MAKE #18 "Mad Science"

MAKE LITERARY MAGAZINE

MAKE LITERARY MAGAZINE

ISSUE EIGHTEEN

MAD SCIENCE

ISSUE EIGHTEEN

Mad Science

ISSUE EIGHTEEN

1

$15

MAKE Literary Magazine

2

Mad Science

FICTION

NONFICTION

INTERCAMBIO PROSE

POETRY

INTERVIEW

INTERCAMBIO POETRY

ART PORTFOLIO

REVIEWS & ESSAYS 3

MAKE Literary Magazine MAKE Literary Magazine: Mad Science Issue 18 2019

Managing Editors

Art Director & Designer

Chamandeep Bains

Greer Mosher

Kenneth Guay Proofreader/Copy Editor Sarah Kramer

Fiction Editor Kamilah Foreman

Contributing Editors Nonfiction Editor

Kyle Beachy

Jessica Anne

Steffi Drewes Miguel Jiménez

Poetry Editor

Cassie Mayer

Joel Craig

Jose-Luis Moctezuma Kathleen Rooney Melissa Wiley

Intercambio Poetry Editor Daniel Borzutzky

Publisher MAKE Literary Productions, NFP

Intercambio Prose Editor Brenda Lozano

Executive Director Sarah Dodson

Translation Editor Kolin Jordan

Associate Director Joel Craig

Latin American Art Portfolio Editor Alejandro Almanza Pereda

Board of Directors Art Portfolio Editor

Bob Adams

Sarah Kramer

Natalie Edwards Héctor García Chávez

Reviews & Essays Editor

Laurie Sartain

Mark Molloy

Leonard Sommer Mike Zapata

Associate Editors Jordan Ecarma Kolin Jordan Katrina Sogaard Anderson

On the cover: Paul Nudd, Stuffed Bottom Feeders, 2019. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas. Photograph

by James Prinz. Courtesy of Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

MAKE: A Literary Magazine is indexed in Humanities International Complete. Writers and artists retain full rights of their material. All other contents copyright 2019 MAKE Literary Productions, NFP. Nothing may be reproduced or transmitted in any manner, in whole or in part, without permission.

Visit us at makelit.org to read more and to support MAKE Literary Productions by becoming a member.

ISSN# 15589315

4

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

From the Editors For this issue, Mad Science, we set out to create a space for works born of careful observation and unhindered curiosity about the natural world, these bodies we inhabit, and the technologies that rise in our wake. You will also find work that confronts our current reality by reimagining its limitations.

Our eighteenth issue is also our final in print. Since our first issue in 2005, we have been privileged to feature contributions from writers and artists selected by teams of thoughtful editors and set on the page by inspired graphic designers.

We are embracing the online platform and the opportunity it provides to share the work of fantastic contributors with a wider audience. But we love print too, of course. Future print projects will include compilations of work published online, as well as new writing, translations, and visual art created for our Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art. As always, thank you for reading.

55

MAKE Literary Magazine

Nonfiction Suzanne Scanlon: Then You Will Never Be Happy J.B. KuzmanchuK: J.B. Kuzmanchuk Was Here.

Cajetan Sorich: Blushes in Her Clutch Kyle Minor: Notes on Harm Reduction Anthony Michael Morena: The Dinosaurs Nisha Coleman: After Dark Nicole Walker and David Carlin: A Short Report on Evolution Sara Wainscott: from The Star Cabins

14 36 62 68 69 72 75 119

Fiction Betty Martin: Second Run Christine Maul Rice: Composite Creatures Anne K. Yoder: Quality Assurance

08 100 124

Poetry Rosebud Ben-Oni: Poet Wrestling with the One Secret She’ll Never Tell Philip Good, Jennifer Karmin & Bernadette Mayer: Particle Physics’

Whirling Dervishes or God Mashup or Discovery of the Higgs

Jared Stanley: Green Hearts and Fire to You Olivia Cronk: from Chenille: Laboratory of Gloom Jacob Saenz: Episodes in Entomophobia, The Sea at Kelleys Island Rosebud Ben-Oni: Writing Love Poems to Alien Horses Cristina Correa: The Great Balanced Day Philip Sorenson: The Aphids

13 22 23 28 56 60 67 98

Intercambio Prose Liliana Colanzi: Animal Worlds

Translated from the Spanish by Martín Felipe Castagnet: The Servers

Translated from the Spanish by Giuseppe Caputo: The Age of Toys

Translated from the Spanish by

58 Julia Sanches of the Palace of Truth Frances Riddle

92 114

Kolin Jordan

6

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Intercambio Poetry Mariela Dreyfus: Post Coitum, I love that woman, Painting

Translated from the Spanish by Carmen Giménez Smith &

Zachary de los Dolores Elvira Hernández: from The Chilean Flag

Translated from the Spanish by Alec Schumacher Raquel Salas Rivera: La Independencia (de Puerto Rico)

Translated from the Spanish by Raquel Salas Rivera Legna Rodríguez Iglesias: from Título / Title

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen Lucía Estrada: from Katábasis / Katabasis

Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott

20

26 84 87 108

Interview Joel Craig: Opening and Re-Opening: A Conversation with Krista Franklin

40

Reviews & Essays Deborah Harris: Exhaustion: A History Kathryn Fleishman: Cells, Interlinked Margaret Kolb: Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline Matt Margini: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing Dr. John Murillo III: M Archive: After the End of the World Jeanette N. Tran: Arts and Sciences: Exploring the “Rough Magic” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

129 130 134 137 139 141

Art Portfolio 32 78

E LI T

A Z I NE AG

77

AK

ARY M ER

M

Sara Ludy: Imprints Ivan Puig: Fórmula Secreta

MAKE Literary Magazine

SECOND RUN SECOND RUN

Mad Science

By Betty Martin

The man wielding a Phillips head like Thor’s hammer was the

Another employee, Chico, rolled a sweeper over the in-

first to say what they were thinking: “We’re screwed.”

dustrial carpeting with the paisley swirls. It reminded him

“This baby ain’t gonna sing for its supper tonight,” he

of comet trails, some kind of inclination graph, or maybe

continued. His name was Lazzario, but his employees called

his little sister’s Spirograph. Chico was studying astronomy

him Laser, from behind his back, aiming their fingers, firing

at Robert Davis College. Chico, for Chico Marx, of the Marx

off fake lasers, stifling hyena laughter. Most of the time he

brothers. Like his namesake, his real name was Leonard.

didn’t mind. Today he did and Joe, one of his employees, the

Lazzario noticed Chico not moving, staring at the car-

one helping him, stopped doing it.

pet and not doing his job. Was nothing going to work tonight?

They stood on either side of the popcorn machine as if

“Chico! How’s the sweeping going?”

worshipping their god. What they were actually doing was

Chico jerked his head up. “Great, Boss!”

trying to figure out how to fix it. Tonight was the last night in a series Lazzario, the owner of The Shooting Star movie theater, had dubbed Noir Notables. In Spanish, Las Mejores Películas del Cine Negro. He suspected there weren’t enough

The Shooting Star was a second-run theater going on its third.

fans of the genre in the old neighborhood, but it was his the-

Lazzario had bought it foolishly, for love. As a boy, he spent

ater and therefore his choice. What he did know was, they

many afternoons here, alone and at the same time among a

liked the popcorn. It was the main draw. And now the ma-

series of perfect others—not the other moviegoers—the ones

chine wasn’t working.

up there, the flat ones who followed a script. Who spoke in

“It’s gonna take a lot of lettuce to get this dead hopper to

whipsmart sentences. The film stars of the 1940s and ’50s.

dance,” said Joe, talking in noir slang. He was trying to lighten

But in the two years he had owned the place, he hadn’t made

the load. It didn’t work.

a profit. Tickets were as cheap as he could make them, the

Lazzario handed Joe the Phillips head. “See if you can do

popcorn free, the movies? He was about twenty years too

something with it.”

late for the revival theater business in this town, and nobody

9

MAKE Literary Magazine

came for the movies. Nobody came for the movies at the sec-

pered something to him. “That is to say . . .” The little figure

ond-runs in this town unless they were porn. He wouldn’t

paused to stick two mitten-like hands behind his suspenders.

break the porn barrier. He’d rather sell the theater, have it

“Heard you had some problems with the machine, got you be-

turned into condos.

hind the eight ball, eh?”

The name on the popcorn machine’s metal inscription

“You the butter and egg man? The man called Laser? Like

was “The Diplomat.” Glyco Axcello Machine Manufactur-

the name,” said the other. Lazzario’s face went from confu-

ing Association (GAMMA for short) had named it. They had

sion, to anger, back to confusion in rapid succession, his eye-

also promised a lifetime guarantee, but Lazzario doubted it

brows and his eyes working comically in opposition.

was still in effect. The machine had already lived its lifetime.

There wasn’t enough lettuce in the world to get it running.

“Fancy facial trick you got going there,” said one of the tiny businessmen.

Chico ran the carpet sweeper closer to the counter where Lazzario and Joe toiled. “What’s wrong with it?” he said.

The other said, “Listen. Guess we better let the cat outta the box—bag, I mean. We’re businessmen from the Glyco

“If I knew that, I’d have fixed it a while ago,” Lazzario snapped. “Here, give me that,” he said to Joe, and Joe hand-

Axcello Machine Manufacturing Association.” When Lazzario still looked confused, he added, “You rang the alarm.”

ed back the screwdriver. Lazzario gave the machine a solid whack.

“Huh?” said Lazzario. This got the two representatives whispering again.

A whirring sounded and then a series of ticks that threat-

“Squawked the horn, gave us a jing-a-ling?” said one.

ened like a bomb. But the machine didn’t explode. The machine heated up. The kernel tray wheezed to life. Joe raised

“So we can fix this lousy piece of crap and get this clip joint up and running for ya?” said the other.

his hand for a high five that wasn’t returned.

Joe turned to Lazzario and said, “I think they’re here to

“I gotta put the reels together,” said Lazzario. As he

get the popcorn machine running again.”

turned to leave, The Diplomat made an ominous revving

“Listen to the kid. He’s got our number.”

sound, one it had never made before. “Keep an eye on it.”

Lazzario rubbed his forehead, blinked a few times. “I’ve

Lazzario was in the middle of splicing on the last reel

been sitting in the dark too much. It’s affected my brain and

when Chico knocked softly on the projector room door. “Uh,

now I’m seeing things,” he said. The two businessmen waited.

Boss?”

“Boss? It can’t hurt to let them try,” said Chico.

“What?”

“Another genius,” said one of the businessmen.

“Something’s come out of The Diplomat and it isn’t pop-

“Go ahead. Couldn’t make it any worse,” said Lazzario.

corn.”

To Joe and Chico he murmured, “Watch them.” He shuffled

Lazzario swore. He left the reels as is, their tails engaged in the sprocket pins but not yet taped together in the splicer.

back to the projection booth, shaking his head and muttering to himself about little green men.

He followed Chico back to the lobby.

Behind the counter, the two newcomers got to work.

At the service counter, Joe’s back faced them. They fol-

They took off their jackets, folded them carefully, and set them

lowed his arms, gesticulating as though he was in some sort

aside. They pulled out a carpet bag from somewhere, opened

of intense negotiation with The Diplomat.

it up and took out tubes, wires, connectors, a three-headed

“Uh, Lazzario’s here,” Chico announced, and Joe stepped aside to reveal two small, doll-like figures, pot-bellied, wear-

tool of some kind, gimcracks, and gewgaws. Joe and Chico gawked at the growing pile of equipment.

ing wide-lapel business suits with short, wide ties, a grin on each of their broad faces. Tiny hats of the type gangsters

“Listen, would one of you mugs get us some tiger milk?

This is some thirsty work here.”

wore in ’40s movies threatened to topple from their earless

“I think he means something to drink,” said Joe to Chico,

balloon-like heads. They stood on the back counter next to

who went over to the soda machine. He couldn’t decide what

The Diplomat, not quite as tall as the glassed-in housing. He

flavor, but then finally filled two paper cups with Mountain

didn’t know who they were, or what they were, come to think

Dew. He returned and handed the cups to the two business-

of it.

men who each drank a sip. Their big, round eyes got rounder.

“Greetings!” one of them said. The other quickly whis-

10

“Say! What is this stuff?” said one. “Love the color.”

Mad Science

“Soda. It’s called Mountain Dew,” said Chico. They looked impressed.

“Super deluxo, multifunctional, jet-propelled—” said the first one.

“All the way from the mountains, huh?” asked one of the

“Galaxy Pro 5000!” finished the second one. They raced

businessmen. After draining their cups, they rolled up their

around the machine turning on levers. Each time a lever acti-

sleeves and got to work with a will and much banging and

vated, the noise from the machine increased, like the revving

clanging. Parts slid off the counter and dropped to the floor

of an airplane about to take off. Elated, the two businessmen

as the two businessmen replaced them with new ones, all the

grabbed ahold of each other and danced. Chico, Joe, and Laz-

while gabbling to each other in a language Joe and Chico did

zario clamped their ears. The two businessmen didn’t, having

not understand. The scent of stale popcorn oil and machine

no ears to clamp. The sound became unendurable and then

grease filled the air as they worked.

a different noise, a horn, sounded. The new pipes and tubes

“Do you think they’re making progress?” whispered Joe.

moved, slowly at first and then frantically, winding up for the

“Dunno,” said Chico. “But The Diplomat sure is starting

pitch. As though from a canon, the tubes sent forth blasts of

to look different.”

popcorn, shooting it in every conceivable direction. The busi-

More clanging and banging ensued, punctuated with oc-

nessmen ran around it, hopping up and down for joy.

casional yips as one businessman got frustrated and popped

“Stop!” Lazzario shouted and then again, “Stop!” his

the other with the three-headed tool. A few more adjustments

lungs exploding to be heard above the noise of the Galaxy Pro

to the popcorn machine and they announced, “Ta-diddle-de-

5000. His face was a dark red boil. He lunged to grab ahold of

da! We’re finished!”

the two businessmen, who squeaked, avoiding his grasp. They

They stood back, letting Joe and Chico have a look. The

hurriedly cranked down levers trying to do what he asked.

popcorn machine had gotten significantly bigger. Gears of all

But there was no stopping the machine. It had a full load of

sizes decorated the glass housing and levers stuck out of it

kernels in its pancake beret and it was going to pop them all

like porcupine quills. An enormous receptacle for filling the

and send them flying into the stratosphere. Joe pulled out

cooking pan with unpopped kernels perched on top of it like a

buckets, trying to save whatever he could before it fell to the

pancake beret. It was exotic, elaborate, shiny, and impressive.

floor. Chico ran to get the carpet sweeper.

But would it work?

When it had expelled its last kernel, the Galaxy Pro 5000

“I’m not sure about this,” said Joe.

sighed. The lobby was ankle deep in golden puffs. Joe and Chi-

“Just you wait until we fire up this baby!” said a busi-

co were both sweeping now but making little headway. Laz-

nessman.

zario glared at the two businessmen, who held their little hats

“Hold on. I’ll go get Laser,” said Chico.

in their hands, their green skin fading to a citrine yellow. One

“Pow, pow, pow!” said the two businessmen together,

of them pulled out a piece of paper from behind its back and,

making guns of their mitten-like hands and emitting a tin-

with his head hung low, presented it to Lazzario.

kling sound, maybe laughter, from somewhere within.

“What’s this?” said Lazzario.

When Chico returned with Lazzario and Lazzario saw what the businessmen had done to his popcorn machine, his

“It’s a satisfaction survey for the big cheese. Can’t leave without it. GAMMA insists.”

expression changed once more. The businessmen grinned,

“Well, I’m sure not satisfied,” said Lazzario. The busi-

misinterpreting the look on Lazzario’s face as one of grati-

nessmen began to cry, big galumphing hiccups and amber-col-

fication instead of what it was. “Wh—what have you done to

ored tears. The tops of their suits dampened with them. They

her?” he said.

held each other, shoulders shaking, voices wailing, the cries of

“Nothing more nor less than a complete conversion!” said the two in tandem.

the condemned. Lazzario’s anger softened. “It’s not that bad, is it? I mean, what? You’ll just get a demotion or something,

They did a little soft-shoe holding hands, then parted,

right? Even if you do get fired, it’s not the end of the world,

their arms positioned as though they were introducing a mov-

is it? Maybe you could find something you’re more suited

ie star.

for.” He looked at the paper again. It had two check boxes to

“Say hello to the new—” said one.

choose from, one labeled “Excellent,” the other “Electrocu-

“And improved—” said the other.

tion.” That was all.

11

MAKE Literary Magazine

“I guess the jig’s up,” one of the businessmen croaked.

they talked, Lazzario felt certain things. First, that whoever

“The dance is over,” said the other businessman. “Better

these two really were, they were just trying to help. Second,

put the bracelets on us.” They both held their arms out as if an

even if it was going to be the last showing, his life would go

imaginary copper was going to put them in handcuffs.

on. And third, and most important, the movies would go on,

“Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that if I’m not happy

no matter what happened to The Shooting Star.

with the job you do, the company kills you?” said Lazzario.

Chico appeared with buckets of popcorn and a cardboard

Chico and Joe had stopped sweeping up popcorn. The ques-

holder with cups of Mountain Dew for everyone. He handed

tion was appalling.

them out and sat down.

“That’s even harsher than you, Boss,” said Joe.

Joe stuck his head out of the projection booth. “Ready for

“They are kinda cute,” said Chico. “They remind me of

the movie, Boss?”

one of my little sister’s Furbies.” The businessmen began to mug, their eyes opened wide, lips pleading, hands kneading

Lazzario formed his hand into a laser gun and made noises. “Roger, Wilco. Ready when you are.”

their hats into lumps. Winsome, lovable, squeezable, but no one did.

Joe ran the movie. Wouldn’t you know it? It was everyone’s favorite, each having seen it over a dozen times, even

Lazzario gave out a strangled noise. “The movie’s show-

the businessmen, so they said, on screens implanted in their

ing is in half an hour! No way are we going to get this place

forearms. Yet, from the start, it was as though they were see-

cleaned up in time. And we still don’t even have a working

ing it for the first time. They held their breath watching the

popcorn machine.”

man and the woman try to recapture a doomed love. They

“But we do have popcorn,” said Chico.

laughed at the pencil-mustached official and his bogus shock

“And the movie’s one of your favorites,” said Joe. “Be a

to discover gambling at the club. They booed the Nazis and

shame not to run it.”

cheered the French national anthem. And at the end, they all

All this was true. Lazzario had gotten it especially for this one last showing at The Shooting Star. He could no longer

said it together: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

afford to pay the mortgage on the place and it was going to be sold and probably razed to the ground to make room for those condos. He couldn’t bear the thought that the place was going to be just a memory and so he hadn’t told his employees. He couldn’t bear his having failed to rescue the flat ones. That was why he had been so angry with the popcorn machine that he had banged it.

Lazzario evaluated the two figures before him. Then he decided. “You, Chico, make a sign and hang it on the door.

Joe, you finish getting the film patched together. You two,” he pointed to the businessmen, “come with me.”

Lazzario sat the two businessmen down on booster seats in the center of the theater. They swung their feet, skimming the velvet on the seat cushions. He went to the men’s room and returned with hand towels for them to dry the rest of their tears, their big polka-dotted hankies too sopping wet to complete the job. When they finished mopping up, he sat down next to them and they had a long talk about conditions at GAMMA. Turns out at GAMMA, the words “you’re fired” meant exactly that, with the employee in question hustled immediately to stand before a firing squad. It was the main method of ensuring attrition in that overpopulated galaxy. As

12

Mad Science

Poet Wrestling with the One Secret She’ll Never Tell

By Rosebud Ben-Oni

& when I do maybe with a wing

{splat}

on the windshield

little enjambed

full of arrows

& xo

o little cyclone

lightning bolts

won’t recharge such

bittered lips & embalmed hearts

em-

no{no}no

I won’t check for rot in the rear view I won’t

xo

how sorry I am what I refuse kills & switches & exudes vacantly

& blue

those slippery such hol{iness}

such mysteries careen & twist out of me

truths

& thirsty

can only covet she

eventually sends for her hitmen

& I won’t I won’t throw handprint against mercy let go its mist exit &

xo

& tomorrow

see-throughs you can’t let be

the glass

& this was it all for

no more

than a handful

of hours you no longer recognize the rust from the wreck this last skunned fitful & wet

togetherness & when I do maybe I’ll sing not a single x

to see where & when

o though almost my

sweetest friend from what’s left o o o last scorched & fallen {x} who surely never wept

13

but an early

xo

MAKE Literary Magazine

THEN YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY (A STEP STORY)

By Suzanne Scanlon

Does anyone ever get over anything? I remember driving

collapsed, emotionally speaking—unable to live, to proceed,

around with my stepmom, looking for an apartment, when

to “get on her own two feet.” She did not want this daughter

she asked me about my brother. Why hadn’t he finished his

to occupy her husband’s energy and worry and stress and

PhD? What’s his problem? she asked. Maybe he’s like me, I

concern.

said. Maybe he’s grief-struck, failing to thrive.

“You know,” she told me, back in the car. “Sometimes

Sure our mom had been dead almost twenty years by

you just have to move on. There is a time to move on.”

then, but it wasn’t until I was a grown-up that I actually felt

Because I couldn’t move on, and because our newly

it, felt the loss of her. I still feel it.

chaotic, overfull house was nothing if not an exercise in

My stepmom did not like this idea. She said, “You kids!

denial, it took me some time to really fall apart—years later,

You know, for years you were crying to your dad. Someone

after I’d left home and was in New York City living on my

was always sad about it.”

own. After a suicide attempt, I was hospitalized. It was a

I did know. In the middle of the night, one or the other

short stint over spring break that turned into a years-long

of us would wake, call out in tears for our dad. “I miss Mom!”

descent into madness.

we would wail, as if she’d just died, which is what it felt like.

That sounds dramatic, but that’s what it was. I was

Meanwhile Dad remarried, had a new baby. My

a mental patient. Certifiable. For a very long time. And

stepmom wanted to move on. She’d been divorced, this

because it was a medical institution, I received treatment

marriage was her do-over. She didn’t necessarily want

then considered scientifically valid.

the four traumatized kids who came along with her new

Maybe that’s how I became a writer. Maybe writing is

husband, but there we were. She didn’t want children who

what you do when you can’t move on.

would uneasily transition to adult life, dependent on their father for years, well beyond college graduation. She didn’t want a stepdaughter who moved to New York City and then

14

Mad Science

Part of the treatment involved monthly family therapy

a young woman dreaming of love and passion and my own

sessions, led by a woman named Karen Goldberg. It was 1992.

happily-ever-afters, I recognize the same yearning in my

Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States. In

own letters; I marvel at the way desire might be transmuted

December, Prince Charles and Princess Diana separate. A

through hand to pen to paper.

royal separation, it is called. The first time my stepmom came to the institution for family therapy, my stepmom wears blue chiffon: shoulder pads, a cinched waist, and an A-line skirt that reminds me of Princess Diana. My littlest sister, C,

Last summer, staying in Harlem, I decide to walk uptown, to

the baby, is dragged along to these sessions, made to sit in

see if I could get the records of those years I spent inpatient.

the waiting area. C admires Karen Goldberg’s style; this is

It’s not as easy as you’d expect; the building is no longer the

Manhattan, after all.

building where I lived; the psych units are in a beautiful new

Back in Aurora, Illinois, C and a friend play a game they

building facing the Hudson more completely and grandly;

call “Family Therapy”: “I’m Karen,” she tells her playmate,

my program has been cut altogether.

who is instructed to be the mental patient.

