent a car and go to the coast,” I say, while considering the litany of horrors this plan could arouse. He tries. “Live music?” I shudder. “I just want to lie down for a bit, actually,” I say, savoring a fresh opportunity to reject all this place has to offer. Our clocks align at opposite poles. He’s obliged to day and I to night. He wakes at sunrise and putters off into a grove of steel and frosted glass. I wake at sundown to a scene of Cory parceling out the various courses of dinner he procured from somewhere in the sharp-angled atmosphere, and we eat together, me with my strong black coffee and he with his honey-rippled tea, and then he washes up and gives me a weak kiss goodnight. The moment the bedroom door closes, my neurons begin their gleeful hopping through unchaperoned darkness. Not enough hours later, he makes his own strong black coffee and pulls on fine-looking trousers while I slump, dramatically, into bed. “You sleep too much,” he says. “You’re never going to adjust.” “I sleep how much I sleep,” I say. When I go to bed, I imagine or detect a sigh of relief from his direction. When he wakes, my fingers tense and they appear, perhaps, like claws. I wake in midday to the barking of an enraged animal, and it takes a decent while of clearing away mental fuzz before I understand the barking as a response to our door being pounded. I open the door and am confronted with a uniformed person surrounded by monuments of tape and cardboard. He offers an electronic pen and tablet to me, says something, and disappears. Particles of exhaustion float through my limbs in a kind of slow-moving suspension, and when they settle out, I feel hunger. In this flat where everything is a bit flat, I somehow crave only flavorless things. I pillage the thicket of takeout boxes until I find a cuboid mass of white rice, which I devour, sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor. I slice open a box at random to find rows of worn spines. Our books. The sting of tears comes from nowhere, a chemical assault. Memories of packing, the clutter of the old house, yellows and greens. Recognition, late though it blossoms, at how full our life had been, how simple and good it is to be surrounded by familiar items and the possibility, however low, that someone who liked you would drop in. I pick up one of Cory’s, a thick book about city planning, parking lot designs, E M I LY F L A M M
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the shapes of massive intersections in the major cities of the world. Our interests have so few overlapping places, or rather, my interests are alive within his field but unseeable from his perch. He takes the aerial view of a problem, while my lens is elemental, stuck in the soil, the undergrowth. I do not complicate his expertise, and he does not threaten my solitude. I drain the remains of the coffee Cory left in the pot and open the laptop computer that sits by his side of the bed. I also have a computer…had. Who knows? It all reminds me of camping in that whatever you bring is too much and too little. Camping! An image: my mother, her hair streaked with charred marshmallow, raving about ants. I type: Hi Mom. Here, well, we’ve made it! We’re getting settled in. Really, Cory is getting settled; I am putting it off. He likes it here. The weather is temperate… I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t name, with certainty, the season. But weather is that thing people talk about to signify their lack of cannibalistic intentions. Boxes. Cory’s things. Now that we are foreign workers or expatriates or roving lumps of meat or whatever we have been officially tabulated as, now that his role is solutions architect and mine is wife, I have become suspicious of him. I want to know what ominous inkblots bloom behind his eyes. It can’t speak well of him, for instance, that he’s ended up with me. At the bottom of the box, I find the lightly spiderwebbed face of a phone and think of the day Cory dropped it onto pavement. We had our own pavement—a long expanse of it—on which we parked, and it connected to roads, roads whose names we knew, and they connected to other roads we still knew but not as well, and on and on like that, this very phone locating us and offering guidance at each juncture until, were we to continue for days, we would eventually hit upon a checkpoint for a new country, and if we crossed it, the phone might work or not work, depending on which arrangements the ranking gods of telecommunications had made on our behalf. Here, it is a block of metal and glass with some dark accumulations of dust and skin, its innards uncoiling beneath the fractures. I press my thumb on the button, and nothing happens, but then it does. A fat smiling picture of the two of us on a hike fills the rectangle. I type the access code and paw through the choices—zap the marbles, splatter the birds. A barrage of stale notifications crosses the screen. I peek into his social media. It’s all held over from before these boxes crossed the ocean, the information posted weeks ago, and it feels like waltzing into a cabinet of cryogenically