“There is no such thing as long-term therapy now,” the

Later I’ll read that Princess Diana was diagnosed

woman who works in records at the New York Psychiatric

with Borderline Personality Disorder. What this means, I

Institute tells me.

won’t be sure, but I know it has something to do with her

There is no such thing as long-term therapy now.

bulimia, manifest around the time of her marriage to Charles.

I can’t help but wonder how my life might have been

Before the marriage, there was public discussion of Diana’s

otherwise, had there been no such thing way back in 1992.

virginity—a requirement for marriage to a prince; Diana’s

Not that it makes a difference—and I feel not a little bit

uncle assures the public of his niece’s purity.

ridiculous reflecting with ambivalence on the psychiatric

I was thinking of getting over it when I saw highlights

care I received for many years, paid for by the State of New

from the latest royal wedding of Prince Harry, who, not long

York, at a public, taxpayer-funded hospital. Since that time,

ago, revealed that he never got over his own mother’s sudden

New York, one of the most generous states in terms of public

death.

mental health care aid, has lost clinics and beds. This year in Chicago, where I live, five public mental health clinics will close. Over the past decade, the number of available beds in psychiatric hospitals has declined by 25 percent; a for-profit

Not long after my mom’s death, and just before my dad’s

company is building a new psychiatric center in the suburbs,

second marriage, we went to Alaska. It isn’t like now; Dad

hoping to make up for the limited public funding for mental

couldn’t text or email his girlfriend, our future stepmom;

health care outside of prison. “America’s Largest Mental

maybe they spoke by phone, once or twice. Our trip to Juneau,

Hospital is a Jail” reads a headline in The Atlantic not long

just the five of us now—Mom’s ghost, too—was pilgrimage or

ago, a study of Chicago’s Cook County Jail.

preservation. If you keep walking, keep moving, everything will be okay. My future stepmom packed a stack of letters for Dad inside his suitcase; she instructed him to open one each day.

I see one or another of the cards, displays of romantic love I

For a while it was just Dad visiting the psych ward. My stepmom

hadn’t seen before, not in real life.

objected, complaining to relatives that Dad had relinquished

Dad’s girlfriend set her alarm not to miss the royal

his family in Aurora for his dramatic, impossible daughter in

wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Dad tells

New York City.

me. She loves weddings. I examine a card, not meant for

Sometimes we went to the theater, Dad and I: Four Baboons

me: girlish curlicue cursive, doodles and smiley faces,

Adoring the Sun, John Guare’s latest at the Vivian Beaumont,

embarrassing references to Neil Diamond songs. Her

titled after an Egyptian sculpture, a critical flop, starring

handwriting is the sort I associate with being grown-up;

Stockard Channing. Four Baboons was a play about the failures

later I see, it’s the handwriting of a teenage girl. Later still,

of what in seventies parlance was termed blended families.

15

MAKE Literary Magazine

“Yours, mine, and ours!” my stepmom would say to

However unhappy she was to be our stepmother,

strangers, explaining our overly large family, a lilt to her

however clashing our personalities and conflict-filled our

voice, a public performance—something she turned on or off.

lives (the fitting name of the street where we lived)—it

Before I could say so, I saw something desperate or hysterical

would be funny but not fair to call my stepmom “just a cunt.”

in her gushing: this need to believe in happily-ever-afters. The

After all, who was it two years ago here at my apartment

thought that saying it would make it true.

helping me move and unpack and set up my new place after

And in a way, it did. As Flaubert wrote of Madame Bovary,

my divorce. It would be easier to say I had a good (dead)

in her obsessive need to perform the role of lover and beloved:

mother and a bad (step) mother but life is never so simple,

Language is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions.

so easily divided.

But I grew to despise my stepmom’s effusions. I wondered if

It must have been the very end of my stay in the ward

she, unlike me, contained what might be an authentic self. I

when my doctor told me something that was meant to help

knew how to gush, to perform. I liked the theater. Beneath

me move on. She didn’t say, like Fleabag, “She’s not an evil

it all, I longed for something solid. In that way, M and I were

stepmother, she’s just a cunt.” But she did say this much:

more kindred than I’d prefer to admit.

She has never wanted the best for you. Sometimes that’s all

Years later she would tell me that, though she had a

we need to know—you’re not crazy, you’re not Cinderella,

mother, she too had never felt seen. The third child, the middle

but you’ve grown up with someone who resented you, who

child: she always seemed to be longing for another life. It is

envied you, even. Or worse: didn’t want the best for you.

the greatest gift we can give each other, to listen to each other.

It is a way of saying, You are real.

In August 1996, Diana and Charles officially divorced. A year later, August 31, 1997, Diana, 36 years old, died at PitiéIt’s May 1993 and I’ve been living in a mental hospital for

Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, France, from injuries sustained

over a year. Dad visits, takes me out on pass to attend Tony

in an automobile accident. Her children, the Princes William

Kushner’s Angels in America at the Walter Kerr Theatre in

and Harry, were 15 and 12 years old.

New York City. Maybe one way to measure a parent’s love is the extent to which he renounces his own interests. I doubt my father would have voluntarily entered a theater, Broadway or not, were I not performing or attending. And

Or maybe what I mean is this: when a parent offers a child the

yet he did and had, over and over again. There we were

arts, the gift of theater or literature or music, I wonder how

in the second row at a performance of Tony Kushner’s

often the parent acknowledges that he is offering her, too, a

masterpiece; there we were watching something I’d never

way out—a way beyond, through, over the world they inhabit.

seen or even really knew existed in life, let alone on stage:

I wonder, too, how often the parent hopes—I think he must—

casual strangers meeting and violently, aggressively

that the child will become an acceptable artist (as if there were

fucking in Central Park. Sex as self-destruction. Desire

such a thing)—neither transgressive nor transcendent.

linked to annihilation. In the play, the character Louis

Perhaps this was what Susan Sontag had in mind when

seeks out a stranger in an act of self-debasing punishment,

she wrote of Simone Weil, of our attraction to the writer and

his aim to ignore the fact of his partner’s illness, a

yet our certainty that we would not wish the fate for our own

partner, dying of AIDS, whom he will abandon, betray. It

child? We look to Weil for an undeniable truth, she wrote. Within

wasn’t real, of course, but it was—in that way of the best

Weil’s abdication, there is something vital—a madness with

theater moments, it was more than real. Surely the most

validity—and, though she would not choose that truth,

transgressive moment I’d ever witnessed on a stage. Sitting

though no one would choose such a life for her child, we do

there next to my dad. We don’t talk about it, the scene, or

recognize it as Truth; we need her voice.

the play very much. But he did that for me. He took me to the theater. To that play.

16

Mad Science

Observing his young daughter, a friend confides, “She

game. He was so impressed by my stepmom’s imagination,

has already learned how to manipulate people, to get

her confidently judgmental worldview. I guess that

them to like her, to be pleasing, to get attention.” I have

for someone so confounded by his own interiority, her

never heard it phrased this way before, from the view of

assurance was comforting. It’s nice to be with someone who

a psychologically astute, loving father—one so aware of

knows everything, a friend said not long ago, about someone

this complicated asset of femininity. Because of my years

we’d just met. Even if that person is entirely misguided?

spent in the care of the mental health system, I’m sensitive

I wondered. My stepmom’s judgments masked a deep

to the ways young women are taught to garner power

unhappiness. Her playfulness charmed me, too; but only in

through flirtation, pleasing moments, and yet, how they

those first months. By the time they married and we lived

are pathologized for using that power to any advantage. I

together—nine of us under one roof—these moments came

have only ever heard a woman or girl called manipulative

to unnerve me, as they were juxtaposed with moments

as insult, or notation of damage. I recall that within the

of darkness and despair—moments when life seemed

construction of diagnosis and mental health treatment,

withdrawn from her; the buoyant air released like helium.

manipulative is a key indicator of damage. We were told

In those regular but unpredictable moments, no one could

that many doctors didn’t want to work with us for this

do a thing to engage her. It was here that she became

very reason: we were difficult. A year after my discharge, I

terrifying to me, a girl looking for a model of who I might

saw a doctor on the Upper West Side. One day, he told me

become. I could not speak to her—I was too afraid—and so

how his office mate remarked upon the steady stream of

I learned to speak through my siblings—my stepsister (her

pretty, difficult women he saw as patients: “Yes,” I asked,

daughter) most of all. If this was manipulation, it was the

“so what?” “He told me that he feels sorry for me.” Dr. Y

primary dynamic of our particular familial dysfunction.

explained, with a guilty smile.

“There’s no such thing as a sick person,” Dr. Lyle, the

head psychiatrist of the ward would assure us, “It’s always a sick family.”

This comforted me and my fellow inmates, but only to

Before Princess Diana dies there, Pitié-Salpêtrière

a point: we were the ones locked up, after all. We were the

Hospital was most famous for its treatment of hysteria

ones unable to live.

among mostly disenfranchised Parisian women of the

Perhaps all that separates the mentally ill from the

1700s. Under Louis XIV, the former gunpowder factory was

sane is this: the ability to adapt, to adjust, to move forward

turned into an asylum that operated more like a prison,

with Fitzgerald’s notion in mind, able to put it, “hold two

where female outcasts could be shut away from existence.

opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain

With no promises of recovery or freedom, the unfortunate

the ability to function.”

“patients” usually finished out their natural lives there, “for their own good.”

The second time my stepmom comes to the ward for family therapy, we meet without my dad. In front of our therapist, When they were first dating, my stepmom taught my father

she asks me,

a game. Sometimes we were allowed to join. I call it a game

“Don’t you know that I love you?”

but it was more of an activity when out to dinner, for

What could I say? Was it possible to be loved and

example. It involved selecting a person in the restaurant—

totally unknown? Someone could love you, and you could

any random diner or couple or group would do—and

know, too, that a part of her did not love you—a part she

then, quietly, imaginatively, making up a story about the

herself couldn’t acknowledge. That language allowed for

couple. It was often unkind, the biography she’d project

this distance, this lack—encouraged it, even. Language

onto the couple: “Oh, it’s a first date! She’s looking for a

is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions. Or

sugar daddy! Look how she’s done up!” My father loved the

disguised the emotions.

17

MAKE Literary Magazine

How historically situated our sense of disorder: in those years, being vegan was bizarre; now New York City, like most The third time we meet in therapy, Karen asks if I felt that my dad

urban centers, is full of vegetarian restaurants.

had neglected me since his marriage. I do not remember what I

O, my stepmom’s youngest daughter, was the other

said in reply, but I do remember my stepmom interrupting this

designated patient in our family. On this visit, she was in

conversation to challenge the therapist,

college studying to be a teacher. She was often involved with

“He may be married to me, but she has his heart!”

men who were lost, needy. Losers, according to our family’s

Twenty years later, a mother myself and nearly the age

gossip.

of my stepmom in that moment, I cringe at the memory: this

At Tavern on the Green that night, my stepsister

language of possession, of competition, used in reference to

happened to declare, with much confidence and some joy,

the relationship between a girl and her father. At the time, my

“I know that I’m going to marry a teacher, I always date

stepmom’s performance in family therapy marked my life’s

teachers.”

bathetic resemblance to a Lifetime movie—now, it strikes me

My stepmom, unable to repress her rage, looked at her

as a clear indication that, at the very least, my stepmom, who I

daughter, shook her head, and declared,

have come to appreciate and even love—my stepmom, who is a

“Then you will NEVER be happy!”

generous and loving grandparent to my son—should not have been my caretaker during these most formative years.

My dad laughed, embarrassed. My stepmom’s first husband was a high school teacher. Her second husband, my father, a doctor. She read her early life as a mistake; this second marriage, the new family, was meant to be her happily-ever-after, a do-over.

I nurtured two projects in those years of institutionalization:

The moment, of course, revealed something of her

first, the project of understanding myself, of mourning my

regret, the lesson of her own lived trajectory. Her identifi-

losses and becoming an artist; second, the project of becoming

cation with her daughters. Also, stultifying assumptions,

ill, sick, a mental patient. While the former still fills me with

which I internalized even as I told myself she’d taught me

gratitude and strength, the pervasive, insidious, and unarticu-

nothing: namely, that one must be dependent on a husband;

lated nature of the latter is marked by shame.

that valuable work would not bring happiness or satisfac-

But were there other ways to heal? To become who I was

tion; that life was about making money and serving others.

meant to be? I didn’t know any. Even then I knew that if I

She had moved up in the world; she had achieved a

could write, if I could become a writer, I would be free. That

certain dream, found what she wanted. My stepmother’s

was true asylum.

resentment or jealousy or inability to care for me, if unconscious, was structural in nature—in the way that a woman in her forties might reflexively despise a twenty-one-year-old woman. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be overcome; I know

One Christmas, my family visits New York City and we all go

many women and men who are wonderful stepparents. Also

out to dinner to Tavern on the Green. I get a day pass to leave

structural and cultural and instinctive was my inability

hospital grounds. As an adult, I see the restaurant as tacky;

to trust her: the way a child must distrust a woman who

it seems fitting that, with the cluelessness of Midwesterners,

is not her mother and yet one who has taken her mother’s

we dine there.

place. Particularly when so little time has passed. Within

If you remember New York City of the early 1990s, you

three years, my mom died; my stepmom entered my life; we

might believe that it wasn’t easy to be a vegetarian; I was

moved; my stepmom had a baby; we were a family of nine.

served a plate of bland, steamed vegetables.

Any contemporary book on remarriage and stepfamilies

One of the few remarkable notes in the charts I proffered

would advise against such a swift transition; yet, this was

that day is a nurse’s note referring to “patient’s bizarre eating

how it happened. It wasn’t done with our interests first. I

habits”; I realize that I didn’t merely feel judged by the hospital

recall the day my future stepmom came over with her guitar

staff, doctors, and nurses, I was, in fact, being judged (seen).

and blue eye shadow; how my sister and I met her, how she

18

Mad Science

hugged me, popping a blister that formed on my shoulder,

She didn’t know how to tell me that my rhetoric was too

the result of a sunburn. I let her hug me; I didn’t even cry.

casual for the formality she expected. I didn’t understand

Or flinch. This was the template for the relationship; the

this early (and perhaps only) writing lesson she offered.

more alienated, the more afraid I felt of my father’s wife,

Instead, she wrote her own version of my thank-you card,

the further inward I turned. It became impossible to ex-

letting me sign it.

press my pain directly. I recall my older brothers that very

Thank you very much for helping me.

same day walking into the family room; they’d been out with friends. They saw this person, this new mother figure, and they walked right by her. My dad said something, tried to make introductions; they refused. It was beautiful, I realize

It’s odd what you remember, my beloved Aunt reflected

now. Powerful. A gesture I needed to make, but it would take

not long ago, at the end of her life. I don’t know why this

years—and institutionalization—and near self-destruc-

memory stayed with me, but I do imagine it had to do with

tion—to find the gesture, the mode of refusal.

my sensitivity, my sense of being criticized not only for my words but for my existence. Perhaps it was because I was a writer, even then, and trying to find my way out of a certain prison—language, discourse, words on the page would be

Not long ago, in an otherwise casual conversation, my

my toolkit.

stepmom bemoaned that ski trip, an activity she has never again attempted. In my presence, she complained to my

Thanks a whole lot.

dad that she was left on the mountain by her instructor.

It is 35 years ago now. “Suzy was in the hospital!” my dad blurted out. It hadn’t occurred to me to expect her to remember that, to imagine my experience of that trip. But for a moment, hearing Dad react, I am reminded of those years, our triangulated dynamic, Faulkner’s line: The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.

I remember the ski trip, being in a cast, and after dinner one night, how a very kind man carried me back to our lodge, up the many stairs to our rented townhome. The next day, stuck in the rental apartment with my new stepmom and her new baby, she suggested I write the man a thank-you card.

So I did. I wrote: Dear Mr. Jimmy, Thanks a whole lot for helping me last night!

My stepmom looked at my card, which I’d left on the table. She made a face like she’d eaten something sour, familiar to me by then. She had a judgmental Catholic’s sense of propriety, an assurance that there was a way things should be done. She spent much of her time focused on how someone (one of us) was doing it wrong. “It’s so easy to disappoint her,” my once-husband made this apt assessment of her, after we’d all traveled together.

She picked up another, blank card. She explained, “Suzy, you don’t write Thanks a whole lot in a thank-you card.”

19

MAKE Literary Magazine

Three Poems

By Mariela Dreyfus Translated from the Spanish by Carmen Giménez Smith and Zachary de los Dolores

POST COITUM Descender las escaleras del hotel y que las cosas vuelvan a su antiguo espesor.

Este placer ya ha sido pagado: todo es dinero todo se vuelve papel moneda el goce es dejado sobre sábanas prestadas.

POST-COITUM To descend the hotel’s stairs and let things return to their former density.

This pleasure has already been paid for: All is money it all becomes a bill the pleasure is abandoned on borrowed sheets.

Frente al espejo de la entrada aliso mis cabellos / acomodo mis senos al lado de mi muchacho tímido como siempre en el primer abrazo.

In front of the lobby´s mirror I smooth my hair / adjust my breasts next to my guy timid as always in his first embrace.

El regreso a casa es solitario y debo esconder mis pasos, el olor que sorprenda a mi madre mil veces violada y todavía virgen.

(Memorias de Electra, 1984)

The return home is lonely and I must cover my tracks, the smell that surprises my mother violated a thousand times and still a virgin.

AMO A ESA MUJER que recorre a saltitos los pasillos con su blanca lucidez de muslos asexuados.

Amo su inconstancia al elegir pareja y sobre todo esa dulce insolencia (traducida en desear a otra mujer) que sus apetecibles faldas de aeromoza ocultan en los días.

A la hora violeta cuando una motocicleta la devuelve ojerosa y con el casco o un libro de poemas bajo el brazo yo espero nuevamente sus saltitos para verla dudar hacer apuntes y soñar la fusión con el idioma que viejas enseñanzas languidecen.

I LOVE THAT WOMAN who skips down the halls with the white lucidness of her asexual thighs.

I love her fickleness to choose a partner and especially that sweet boldness (translated in desiring another woman) that her sexy flight attendant skirts hide during the day.

At the violet hour when a motorcycle brings her back raccoon-eyed with a helmet and a book of poetry under her arm I wait for her skipping again to see her doubt take notes and to dream of that fusion with the language where the old lessons languish.

(Memorias de Electra, 1984)

20

Mad Science

CUADRO

PAINTING

Así, como en los desnudos de almanaque la misma posición apasionada soy un remedo de película moderna, hasta podría hasta podría desnudarme en un teatro -que salga ya, lo que llevo aquí dentro-.

Just like a calendar’s nudes, the same passionate position, I’m a replica of modern films, I could even I could even strip in the theater -come out already, what I carry inside-.

Entre la luz mortecina, las persianas algo debo buscar si accedo a contornearme parada ante el espejo de perfil y despeinada: espérate flaquito, o mejor, no te demores ¿es ese diálogo un diálogo de amor? ¿es esta escena algo que después recordaremos?

Amid the dim light and the blinds I might search for something if I follow my curves standing sideways and tousled before the mirror: “Wait for me, lover, or better yet, hurry up” Is this dialogue a dialogue of love?

Is this scene something we’ll remember?

La ropa íntima en el piso es desorden, yo todavía cuido la limpieza de los genitales nuestro olor, algo que nos defienda cuando es hora de apurarse en esta complacencia la habitación no es mía, ¿entiendes? eso cambia las cosas al vestirnos otra vez ante el espejo para que tú te sientes a fumar un cigarro.

The underwear on the floor is disorder, I still care for clean genitals our smell, something that guards us when it is time for us to rush from this satisfaction the room isn’t mine, get it? that changes things as we get dressed again in front of the mirror so you can sit and smoke a cigarette.

(Memorias de Electra, 1984)

21

MAKE Literary Magazine

Particle Physics’ Whirling Dervishes or God Mashup or Discovery of the Higgs

By Philip Good, Jennifer Karmin & Bernadette Mayer the higgs boson particle is a little thing in physics anywhere there is space there is a field what if the boson particle was never named that proves how particles acquire mass, we’ve been looking same place same quantum state higgs has a memory broken into hypothetical fermions for it for a long time, it & its mass; we found it in 2012 the difference between a barracuda and a large man swimming his role in the universe is guaranteed anywhere there is space there is a field spontaneous radioactive decay no need to smash atoms, einstein used a chalkboard it’s part of the compact muon solenoid experiment or subatomic punctuation building blocks like syllables in language create words to find this out, now we know why everything holds together an invisible field has no religious meaning techniques limitless as quantum physics for reasons way beyond the understanding of you & me not god, just god damn big bang, the universe whiz kid finds mass because there’s always something smaller than what omnipresent non-zero empty space would be happier without the god nickname you thought was the smallest element of that thing a symmetry breaking machine with no substance as substance without examples is still substance in fact, there is no such thing as a thing no limit no number occupying the quantum state what if proof of the find does affect humans it’s more like what you thought you saw on lsd turn it off and the universe evaporates higgs and his goddamn theory no ideas but in things that don’t really exist your bird swallowed its cage just one more step to more theories

22

Mad Science

Green Hearts and Fire to You

By Jared Stanley Joanne Kyger, 1934–2017

Oaks poke the mist rocks lip the water so what’s the point? that we’re the adults now?

Now we’re the people whose actions are sometimes questions?

Now we have to stop asking every goddam tree whether it’s our mother or not?

Things like to interfinger. I get it.

I get it. Every war is touch “at the time of our choosing.” I get it.

But you You and

gunmen, the ground under will grind you up. Why kill? need to rub on each other then take a nap.

There was birdsong in the Mesozoic and there will be annoying robins tomorrow; falcons snap the necks of ducks.

A low red light weighs on a mountain across the river and not even ‘what is above’ knows ‘what is above.’

Whims, possibility in love.

Where you been, JK? Hovering?

There’s a lovely cup in the house of an old friend who knows me well placed on her big green table by an arm extending from a cloud.

It came at me through the sunroof.

Typical light. Typical moss.

I sip at your death (I mean book) and there’s a nauseous feeling in my earbuds so I try drinking water instead.

“Lay my purple on the grass” sings ANONHI neé who-

really-cares-about-birth-names-anymore.

“You,” as “letters” fill my cup.

Did the arm come from a moon.

How it pulled at my tides.

Joanne Elizabeth.

Hokusai changed his name each time he changed his style.

You changed your style but kept your name and gave it to that book Joanne, and then there was that other book, The Distressed Look, a joke about jeans and George Bush.

ANONHI, whose new album B told me about a few days before in Philadelphia, has made anguish at the polyvalent death of our kind of world an interfingered Now you can feel whale is made to by a tinny arrow

reality in sound. how a radar-mad vibrate, driven to a beach of naval bullshit.

“Crammed people land.”

Horror vacui.

Aren’t submarines sad?

It’s sad a thing exists which can’t trust its ability.

A refrigerator can sing along with Maria Muldaur in a monolithic and inevitable way.

At least it never knows itself At least it never teaches children.

I had this uncle who stabbed people for the USA.

23

MAKE Literary Magazine

Sonic warfare is see-through and cruel. This world, its no.

Your book’s the right size to block out their sun.

It suffered. I’m in a valley on the other side of the continent reading from your little book of Oaxaca, a gift from C. He crossed out the word God on the cover, so now it reads ‘Joanne Kyger Never Dies’ … “an existential

B has a guest room full of your broadsides.

I took a nap and then

we walked calmly

crash / of alarming proportions.”

Reading this makes me nervous and iridescent; ruby-throated, silent except for odd little chirps:

through Philadelphia.

A Man’s Image

has moved to

1841 Passyunk Ave.

such an affectation, being a person.