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preserved lawyers, their commentary organized for some unnamed magistrate. For some reason I want to keep it from him, but the apartment offers no hiding places. Each corner is so clean that even our meager little thoughts ricochet through the emptiness. Spoken words glare, confrontational as neon signs. I fall asleep on the couch clutching the phone. I dream that he returns from work, faces me bluntly and says, “Are we in a fight? I literally can’t tell.” I respond in an evasive, tedious style, which is more or less my signature. “You can’t tell in a literal way, you mean? You can’t tell in a way that is expressed in letters? You can’t tell in a way that is plain, factual, and unvarnished?” “I mean that I just can’t tell.” “If there is a fight, the belligerents in this fight must be you and me. We are the only people here. The body of you and the body of me. The continent of you and the continent of me. The government of you and the government of me.” “If we’re talking like this, there must be a fight.” In the dream, Cory’s face is a smooth, confident thing. Maybe this is just how he is at work, that place he spends almost all of his days but where I have never seen him operate. “But it doesn’t need to be you against me. We could be fighting our problems in this country, together. Or the memory of our last country. Or this apartment. Or this kitchen. Let’s fight the kitchen; this kitchen sucks, and we both know it. Or, well, the memory of you could be fighting the memory of me, or the future of you fighting the future of me. Any version of you could fight, at any time, any version of me, or this country, or that neighbor, or any room in the whole goddamn world or maybe,” and his eyes brighten and inflate, “all this tension is about how your mom never calls you on your birthday.” When Cory the living human comes home, he lies down opposite me on the couch, pokes me with a warm foot clad in a dress sock, and says, “I think it’s time we got a television.” He picks one out using the credit card, and on the day it arrives there is another intrusion of midday barks and a situation with a delivery person at the door. The television is smooth and oblong and expertly designed, and like everything else, I hate it. It hates me too. Quantities of starlight bounce harshly off the glass—a little world of zingy, faithless overtures. Men eating steak. Men hitting homers. Women on boats, in restaurants, trying on clothes. Women’s bodies dumped in lakes. A woman singing with her leg curled around the mic stand. Men ice fishing. Theaters of tenderness and lovemaking. I watch with the sound off. Language is my home, if I have one. E M I LY F L A M M
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In our old life, I had been to three therapists, each more frustrating than the last. Mona had tiger stripes on her fingernails and ate Cobb salads while we talked. I liked her company, but for a therapist, she talked a lot about herself. If ever I neared the borders of a tension in my life, she would reorient me toward a semi-relevant anecdote from her own illustrious personal history. I wondered what school of therapy that trick had come from. Christophe was a lifeless professional. He talked all the proper talk; he must have scored high on his exams. I went to him twice, and the visits made me feel insignificant, like a stain on the underside of an item in the farthest corner of his garage. Geraldine was promising. She was better trained than Mona and more human than Christophe. Her face calmed when my yolk quivered, and I could softly approach the edge of the raw territory. For two serious months, we waded through the boggy, plotless turmoil of my youth, pulling apart the layers of my composite fears. I didn’t stop seeing Geraldine. She left. After a short break in our visits, I called to make an appointment, and the line was dead, no forwarding number given. I tried the knob to her tiny green office, and it was locked, and the engraved brass sign for her practice had been removed. Internet searches turned up nothing useful. I questioned for a moment whether I’d dreamed her up, but hey, maybe she, too, had a partner who one day jettisoned up some corporate ladder and together they ducked out the back door of their lives. The next time our fight surfaces, it is not inside a dream. Cory wakes me in a bleak pool of light. “Jen,” he says. There is a long time where he tries to figure out what next to say. “You’re getting so thin,” Cory says. “You’re starving.” “I would know if I was starving,” I say. I can see he’s purchased me a fancy coffee and some kind of baked good heaped with glaze. “Is this an intervention?” I ask. “Do you think it should be?” “Is my mother coming?” I laugh sputteringly, and for a frail moment she flickers into view. He pauses. “Do you want to talk about your mother?” “What is all this?” I ask, pointing at the television suddenly standing regally atop a media console—did we have a console?—and gesturing at the food. “That’s a TV,” he says, “and that’s a muffin.” “And these are shoes,” I say, stuffing my feet into some and leaving the flat for the
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first time in who knows when. I walk to the main road, noting the effect all this excitement is having on my circulatory system. On the main road here, there is also a café, and whenever I see it, it makes me nervous. It’s the sort of place that puts out comforting soups, where people gather and huddle in scarves. Its promise of kindness conceals a terror. This harbor and its dwellers might reject me as an irritant, an outlier. Or worse: they accept me now and shun me later for stingingly particular reasons. Through the blur of the window, I can see a woman behind the counter who appears even more faint and implausible than I appear to myself. I walk in and pour a glass of water from a lukewarm jug and carry it to a precarious metal chair. After an awkward period of settling in, there is a cradling effect. A carousel of adult clothing and coiffure passes by, and I miss the children, all of them. What they had said, in their ways. Was it teaching? I had tallied the bodies. Fielded stray crumbs. I am always still for far too long. I don’t notice when the pastries are taken from the case, but now the shelves are bare. I am never asked to go, but surely the woman wants to close. I move along discreetly, in the way she has worked around me, and when I arrive at the flat, Cory’s absence is a blank relief. He is out looking for me, and I cannot guess where he is looking.
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