Maybe that’s where you started being poems … which, yes, can be touched but it’s not quite skin, is it?

So that’s when California tumbled into the sea!

I can’t remember which war we’re in—is this one about real estate

Two tears well up.

In emails you referred to ‘yourself’ in single quotes: “Yes, of course I remember

in this world or another one?

I’m pierced when I doubt.

Which internal organ is this I feel?

[which ancestral organ] a tickling finger from a cloud,

your book MADE OF FOREST. And your poem dedicated to ‘me’ identifying yourself as a ‘materialist raccoon.’”

There was an apple tree and a crystal under Tamalpais.

We took turns reading from Allen’s last book: “Chopping apples for the fruit compote— suffer, suffer, suffer suffer” just as Donald, at the other end of the table, halved

war, war, war, war, in the house of an old friend.

A passerby’s slacks cup gray light in their drape: a curiosity in the blood you called it ~

a living mirror of the dead at play.

As when you were alive, the water feels private so I steal it for my cup.

Did it hurt? I hope not.

one from the tree. We laughed.

24

Mad Science

Hokusai was adopted by professional mirror-makers.

I touch wet pebbles and curse listlessly.

You spilled your purple on the grass.

It’s hard to find a war that cares how “all-in it” our contempt for it makes us.

These wars seem to last about a week “so the world will know” how little attention is required but then what do I know?

Summer’s average vultures.

Curiosity in the water Curiosity in the blood a serious and stylish person in your self-possession and depression, when “the power of belief” was from you, I cupped it and swallowed like usual.

As for my overbearing interest, what could it look like to them, the them we dream about the them we insert in the dream?

So here is my fascination, which retains its ill-advised, quail-like specificity; it’s only my open play, a dare of greeting: the deer eat tender shoots and glance over their shoulders: Your nose looks dry. You have wary eyes.

Some fur rubbed off on a tree.

April 2017

25

MAKE Literary Magazine

from The Chilean Flag

By Elvira Hernández Translated from the Spanish by Alec Schumacher

The Chilean Flag with the eye that it has growing like a star atheist cyclops eying up and down the edge of changes fears they may change her name The Chilean Flag

***

48 hours is the day of the Chilean Flag the salutes of hundreds of salvos the discourses of fifty sheets of paper the processions of two or three regiments the ribbons the standards the banners ad infinitum at the speed of light the toasts and honors

The Chilean Flag knows that its day is the day of judgment

***

Once again the Chilean Flag brandishing daily eczemas brings to the table small crumbs leftovers the small slivers arrive from poorly slicing thin bread to the underside of the Chilean Flag thousands of parts of an already shaving of sawdust once again the saliva clogged with saliva the Chilean Flag again the mouth spits the formless vomitous chacarilla1 even though it costs her teeth

1 “El Acto de Chacarillas”: This was a discourse given on July 9, 1977, at a hill named Chacarillas in Santiago where youths gathered for the anniversary of the Frente Juvenil de Unidad Nacional and to commemorate the Battle of La Concepción (1881). Augusto Pinochet presented his “Plan Chacarillas” to the seventy-seven young adults (the number represented the seventy-seven soldiers that died in battle in 1881). The plan established the future of the dictatorship in three stages, including a supposed return to civil governance in 1985. See Cristián Gazmuri, Historia de Chile: 1891–1994 (RIL editores, 2012).

26

Mad Science

***

The yellow of the Old Motherland isn’t left in the garret behind the Chilean Flag’s back it plays its grand trick with much fanfare and goose-stepping

***

The museums preserve the story of the Chilean Flag dispersed anonymous covered up

the eye can apply its blindness to book frayed

it’s already dead history

The Chilean Flag reposes in a glass case

(visits during office hours) (pay your dues)

The Chilean Flag escapes down the street swearing to return until the death of her death

27

MAKE Literary Magazine

from Chenille: Laboratory of Gloom

By Olivia Cronk

(I pretend that) my boyfriend was wearing eyeliner in those days. I remember a secondhand navy blue rain jacket and this one day when I got cut early at work and came home to an empty apartment and put on rose-scented lotion and took a walk in that coat.

I could still go out into the neighborhood then. We both did. Read the papers.

Rolled cigarettes. Strummed a few sad tunes over and over. Fell down drunk in front of the TV.

I am a vapor of everything I anticipate.

He is blue ghost gas floating over the birdbath.

He is prone to compulsions prone to spider fingers all around the bedpost illness as weather garden dominion compulsions the tin & twee & shameful mole-faced cup of Shirley Jackson of British psychedelia of poison mushroom sister clocks,

(and how we have loved those) He is prone to watching a gray bloated body with rainbow string bikini ribboning it across it: No matter his agitation, whatever you tell me, doctor, no matter, no matter he is the mirror tiger of my favorite times.

28

Mad Science

I tinker quietly around his sleeping body just to sniff out a fool screaming girl haunted house mimic, to use it to admit, so awfully, that I’ve always believed feeling itself to be unworthy of speech —for myself and for others;

to marshal enough emotion to parade it in language to make the transmission worth it seems simply outrageous to me makes me just sick.

I’m so sorry.

I have many faces, and most of them are utterly cold.

The things I give to him during his dream time.

The way I drag ass to a patchouli lagoon. Wish radio backwards.

They’re gonna make you wish you never came to my room.

We could still go out of the house then.

We could go.

Ten times slow-mo walking through the Plaza de Santo Domingo pencil skirt I’m hooked on the notion of my own arm trailing beyond as I pass through the tissue of membrane of precipice,

29

MAKE Literary Magazine

right there in the plaza in one world, but one arm behind me, hanging onto/in the other world

& I grip him bitterly and tenderly at once,

It is always in heroic terms.

It is always winter.

It is bad wounds on the feet.

A bucket of cheap cookies.

He sleeps on and on.

I knew before that to be woken from his dreams would ill him. Fever-scarf.

I knew that before.

I knew he was a planet.

Rubied.

Dollared.

A dead branch fulla dead birds and his tarot cards flipping just as the window opens just like that.

Cedar star, doomed face, queen face, knight, toil, his face. The window the card.

Opens. He hollers his gaze.

Finish porcelain the garden. Shuffle the deck.

30

2019 IS THE YEAR OF POWER

FALL OCT 26—NOV 10

30TH ANNUAL CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL CHICAGOHUMANITIES.ORG (312) 605-8444

LIVE THE WRITING LIFE YOU IMAGINE Sign up for open-to-all, non-credit courses that will inspire and challenge you at the University of Chicago Writer’s Studio downtown. From Basic Creative Writing and Memoir Writing to Storytelling for Business, find the class that is right for you. Join our community at our lively and inspiring open mics and write-ins.

NEW CLASSES START SOON Learn more at writersstudio.uchicago.edu.

MAKE Literary Magazine

IMPRINTS

Sara Ludy is an American artist working in a wide range of media including video, sound, animation, VR, AR, audiovisual performance, sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. Through an interdisciplinary practice, hybrid forms emerge from the confluence of nature, architecture, abstraction, and the unconscious, reflecting an uncanny presence that questions our relationship to immateriality and space.

Imprints , 2018, is a cosmological experience. Fluid and familiar but alien and vexing, an early or ancient memory that doesn’t quite form. On the one hand microscopic and fleshly, it has the celestial aura of the overview effect, a shift in thinking that comes from great distance and time.

BY SARA LUDY 32

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Imprint 5, 2018 Digital image

Imprint 4, 2018 Digital image

33 33

MAKE Literary Magazine

Imprint 6, 2018 Digital image

Imprint 7, 2018 Digital image

Imprint 3, 2018 Digital image

34

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Imprint 1, 2018 Digital image

Imprint 2, 2018 Digital image

Imprint 8, 2018 Digital image

35 35

MAKE Literary Magazine

J.B. KUZMANCHUK WAS HERE.

By J.B. Kuzmanchuk

If I’m going to be dramatic, I’d like to start now with the line:

like winged hymns, repeated chants, echoing proverbs scrib-

My name is J.B. Kuzmanchuk. The J.B. stands for Jay Bird. The

bled in buffalo blood on the walls of my hushed cave just like

Kuzmanchuk is Ukrainian for Nobody gives a shit.

John when he wrote REVELATIONS chained to a rock on that

I was in high school the first time I tried to read

island in Greece. My Psalms were sung face first into bean

HAMLET. My favorite teacher, Cheryl, walked us through it

bags, gym socks and the wet underwear Scott Lieser left at my

with special care. First, she taught us how to say every single

13 year old swimming pool / scavenger hunt themed Birthday

name in the cast. Wrapping our mouths around the obligation

party. I handwrote all my riddles. I liked a good hunt. I want-

each character required. And then step by step we mapped the

ed to be everyone’s prey. Language was something I sought

dramatic action of the plot. She was careful to warn us away

first to know and then to use. So I snapped Cheryl’s words

from the Mel Gibson movie, “Reading Hamlet and/or seeing

against my tongue like a marble collection. She knew I loved

Hamlet performed live is the way to go.” I believed her. Cher-

art and she said things like this out loud in class “historically,

yl covered her classroom walls with Georgia O’Keeffe flow-

many, many great renown artists were also homosexual.” All

ers—hundreds of museum prints of opening vulvas—this

the 1990 Ohio boys blushed accordingly.

delicate garden was a truth in the desert. My older brother

My guardian angel is the oldest Kristner boy. The one

and his Desert Storm Marine friends said Cheryl had wooden

who went away in the ’80s. Forever. The one whose name

boobs and was a scissor-sister lesbian with the librarian. They

was never spoken again. His father demanded it. And all of

hated her and whenever they said Cheryl’s name they would

his seven younger sisters obeyed. He was the one they re-

make horse hoof clomping sounds like wood knocking against

fused to claim. The one they never buried. I dream of him.

wood.

My guardian angel. He has a boom box and a fresh head of

But I loved her. She taught me words like Sacagawea and

tightly curled sun sandy blonde hair. He’s wearing a sporty

Liliuokalani. Words I carried around with me for the song of

half shirt with bare midriff, tube socks hiked up so high like

their language and the soul of their stories—I let them roll

an arrow leading upward thru his tanned blonde wisped thigh

36

Mad Science

hairs and straight into a pair of cut off jean shorts where all

You can wake me up at 3am. I like reading maps, I’ll try to

his Daisies meet his Duke. That’s David. My angel. David. Just

help you fix your bike. I like packing luggage in the car trunk

like the one who danced naked before the Lord. Like the one

so that it all fits just right. It makes me feel good. I don’t want

who played the harp. The one who wrote poetry while loung-

you to be my girlfriend. And I’m not going to be your mother.

ing around with all that sheep shit sharing his cave with a guy

But I built a place in this madness for us. Where we swear

named Jonathan. Everybody has a song.

on swords and wash the chalk drawings of our father’s dead

Kristner Angel David visits me in my dreams. Celestial.

bodies off the kitchen floor. If you get lost, there’s a detailed

He teaches the cage in my rusted chest how to phonetically

map pinned inside the fly of my boxers, explaining exactly

spell simple words like courage and outrage. He presses play on

where and why we both exist. And on any night when you

his boom box and performs his dying last words. It requires

can’t sleep, I’ll hold you in my arms at 3am. We’ll crawl to-

a box fan. And sheer white drapes. Sheer white bleached hos-

ward the window framing the night sky and watch the irony

pital gowns. Sheer white starched bed sheets. Sheer white

of silent lightning.”

walls. Sheer white agony. David knows all the lyrics to Chris-

DAVID: My Lord, if I were a prince and You were a sol-

tina Aguilera’s “You Are Beautiful” in sign language. When

dier, would you cradle my neck while the rest of me bleeds?

he’s done performing for me, he asks me for notes.

(BEAT) Would you?

Me: Contemporary song choices are always a little dated.

J.B.: I’d try.

Angel David: I’m dead.

Cheryl had to make this announcement to the class, “Ev-

My best friend in college was also named David. David

eryone needs to get their parents’ signatures on this release

wore white boxers when he woke me at three in the morning.

form stating that they give their permission for you to attend

We crawled half naked through my parents’ guest room to-

the performance of A CHORUS LINE in Akron. There are

ward the window with the night sky. There were no buttons

some adult themes and sensitive material. Specifically, some

on the flies of our boxers, just flaps that would crease, gaping

people might be offended by the homosexual content. I’ve

wide holes and on some angles you could see the world.

seen it. It’s moving and I think you all will enjoy it.”

HAMLET: My Lord if I were a prince and you were my

Somewhere in Akron, seated in the balcony way up in the

most trusted friend, would you keep my secrets?

dark, there is a seventeen-year-old kid leaning forward, cap-

HORATIO: I would.

tivated by the lyrics to the song “At the ballet.” Later I wrote

On that particular night, David wanted to show me the

in my class assignment review, “When I heard that song it

heat lightning in the summer sky. The storm was violently si-

was as if someone found the hope chest I kept hidden under

lent. As if it knew we were all trying to sleep. He told me “keep

the carpet and loose floorboard of my circus wagon. And they

the lights off.” And the streaking lightning, weaved electric

opened it.” I meant every word. Cheryl understood.

in and out of the clouds across the fields. Like veins exposed.

STAGE DIRECTION: I faked my parents’ signature.

The room flickered. We shared the silence. Together. I loved

At my birthday party, before he left his wet underwear

him for this.

in my bathroom, Scott Lieser and I had a definite connection.

He was my friend. My closest friend.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of connection. One where

And that rusted cage placed inside my chest still scrapes

we were both playing Puck. It happened right after Marcie

my insides and aches for that kind of intimacy. It sometimes

Copeland took my entire 7th grade class secretly one by one

feels like madness.

into my basement bathroom to look at Scott’s turd in the toi-

HAMLET: My Lord If I were a prince and you were a sol-

let. She told everyone he forgot to flush. She wanted them

dier, would you cross the oceans beside me in battle, until we

to see it. Once Marcie knew she had gotten to everyone, she

both arrived safely home.

came outside to the pool and shouted, “Last chance for the

HORATIO: I would.

Scott Lieser Turd Tour!” Scott ran out of the pool. I ran after

We sat in the darkness at 3am. So close that our bare

him. His sad eyes looked even sadder than ever. That’s when

knees touched. I remember liking the way the hair on our legs

I took him upstairs to the off-limits bathroom and gave him

brushed against and intertwined. It was masculine.

a pair of my own underwear and shorts in an attempt to con-

I want to tell some guy: “I know how to be your friend.

sole him. He was too embarrassed to go get his own bag. He

37

MAKE Literary Magazine

was shivering against the side of my bathtub. My hands were

my side at the party. We connected. Intensely. All the other

full of clues for my scavenger hunt. Decorated note cards that

kids had divided into couples. The sun was down. The school

read, “Clue One: Meet me where the two ends meet—follow

year had just ended. And it was the first of a warm summer

what runs around a pasture but never moves.” I asked Scott to

night. Darkness. The couples all strewn on top of each other.

hold my cards. I turned the hot water on.

Stacked like boards. They were planked bodies. Awkwardly

There was a bird in a cage clearly making every effort

making out. Playing love. Experimenting. Scott and I started

to get out. I was attracted to Scott’s body. I saw him dance

to speak a made-up language of elves and ewok. Performed it.

once at a sock hop. He only knew two moves but they were

A poetry of faerie shadows offending and mending. We start-

smooth. And it was rare that any guys danced at those things.

ed to navigate the field. Playing like soldiers sent to cross the

Dana Ward told me a story once in the back of the band room.

land undetected between all those slumbering straights. We

She locked the door to the rehearsal room and lowered her

were sent to save one another in the rice in the wheat in the

voice. We were all holding our clarinets. According to Dana—

farm county mist rising. We ran. Our mouths bleeding like

when her cousin Linda was visiting from Kentucky—Scott

tongue lost puritans. Dove. Grabbed arms. Casting spells.

just happened to be over playing with Dana’s adopted brother

Connected. Inhibition abandoned. We wept over each other.

Jermaine. That night Linda woke Dana in a panic. And this is

We wept from our weakness. We urgently revived ourselves.

when Dana’s eyes widened and her voice got very direct and

We rallied. We survived. Our skins connected.

serious. “My cousin was freaking out. Because Scott’s cum

J.B.: I wanted you, Scott. I wanted to hold you and make

was dripping from her pussy lips.” Dana kept repeating the

you tell me everything you hated about your dad until you

phrase “pussy lips” over and over in the story. Specifically

cried. We’d kiss each other’s noses by mistake at the Sock

shocked and shaking her head like a natural disaster had just

Hop. It’d be you and me. A soldiers’ slow dance. Our names

hit the town. Suspenseful and Unfortunate. Dana didn’t know

would be announced over the loud speaker and everyone

how to help Linda. “She’s probably going to have an abortion

would be required to know how to pronounce them. We’d

now that Scott’s cum was dripping from her pussy lips.” I vi-

shirk down the red waistbands on our sweatpants in a jani-

sualized an oil painting of Scott’s cum dripping like a second

tor’s closet and let our warm tears drip like the misspent seed

set of silent tears from Linda’s pussy lips.

agape and falling from the mouth of Linda’s pussy lips.

Occasionally, Scott liked to hump other guys’ legs act-

ANGEL DAVID: That’s not a bad job, Kuzmanchuk. Your

ing like a rabid horny dog. He was a good at it. Back then, we

courage. More outrage.

were allowed to wear sweatpants to school and they hadn’t

It wasn’t until much later in life that I thought of An-

specified the rule yet that you also needed to wear under-

gel David. When I was grieving the loss of my own belonging

wear under the sweatpants. There was a lot of Pudge. A lot of

and taking all the high roads to find my way home. I had this

Jostle. Scott constantly man handled his crotch adjusting his

memory of one of David’s sisters going on the church bus trip

junk all day long. Some guys were onto me. I believe Scott was

to Cedar Point Amusement Park. I was a thirteen-year-old

one of them. He might not have known my difference exactly

kid. And she was drawn to me. She was much older, an adult

enough to name but he was drawn to it. TJ was another one

in her twenties. Her older brother was dead. And she loved

with the same instinct. It was like a sexual radar. Not that he

the way I screamed on The Gemini. We clicked effortlessly. I

was into it, but he was aware of the “otherness” and drawn

liked the attention. I remember I was surprised that she was

in to observe or examine. He used to do this thing when he

praising something in me that most people side-eyed. Instead

was talking to you—he’d look deep into your eyes, connect

of snarling at any of my femininity, she encouraged it. Played

and then reach his hand to the tip of his dick tented in his

off it. Stoked it. And celebrated it. She saw Angel David in me.

red track sweats. And then he’d watch you to see if you took

“Let’s go on it again. But I’m only riding with J.B. and we’re

any notice. To collect the data of the movement of your eyes.

going to scream like our lives are ending.”

It was aggressive and mocking. He stole my breath. His grin

I thought of those roller coasters while I was watching a

mischievous.

documentary about AIDS and activism. I thought of my Angel

After he changed into my underwear. And hung his

David when they were throwing the corpses of dead gay men

own wet underwear on my shower curtain. He didn’t leave

over the fence onto the front lawn of the White House. Into

38

Mad Science

Nancy Reagan’s flower garden. The Lord saw fit to take Nan-

The plot doesn’t turn there. It doesn’t end. It wilts. Up-

cy’s breast away. Cancer. And I think at some point during

rooted. Petals cast aside or drown. A wink. A tear. The potion

her recovery she peered through her drapes—saying goodbye

stabs and the faeries bend. Cheryl corrects me, “Hamlet dies

to her pound or two of flesh—and she caught a glimpse of

first. Not Horatio.”

David. Moving through her like fabric billowing gently up in

Cheryl: J.B. will you read aloud for us Act V scene II lines

a box fan. A breath. A wing. A moment. The unread message

388 thru exeunt.

of human ash, a heretic’s soil and Nancy’s June daisies. And

J.B.: (aside) Before the curtain falls, into the light steps

then, like a well-trained midway carnie rat, Nancy sized up

your baseball coach from little league, the drunk Vietnam Vet.

the angel corpse and guessed its weight against a plush prize.

He is tossing glitter now and is not wearing any pants. He apol-

“Mostly bone now,” she said. We faggots like to travel with

ogizes for all the times he hit you in the face with his balls. I

both tits out.

am on third base waiting for the signal to run. I piss my pants

OPHELIA: And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts.

slowly, take a breath and whisper, “It’s me. Sybil. Chain me to

When I was a kid, all the boys played war after church. In

your radiator.”

our Sunday clothes throwing the rotten apples like grenades.

J.B. reading aloud.

Our mothers scolded our ruined knees. We were two streets

J.B.: After the poison settles and they’ve cleaned the con-

and one hill away from where David Angel’s father lived in

crete. HORATIO hides in a maidservant’s quarters. He stands

the silence of his dead son’s name. It was nineteen eighty

in front of a mirror for two days straight, smelling HAMLET’S

something and Jeffery took a shovel and broke the neck of a

tights and mouthing the words “I’m still here. Why did you

chipmunk in the tall grass behind the Sunday school room.

leave? I tried to quiet your ghosts. If I could whisper you back

And we’d dare each other to run through the neighbor’s yard

to life. Sweet Prince. But I remain.

where the man who tied dead birds on his clothesline by their

HORATIO: Woo’t weep. Woo’t fight. Woo’t fast. Woo’t

tiny dangling feet lived. Dozens of them. Bird corpses. Rot-

tear thyself. Sweet sweet. Now cracks a noble heart. (to HAM-

ting mid air. This was war. I used to always want to be the ca-

LET) My Lord, You once did love me.

sualty. The first soldier down, the one the others would have

J.B.: So I do still.

to come back for.

Angel David: When Horatio finally dies. No one is left to

HAMLET: Hold on. Not without J.B., I won’t leave him

watch him.

behind!

Scott’s Underwear: Only the dangling, flightless dead

There I was. Dying in the churchyard. They’d fling me

birds sing him to his rest.

over their shoulders and carry me to safety. I always wanted

Cheryl got cancer in her hip. I sent her flowers. Red Ori-

a leg injury. So they’d have to cut off my pants. Rip them to

ental Poppies. White Daylilies. I sent her signed copies of es-

shreds. To get to my wounds. And nurse them.

says I had published. I sent her tickets to the play I wrote. Cop-

HAMLET: (barking manly orders) We don’t have a choice.

ies of reviews in the New York Times. The last time I saw her,

Get his pants off. It’s his leg. I’m sure of it.

I stood on the stage after the audience applauded and I asked

And like a good friend. The best friend. There is my

them to indulge me.

HAMLET pulling my woundedness with his bare hands across

J.B.: My favorite High School teacher is here tonight. She

a million dead bird bodies, pounding his chest in agony when

taught me HAMLET. And drove me and my classmates hours

he realizes that I might not make it. I’ll be half conscious but I

back and forth to Cleveland and Akron to expose us to all sorts

will hear his grieving. Every word.

of art and theater. She inspired me. I am a product of her life’s

HAMLET: Don’t you leave me! Don’t you give up on me!

work.

And to this HAMLET, I would send a love letter. A thank

And then I told her, “Thank You.” My older brother still

you. To console him in the despair of my absence. “Press your

whinnied like a horse.

lips against my forehead. Platoon me, Pietá me, cradle me

My name is J.B. Kuzmanchuk. Give a shit.

in your Sunday school arms. Beat your chest to the heavens.

Heaving Hamlet. My heart. My confidant.”

But his response will be silence.

39

MAKE Literary Magazine

OPENING AND RE-OPENING

Images Courtesy of Candor Arts

A CONVERSATION WITH KRISTA FRANKLIN

BY JOEL CRAIG 40

Mad Science

It’s difficult knowing where to start with an introduction to Krista Franklin, so I’ll start with a word: kinetic. It speaks not only to the dynamics within her work as a visual artist and poet, but to her vibrant presence within the Chicago arts community as a committed organizer, teacher, and curator. A Cave Canem fellow who has held residencies at A Studio in the Woods and Chicago’s Arts + Public Life Initiative, she cofounded the 2nd Sun Salon and, with artist Fo Wilson, curated the Chicago citywide poetry and art initiative EKPHEST: A Festival of Art + Word (featuring Duriel E. Harris, Jamila Woods, avery r. young, and Keith Wilson, among others).

I’d known Krista as a poet long before I discovered her prolific and brilliant output as a collage artist. Over the years, more layers of practice would reveal themselves: installation, papermaking, letterpress, performance, and collaboration with fellow artists, writers, and musicians. For Krista, building an artistic community is “a vital practice . . . and a continuous undercurrent that fosters the advancement of creative liberation, reflection, scholarship, and artistic communion.”

Her newest work, Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), is a true opus and a palpable representation of her artmaking and ethic. Third in a trilogy following the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012) and the hand-bound letterpress book Killing Floor, Under the Knife is an art book in the best sense—a personal museum, handmade and wholly original. The title is a frank nod to both her process and to a recent surgery she underwent to end a fifteen-year battle with uterine fibroids.

She told me, over coffee in the Chicago Loop on a cold January morning, that during the initial days of her recovery from surgery, she began writing what would evolve into Under the Knife—a dynamic mixture of memoir, discourse, collage, and experimental excavation of a lived life. It’s also beautiful, reveling in its tactile and emotive asking of the fundamentals: what is a book, what is liberty, and how does one form an authentic identity?

41

MAKE Literary Magazine

Joel Craig: When you originally started writing, you were in the hospital, right? Were you just writing for the sake of writing, or did you start to conceive of something long term?

Krista Franklin: I started writing after I got out of the hospital [post-surgery].

I think I was there for about four days. When I got home, I started writing. I dedicated myself to fifteen minutes a day, first thing in the morning, when I woke up.

Initially I conceived it as a memoir, but not like . . . you know I have a really bad memory, so to write an autobiography or a memoir was gonna be a dicey endeavor anyway, because I don’t really remember a lot of things. We all have significant memories that our imaginations go back to, but details are lost. I had to imagine it as a kind of a construction, or reconstruction of things. I couldn’t really get caught up in facts or fiction. I just allowed whatever was gonna come out to come out.

So, I did that every day. I was very dedicated. I would set small goals for myself, like, “When I get to fifty pages, then I’ll let people read it. When I get to this point . . .” I just kept moving the goal post. Then I got to a place where I couldn’t write anymore, and at that point I was pretty much healed—I could at least sit on the floor again. I could work how I was working before, to a degree, but with a bit more caution. At that point I took what I had to the cutting floor.

I couldn’t get past a certain point in the narrative. And I thought, “Well, why don’t I just embrace that, and reconstruct the whole damn thing?” That’s when it became more of a conceptual project around rupture, family, the body, and body memory, intergenerational traumas that happen in the body. It became more of an abstract idea, an abstract concept rather than the details of my life and my family’s life.

JC: We carry the trauma of our forebears mentally and biologically—I believe that. You’re also dealing with an ongoing condition, one that isn’t widely known, and only suffered by women. Do you think having endured the physical trauma of surgery helped illuminate or decode something in you?

KF: It was always a part of my life that there was an opening, a re-opening, an opening, and a re-opening of my body. I never really thought about it too deeply in terms of the intergenerational. Although I did consider the idea that most of it was happening in my reproductive organs, and choices I made around not wanting to be a mother, or not feeling like motherhood was for me, and that some of those psychological underpinnings were affecting my entire bodily system. That it was rooted in the mind, and my body was absorbing these mental and spiritual shocks to my system, and some of that had to do with my family.

My mother and her sisters were ostensibly taken from their home, taken from their grandmother’s home and put into an orphanage. Many of their formative years were in this orphanage, and it was actually a pretty decent orphanage, all things

42

Mad Science

considered. My mother often says, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to us,” because the women in my family weren’t financially capable of taking care of their children. It was a financial matter. It was about money. No more, no less. It wasn’t like they were being mistreated. They might have been a little neglected because they didn’t really have much supervision. Kind of like feral children, you know what I mean? So, they were sent to an orphanage.

I just had to really think through the perils of motherhood. I think a lot of people just don’t. Either they don’t have to, or they don’t fucking think about it at all.

It’s like, “I’m just gonna have some babies and everything’s gonna be okay.” Well, it might not. I mentally work through all of that pretty regularly. Even before this book, my work dealt with ideas of motherhood and nurturing, illness, and women’s reproductive health, particularly mine.

I’ve always kind of been there, so I’m not sure if there was any huge revelation that occurred in the process of making this book. For me, making this book was more like the closure. I think of it as a part of a trilogy, and it’s the final piece, right?

And all of them, the entire trilogy, are about the body, especially the Black body, and the Black woman’s body in particular. And this project is the culmination of all of those ideas.

JC: Culturally on the whole, and in the Black community, is there pressure to become a mother?

KF: I think that there is pressure to be a mother regardless of your cultural background. I think if you are a woman and you have a woman’s body, it’s kind of expected, right? It’s built in. The duty that you have in the world is to reproduce.

People are literally talking about their biological clocks right now as we’re sitting here in this café. You know what I’m saying? I don’t fucking believe in a biological clock, but people believe in that shit. Right?

JC: Right.

KF: And they really organize their lives around this imaginary clock that’s supposedly in their bodies, that’s [going] tick, tick, tick like a little time bomb, and you’re not gonna be able to have a kid. I think a lot of women really . . . their whole lives even revolve around it. Their entire structure in the architectural imagining of their lives revolves around giving birth.

JC: Do you think there’s cultural shaming when you don’t participate?

KF: Absolutely. And if it’s not shaming, it’s kind of a suspicion. People are suspicious of you. Because, first of all, it’s like this societal agreement. We’ve all agreed to play this game. This game is called Get Married, Have Babies, Get a House, Have a Family, Build Your Family Up, Make Your Empire. We’ve all agreed that this is the

43

MAKE Literary Magazine

game that we’re playing. So, when people digress from that game or say, “I’m not interested in that game,” there’s definitely gonna be penalties for that. Whether that be skepticism about, “Why wouldn’t you want to do this?” Like, “Everybody’s doing this. Why are you not interested in this?” to “You’re being selfish.”

JC: You’ve experienced this?

KF: It’s never happened to me personally, but I know women who’ve told me, who have chosen not to have children for various reasons, that they have been accused of being selfish. Usually by other women. “You’re being selfish. You should be having babies. Why are you not having babies? You’re too beautiful to not have babies.” And it’s like, “Um, wow.”

JC: Going back to what you say about suspicion, in the societal architecture.

I mean even as a man you get raised eyebrows because there are questions about masculinity . . .

KF: Totally.

JC: . . . virility . . .

KF: Absolutely.

JC: . . . if you don’t choose to participate, then what is wrong with you?

KF: What’s wrong with you? They always assume that there’s something that’s wrong with you, right? And how does that impact the body? Even that in and of itself is an interesting line of questioning. It’s like, when you’re constantly being told, even in your mind, like the critic in your head is saying, “There’s something wrong with you. Why are you not participating in this?” Your body starts to respond to that. The pathology of that thinking begins to take root.

Then you’re like, “I don’t feel virile. I can’t have sex right now. I’m not aroused to even be with somebody, because I feel deformed or [like] something’s wrong with me.” You know what I mean? I feel like I’m not well.

JC: You have a lucid statement in the book that talks about the pathology of emotion. About being groomed to not share that or show that emotion. That’s another scarring or buildup of negativity that can happen within us if we’re not allowed to share what we’re actually feeling, rather just go along with a prescribed narrative. Am I reading that correctly?

KF: Oh, for sure. I mean that’s definitely a part of it. That’s a really beautiful articulation.

JC: Part of what I’m thinking about is your description of the finite as ruin.

The closure of things is always ruin.

KF: Yes. JC: Why that particular word? Is it because the finite is always so dangerous for us to fathom, even though we know it’s coming? Is its pending impact something that we can’t ever be at peace with?

KF: I think that you can find contentment, and you can find peace. But I think because things are very finite, sometimes we’re afraid to really delve into the magnificence of the thing. How big it is, or how unruly it is, right? That you might never come to a really clear, concise conclusion about things. It’s unknown. The unknown factor is always present. I think that’s the best way I can articulate that right now.

44

Mad Science

JC: As an artist, has this kind of thinking had something to do with how you find and choose your artistic community? We’re both about the same age. We’ve both been in this game for . . .

KF: Long time.

JC: . . . two and a half decades.

KF: Long time.

JC: When you’re younger, it can seem like there’s a prescription to achieving your own artistic goals . . .

KF: Yes. JC: . . . or conclusions. And then you come to find, “Well, these people have some power for a while, and this aesthetic seems popular for a while . . .”

KF: Yeah.

JC: . . . but there’s always new blood . . .

KF: Always.

JC: . . . new blood coming and new ideas, new scenes. How do you motivate yourself to stay in the game to come up with something magnificent like Under the Knife . . .

KF: Wow, thank you for asking me that.

JC: . . . to give yourself permission to create how you need to create? Because we’re always learning, and new possibilities become evident if we’re open to them.

KF: I have been really, really lucky. I will say that. I’ve been surrounded by some really magnificent individuals over a long stretch of time. Even as the communities that I’ve involved myself with or become a part of have shifted, I’ve allowed myself sometimes to shift along with it. So, if a place no longer feels healthy for me, or it’s not feeding me creatively, then I’ll leave. That could be a group of people, it could be a reading series, it could be anything. If I feel like this is no longer giving me a joyful sensation or fulfilling sensation, I’m gonna walk away from it.

I’ve had to go through a lot of ups and downs though, as we all have, if you stay in the game long enough. Because like you said, the trends change, people have short attention spans now. So, it’s like somebody might stick with something for a little bit, and then they’re out. You know what I mean?

I’m surrounded by a lot of young people all the time. By young, I mean in their 20s and 30s. They keep me vibrant mentally. A lot of them are very ambitious. A lot of my students had books out before me. That’s very humbling. And you’re like, “Well, what am I doing wrong?” Like, “I don’t have a book out, and they have a book out, and it’s a best seller.”

And I had to work through my ego around a lot of that stuff. I had to deal with the feeling of being a failure, or not reaching the goals I wanted for myself. Or the expectations, like, “You’re a writer. You should have X, Y, and Z books. You should have this, that, and the other.”

And I was also doing a two-track thing. I was doing visual art as well as writing.

I followed the visual art path mostly because of money. Because we know as writers, there’s not a lot of money in writing. There’s hardly ever any money in writing.

JC: The payment is cultural credit.

KF: Totally.

45

MAKE Literary Magazine

46

Mad Science

JC: And if you’re not getting the cultural credit . . .

KF: Then why would you do it?

JC: Right. But at the same time, the set markers are so specifically identified.

“Here we have this perfect-bound volume that can be distributed.”

KF: Right.

JC: Which does not reflect that you have a body of work as Krista Franklin, as a community organizer . . .

KF: Right.

JC: . . . as a curator, as a visual artist, and as someone who’s had countless conversations with other writers and artists that have resulted in other things . . .

KF: Which people would never see, right? People don’t see that stuff. People who you’re involved with, the communities that you’re involved with, they see it.

But the larger world does not see these little incremental things that you’ve been doing along the path, and your journey, and the influences that you may have had, or the influences that other people may have had on you.

I don’t think I could have made Under the Knife if it weren’t for the young people that were around me, who I was teaching, who I was working with and mentoring, or who I was just being friends with. They’re very much risk-takers because they’re young. They’re like, “We have nothing to lose. Do whatever you want.” So I’m like, “Oh, then if that’s the case, I can do whatever I want. I can take risks and it could work too. I can write a book and take it apart. I can fucking paint over these pages. I can do whatever I want now.” And that was a liberating gesture for me that I learned from them. It’s like, “There are no rules anymore. The rules are play, play, play, and enjoy it, and try to get some kind of fulfillment out of whatever it is that you’re making.”

I’m also not attached to things like I think a lot of people are. People were asking, “Are you going to have a book release party?” And I’m like, “Why? No.” Even my publisher was kind of stalling putting the book out because they thought I wanted to have this big release party. And I’m like, “I don’t. If that’s what the holdup is, you guys, let’s not do that. Because I have no desire to be re-reading this book in public. First of all, it’s like going back to the scene of a crime over and over again.

I just want it to be out in the world, walking around on its own two feet, touching the lives of people who get it. I don’t want to do a whole show around it or a fucking production. I just want to get it out there and go off to do the next thing.” I’m just not attached to things like that.

Even my artwork. I have some artwork that I really, really love and I want to keep near me. But for the most part I’m like, “You want it? Come get it. ’Cause I don’t want it in my house anymore. I gotta figure out how to make the next shit.

Come take it away, ’cause it’s just reminding me of the old shit that I was doing and I don’t want that around me.” You know what I mean?

JC: I do.

KF: The process of making this book has taught me a lot, just in terms of bringing those two tracks together in a concretized way. Like where the intersection [is], the crossroads between the writing and the art, and what that looks like; what I can make that look like for me.

47

MAKE Literary Magazine

JC: Knowing you, I thought that immediately when I opened it up. You’ve constructed your own museum and archive.

KF: Totally.

JC: One can enter into this space. And it is a fully formed space, and you don’t need to be around to act as a guide.

KF: Nope.

JC: And you’ve given yourself complete permission to show the flaws.

KF: Yep. JC: The scars, even.

KF: Yeah.

JC: What in your process gave you permission to show what would be considered imperfections by most book editors? For example, showing a photocopy of a handwritten page from a notebook instead of an edited page laid out in type.

KF: I totally know what you mean. Honestly, the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection . . . the longer that I sit with this project the more that I realize how impactful that collection has been for me. Have you ever been there? It’s housed at SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago], but it’s open to the public. People don’t know about it. It’s like one of the best-kept secrets in the city.

They have an incredible collection of artist books. I take my students there every year. No matter where I’m teaching in the city, I always take my students there, ’cause I’m like, “You guys need to look at these books, see the possibilities of a book.”

Sometimes it’s just pictures, sometimes it’s letterpress prints, sometimes it’s tarot cards—the book is the tarot card deck. You know what I mean? Just thinking about what a book is. It’s really had a big impact on me, sitting in that room over and over again, looking at the different stuff people have produced. It liberated me.

It made me [say], “Oh, I can pretty much do whatever I want.”

JC: It sounds like you experienced something I think about a lot: artistic stakes versus commercial stakes.

KF: Right.

JC: To me, the artistic stakes always need to be number one.

KF: Absolutely.

JC: Because you don’t know what’s going to happen after that.

KF: No. JC: I love that Under the Knife has a print run of 500.

KF: Right.

JC: It’s designed for artistic stakes.

KF: For sure. Yeah, I really just wanted to show process. ’Cause we always have this idea in our mind about what a final project is supposed to look like, so clean and neat and tidy. But it’s like, “What does it take to get to that object?” So much revision, so much re-writing, so much spell check, editing, so much. And I wanted to pull the curtains back and let people see behind. It’s like you’re looking at the wizard right, the Wizard of Oz, but you look behind the curtain and there’s that little man back there . . .

JC: Making decisions.

48

Mad Science

KF: He’s making all those little decisions. Pulling on those pulleys, hitting those switches. And I wanted to show that in pages of the book. Sometimes you want people to know shit, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you scratch stuff out, mark over things. And the mark-making is an artistic gesture. I don’t think we see it like that when we think about editing a manuscript. But we do with a painting or a drawing. Somebody writes lines across a page, and that’s suddenly a painting.

So, it’s like, “Okay, well, my editing marks can be mark-making.” Like me writing over stuff, all of this is mark-making. It’s an alphabet and also art. And the alphabet is its own art, too.

JC: I found that your erasures were particularly compelling because there’s so much immediate mystery.

KF: Yes. JC: You are choosing to redact certain parts of your own story.

KF: Absolutely.

JC: The language you choose to leave behind then becomes the layer you have chosen to present. You wouldn’t think about that if it were a non-erasure just presented on a page. You would just take the information as . . .

KF: Take it for granted.

JC: Right.

KF: Part of the erasures were me being like, “I want to get rid of people’s names.” ’Cause I didn’t want anybody coming after me. I was like, “I don’t fucking want to deal with it. So, if I just get rid of all the names it won’t matter, right?” But in the process of it, that also became a weird loophole, and I was like, “I can’t go through this entire thing and erase everybody’s name.” There were certain pages where I was real militant about it and then other places I got real loose with it. I mean most of the names that are present in the book are my family’s names. And even with that sometimes I feel funny about it. I feel exposed, or like I’ve exposed them.

JC: But there are great moments where you allow names, like Charlie, the official party-starter.

KF: That’s my granddaddy.

JC: That’s one example of what I’d call an echo in the book.

KF: Yes. JC: He resonates with me today as several people I’ve known. More than several people. So, I feel like you choose these moments wisely and respectfully.

KF: Thank you.

JC: Because they resonate as people we do and will meet, whether or not they’re in our family.

KF: Yeah, thank you for saying that. I mean I definitely think that there are archetypes. I like to think of them as archetypes. Charlie is an archetype to me. He’s a particular type of Black man that I’ve always been drawn to. Or a particular male energy, I would even say. Sometimes it’s not even about the color, it’s just about an energy that somebody has, if they’re a free spirit. I never knew Charlie. I may have met him once. My mother says I met him when I was a kid, but he died when I was very young. But his legacy remains because they talk about him all the time.

49

MAKE Literary Magazine

It’s like a lot of people that are in my family that I know about, I never met them. They were dead before I became aware of who they were in the world, and who they were to me. I really enjoyed the concept of making this person up, making these people up. And Charlie is like that. He’s a sad figure. He’s also triumphant, ’cause people love him. He’s well-loved, even though he’s fucked up.

JC: There’s a Svengali kind of necessity in our lives where there’s always someone more liberated than us.

KF: Oh God. JC: Even if their story is sad, they allow for us . . .

KF: Absolutely.

JC: . . . some kind of . . .

KF: Catharsis.

JC: Right. They allow us to have joy in the moment, they give us permission to be in the moment.

KF: Absolutely.

JC: I’m gonna keep coming back to the word permission . . .

KF: It is permission.

JC: . . . ’cause I feel like so much of this book is about permission.

KF: It is. Permission to acknowledge the truth of things, or what we see as the truth of things. That’s the other thing that the book kind of fucks with, is this idea of what is true and what’s not. ’Cause I think all memories are lies.

JC: Yeah well, we’re constantly re-editing them toward . . .

KF: Constantly.

JC: . . . whatever we need them to be for our current moment.

KF: Absolutely. And you know what, however you want to pitch something to somebody, too. It’s like, “Am I the victim or the hero in this story?” You know what I mean? And telling a story where you’re the victim, how that can become beneficial to you. How you can reap benefits from being a victim.

JC: We live in the culture of the elevator pitch.

KF: Totally.

JC: And that only becomes more compressed in the era of social media.

KF: Right. And I think you got the nuance of life, the nuances of the experience of life. That somebody can simultaneously be a really fucked up human being, and also be really beautiful. People always talk about polarities and binaries and shit, and I’m like, “But y’all are the most binary thinkers in the goddamn universe, because you can’t see that someone can be a monster and an angel simultaneously.”

That the possibility of that is actually fucking real. And it’s terrifying. That’s why we don’t want to think about nuance. It’s scary. So you want people to be either all good or all bad, ’cause in that way I know where to put you and how to deal with you, trust you or not trust you.

But the reality is that we’re all flawed. You know, we all make mistakes. My grandmother isn’t a bad mother because she couldn’t take care of her children. She couldn’t afford to take care of her children. It doesn’t make her a bad mother. She was just incapable of taking care of her children, ’cause she didn’t have the financial and emotional wherewithal to do so. There are a lot of women out there like that.

50

Mad Science

JC: I feel like culture also grooms us to believe, especially in the post-war state, that everyone has an equal toolbox for getting through life.

KF: Which we know is a lie.

JC: Right. So, families spend time—my family spends time masking its origins or apologizing for how it’s arrived, for where it’s at, or tries to erase negative history . . .

KF: Wow. JC: . . . as opposed to having a chuckle about it, and just being open . . .

KF: And acknowledging it. This is the reality of what we’re dealing with right here. This is the truth of the matter. Take it or leave it, love it or not, right?

JC: You make several references to media, like being a child of media . . .

KF: Oh yeah.

JC: One place where I feel like people are often both brilliant and monstrous is when they are media figures. Because we both love their success and want to tear them down . . .

KF: Destroy it.

JC: . . . simultaneously.

KF: Yeah.

JC: Is there a threshold where you and I existing in the regular world are safe from that, and they being “out there” are fair game? Or is it just the inability to touch someone who’s beyond that threshold that makes for that difference?

KF: I think you really hit the nail on the head. It is the inability to touch that person. Because people say really rude and mean things about regular people too, especially on social media. People they don’t know. They make full-on judgments and assessments about people and they have no idea the life that they live, but because they’re a celebrity we just have this common understanding that everything they do is up for public scrutiny. Every move that they make, we can weigh in on it.

So, to me there is almost no threshold because in the imagination we can say whatever we want about people, and not think that they’re gonna be hurt or wounded by our words or our assessments, right? It’s a lack of compassion.

I’m a media junkie—I always have been. I love superstar stuff, I love celebrity culture. I love music culture deeply—deeply love music culture, music history.

Which is also a very problematic space.

Like Hollywood space is very public. I like really complex, problematic spaces, and people that can survive and thrive in those environments. I’m not one of those people. I wouldn’t want to be one of those people, but I’m intrigued by those worlds.

And social media, too. I have to take breaks from that. ’Cause it’s an all-consuming universe.

JC: Yeah, and a deeply competitive one.

KF: Oh God. I had to actually tell myself right before I started writing Under the Knife, I decided, “I’m not posting on Facebook anymore until I write this book.”

Like creating posts. I would share stuff, but in terms of composing a post I’m like, “Why am I giving this shit away for free? Why am I doing Dear Diary on Facebook, when I can do Dear Diary in this fucking book?” You know what I mean? And make something that’s gonna have some power to it, that’s gonna have some longevity to

51

MAKE Literary Magazine

it. Not just a three-day engagement with somebody . . .

JC: In the echo chamber.

KF: In the echo chamber. I literally said, “No more posting on Facebook. No more giving away your writing for free until this fucking book is done.” And it really changes your energy. It reinvigorates your energy ’cause you’re like, “I’m not gonna invest in this space that is not really affirming unless everybody agrees with you,” which again is the echo chamber. Everybody likes the same shit, right? But again, I love these media worlds. I love even the social media world, but it’s toxic. It’s toxic.

JC: It can be. As a Generation X person, it can feel like going back to high school.

KF: Totally.

JC: And I spent all of high school trying to get away from high school.

KF: My God, like literally running. I was on my bed as a teenager like, “When I get out of here . . . I cannot wait to get out here. Out of this city, away from these people, away from this whole shit-show.” And you’re right; it is an ungenerous competitiveness, low self-esteem a lot of times. You know what I mean? Your self-esteem is contingent on other people liking what you say.

JC: Going back to Under the Knife, it’s also deeply refreshing to pour over something that’s so organic, and does bare its process, while keeping secrets at the same time.

KF: I like what you said about being a Generation Xer. And just what I call the analog. Which could be like albums, things that we had that were around us all the time when we were kids. You know, Joel, things that we could hold, albums and books, and this physical, sensual world that was always present.

JC: You describe in a passage about how you would hold records and while you listened to them and write down the names of the players and the engineers in your journal.

KF: Yes. JC: And you would build a vocabulary, let’s say, for your taste.

KF: Exactly.

JC: And in that era you had to build your taste very slowly . . .

KF: Very slowly.

JC: . . . you had to find things.

KF: You had to search. I mean even like the library card, card catalog and stuff. Some people don’t even know what the fuck that is. There are kids that have no idea what a [catalog] card is. You know what I mean?

Just to have to search for stuff, like you said.

I remember going through albums at the library, and it was a whole sensual experience of touching.

“Ooh, that album cover’s dope. I wonder what they sound like? I’m gonna take this home and play it.”

52

Mad Science

Looking, feeling, smelling, it’s a whole sensual, embodied experience. And I wanted to bring that back with the book. I wanted to bring that feeling of, open up to any page and anything magical could be happening right there.

The texture of the paper, the smell of it, you know all of it. I just wanted all of that to be present, ’cause I miss that about the culture that we live in, now that everything’s digital.

JC: There is something to discovering and building your identity with these tactile things.

KF: Objects.

JC: My experience at that age was that we learned to identify potential allies by how we dressed, especially if you were an artistic weirdo. Now I don’t know if you can tell when you go out in public.

KF: You were a weirdo—that was a unique thing, right? Now, it’s like everybody’s a weirdo.

JC: It’s fully a commodified aspiration.

KF: Totally. But then it’s like, “Are you authentically a weirdo then?” Like if everybody’s doing it, if you’re really popular, like is that real?

JC: Well, and what is the impetus for weirdness? Is it figuring out how you fit in versus seeking power by resembling?

KF: That’s very complex.

JC: Complex conformities that probably have generational distinctions.

KF: I love being a Generation Xer. I love the fact that I have memories of things that people don’t have. There are certain experiences that were very impactful, that shaped me. It’s not really common anymore that you have to physically seek it out.

JC: Well we both grew up in the era of MTV, which both broadened the pop spectrum but reduced the number of visible artists simultaneously. Which perhaps leads to the alternative-seeking that went on in the decade after.

KF: That’s interesting, ’cause I always thought MTV played music that was very inclusive. Right at the very beginning, it was like all bets were off. It was everything. And when you think about those early music videos, they were like art films.

JC: As a medium, it was starved for content initially. And many of the artists who had made videos were perhaps coming from an art school background, in the UK especially. Plus, Prince.

KF: Right.

JC: So, that changed pop. But then by the end of that decade, airtime is loaded with hair bands.

KF: Totally. The 80s was all hair. It’s still some good shit though.

JC: Yeah, for sure.

KF: There’s still some good shit [that] came out of there. Like the new wave shit got kicked out real nicely in the 80s.

JC: And then there are these subcultures happening that are largely word of mouth and being passed around, like house music, hip hop, and punk.

KF: Absolutely, absolutely.

JC: My memory is the more underground you could find, the more cred you got. You had to earn your cred.

53

MAKE Literary Magazine

KF: You had to earn it, absolutely. I miss that. It still exists to a degree. There’s still a lot of underground shit that’s being produced. Maybe if I was younger, I would be more tapped into it. But it’s different now.

JC: You talk about embracing flaws and failure. Are there what you might have spent years thinking of as flaws or failures in making work that you actually turn to your advantage in doing this? Like your ability to weave poetry and different media together, recirculate and reposition ideas throughout this text?

KF: That’s a really good question. I mean, I would say I probably have a bit of an insecurity around poems. Sometimes I wonder, “Am I really a good poet?” And so that may have fueled this book to a degree. I wanted to open up the landscape a bit. I’ve gotten more attention from my visual art over the years than I have my poetry.

People talk about my poetry mainly when they talk about me reading it in public, not reading it themselves. Like, not going home with my books and reading them, but me performing the poems or reading the poems out loud. That’s when people really respond to my poetry.

So, I’m like, “Does that make me a good performer, or does that make me a good poet?” So, then I think because of my uncertainty sometimes around that, it’s fueled me to be a little bit more experimental in my approach to writing. ’Cause if I’m like, “I don’t even know if I’m good or bad, then it doesn’t even matter, I can just play. I also really enjoy editing and revision. That’s one of my favorite things to do.

Like when the poem is written and now you go back in and you start tweaking it, and taking things away. I love that process, and I think that comes out in the book.

JC: That’s where the action is at.

KF: It is! So I like to show people, I crossed this out, I re-wrote this. This is important, this is not so important, right, just kind of really showing, again, the process. So maybe my insecurity around being a poet may have fueled this book to a degree. And then also I looked at it as a space to reintroduce ideas or make connections. Like there are poems in here that were in the other two books that preceded it. So, again this is the closing of that chapter. There’s a lot of poems that were in Killing Floor, there’s a few poems that were in Study of Love & Black Body. Actually the first poem in Under the Knife is the first poem in Study of Love . . .

So . . . the opening [poem] of that book is also the opening poem in this book and so that’s it. It’s the closing of a chapter. That opening poem is my ars poetica. It’s about the surgical world, and how the surgical world is the way that I think of writing. That you take it apart, that you open it up; that it’s bloody, it’s messy, it’s dirty.

It’s like you’re telling secrets, it’s messy work. You know, the blood on my hands is my blood. I did the whole thing.

That poem opening both of these books is significant. ’Cause it’s about,

“Oh, this is Krista. This is what Krista thinks about poems, and about writing, and about art. She thinks it’s a fucking bloody mess.” You’re stitching stuff together, you’re tearing it apart, you’re taking things out, you’re excising. It’s like a constant surgical procedure.

JC: That’s a wonderful way to put it. And hopefully there’s life after that.

KF: And hopefully there’s life after that, right? Like hopefully something real-

54

Mad Science

ly good emerges from these kind of procedures of violence. Psychological violence, memory violence. So, if something good comes from that, somebody opens this book and reads some shit and is like, “Oh,” and it makes them think differently about their life, or their pain, or about some family trauma, or whatever, or makes them laugh, right? Because stuff is so crazy and hurtful sometimes that you have to laugh about it. If I can make that happen with this book, I’m more than comfortable.

So, being insecure and then being stabilized I think are underpinnings of that book.

JC: Well, as an aside you are a real poet, and don’t ever doubt it.

KF: Thanks, Joel.

JC: I think it’s important that you’ve brought that impetus into another project. ’Cause sometimes I feel like the world of poetry is tired. And it sees the same type of thing, over and over again.

KF: Yes. JC: So, when I witness that sameness being nudged at or torn at, I think that’s really healthy. I’m thrilled for the people who will test it and take it to task.

KF: Yeah, thank you for saying that. I agree, I think you’re absolutely right.

You know the poetry world can be an echo chamber as well. And it’s, again, a popularity contest. It’s like, “Who’s got the sexiest book right now? Who’s got the sexiest image that goes along with their book? Who’s got the sexiest brand? The sexiest performance style?” It’s always a constant production and performance and a competition. . . . But the pleasure, the pleasure, the joy of reading a really beautiful poem.

Or a poem that really shakes up your imagination around how something can be structured or articulated.

JC: Nothing can communicate in the same way.

KF: No. It’s so good.

JC: I’ll always love that about it.

KF: Me too. And so, kind of lowering the stakes for myself, and not worry so much about, “Am I going to be able to get a poetry book out in the world?” When I stopped caring about that, I was able to love the work again.

JC: That’s great.

KF: I was able to love sitting at my notebook or my computer composing something for fun. Not because I had some kind of expectation for what it was gonna get me. It’s like, it’s not gonna get me anything except an understanding of an experience that I didn’t have before, and that’s about it. And that’s the most you can hope for. It’s not gonna get me famous, it’s not gonna get me more fucking money, it’s just gonna be out there, and people can live with it or not.

But for me it’s the joy. I’m always seeking to get back to that teenage girl

who was just in the bed, on the floor, writing all this shit down, and loving it. Listening to this album and daydreaming; just imagining the possibilities and the magic of life. And thinking about love, and thinking about death, and thinking about all of these really heavyweight [ideas], and composing around that shit. I’m always trying to get back to that.

55

MAKE Literary Magazine

Episodes in Entomophobia

By Jacob Saenz

your ceiling contains little

browns streaks & smudges like a child’s strokes

of fading finger-paint but looking closer

one can see the smearing of bug blood & guts

the end results of fear snuffed out w/a Swiffer

the swift broomstick of death you wield

to clean & calm the floors & walls of your mind * the little jumping spider

on a jaunt near the top of the window is too close

to the couch & your body for you to let it thread

a web to slink down from one day spy-like & meet you

two eyes to eight eyes so you think it’s best

to smash it dead now than to have a scenario

in your head play out in material reality

* the house centipede

crawling up the tub causes you to bawl

& ball up on the bed where I’m freaked

awake by your shrieking over its size & pace

the grace of its movement on the hunt for insects

& arachnids to feed on to minimize your exposure

to other many-legged explorers still not enough

reason for you to let it live as you order & arm me

w/a chancla to crush it dead but when I strike

I only slice a few legs off which the bug detaches

& abandons as it scurries into a crevice I can’t reach

& leave it be while you still cower & refuse to shower

for the rest of the day

*

the dead float

of a roach in the cat’s tin

bowl sets you off screaming & breathing

fast as you back away unable to change

the water as the cat laps up gulps

around the brown shell & you call on me

to flush the body & refill the bowl

56

Mad Science

The Sea at Kelleys Island

after Theodore Roussel’s The Sea at Bognor

By Jacob Saenz

Green water chops the rocky shore like a chained dog snapping its jaws its jowls full of foam & venom *** the water throws carcasses of mangled fish tangled in sludge & seaweed onto stones a blonde boy chucks rocks at the pile of bones to kill time while the ferry pulls in *** Circus brought ashore.

Elephants ferried over night to hide the chains.

*** Near the western shore, toxic algae blooms & bruises the deep blue water into swirls & swaths of vibrant green. Still safe enough to swim in, so says a rickety signpost.

I watch a boy dunk his head in water & emerge w/a smile slimed onto his face.

I dip my feet, burrow my toes into sand.

That’s as deep as I allow myself to go. *** On the ferry back to the mainland, I watch the sun slowly sink beyond the water, which is vast & seemingly endless. Gulls swoop & dive for near surface fish but come up hungry. A few birds wade on waves & I secretly wish for Bessie, fabled monster of the sea, to emerge, snatch one up as a snack & look back at me w/its viciously sparkling eyes the legend says she has.

*** Inscription Rock stands bold on the south shore, a limestone boulder holdover from the Pleistocene Era, full of petroglyphs of foxes & beavers, deer & canoes, originally etched by the Erie or Cat people who were annihilated by the Iroquois who themselves were fucked over by white folks who started carving their hearts & initials into the stone like assholes until the National Register of Historic Places said, “This is history” & put up some wooden slats & a plaque around it for protection & there it lays like a beached whale wanting for water.

57

MAKE Literary Magazine

Animal

By Liliana Colanzi Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

If I had a superpower, it’d be to experience the

Baron von Uexküll lost his fortune in the First

world for a few hours through another animal’s

World War and was forced to take up a teaching

perspective. How do parrots, eels, a worm, or a

position at the University of Hamburg, where he

scorpion sense the world around them? How does

developed his most influential theories. According

an armadillo feel the sun’s heat, the earth’s scent,

to von Uexküll, we are used to viewing the world as

the growling of other armadillos, the passing of

a homogeneous reality that we share with animals.

time? A single day in the life of a human being is

Yet, each animal relates to its environment in a way

the entire adult life of a mayfly, that winged insect

unique to its species: there is a world for flies, a

with twenty-four frenzied hours in which to dry off

world for iguanas, another for jaguars. Von Uexküll

its wings, choose a partner, have sex mid-flight, lay

referred to the system of signs used by each organ-

eggs (when female), and drop dead. A dog perceives

ism to “understand” its environment as umwelt or

the world through its infinite complex odors, while

environment-world.

a whale is able to call to another that’s hundreds of kilometers away.

“The universe is filled with glimmering soap bubbles. Each holds a world, a world fleeting and

Jakob von Uexküll, from Baltic Germany, one

humble, or vast and lush. There is no legend, no

of the most important zoologists of the twentieth

story equal in fantasy to those living worlds,”

century, dedicated his life to studying animal be-

writes von Uexküll in Biologische Briefe an eine

havior. The son of an aristocratic family in decline,

Dame, or Biological Letters to a Lady. And: “We

58

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

cannot perceive those extraneous schemas except

explains how a scientific lab managed to keep a tick

from within our own.” We’re condemned to imag-

alive for eighteen years without feeding it: during

ine the extraordinary lives of other living beings

this time, he speculates, the tick would have re-

without being able to access them. “All that’s left

mained in a latent state, like sleep for humans. In

for us is to lament the impossibility of painting

his book The Open, the Italian philosopher Giorgio

those thousands of worlds in their own colors, of

Agamben revisits the tick anecdote in order to ask

hearing their unique sounds, feeling their own par-

himself what happened to the tick and its world in

ticular spaces and times. We are entirely ignorant

the course of those eighteen sluggish years: if a be-

of other subjects’ sensations.”

ing is defined by its relationship to its environment,

One living being that interested von Uexküll

what happens when it endures utterly deprived of

was the tick. A tick spends its days perched on a

it? In other words: What does the tick experience in

branch waiting for the right time to pounce on an

those eighteen years without sustenance?

animal and suck its blood. Deaf and blind, the tick

The story of the tick reminds me of the fifty-

nestles into a space because of how its skin reacts

two-hertz whale. A specimen on our radars since

to light. At first whiff of a mammal passing nearby,

1989, this whale sings at a unique frequency, higher

the tick flings itself at it: “If by luck it falls onto a

than that of other whales: maybe it suffered some

thing emanating heat (which it can perceive thanks

malformation, or perhaps it’s a hybrid. The thing

to an organ that senses temperatures), it has

is, because of the unusual frequency at which it

reached its goal, the hot-blooded animal, and then

sings, no other whale can communicate with it. It’s

it needs only use its sense of touch to find a spot

possible that this creature has spent decades sing-

as devoid of fur as possible and burrow itself head-

ing the ocean through without a single whale ever

deep into the animal’s cutaneous tissue. Now, it

answering its call. This has led it to be christened

can slowly slurp at a gush of hot blood.”

“the loneliest whale in the world.” But maybe we’re

The tick doesn’t even enjoy the taste of blood:

projecting: How can we know that a whale feels

this mite lacks taste. All that matters is for the liq-

loneliness in the same way humans do? Von Uex-

uid it drinks to be the temperature of mammalian

küll said it before: “Our greatest shame is that we

blood: after eating, it lays eggs and dies. The envi-

will never know what it’s like to be another.” In any

ronment-world of the tick consists of the butyric

case, there’s something touching about an animal

acid scent in mammalian sweat, the temperature

ceaselessly wandering the oceans after an answer

of blood, and the creatures’ skin type. Von Uexküll

that might never arrive.

59 59

MAKE Literary Magazine

Writing Love Poems to Alien Horses

By Rosebud Ben-Oni

means not sleeping among you -of-paradise until the bite proves fatal but being taken

into the field & shot

in post-temple sacrifice

so we come together hard winged & deciduous

:: means slick armor

sheds twice a year a swarm of comets

whose resurrection

:: means we dream even after we die

:: means to speak the tongue of post-dust & post ice

the brxght brxght xyxs & what happened post {x}

when {x} was {{I}}

ridden

means :: saying our name

a certain number of times would save celestial foal slaughter :: means post-chosen & the mountain we must climb

60

from

Mad Science

has no post-peak & never to post-reach the gates {{{I}}}

want you to share mysurrender

but the hard shell of your exo-skele tal & { } won’t let {us}

{ } don’t want to see you post-fading

into our own xyxs {{ }}

:: you alone strange wings singing in the arroyo across {I} post-light when the night is an ofrenda

our bleached bones in a field of red sand

:: means awakening the wrong side of the river & a small hand buzzing over a stale loaf of bread was it blood

you aim at the sky

a thousand lit arrows

61

{my love my}

means

MAKE Literary Magazine

BLUSHES IN HER CLUTCH

By Cajetan Sorich

ACT I SCENE I

(Person with their back to the audience, staring at Stranger)

way the disk lands) Person: That thing loud thing did not set itself down with

(standing six feet away) (Stranger clutching the head of a sunflower, its yellow

no help see there is a rope still attached to its middle.

petals overflow the edges of her palms)

(later, the Zipper Salesman will probably mention that

Person (staring): Hello Stranger a wilting flower with no

the distance between Stranger and Person, and the diameter

stem you’re holding a flower with no stem wilting in this heat?

of the disk, are both six feet. The twin distances are notice-

(Stranger ignores Person, staring at the sunflower’s

able, but the audience probably won’t. To be safe, he may later

fuzzy middle)

choose to point this out. He is always worried about conveying

Person: Is that your sunflower?

gaps and spaces.)

Stranger (gazing down): Yes, it’s mine, whose else would

Stranger (to her sunflower): Where is the rope hanging

it be? It’s in my palms, isn’t it? Whose else would the sunflower

from? Who lowered the disk from so high? Where is the rope

be?

hanging from?

Person (under breath): I want to be you.

(the audience can’t see who lowered it, either)

Stranger: What?

(no dramatic irony here) Person (sighing, slowly sitting on the floor): What will

(silver backdrop lowers and encompasses Person and Stranger in silver)

you do after they come?

Person: Nothing maybe you’re holding it for someone else

(the audience wonders who is coming)

who will meet you here and take it from you but you don’t want

(the three irony-types are categorized by who’s in the

it to happen then we both won’t be able to look at it anymore?

know)

Stranger: Both of us? They will take it from me, not you.

(dramatic, verbal, situational)

(laughing)

(wither the audience knows best, the speaker knows best,

Both of us.

or the story itself knows best)

(from above, a silver disk, six feet in diameter, lowers

(stage lights gleam on something in the sky, it is the blade

onto the plush grass, the kind that’s long and parts like fur

of a knife piercing through the silver backdrop at six feet from

when the wind brushes it)

the stage floor)

(the audience can tell that there is plush grass by the soft

(Person stares at Stranger as she stares down at her

62

Mad Science

Zipper Salesman: Hello, I hear alotta questions here, and

sunflower, a chain of stares) (Person’s back still facing audience as they sit cross-

I don’t know much, I only sell zippers, but the first image that

legged, probably hoping the chain will break and Stranger will

comes to me when I close my eyes and try to guess which floor

look at them)

is a fantastical, sound-warping UFO.

Stranger: Why are you so curious about the sunflower?

(or maybe a gleaming, silk-sliding knife) Zipper Salesman: The sounds it would make but also its

It’s just a flower. Why are you so curious? (the audience begins to notice that Stranger repeats her-

shape, a flat circle taking up space.

self)

(for a long time, unlimited slices) (Stranger loops)

(of sound)

(blade gleams again)

Person: That’s not real not helpful at all not real at all.

Stranger: I got this flower yesterday. Since then I’ve had

Zipper Salesman: Not real? It’s right there.

the flower.

(Zipper Salesman points at the disk, in the grass, sitting

(it’s a flower with no stem)

six feet from the three of them)

Person: Where did the stem go?

(from its center the rope tracing up into the sky)

Stranger: I’m not sure, it’s been gone since yesterday.

Stranger: I can tell you

The stem was gone. I think it was cut, but I don’t remember

where I got the sunflower.

who cut it. I don’t remember if it was cut before

(has she remembered something?)

Or after

I remember—

I found it. I’m not sure.

(blade is not on the floor anymore)

(what a hazy, looping memory she has)

(no gleam)

Person: If it has no stem coming from its middle where

Zipper Salesman (interrupting): I’ll tell you

did it come from where did it grow?

what I am going to do. I’m going to compose the shape of

(Stranger may loop, but Person runs on)

my next zipper through sounds; I’ll find a way to turn words

(who grew it?)

into sounds, and from the sounds I’ll find a way to shape the

(It goes Person who’s staring at Stranger who’s staring at

zipper to convey exactly what I need to convey.

sunflower who’s staring—)

(silver disk plays the air)

(blade begins to slide—the audience had forgotten about

(fantastical sound)

it, peeking out from the silver—)

(sort of wiggly wompy)

(down, toward)

(slices—maybe they are limited)

(Stranger loops the stares)

(like Stranger’s memory or Person’s use of punctuation)

(the plush grass)

Person (to Stranger): Can’t you tell me where you found the flower or did someone give it to you which is it this man here who sells zippers doesn’t know where you found it knows

SCENE II

nothing about what’s going on.

(Stranger and Person standing next to each other with the

(like answers)

flower and the disk and the blade and the loops and distances

Stranger: I didn’t find it, it was given to me. I have to

and the rope and the lack of stem)

watch it until they come get it.

(the sky is silver there is a slit and the gleaming blade is

(earlier, didn’t she say she found it?)

on the floor)

(looping stares) Person: I just want to know the floor where she found the

(the blade reached the floor when nobody was looking) Stranger: I found it on the floor. Yesterday I found it. The

flower came from who gave it to you can’t tell me where she

flower, on the floor.

found the flower and where I can

(the blade was silky the way it is slid toward the floor)

find one, too.

Person: The floor of where?

(you can’t find a stemless flower and just decide it’s im-

(a man steps on stage from the slit in the sky)

portant, it won’t work)

63

MAKE Literary Magazine

(but how can you love its fuzzy middle and clutch it for

(just the air)

hours knowing someone will soon take it)

(the boathouse is not in the sky)

Zipper Salesman: Get up, come here, come over, we’ll

Person: I can take anything I want sometimes things I

talk.

don’t want I guess I wonder if truly Stranger wants the flower (blade still gone)

wants to stand at the corner all day days waiting only to give it

(Person follows Zipper Salesman through the slit in the

back to someone she doesn’t remember and never see it again

sky)

after holding it all day waiting protecting it watching it wilt Stranger: I didn’t find it, it was given to me. I didn’t find

feeling the soft petals

it. I have to stay here with it.

I want to do it makes me feel empty watching her hold it

(I don’t know if she found it, or if it was given to her. I

reminds me that I don’t have something to watch over some-

don’t know who she’s waiting for, or when they’re coming)

thing important.

Zipper Salesman: And why couldn’t you take it?

(but she does need to stay here)

(blade gleams)

SCENE III

(the audience remembers that the Zipper Salesman came

(Person and Zipper Salesman standing, their backs facing the

from the slit in the sky)

audience)

(now the silver is just the air around them)

(the two are looking at a houseboat)

(they’re not in the sky)

(a roughly painted houseboat on the silver backdrop)

SCENE IV

(it is not a houseboat in the sky) Zipper Salesman: The thing with zippers, the shapes

(Person talking on a blue rotary phone that is mounted to the

need to have empty spaces, that’s the shape I’m looking for, it

wood panels of the houseboat) Person: I told you last week and I will tell you again now

depends on where the empty spaces go. (and teeth)

I will probably tell you again next week, I do not know why I

(tell the audience where the empty spaces should go)

couldn’t take it because I can take it and I still might take it

(and where shapes should take the place of empty space)

because I don’t know where to go to find a sunflower no stem

Person: You brought me here to talk to me well I’m here

to protect.

please go ahead tell me how do you decide what to leave empty

(sighs, slowly sits on the floor gliding down the backdrop,

what to fill.

silkily, like the blade) Person: Yes I know I can cut the stem off any flower I

(tell Person about how much space there should be between shapes like the sunflower’s fuzzy middle or the big, fat

want but—

silver disk)

—Well how the hell am I supposed to care about it if I’m

Zipper Salesman: What is something you’ve wanted but

not protecting it what’s there to care about to be tortured by

you couldn’t take?

if I don’t have to hold it and wait for someone to come and

I’ll tell you

take it?

I wanted so badly to buy a giant strawberry-shaped gum-

Okay yes okay yes I’ll see you soon okay yes.

my at the shop near the pier And to take it home to the boat,

(Zipper Salesman comes out of the boathouse)

it was so large

(meaning that he crawls out from beneath the silver back-

I would have had, for a temporary but satisfying stretch

drop that the boathouse is painted on)

Of time,

Zipper Salesman: I have a confession to make.

Unlimited slices

(they stand arms at their sides, staring at one another)

Of strawberry candy. It was the type of gummy candy I

Person: Okay please.

Zipper Salesman: I am a Zipper Salesman I only sell zip-

like But you can’t just decide that something is unlimited, it

pers. I don’t know much.

Person: I never asked you to convey anything any way

won’t work (the silver is not sky anymore just atmosphere)

it’s okay.

64

Mad Science

Stranger: I don’t see it. It lost the rope, that’s why it

Zipper Salesman: I can’t connect words or sounds only fabric I can only slice through fabric with my knife.

moved all around from left to right while it fell. I don’t see the

Person: Your knife?

rope attached.

Person: Then from where did it grow?

(the word pricks the audience’s attention but they don’t consciously realize it)

SCENE II

Zipper Salesman: I don’t want to sell zippers anymore.

I can’t convey anything with these zippers I am not a Zipper

(The bus is full and Person has to stand. They let an old man

Salesman anymore.

press his round belly against their hand which is wrapped

(he can only slice through fabric with a knife he can’t

around the pole for standing people. Is the pole actually for

make space with words)

standing people? Maybe it’s not for hanging onto but for holding up the ceiling of the bus, like scaffolding. It could hold

ACT II

both purposes. Unless holding the pole risks collapsing it, and

SCENE I

with it the ceiling. This isn’t likely because if they are fragile

(Stranger alone, not in the sky)

but vital, the bus driver would warn us not to hold the poles.

(the sky is still silver and the boathouse is still painted

Probably.

on it)

They get off the bus at State and Oak. Across the street a

(but now the audience sees the boathouse as it is, as a

woman holds the head of a sunflower in her palms. The fuzzy

painting, not a houseboat)

middle faces her, and its sagging yellow petals overflow out

(the blade lies on the floor peeking out of the slit in the

of her hand. She has on large sunglasses and wedged heels.

silver sky)

The woman is a priest carefully presenting the eucharist. She

Stranger (muttering to her feet): I found the flower on

is the congregation, too, bringing the flower closer to her face

the floor and someone gave it to me.

to admire its wilting petals.

(blade of a knife gleaming but not from the floor)

Person swims across through the silvery haze of a rainy

(the sharp tip of a new knife is peeking through the silver

summer day. The sunflower-clutching mother glows in their

backdrop)

peripheral. Has she been holding it all day, or did she find it on

(Stranger mutters to her feet but stares at the flower—

the ground five minutes ago? She cups it at a distance from her

not looping stares but attention tiers)

chest to provide it with the space it needs to breathe. She’s not

Person (walking down the street, stops next to Stranger,

letting go of this flower, it’s soft, dripping petals. It’s charm-

looks up at the houseboat painting): When did this get here is

ing, a grown woman cradling a flower the way a child playing

a strange place for a mural like this a nautical mural it looks

house would. She’s found a new house decoration and it blush-

sort of familiar.

es in her clutch. This woman is lucky. In her palms she has

Stranger: What is that sound, do you hear that sound?

something she cares about.

What is it?

Person makes a choice. Edging closer toward the woman

(it is the knife slicing through the silver atmosphere to-

the choice becomes urgent. Person swims faster and faster,

ward the stage floor)

their armpits moisten and their face begins to blush. With a

(the blade gleams)

swift pluck, the flower is on their hands, and they begin to

Person: Remember the disk with the rope hanging from

run)

nowhere where did it go?

SCENE III

Stranger: They pulled it back up some time last week. I

Stranger (shouting): Hey, stop, stop, you know I need that!

barely noticed that they pulled it back up. (on cue, as if the timing is staged, the disk floats down

Stop, please, they’re coming for it I need to give it back to

from the sky)

them. Hey, stop, stop. You know.

(it floats down, swaying left)

(Person turns the corner and weaves through waddling

(and right)

tourists and rich town-house residents)

Person: Where is the rope?

(stopping to catch their breath)

65

MAKE Literary Magazine

Stranger: Hey! Heeeeey!

Person (peering into the houseboat): Why do you have

Stranger: I need that! I need it!

all of these things these different shapes they’ve no use but

(Person runs)

to be shapes?

Man: I’ve nothing else to do but sit in my houseboat and

(they’re running in circles) (the silver can be sky or just the air)

figure out how to convey what I want to convey. It’s funny, I

(Person is thumping feet)

like shapes, but, ever since I stopped selling zippers, I’ve been

(gentle hands the flower relaxes in their palms as if it be-

a little more concerned with numbers.

longs there)

FINAL SCENE

(the two blades gleam) (the two stop)

(Stranger staring at the sunflower)

(Person is an orb of sweat and clanging, torpedoing

(the backdrop is orange with three slits in it, one blade

urgency)

gleams from the floor) Stranger: I can’t remember who gave this to me. I found it

(but they both stand in place) Stranger: I need that, please, you know that, I need that.

on the floor of my apartment, and they told me to take it with

Person (shouting): You’ve been watching it all day days

me, but I can’t remember them. They asked me to protect it

weeks actually they’re not coming they’re not real like the

until they come back, but I don’t know them. I can’t remember.

person in the sky with the rope there’s nobody coming there’s

Maybe they’re imaginary but how will I know if I don’t

only the imaginary person with the rope.

wait here to see if they come and take it back. (a hand reaches from the second slit and picks up the

SCENE IV

knife)

(back at the houseboat)

(Person steps onto the stage from the slit in the orangey

(Person slides onto the stage from the newest slit in the

haze of summer)

silver)

(blade gleams in hand) Person: I’m sorry I tried to take it from you you care

(A man, immediately after, slides through the adjacent, six-foot slit in the silver)

about it and I wanted to care too I wanted to cradle the flower

Man: You’ve come back, welcome back. Hey, have you

and wait for someone.

Stranger: That’s the knife. There’s no stem because it was

noticed that these slits here are about equal in length? Both about six feet. Nature sure is remarkable.

cut with that knife, that’s the knife.

Person: I tried to take the thing I wanted the flower.

Person: This can’t be the knife this is my knife and I’ve

The flower is gone I gave it back to the woman I will never

been using it to cut shapes to choose where there is emptiness

hold something I care about not like her I just can’t seem to

where there are teeth can I please take a picture of it only to

care about it.

remember it before they come back and all we can do is talk

Man: I’ve been working on some shapes. No more zip-

about it?

pers, though, don’t care about those.

(Person pulling out their phone)

(drear clangs)

(Tapping the screen to focus on the yellow petals curling

(slices inside of Person’s head)

over Stranger’s fingers) Person: Little sun rays.

(Man picks up the knife used to cut the first slit in the silver)

CURTAIN

(the other blade gleams) (Man slices a new vertical slit through the middle of the houseboat) Man: See. (Man pulls out a flexible silver fabric disk, three feet in diameter) (it’s one of two three-foot disks)

66

Mad Science

The Great Balanced Day

By Cristina Correa

This story does not fit on a raft. Into the tangled look, silver thrills what has been monstered: the one standing, killing Medusa.

Get her head, (lottery of the soul) her eyes (doors she looks right through) like galaxy always expanding beneath a gigantic hat— piled up corpses: in which: a system: regularly is: primary: by the dimmer: eclipsed: that Perseus holding her, true, an artistic representation or twodimensional image, rather power to transform. He becomes a hero: most unfortunate, violent, and dangerous star in the heavens. From the point of view of the historically noteworthy— eyes twist the lids over and glow and heat-crust—the woman is daft. She hasn’t learned a later evolution, an eclipsing binary, only the theory of: massive stars: much faster: than ones: less massive: evolve: a bloody violence, spin, a variety of cultures, wide, axes across.

How can any woman live like that? Growing stupid in anticipation, lifting in the wind, a remnant, a supernova, all they want is to be. The braided serpentine hair of expansion, the thermal character of each soul spinning sweetly around itself, here Medusa and Perseus are twins in concentration, flares at the edge of great design, and her bare eyes low, under her neck, the hand, it grows and does not drift away, this dead scene, under the cusp: the great balanced day.

67

MAKE Literary Magazine

NOTES ON HARM REDUCTION

By Kyle Minor

Last week we packed the nurse van with needles, sharps con-

Twice I have vomited in the bathroom of the needle ex-

tainers, HIV antivirals, garden-variety antibiotics, individu-

change. Both times when I got on my hands and knees on

ally wrapped Rice Krispy Treats. The week before there was

the floor, I was afraid a tiny invisible grain of fentanyl would

fried chicken, but today there is no fried chicken.

enter my bloodstream through the skin and kill me like it

The abandoned factory is two city blocks. It has no roof.

killed Prince and Tom Petty.

I don’t know how many people live there in the rain. Why

Once in another needle exchange, a woman introduced

didn’t we bring tarps? I’m worried it will start snowing in

herself like this: “My name is Charmin. C-H-A-R-M-I-N. Like

two months. I’m worried someone will jab me with a dirty

the toilet paper.”

needle even though that has never happened.

When I got the Naloxone training, I accidentally

If someone overdoses today, they will die, because I

knocked the heroin dummy off the table and later I dreamed

don’t have any Naloxone, and I can’t bring them back to life

his head fell off.

without Naloxone.

The people who live in the abandoned factory are still

When the nurse talks, her voice sometimes reaches a

alive. If they stay alive today, they might be alive tomorrow.

frequency that triggers my vagal nerve, and before I can pass

It is expensive to keep heroin people alive. Last month

out she gives me a Rice Krispy Treat.

a county prosecutor said only one historical figure had the

Some of the paramedics have compassion fatigue. They

answer to this heroin problem, and that historical figure was

don’t want to keep bringing the same dead people back to

Charles Darwin.

life. Naloxone is expensive.

68

Mad Science

THE DINOSAURS

By Anthony Michael Morena

Downstairs, when you first walk into the American Museum

up, protect bones that it has never known, hunt what it has

of Natural History, there are three giant dinosaurs locked

never hunted (like this). It stands on two legs, not because

in a dramatic struggle of life or death: two barosauruses

there is a theory that these dinosaurs could do that sort of

and an allosaurus. The barosauruses are large, long-necked

thing, but in imitation of us, like a mother who doesn’t like

herbivores and the allosaurus is a predator. One barosau-

the way that stranger is standing too close to her daughter

rus is an adult female and it is posed rearing up on its hind

in line for tickets at the museum. That is a story, too, fiction

legs to defend the juvenile barosaurus behind it from the

adding flesh to bone, so that we will see ourselves in it and,

attacking allosaurus, threatening with its long foreclaws.

that way, learn.

The room is a rotunda, and the barosaurus’s neck stretches

Maybe it’s the fantasy that keeps those bones from be-

up some forty feet into the air.

ing up here with the rest of the dinosaurs.

Of course, it’s all a fiction.

There is no fossil evidence that such an encounter ever

took place, no evidence that allosaurus preyed on barosaurus, no proof that barosaurus or any other sauropod like

In the late 1980s, when I was a kid, everyone was into di-

it could rear back on its hind legs, or if the single sharp

nosaurs. Stephen Jay Gould said that he believed that this

toe on its forelegs was ever used for defense. This young

was an occurrence of dinomania. His phrase. He said the

barosaurus is not the offspring of the full-grown barosau-

fascination with dinosaurs was a fad—like yo-yos when he

rus. There is no evidence that barosaurus even cared for

was a kid—and that as a fad, it would be cyclical. Quick to

its young. The bones themselves are not bones but replicas

fade away and come back again. Gould blamed the fad on

that make the dramatic poses possible to mount. Bones are

commercial exploitation of the science of paleontology. Toy

too heavy to support these kinds of dreams. Only feather-

companies, TV producers, movie studios. But I don’t think

weight models, cast like papier-mâché, are strong enough

any of us growing up were marketed into liking dinosaurs.

to make a dinosaur rear up like this as it has never reared

We were being marketed so much more besides dinosaurs.

69

MAKE Literary Magazine

When Ronald Reagan took over the White House he ap-

to the ones he created and that you can still see standing to-

pointed an FCC head who deregulated the entire TV cartoon

day in London’s Crystal Palace Park. Hawkins’s idea for his

industry, allowing more advertising, and shows that were

museum was to fill it with recreations of America’s prehistor-

tie-ins to toys—commercials basically—to air for the first

ic life: the first dinosaur fossil discovered in America, Amer-

time since the 1960s. Toy manufacturers like to call this their

ican mammals, an American museum. Hawkins’s workshop

Golden Age. Everything we consumed was marketed to us. I

was built directly inside Central Park, and numerous models

think that dinosaurs offered an escape from that.

had already been finished when the plans to open the Amer-

Most of the reading I did about dinosaurs I did at the

ican Museum of Natural History were suddenly announced.

library. At school, in TAG, we labored together to create a dinosaur encyclopedia with illustrations. Dino-Riders and Dino-

saucers, Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs and even Jurassic Park were more of a reaction to us and our interest than the other way

Albert S. Bickmore got the idea while he was working at Har-

around. We were the ones being exploited, not paleontolo-

vard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology: the premier scientif-

gy. There is a hint of Boomer supremacy lurking in Gould’s

ic institution in the United States belonged in New York City.

idea. It’s as if he was saying that kids in the 1980s and 1990s

He preached it to the other researchers who worked in the

couldn’t have a genuine interest in the science of dinosaurs.

lab, to undergraduates, to visiting lecturers, to anyone in the

In the dinomania article, Gould tells about how he was one of

room, to anyone who would listen. When he spoke to a prince

two kids in his neighborhood who liked dinosaurs, and they

paying Harvard a visit and it got him fired, Bickmore took the

were bullied for it. Both he and his friend became scientists.

idea directly to the New York elite—the Gilded Age robber

How could so many of us be like him? he insinuates.

barons who agreed with him completely.

for the Paleozoic Museum when the Central Park board gave

Hawkins was already at work on his model dinosaurs Bickmore and his backers approval for the American MuseExtinction is not easy to relate to. Dinosaurs are a memen-

um of Natural History. All they needed to open the doors was

to mori for the human race. The way some of the halls that

the okay from William “Boss” Tweed. All politics in New York

have existed in the museum are no longer there, entire parts

flowed through Tweed. Corrupt, mean, violent. When they

of this book now no longer exist, their parts removed, placed

talk about the Democratic machine in New York, Tweed is the

elsewhere, like the brontosaurus that when I was young I saw

one who designed it, and built it, and fed it human oil.

here, a mistake that should never have been made: a wrong

His benefactors arranged a meeting, and sent Bickmore

head on a wrong body, now shelved away in a drawer behind a

to Tweed with a letter. Something opened up the door for

door. An extinction for the extinct.

Bickmore from inside the hotel room and waved him in. With

The people in this city, too, have been moved. Moved in,

the curtains drawn and the room full of thick cigar smoke, it

moved out, removed.

was difficult to see. Whatever had opened the door for Bick-

The change that they want—for you to go away forever—

more had blended into the furniture along the wall, or had

is not possible. Some things remain, trace, hard, turned from

become part of the wall itself, so as to not be seen.

bone into stone and stand witness. Not because they die out

Bickmore continued into the room, and there, seated in

and are buried in the earth, but despite it. A permanent death.

a large chair, was Tweed. The room coalesced around his fig-

Take, for instance, the shards of broken dinosaurs that

ure, crosshatched under his weight. Bickmore felt drawn to

can be found if you take a shovel and start to dig in Central

him, an animal gravity he could not quite understand. That is

Park somewhere around Umpire Rock, near the baseball fields.

when he heard the noise.

Before there was a museum, there was a museum. In 1868, the

It did not ask “Yes?” It must have said something, it must

Central Park board asked Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to

have wanted something, because before he could realize it,

create a prehistoric garden in the park. This Paleozoic Mu-

Bickmore was giving the noise an answer.

seum was going to be filled with enormous prehistoric crea-

“Sir, I am Professor Albert Bickmore and I have here let-

tures, plaster model dinosaurs and ice age mammals similar

ters from some of the most respected men in New York who

70

Mad Science

would like to see a museum of natural history established in

walk into this room.

New York—”

In an interview once, he pointed out a glass dinosaur that

Tweed held up a hand and stopped him.

was given to him by the museum that he keeps in his office.

“The world as you know it is not how you would have it

He called it a brontosaurus, the dummy.

exist?”

“No,” said Bickmore cautiously. “Well, yes, in a sense.”

Bickmore handed over the letter.

One day Joe Monero raised his hand—in CCD class, appropriAs he opened up the letter, an orange glow lit Tweed’s

ately—and began a rant about how he believed dinosaur fos-

face. He left it there, delighting in it, the color sparkling in

sils were a hoax, planted in rocks by scientists to perpetuate

his eyes, which were focused and did not move the way they

a myth. Probably not because he thought that was true, but

would if he were reading.

only to make the rest of us mad.

And just as suddenly the light went out. Tweed folded up

In Petersburg, Kentucky, just outside of St. Louis, is the

the letter and slid it into a pocket in his vest. His face could

Creation Museum. This natural history museum displays di-

not be seen through a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

nosaurs and humans living together, in line with the literal

“Yes,” said a voice, disembodied within the cloud. It did

reading of how the Genesis account describes the origin of

not sound like Tweed. The words seemed to confuse Bick-

the world and the universe. Dinosaurs could not have lived

more, who stared and shook his head, unsure.

millions of years ago—the world is only 6,000 years old—

His shock must have been obvious then, because Tweed

which means they must have lived with humans.

answered again, not with his voice but from his hand. Thick

Ken Ham, who runs the Creation Museum, says that

strands of cigar-butt smoke seemed now to swirl into the

because we were not alive during prehistory there is no way

shapes of letters, twisting up and curling over until they had

we can say for sure that the fundamental laws of nature were

arranged themselves into letters floating across the room:

the same then as they are now. No way to tell if volcanic rock

Y-E-S.

formed from lava as it does today. That gravity did not always hold things down.

One diorama in the Creation Museum shows Adam and Eve sitting in modest waist-deep foliage while a happy veloci-

It was nighttime when Tweed’s gang came to the workshop

raptor chews leaves from a tree right next to them. But since

for the Paleozoic Museum. Hawkins watched as they fanned

we weren’t there, we can’t say that this ever happened either.

out to the left and the right, brickbats in their hands and hammers. The model duckbills that were going to be shown feeding the swamp were smashed. The dinosaur feeding on one of the duckbills was smashed. They smashed the models and the molds. They tore the room apart, and when they were done, they got to work on Hawkins.

“Embrace life,” the leader of the gang told him. “Not these dead things from the past.”

David Koch—the Republican mega-donor and climate change denier—has been a major donor and, until recently, a member of the museum’s board. In the 1990s he dedicated the funds that went into refurbishing the fossils halls here on the fourth floor. That’s why his name is on the wall when you

71

MAKE Literary Magazine

AFTER DARK

By Nisha Coleman

When I was nine, my dad walked by my bedroom door

than-alive kind of way. And now he was somewhere out in the

carrying his shotgun. It was late summer, dusk. I watched him

forest with a gun, preparing to blow his brains out. Was he

head into the woods, his gait slow but determined. I watched

doing it for us? Could I stop him? Should I? My mom was out

until he disappeared down the path, into the pine tree shad-

of town, so as the eldest, I was in charge. I was the one who

ows. I watched until I couldn’t see him anymore.

was supposed to know what to do. But I didn’t.

I knew without a doubt what he planned to use the gun

The official labels wouldn’t come until much later, but I

for, but to be sure I went upstairs to inspect his to-do list.

always knew that there was something not OK about my dad.

He wrote a new list every day in a spiral notebook, printed in

For years I’d observed his ashen cheeks collapse under the

impeccable, microscopic handwriting. The list would include

weight of misery, his blue eyes dim like a flashlight with ail-

items such as “play guitar” or “stack wood” and he would

ing batteries, a scowl seep in to contort his face. I feared him.

add a small, uniform checkmark to each task once complet-

His moods and what they made him do. I stayed out of his

ed. I would often glance at it in the morning, scouring it for

way, tried to be small, to take up as little space as possible. He

any activities of interest such as “go to town,” which had the

spent a great deal of time alone, toiling in his tiny workshop

potential, albeit slim, for something fun like renting a mov-

in the basement, smoking his pipe or drinking or writing po-

ie or, on an exceptionally good day, a box of donuts. When I

etry. Often all of the above. At night he would play the guitar

was younger, I would add “play” to the list, trying my best to

at the kitchen table. From my bed I could hear the gentle fin-

make my frustratingly childish penmanship match his inimi-

gerpicking and sometimes I would hear the low hum of his

table letters. Sometimes it worked. But we’d stopped playing

singing. I was jealous of that guitar, the way he swayed with

by the time I was nine. By then we simply coexisted, mostly

it, the way he gently plucked the strings and would sometimes

witnessed each other coming and going, walking by.

rest his mouth on the top curve as he played, as if lightly kiss-

On this day, there were only two items on the list, and I

ing it. And most especially I was jealous of the way the guitar

only remember the second one. It read: “Cash in. Have fun.” I

seemed to soothe him in a way I never could. But one Sun-

knew this had to do with insurance money, which he had men-

day afternoon I glanced out of my bedroom window and saw

tioned a couple of times in a sort of I’m-worth-more-dead-

my dad in the backyard sawing his guitar into pieces. As if it

72

Mad Science

was mere firewood. That’s how I knew things were getting

One night, in a whiskey-induced stupor he threatened to kill

worse. That he could mutilate the one thing he truly loved

my mom with it. She fled outside and stayed in the shadows

meant that anything was possible. There was a wooshing in

where the tree frogs chanted and the fireflies flashed. She

my chest. I ran upstairs and found my mom in the kitchen

waited until he had passed out, the gun sprawled beside him

and asked, my voice weak and breathless, “Why is dad doing

on the bed like a mistress, his very own femme fatale.

that?”

Since he spent so much time in his workshop, he and

“Because he’s fucking lost his mind!” she said and a sob

the gun hung out a lot together, like two star-crossed lovers

that sounded like a gasp for air escaped her mouth.

flirting endlessly, never daring to make that final move. Un-

The whoosh was back now as I sat at his place at the

til now. Why he chose that day, I don’t know. It didn’t seem

kitchen table, waiting for what was to come next. If I were to

more miserable than any other day. It was late August, the

speak, maybe my voice would have sounded weak and breath-

night sounds dampening as the tree frogs and crickets drifted

less again, but there was no one to speak to. I sat at the kitch-

into retirement. Dusk turned to dark as I waited. Without any

en table, the spiral notebook open on the table beside a small

moonlight, there weren’t even any shadows, and I didn’t like

red-winged blackbird that my dad had painted there, directly

to think of my dad in all that darkness. The minutes passed. I

onto the wood. He’d painted a small bird for each of us in the

waited and waited and waited.

family and let us choose which bird we wanted. Across the

It did not occur to me to call anyone. 911 had yet to ar-

table was a blue heron for my mom. On the left a blue jay for

rive in rural Canada, and there was no list of emergency num-

my brother and a chickadee for my sister. Mine was on the

bers to call on the fridge. In fact, it did not occur to me to

right: a snowy owl. Unlike the others, I picked a bird I had

even call my mom at my grandma’s, whose number I could

never seen. A bird I had only learned about in the school li-

have found in the blue address book in the cupboard. I sat

brary when we did a unit on owls. They lived in impossibly

there with the burden of the knowledge gnawing at my chest.

cold climates. The males can be pure white, so sitting on a

I thought about going out there in the woods to look for him.

tree, they looked like ghosts, and when they flew they looked

There was a lot of land back there, at least a few hundred acres

like angels, their wings wide and white and full of power. I

of wilderness including a pond that the beavers had dammed

stared at the blackbird in an embarrassed silence, knowing

into something that was starting to look like a small lake. Be-

that whatever the right thing was to do, I was certainly not

sides the couple who lived across the road, the beavers were

doing it. I was conscious of my breath then, the ticking of the

our closest neighbors, and as far as neighbors go, they were

clock on the wall, and the space that I took up on his chair as

pleasant. They kept to themselves and never interfered with

I waited for the shot to reverberate through the forest. And I

our lives except in the spring when they flooded the road and

wondered what I would do once it came.

the ministry came knocking on our door. Beavers are monog-

Recently, a friend dealing with chronic pain showed me

amous, and the devoted couple on our pond built a lodge near

a large bottle of prescription painkillers she keeps on a shelf

the back where they raised their young. At dusk you could

in her room. She told me that if things ever got unbearably

find them swimming, sometimes mating—although “making

bad, if life simply became intolerable, she would take them.

love” might be a more appropriate term as they are surpris-

As in, she would take them all at once. She begged me not to

ingly sensual creatures. Throughout the night is when they’d

hide or confiscate the pills because, she explained, just having

do their work, chopping down trees and dragging them to the

them there on her shelf, visible from her bed, was soothing.

dam. It’s a common fact that beavers’ front teeth never stop

It must have been the same for my dad and his shotgun. He

growing, so it’s not so much about work ethic as it is about a

bought it with the pretext of protecting the chickens from

biological necessity. They have to keep chomping. But it’s not

predators, but I doubt he would have shot an animal. The gun

just their teeth. Their bodies don’t stop growing either, so the

sat in his workshop and became what the bottle of pills is for

older the beaver, the bigger, with the largest on record weigh-

my friend. An end in sight. A promise. A way to have the upper

ing in at a terrifying 110 pounds.

hand over life. When things got bad, out would come the gun.

The worst thing about waiting is that time stretches,

My younger sister once discovered my dad passed out drunk

making the wait even longer. It can be helpful to distract

in our backyard treehouse, the gun strewn across his chest.

yourself when you have to wait, but of course reading or

73

MAKE Literary Magazine

watching TV were unthinkable at that moment. I didn’t even move from the chair where I sat, like a vigil, my senses heightened. I don’t know how long I waited there. It felt long. Very long. But eventually I heard a loud sound: the back door slamming. Then the door to his bedroom close.

Like humans, beavers transform the natural world for survival. Like beavers, my dad worked as a builder. Unlike beavers and unlike any other creature in the natural world, humans willingly end their lives. Or at the very least they think about it. The question seems to torment them. To be or not to be. My dad answered the question for himself that night—after hours of deliberation, he hurled the gun into the pond.

No one spoke about the incident. And as with everything else, the story sunk down in the muck of our minds, a place no one felt like going. But the thing about muck is that, while it obscures things, it also preserves them. Naturally mummified bodies from thousands of years ago are found perfectly preserved in bogs, their skin still intact, even their facial expressions. The beavers eventually found the gun somewhere down in the dark water. They brought it to the surface and stuck it in the dam, as if on display, the pièce de résistance.

The Sistine Chapel of beaver dams. Fortified to perfection and topped with a hunter’s rifle.

“Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher,” writes William Wordsworth in his poem “The Tables Turned.” I like to think of the beavers, our productive neighbors from down the pine path, as exemplary. Bringing things from the muck into the light. Keep going! they seemed to urge. Keep moving! Keep chewing! Keep building! Keep growing!

74

Mad Science

FROM THE AFTER-NORMAL: BRIEF, ALPHABETICAL ESSAYS ON A CHANGING PLANET

A SHORT REPORT ON EVOLUTION

By Nicole Walker and David Carlin

Elephant In the movie Waterworld, the audience discovers halfway

Kevin Costner has forgotten about cities. No one remembers

through that Kevin Costner has grown gills. Waterworld is an

streets and cars. No one remembers when there were other

eponymously titled film. The world is covered by water. There

bad guys like poachers and child molesters and Cabinet mem-

is no dry land anywhere in the world. The food is fish, if you

bers. And, most pointedly, Kevin Costner has grown gills. He

can catch it. Water comes salt-cleaned from the sky or in the

has evolved. He has become part fish. That can’t happen fast,

form of filtered piss. There are bad guys: Smokers, who smoke

can it?

cigarettes and spew smoke out of the backs of their very bad

In November 2016, an article came out stating that el-

Jet Skis. There are other kinds of bad guys who strive to make

ephants were being born without tusks. In response to the

new dry land with the decomposing bodies of bad men or me-

poaching of elephants to sell ivory to Asia, especially China,

dium-bad men and maybe also decomposing fish guts. The

elephants are evolving to save themselves. A big fuck you to

making of land is almost as difficult as the making of water.

the poachers of the world.

Boats banded together with rotting hulls pile dead bodies in

Think of this world so rich in substance, so rich in so-

tanks, hoping one day the solids will outweigh the liquids.

lidity, that you can stand assuredly on the ground. So rich in

But it must have been a short time since the ice caps

grasses and grains of sand and deciduous trees whose leaves

melted and the world was swallowed up, because the hulls of

fall to the ground and easily compost themselves into dirt.

all the boats haven’t rusted through and Kevin Costner still

No one needs to work on dirt-making. The Earth is so plenti-

manages to keep a pot of lime and a pot of tomato alive on the

ful that there are elephants enough to leave behind for dead

deck of his boat and the bad guys, the Smokers, still have cig-

on the grassy, sandy savannah floor, the entire body of an el-

arettes and enough gasoline to power their smoke jumpers.

ephant, taking nothing but its tusks. The leaves fall on the

But it also must have been a long time since everyone besides

scratchy elephant skin. They decompose together. It’s the

75

MAKE Literary Magazine

poacher carrying those heavy tusks who is alone. He sells his

My mum’s friend Von, from Adelaide, has a longstand-

cut to a lonely man who sells the collection of tusks whole-

ing fascination with fungi. It’s not a fascination that’s quick

sale. A whole shipping container full of ivory. Two. Three. An

to spread. The fungi people are more of an underground

abundance of ivory stacked on top of an abundance of shoes

network, like the fungi themselves.

and lumber and lithium bound for the land most abundant

Von says: “I like small, secret things.”

with humans. Perhaps you can imagine a lonely man in that

The other morning I was walking near the suburban

most-abundantly-peopled land looking for a way to say This

beach at Glenelg just east of Adelaide, where Mum and Von

part of the planet is mine. His Buddha isn’t quite the Buddha

and their friend Marg and I had been swimming, and it

who urges mindfulness and living in the moment. This little

came up that the fungi season was about to start. Von had

Buddha statue carved from the great abundance of mineral,

just been to her first Fungimap group meeting for the year.

the great abundance of ivory, the great abundance of grasses

Fungimap is an Australian citizen science association dedi-

and sands and deciduous trees. There’s something about tak-

cated to all things fungi.

ing a little bit of the world home with you in your pocket, even

“Haven’t you heard that story?” Von said when I asked

though you know it signals the death of everything around

how she got into fungi. “I was out camping in Tassie, and I

you. Ivory in your pocket is a talisman that says, “Not yet. It’s

was relieving myself in the bush in the middle of the night,

not over yet.” Until, of course, it’s over.

as one does, when I saw this thing right beside me on the

But it turns out the elephants aren’t any more in charge

ground, glowing bright green. I hightailed out of there quick

of their evolutionary skills than Kevin Costner with his gills

smart, but in the morning I went back and found my wet

or the poor boat people trying to make soil. They didn’t de-

patch and there beside it was an ordinary, plain-colored

cide to stop being born with tusks. Evolution chose that fate.

mushroom. Next night I went out again and it was glowing

It happens every few years, when so many female elephants

green. I was hooked!”

are hunted. The ones without tusks are the ones who survive.

Some fungi are indeed bioluminescent, to attract in-

They go on to give birth to the next generation. Their tusk-

sects, after dark. But fungi are amazing in many ways hu-

free DNA gives way to tusk-free baby elephants. Neither in-

mans are only just discovering. Trees, other plants, and

tent nor timing has anything to do with it. It’s always been

fungi form symbiotic partnerships. The fungi intertwine

this way. Elephants have been getting rid of their tusks for

with the tree roots, like hair extensions, and in exchange for

decades. Every year, 10 percent fewer babies are born with

wholesome carbohydrate energy from the trees, which the

tusks. Evolution, unlike ivory, is forever abundant.

trees have extracted by photosynthesis from sunlight, the fungi reach down deep into the earth and bring back such

Plasmodia

essential minerals as nitrogen and phosphorus, which the

I have come late to slime mold. Some things I know:

trees need to grow big and strong. Trees use fungi to com-

• Slime mold is neither plant nor animal. Slime mold

municate with other trees, even to help take care of them

metamorphoses from an amoeba into something called

when they are in need—all of this scientists have shown.

a plasmodium, that flows across the surfaces of damp

Where forests used to be metaphors for individualist com-

logs, stumps, leaves, and other ground litter in forests,

petition—the survival of the fittest, sapling-eat-sapling,

also within rotting wood.

pay-no-taxes, natural way of life—they are now revealed as

• Plasmodia don’t have legs; in fact, they are one giant

sophisticated networks of multispecies cooperation, surviv-

single-celled organism with many nuclei so they don’t

ing on give and take. Trees and fungi, like humans, live their

have brains either, or organs of any kind.

lives entangled.

• They move by pulsating forward and backward.

Just as I’m finally coming to realize that fungi might be

• They live on bacteria, algae, and the hyphae, spores and

the coolest organisms with the best metaphoric potential on

fruiting bodies of fungi.

the planet, Von says: “You know what’s really weird? Slime

• One famous slime mold looks so disgusting to a human

mold!”

eye that it is called dog’s vomit.

Slime mold is the fungi-lover’s fungi. It is not even a fungi anymore—it has been pushed over the classificatory

76

Mad Science

fence into the wild territory of protists. All I can understand

only learn but also teach naïve slime molds what they have

so far about protists is that it is the category you go into if

learned. The biologists showed slime molds that crossing a

you are not in any of the other categories. Protists are like

bridge of salt posed no threat, then invited the newly wise

the + at the end of LGBTQI+, the cutting edge of organic

slime molds to fuse with naïve slime molds. The newly fused

diversity.

slime molds, it turned out, also knew the trick of crossing

Slime molds are not just ugly, they are also beautiful.

salty bridges. Then if the scientists separated the fused

They metamorphose again, after being plasmodia, to the

slime molds after they had been cozied-up together for three

fruiting stage. This is when, like fungi (but not fungi), they

hours (time enough for a vein to form at the point of fusion,

suddenly produce profusions of spores, often looking like

as the biologists saw through their microscopes), the slime

little lollipops on sticks, that blow away in the wind to live

mold that had previously been the naïve one was now just

mysterious new amoebic, plasmodic, sporangic lives.

as smart as the wise one and would happily go across the

“Where do they go at the end of all that?” asks Von

bridge to oat-land on the other side.

rhetorically, as we get off the tram. “Nobody knows,” she

So the moral of the story: not so smug, humans! If slime

continues. “They disappear without a trace. We haven’t be-

molds can do all this stuff, without even a single cell divi-

gun to understand them!” We part ways on Gilbert Street

sion or a smiley face, then we need to get our advanced pri-

to hunker down against the heat. “Look them up,” she says.

mate shit together.

“It’ll blow your brains, I promise you!”

Scientists have discovered that, even without brains or nervous systems, slime molds are remarkably smart. Plasmodia can solve mazes, pulsating through them, investigating all the dead ends before settling on the shortest path to a food source. Other scientists have used a diet of oats and a map of Japan to coax slime mold into creating an accurate version of the Tokyo regional rail network that, on various measures, functioned roughly as effectively as the actual Tokyo regional rail network. “Overall,” they concluded, “the Physarum (a.k.a. slime mold) networks showed characteristics similar to those of the rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. However, the Physarum networks self-organized without centralized control or explicit global information by a process of selective reinforcement of preferred routes and simultaneous removal of redundant connections.”

Elsewhere, paid again with oats, slime molds have obliged by recreating the network of the Canadian highway system But wait, there’s more! Slime molds are also capable of learning from experience. A team of biologists in France has done experiments where they blocked the paths of slime molds with bitter and salty but harmless substances. At first the slime molds didn’t want to cross the foul-tasting coffee stain (or whatever), but once they realized after a few days that it was in fact merely unpleasant rather than dangerous they started going across anyway. In December 2016, the same scientists demonstrated that slime molds can not

77

MAKE Literary Magazine

FÓRMULA SECRETA Two of the great issues that humanity has to deal with in the present and that are glimpsed as the great problems of the future are, on the one hand, energy resources and, on the other, food. The most revolutionary technologies and the biggest commercial and political interests attend to these issues with particular importance. Both are reduced to the same thing: energy. One for machines and one for bodies. There is one element in which the two converge: sugar.

Fórmula Secreta is part of an investigation about the triangle of relations drawn between neoliberalism-energy-bodies.

Starting from the analogy that fossil fuels are to industry what food (in this case soft drinks) are to the body, I dedicated myself to the alchemical task of distilling soft drinks to turn them into drinking water as a decolonizing gesture. The exercise invited the spectator to taste the recovered water and thus provoke a particular critical reflection around the theme.

Throughout the project, investigations were carried out into the quality of the ingredients and colorants used in these beverages and their repercussions on health. As an urgent call to the government to take care of the population’s health, we collaborated with civil society organizations to send 500 boxes to Mexican legislators with a sample of recovered water and another of the resulting “melcocha” (a mixture of sugars, artificial colorings, and flavorings) along with relevant information. The central axis of this project is to analyze sugar as a form of energy under the hypothesis that energy is the basis for establishing relations of exchange and transformation, not only of living beings, but of everything existing in the known universe.

BY IVAN PUIG 78

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

MolĂŠculas Digital print Representation of the molecules that commonly used colorants in sweetened were created by photographing out of soda bottles of different colors and

compose the five most beverages. The images focus and from above sizes.

Conjuntos Infographic mural This chart establishes certain relationships between neoliberalism, bodies, and energy.

Agua recuperada y melcocha Three-liter Coca-Cola bottle containing the distilled water and a glass jar with the "melcocha" that was removed.

79 79

MAKE Literary Magazine

Fórmula Secreta acción legisladores Press conference Cardboard box, water, and “melcocha”

80

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Fórmula Secreta en el mercado Single-channel video 6’12” This video shows a presentation in a tianguis (a flea market) where the distillation is offered to passers-by.

Colorimetría Glass bottles containing samples of different soft drinks and their colors.

81 81

MAKE Literary Magazine

82

Mad Science

83

MAKE Literary Magazine

LA INDEPENDENCIA (DE PUERTO RICO)

By Raquel Salas Rivera

¿no te sentirás solita

won’t it be lonely

(algunos preguntarán)

(some may ask)

al quedarte a solas con solo tus cosechas, solo tus playas para visitar, solo tus montañas para subir en carro hasta que la carretera sea precipicio con una madera fina de papel de regalo, amarrada con un lazo de pluma de gallina, con firma de perro sato?

to have only your crops growing, only your beaches to visit, only your mountains to drive up until the road is a cliff with thin wood wrapping, tied with chicken feather bow, with a scribbled stray dog name?

¿no extrañarás los sonidos que entran filtrados por otros mundos, la algarabía del descubrimiento constante torcido para formar los blasones, tu esperanza con casco, siempre en el campo de batalla, siempre a la defensiva?

won’t you miss the sounds that filter through from other worlds, the clanking of being discovered, constantly bent into crests, your helmeted hope forever afield, forever on guard?

¿no te abandonarán tus dioses? ¿tus hijos, no cruzarán mares correteando hacia el pecho de aquella nación mayor? ¿no te negarán la alegría como bienes en el puerto? ¿no te castigarán por manifestar aquel sueño?

won’t your gods leave you? won’t your children scamper across oceans into the bosom of that older nation? won’t your joys be withheld like goods in the port? won’t you be punished for the dream you chose to manifest?

¿no volverán con más ejércitos, pistolas más grandes,

won’t they come back with more armies, bigger guns,

84

Mad Science

estrategias más densas, nuevas elecciones, radiaciones, chupacabras para tus vacas, especies extrañas que te comerán cruda?

denser strategies, new elections, radiations, chupacabras for your cows, strange species that eat you raw?

¿tus celulares captarán sólo la devastación, plagas esparciendo tu cáscara seca? seguramente las minas viequenses despertarán dentro de los volcanes inactivos donde peces raros ponen huevos venenosos.

won’t your phones only capture devastation, plagues littering your dried hull? surely the mines in vieques will all awaken in the once-dormant volcanoes where strange fish laid venomous eggs.

pondrás en peligro a todos tus viejos amantes, quienes, buscándote desesperados en un mundo reorganizado, accidentalmente tocarán la puerta errada y morirán.

you’ll endanger all your old lovers, who, desperately trying to find you in a rearranged world, will accidentally knock on the wrong door and die.

¿no morirás? ¿tu muerte no será como un nuevo planeta vaciado de todo aquello por lo cual luchaste?

won’t you die? won’t your death look like a new planet emptied of all you fought for?

te llamarán terrorista. un día no regresarás y todos se enteraran de que en el cuerpo tenías demasiada independencia.

they’ll call you a terrorist. you’ll never return one day and everyone will know there was too much independence in you.

¿no lo romperás? ¿no arruinarás las aguas?

won’t you break it? won’t it ruin the waters?

(algunos preguntarán) ¿cómo sabes si funcionará? ¿cómo te puedes asegurar que no acabará con lo poco que tenemos, los cupones que hemos ahorrado, los apartamentos apestillados donde guardamos viejos marcos, récores de los trabajos que perdimos, la gente que perdimos a la jeringuilla o a los sótanos de ciudades lejanas?

(some will ask) how do you know it will work? how can you be sure it won’t just take down the little we have, the coupons we’ve saved, the cramped apartments where we store old frames, records of jobs we’ve lost, people we lost to the needle or basements in far-off cities?

aquí tienes un matrés que usamos hace quince años y guarda la historia de nuestra resistencia. esto se lo llevará tu empeño en salvarnos.

this here is a fifteen-year-old mattress and it holds the history of our endurance. this will be swept up in your rush to save us.

85

MAKE Literary Magazine

mira lo que nos dieron: estas promesas interminables que algún día quizás se cumplan. sin ellas, ¿no se sentirá el vacío?

look at what we’ve been given. these interminable promises that may one day deliver. without them, won’t it be empty?

¿no se sentirá como si todo lo que tenemos son latas almacenadas y una tierra que no sirve gracias a todos los fuegos?

won’t it feel like all we have are stored cans and land useless from the burnings?

tendremos que luchar y sabes que tras la lucha no nos queda lucha. ellos enviarán nuevas naciones para matarnos y entonces, ¿qué ofrecerás? ¿tu bandera y tu orgullo?

we’ll have to fight and you know after a fight there’s no fight left. they will send new nations to kill us and then what will you offer? your flag and your pride?

¿no quedarás relegado al olvido? ¿tus restos no se hundirán en la tierra como huesos de taíno?

won’t you be forgotten? won’t your remnants sink into the earth like taíno bones?

no botes a los buenos colonizadores con la poca agua de lluvia que recolectaste. no es su culpa que beban de un pozo llano para luego volver a sus casas con piscinas y sus cabañas frente al lago. ellos también necesitan, como nosotros. ellos también.

don’t throw out the good colonizers with the little rainwater you’ve gathered. it’s not their fault they drink from a shallow well, then head back home to pools and lake cabins. they too need, like us. they too.

¿no te resultaría mejor visitar a tu cura, ir a terapia de pareja, trabajar juntos para arreglar la relación?

won’t you be better off seeing your priest, going to couples therapy, working on this together?

¿no confías en que mejorarán las cosas? mira a todas las naciones modelo en sus filas largas, por lo menos tienen aire acondicionado en el daco imperial.

don’t you trust things can get better? look at all the model nations in their long lines, at least they have air conditioner in the imperial dmv.

¿no te perseguirá esta decisión?

won’t you be haunted by this one choice?

asegúrate que quieres hacer esto. nos queda poco.

make sure you want to do this. we have so little to live on.

¿por qué te atas a cosas imposibles? siempre será diferente de lo que te imaginas. ¿y quién dirá que será mejor? ¿cómo estás segura?

why do you cling to impossible things? it will always be other than what you imagine and who says that will be better? how do you know?

¿no ¿no ¿no con

won’t you be sorry? won’t you wish you had a boss? won’t you get restless with all that freedom?

te arrepentirás? desearás tener jefe? te sentirás inquieta tanta libertad?

86

Mad Science

FROM

TÍTULO / TITLE

By Legna Rodríguez Iglesias Translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen

22 en vísperas de la culminación del período para la venta de equipos de cocción (ollas de presión eléctricas, arroceras y cocinas eléctricas) llegas tú y te plantas frente a mí y me miras con esos ojos de muerta de hambre y de gorda a base de arroz en vísperas de navidad y de año nuevo y del día de las madres y del día de los padres los mismos ojos de muerta de hambre y de gorda a base de arroz glaucoma y astigmatismo detectores de luces alrededor del arroz y de porciones de arroz para celebrar el día de las madres y los padres la venta por crédito de los artículos referidos quedó aprobada a partir de instrucciones ministeriales que nada afectan tus ojos ni mis ojos nuestros ojos son bellos el arroz es bello las ollas de presión eléctrica son bellas la belleza del mundo condiciona tu vida mi vida y la vida útil de un objeto solo hay que tener cuidado de mirarnos y más cuidado aún de tropezarnos

22 on the eve of the close of the sales period for cooking equipment (electric pressure cookers, rice cookers, and electric stoves) you come and stand right in front of me and look at me with the eyes of a girl starving to death and fattened on rice on christmas eve and new year’s eve and mother’s day eve and father’s day eve the same eyes of a girl starving to death and fattened on rice glaucoma and stigmatism sensors of light around the rice and servings of rice to celebrate mother’s and father’s day the sale of the referred-to items on credit was approved per ministerial instructions which don’t affect your eyes or my eyes at all our eyes are beautiful rice is beautiful electric pressure cookers are beautiful the beauty of the world conditions your life my life and the shelf life of an object we just need to be careful of looking at each other and even more careful of stumbling

87

MAKE Literary Magazine

44 mi doctora privada que antes fue mi novia y antes fue mi amiga y antes mi enemiga y me obligaba a meterme bajo duchas de agua fría para bajarme la fiebre del dengue o la desesperanza del dengue y de la desesperanza me recomienda dormir de siete a nueve horas diarias cada día o cada noche el momento que yo elija para hacerlo me incumbe solo a mí y no es problema la cantidad de horas aconsejadas resulta casi imposible de llevar a cabo comer no ayuda leer no ayuda reír no ayuda llorar no ayuda correr no ayuda pelear no el efecto más común con la falta total o parcial de sueño es sin duda melancólico un efecto que supongo extraño para la mayoría de los hombres y las mujeres actuales por implicar algo conocido con el nombre de emoción palabra tildada en la última sílaba sin embargo muchos otros factores de salud a nivel físico y psíquico intervienen aquí mi doctora privada me recomienda dormir ocho horas si es preciso junto a ella la cantidad de horas aconsejadas resulta casi imposible de llevar a cabo ni qué decir del cómo el cuándo y el dónde metodológicamente antiéticos la cama se encuentra localizada junto a la pared de manera vertical la mesa es lo único plano que veo parada en puntas de pie desde este ángulo sin embargo muchos otros factores de salud intervienen en mi modo de ver las cosas

44 my private-pay doctor who was my girlfriend before that and my friend and my enemy before that and who’d make me take cold showers to bring down the fever i had from dengue or from the despair of dengue and despair recommends i sleep seven to nine hours a day every day or every night whenever i want to that’s my business and it’s not a problem the amount of hours suggested ends up being almost impossible to do eating doesn’t help reading doesn’t help laughing doesn’t help crying doesn’t help fighting doesn’t the most common effect from a total or partial lack of sleep is definitely melancholy an effect i’m assuming is strange for most modern-day women and men since it implies something known as emotion a word whose stress is on the second syllable still many other health factors both physical and mental come into play here my private-pay doctor recommends i sleep eight hours if need be next to her the amount of hours suggested ends up being almost impossible to do not to mention the how the when and the where all methodologically unethical the bed is up against the wall vertically the table is the only level thing i can see standing on tiptoes from this angle still many other health factors come into play with my way of seeing things

88

Mad Science

22 estoy enamorada de ti como Sylvia Plath estaba enamorada de Ted Hughes y no me importaría encontrar la muerte en ti como Sylvia Plath la encontró en Ted Hughes igual ya encontré mi muerte en los cañaverales en la Sierra Maestra y en Villa Mariana lugares donde tal vez también tú encontraste la muerte una muerte más interesante que los poemas de Sylvia Plath unidos en un mamotreto a los poemas de Ted Hughes lugares donde no se sabe de dónde viene el viento ni hacia dónde va la lluvia llovizna llovizna llovizna oí en el cañaveral y entre los bambúes de Villa Mariana llovizna llovizna llovizna entre las madreselvas de los corazones de las mujeres un sinnúmero de palabras amenazadas por el calor del verano y más amenazadas aún por el calor del invierno que es el mismo calor del poema de Ted Hughes estoy enamorada de ti como un tigre infantil de un poema infantil para cachorros o como Sylvia Plath convertida en cachorro viendo a Ted Hughes convertido en cachorro agachado tras las cañas de un cañaveral en Cuba en pleno mes de verano en pleno marxismo socialismo comunismo en pleno desfile de los trabajadores llovizna llovizna llovizna repiten las cañas podridas consumidas hechas tierra igual ya encontré mi muerte y la muerte es mejor que la tierra sin ti

22 i’m in love with you like Sylvia Plath was in love with Ted Hughes and i wouldn’t care if i found death in you like Sylvia Plath found in Ted Hughes in any case i already found my death in the cane fields in the Sierra Maestra and in Villa Mariana places where maybe you found death too a death more interesting than the Sylvia Plath poems joined with the Ted Hughes poems collected in a big book places where no one can tell where the wind comes from or where the rain goes to drizzle drizzle drizzle i heard in the cane field and the bamboo in Villa Mariana drizzle drizzle drizzle in the honeysuckle bushes in the hearts of women an endless number of words threatened by the summer heat and even more threatened by the winter heat which is the same heat as in the Ted Hughes poem i’m in love with you like a baby tiger in a children’s poem for cubs or like Sylvia Plath turned into a cub watching Ted Hughes turn into a cub crouched down behind the sugarcane in a cane field in Cuba at the height of summer at the height of Marxism socialism communism at the height of the workers’ parade drizzle drizzle drizzle repeats the rotten shriveled ruined cane in any case i already found my death and death is better than the world without you

89

MAKE Literary Magazine

77 el azúcar en ráfagas ha vuelto a mí y estoy entusiasmada y agradecida por ello desde hacía quince años no experimentaba este dulzor que llena al cuerpo de energía hubo un tiempo que me embargó la nostalgia extrañaba demasiado aquellos vidrios diminutos la cuchara temblorosa en mis narices los labios entreabiertos las papilas aguándose la mente en blanco y una página tan blanca como el lugar de pensar hago zafra una vez más celebro una vez más estoy sola y ladro y muerdo el azúcar entre otras cosas maravillosas como el deseo de trabajar da rabia y da virtud ofrece al consumidor lo que faltaba a su espíritu una chispa eso es rabia y virtud eso es crecimiento a mi edad lograré esperar los años que sean necesarios para meterme una cuchara de postre en los dientes llena de azúcar cruda prieta llena de lo que siento por ti yo te amo

77 sugar has come back to me in bursts and i’m excited and grateful for it for fifteen years i hadn’t experienced this sweetness that fills a body with energy there was a time when nostalgia overcame me i missed those diminutive shards of glass too much the trembling spoon under my nose lips slightly parted taste buds watering mind drawing a blank and a page so blank like the place to think i harvest sugar once more i celebrate once more i’m alone and i bark and i bite sugar among other marvelous things like the desire to work makes you angry and virtuous offers the consumer what their spirit needed a spark that is anger and virtue that is growth at my age i’ll manage to wait as many years as it takes to gobble down a spoonful of dessert full of sugar raw brown full of what I feel for you i love you

90

Mad Science

99 en espera de que amaine la tormenta me distraigo con un poco de autoayuda me corto las orejas la nariz y un dedo y los echo en una olla de cocción eléctrica ubicada al lado de la hornilla eléctrica sobre dos ladrillos que son su plataforma adentro una libra de frijoles colorados puestos en remojo desde anoche veo los granizos y los goterones pero no los oigo es una suerte dicen que el terror proviene del sonido a varios kilómetros de mí un hombre sobrevive al cáncer terminal está lleno de cáncer lleno de cangrejos que se alimentan de él hace dos décadas el hombre sin embargo sobrevive sin perder sus orejas su nariz y sus dedos lo ve todo y lo oye todo es una suerte dicen que el terror proviene de la ignorancia a varios kilómetros del hombre otro hombre se distrae con un poco de autoayuda se corta las orejas la nariz y un dedo y los echa en una olla de cocción eléctrica junto a una libra de frijoles colorados puestos en remojo desde anoche la tormenta no amaina y él ve los granizos pero no los oye es una suerte dicen que el terror proviene del sonido yo sé que proviene del interior

99 waiting for the storm to die down i amuse myself with a little self-help i cut off my ears my nose and a finger and I throw them into an electric cooker located right next to the hot plate on two bricks which are its shelf inside it a pound of red beans soaking since last night i see the hail and the raindrops but I don’t hear them fortunately they say the fear comes from the sound several kilometers away from me a man survives terminal cancer he’s full of cancer full of crabs that have fed on him for two decades still the man survives without losing his ears his nose or his fingers he sees everything and hears everything fortunately they say the fear comes from the ignorance several kilometers away from the man another man amuses himself with a little self-help next to a pound of red beans soaking since last night the storm doesn’t die down and he sees the hail but he doesn’t hear it fortunately they say the fear comes from the sound i know it comes from the inside

91

MAKE Literary Magazine

Truth

By MartĂ­n Felipe Castagnet

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

92

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

It was the kind of city you could walk at night. The

knew it. To get the clothes clean they used strong

old fortress was located at the end of the gigantic

chemicals that soaked through the latex gloves he

park, bordered by the lake. The pit, Baptiste cor-

wore.

rected himself. The path was well lit and the plants

He smelled his hands now, as he walked toward

smelled like lemons that had been squeezed by

the Old Lathe. They didn’t exactly smell like lemons.

hand. The problem was the cold: a southerly wind

And what if I have to go into the prison, he

was blowing that night, and in his haste he’d left his

asked his cousin, who laughed.

gloves in his apartment. He’d also forgotten his ID, but it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t need it.

It’s a women’s prison, they’re not going to let you in easily.

His cousin woke him up just as he’d fallen asleep. Or that’s what he thought at first, when he

At first, before the alarm went off, everything was

heard the phone ring: in reality he’d slept two or

going smoothly: he walked through the exterior

three hours. He was exhausted after working all

wall; he entered the code his cousin had given him,

day at the dry cleaner, and he’d fallen asleep fully

watched closely by a guard—a white guy—but the

clothed, without even drinking the bottle of cane li-

automatic door opened and he was inside without

quor he’d bought when he got off the bus. The sound

any trouble; he opened the locker in the dressing

of the phone ringing was so startling that he imme-

room with a second code and he put on the cover-

diately forgot what he’d been dreaming about: he

alls and jacket all the guards wore. Before leaving,

was missing an arm, then he started crawling on all

he picked up one of the wristbands that hung from

fours, and then he was missing a leg. You owe me a

hooks beside the wooden door. He turned it on: a

favor, his cousin said to him, you know you owe me

green light started to blink and then stayed on. If he

a favor. Yes, he responded, still sleepy. We look a lot

stopped for more than three minutes, the wristband

alike, his cousin continued, you know we look a lot

let out a whistle that wouldn’t stop until he moved

alike. That woke him up.

again.

I need you to cover for me, his cousin had

He started walking through the tunnels. Some-

said. Everyone says we look a lot alike, that we look

times they were underground, other times they

like twins. It’s not that we look like twins, Baptiste

emerged into the night air and snaked alongside the

thought: it’s that all us black people look alike to

walls that flanked the pit. Every hundred meters or

them. But he listened anyway.

more there was a post. They were accessed through

His cousin worked at the ancient fortress that

tiny wooden doors.

everyone called the Old Lathe. For the past sever-

Maybe his cousin had stayed home because of

al years it had served as a prison. His cousin always

the cold. Maybe the cold can penetrate so deep into

said it was a good job: strolling around outside. All

your bones that it ends up making you go sick in the

you have to do is go from one post to another, he

head and you’ll do anything just to stay in bed.

explained. They monitor your location with a de-

Sometimes, instead of looking toward the city,

vice you grab when you go in. It’s as simple as that,

Baptiste stared at the fortress. Soon he’d entirely

cuz. You go in at midnight, you go home at dawn.

stopped glancing toward the low darkened build-

If you do well I could even put in a good word for

ings and only had eyes for the black tiles shaped like

you, so you can quit that horrible job you have. Bap-

birds, the familiar emblem placed on every fifth tile,

tiste didn’t like the dry cleaners at all, and his cousin

with patches here and there, some old, some new.

93 93

MAKE Literary Magazine

Some of the tunnels were dead ends. The corri-

staring at him, so he fixed his eyes on the end of the

dor would curve downward, and when the turn end-

room. There were weapons hanging from the walls:

ed there would suddenly be a wall or a false door.

shotguns, batons, even whips. He suddenly realized

They were designed as traps in the old fortification,

that they, the guards, weren’t armed. I don’t even

and they were the reason it had never been taken

know how to shoot, he thought, I’m going to give

by force. Enemies had been kept in these sad, emp-

myself away.

ty spaces. It was here that Baptiste had to be most

You guys, to the walls on the eastern side. You,

careful: a real guard would not try to open a fake

to the west side. And you, he pointed toward Bap-

door. He kept his cousin’s advice in mind: if the

tiste’s group, follow me. It was a small group of four

hinges are drawn on, it’s fake.

guards, all looking alert. The dwarf started down

He was leaving a passageway when the alarm

a narrow passageway; he hadn’t said anything to

sounded. Suddenly everyone started running: he

them about the weapons. Baptiste slowed down and

couldn’t see all of them, but he heard their boots; he

tried to call his cousin, without any luck. His cousin

froze, then started running too. Finally, he got up

didn’t answer again for the rest of the night.

the nerve to ask what had happened. Someone got in, they told him, and we’d better find him. The first

Baptiste didn’t know the fort’s history. First it had

thing he thought: It’s me! They’re looking for me!

been a palace and then a fortress. It had been de-

Then they told him the alarm had been activated be-

commissioned, abandoned, taken over by rats, re-

cause someone had jumped over the wall. He hadn’t

covered, transformed into a government building,

jumped over the wall. He wasn’t the intruder they

then into an armory, abandoned again, and finally

were talking about. He suddenly hated the intrud-

cleared of rodents by an indecisive government that

er, the real one, for stealing his role, or for ruining

wasn’t sure whether to turn it into a museum or a

his night, he wasn’t quite sure. This place isn’t big

military base. It had never been taken by force: it

enough for the both of us, buddy, he thought.

was such an intricate fortress that it was almost im-

He ducked into one of the posts and called his

possible to get into or out of. The perfect prison, a

cousin to ask what he should do. When his cous-

bureaucrat had finally decided, as he was finishing

in answered, all he heard were voices in the back-

his coffee on the terrace of a government building;

ground, unintelligible, as if they were speaking an-

he returned to his office and drew up the proposal

other language, and then the call was cut off. His

in under an hour. A women’s prison, he specified, to

wristband started whistling. He said to himself: if

make it more inclusive. A modern prison that will

anyone asks, I was taking a piss. He went back into

tap the full human potential of its inhabitants!

the tunnel, worried, but no one said anything; they

Even if Baptiste had known its history, he

were preoccupied with catching the intruder. Every-

would’ve been surprised by what he saw when he

one moved in the same direction, he noticed, so he

emerged from the tunnel: a huge courtyard, half-

followed. He was about to ask the man next to him if

way excavated and covered in stakes and tarps that

this happened often, but he stopped himself.

flapped in the wind. To one side, a shed held the

They reached a room that was not part of the

heavy tools the prisoners used during the day. In the

guard’s route. Baptiste wasn’t sure when they’d

center, set up like some kind of field hospital, several

turned but he knew they had been moving toward

dozen beds formed a tight circle under a canvas roof.

the interior of the fort, away from the wall. The

A doctor moved from bed to bed, her face lined;

stones here were different: not as dark, more sym-

she looked like a grandmother caring for her sick

metrical, and most of all warmer.

granddaughters. As the guards approached her, she

A small man, practically a dwarf, separated

signaled with a finger for them to remain silent.

them into groups as they entered. Three groups, in total. Baptiste began to worry that people were

The prisoners were sleeping, connected to their beds and handcuffed to iron pipes.

94

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

You guys stay here until this is resolved, the

stand what the women were saying, because they

dwarf ordered. The female wardens stared at them

slurred or cut off their sentences midway. Most of

with hatred; the male guards stared back at them

them worked in their dreams: solving mathematic

with shame. Why did they bring us here, Baptiste

equations or cracking enemy codes; a few had dark,

thought, if they have weapons and we don’t? And

vaguely sexual dreams. Under normal circumstanc-

what should we do with our wristbands, boss? one

es the doctor would have been happy, but now she

of the guards asked. Let them whistle, the dwarf an-

was just frustrated, partly because of the extra in-

swered angrily, and he left the yard.

mate, partly over having to interrupt her patients’

There should be seventy-five beds and seven-

dreams.

ty-four women, the old woman explained to them

Baptiste again felt he was being watched, this

in a low voice. But now all the beds are occupied.

time by another guard who was bigger than the oth-

Whoever the intruder is, she’s asleep.

ers, also an immigrant. He looked away, but the guy

They don’t have a list? Baptiste asked, trying to

came over to him, and he froze. You’re new, right?

help solve the problem as quickly as possible. He im-

the big guy asked with a little plastic coffee cup in

mediately thought: Idiot! Your golden opportunity!

his hands. Baptiste immediately decided he was

Their wristbands began to whistle.

trustworthy. He asked if this happened a lot. No, it

I need you to either follow me or walk in cir-

wasn’t normal. In fact, it was the first time he’d ever

cles, the doctor said. The guards looked at her. This

been inside. It’s sick what they do in here, the man

is only a pilot program, she added.

said, really sick.

Baptiste followed her. The others followed him.

You don’t even know what we’re doing here so

The list disappeared, the doctor continued,

you don’t need to have an opinion, the old woman

and unfortunately I don’t know all their faces. The

said. You’re the security, take care of that and keep

inmates have already been inspected, unsuccessful-

your mouths shut.

ly, so we have to go through them one by one. She

They all went silent, but the next inmate had a

approached one of the beds and disconnected the

lot to say. As soon as they woke her up, she opened

prisoner lying in it. The woman who had been sleep-

her eyes and immediately said: I dreamed that we

ing peacefully, her eyes twitching lightly, began to

jumped over the wall. I dreamed that we opened

shake as she woke up, as if she’d been having a night-

the door that doesn’t close. I dreamed that we were

mare. She searched for the old woman and said with

close to the treasure.

a sleepy voice: I dreamed that my husband opened

The old woman became tense, as if the cold

his mouth and in place of a tongue he had a cock.

made her want to shit. How did you get in? she

Could you understand anything he said? The inmate

asked. The inmate looked up, as if she were search-

shook her head. The doctor reconnected her and the

ing inside her head.

woman quickly fell back to sleep.

No one got in. We’re all here. The prison is a

The stimulus we give them before sleep deter-

facade. There’s treasure. We’re digging.

mines what they dream about, the doctor explained,

We already dug, it’s not here!, said the doctor.

of course it doesn’t always work perfectly. During

The wristbands began to whistle. The inmate

deep sleep their minds solve problems that, con-

smiled with metal teeth and went back to sleep

sciously, they’d never be able to. And this way they

without being reconnected.

work double: during the day on their shifts, and at night in their dreams.

She’s over stimulated, said the doctor, I have to lower their dosage or they start to imagine

They checked another fifteen inmates before

things. In reality the stimulant is just a placebo

taking a coffee break. All the women woke up agi-

used to increase productivity, she said to herself,

tated and went back to sleep after telling them what

lost in thought. Baptiste didn’t know what a place-

they’d dreamed about. Often, they couldn’t under-

bo was, but he understood the idea. They contin-

95 95

MAKE Literary Magazine

ued their rounds but the other inmates didn’t have

He couldn’t stop picturing what he’d seen

anything to add: they dreamed that they were dig-

right before leaving the fortress: the inmates

ging and in the depths they found dark water, the

marching toward the work shed, recently awak-

results of some equation, or their mother’s hair.

ened after a long night of work and facing a gruel-

Couldn’t they be lying? asked the big guy.

ing day of more hard labor. They yawned, clutching

The IV drip contains something that inhibits

cups of hot mate tea in their bruised hands, too

them from lying, the old woman admitted. After

tired to bring the cups to their mouths.

all. They called this place the Palace of Truth. It

What happened at the Old Lathe? he asked his

always seemed to me a dignified name and I want

cousin when he couldn’t resist any longer. Nothing,

to live up to it.

they doubled security on the inmates, but there was

Finally, the doctor gave up: everything was

no news yet, he said. (Of course his cousin couldn’t

in order. There was one extra inmate, but no one

ask too many questions because he was supposed to

was missing. The dwarf cursed and insulted her,

have been there.) And thanks for covering for me,

although he hadn’t been able to find the intruder

cuz. No one suspected a thing. As soon as they’re hir-

either; the wardens stared at him with hard eyes.

ing again, I’ll put in a good word for you. I’m sure it’ll

What do you expect me to do, the old woman

be in the next three or four months. Definitely in the

asked, shoot them all?

next year or two, at the most.

It began to get light. It was so cold that Bap-

Baptiste repeated his cousin’s words as he rode

tiste longed for the chemical warmth of the dry

home on the bus: thanks for covering for me. The

cleaner, corrosive but sheltered from that souther-

women are protecting each other, like we blacks pro-

ly wind. No, he corrected himself, I’m never going

tect each other.

back there ever again. Even if my hands freeze.

The simplest answer is always the right answer,

He rubbed them together and brought them to his

his cousin had said. One had come in and none had

nose. They smelled like dirt.

gone out. I refuse to believe that explanation, Baptiste thought, as he scrubbed at the chemical clean-

His cousin had spent the whole night with a wom-

er. They’re fucking with my head. This sheet is still

an who washed dishes. Or at least that’s what he

stained, piece of shit! He scrubbed until he almost

claimed. He’d met her at the laundromat: he was

wore a hole in the fabric. He felt high, his eyes water-

on his way to work, she was just getting off. Why

ing from the toxic fumes.

didn’t you just tell me? Baptiste asked him. If I’d

I could work in my dreams too, Baptiste told

told you, you would’ve never agreed. And that’s

himself. The machine wasn’t necessary, the doctor

why you didn’t answer your phone! The simplest

had said. Work harder, shithead, his boss said, or I’ll

answer is always the right answer, his cousin said

have you deported. He went back to his apartment

with a stone-like calm.

and drank a bottle of cane liquor. He tried to fall

Baptiste broke his solemn vow and returned to the dry cleaner. His boss treated him like gar-

asleep repeating the same phrase, over and over: one had come in and none had gone out.

bage. Filthy negro! Shitty slum dog, wash that

He dreamed that he was digging at his own

again! The sheets, from the hospital, arrived in

brain, with his hands, like he was trying to remove

industrial quantities. They were stained with who

a splinter.

knew what, but he had to find a way to make them white again. But even so . . . This city is beautiful,

His body was in the prison yard but his hands were moving down the tunnels.

he told himself, not like the place we come from.

He continued digging, until he hit the wall, dig-

Where the prisons are overflowing . . . and no one

ging, until he reached one of the false passageways,

sleeps . . . and no one wants to be there. With these

scratching, until he found one of the fake doors that

thoughts in mind, he drifted off to sleep at night.

led to nowhere.

96

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Why would anyone want to break into a prison? he asked himself when he woke up. Because they need the stimulus. They don’t want to break into the prison but into the palace, the ruins of the palace.

They want to find something that’s inside. But I can get inside too.

The next morning, he called his cousin. I want to cover for you tonight, he told him. You’re crazy, his cousin responded, but the chance to meet with the dishwasher again was too tempting. You didn’t fall in love with one of the inmates, did you?

This time he remembered to wear his gloves, but there was no wind and the night was calm. At the Old Lathe he repeated all the steps just like the last time, as if he were just another guard. In his walk around the wall he ran into the big guy, who looked at him and raised his eyebrows. He continued walking toward the false passageway, with a new confidence that he’d never felt in his previous life or in this one.

He thought: the hiding place might be inside the old palace, and in that case, there’d be no way for him to get to it, but if that were the case they’d have already found it a long time ago. But they hadn’t found it because it had always been outside the palace, in the walls.

Once again, the alarm sounded. He heard shouting and running, a splash. The big guy said to someone: now there are seventy-five beds and seventy-four women again. And another guy said: someone jumped over the wall. Baptiste laughed: we’re all here. There had always been seventy-five.

He heard the wardens approaching. They ordered the guards to stop or they’d shoot. Baptiste pushed open the false door with the hinges drawn on and he saw fresh dug earth. His wristband began to whistle. What did it matter, if he’d been right all along? He’d finally been right!

His ID gave him away. This time he’d forgotten to forget it.

97 97

MAKE Literary Magazine

The Aphids

By Philip Sorenson We live behind the fence. We squat in the dust, and we shit out coded messages. When we shit out coded messages, many things come to light. There are many ways of having a sense of humor.

We are planning on climbing over the fence. On our face there are three things. Our backs are covered in a beautiful dark.

Our backs are hunched and ringed. When we hear the thing on the other side of the fence, we begin to crouch. There is a song then. The sun can be too bright for us, but we still love her.

We can close our eyes. There are long stretches of land when we mistook the bird for a rat.

Sometimes it is difficult to know the difference between things.

At first, we didn’t have very good eyes. Now we can smell things and see things. The first thing has a beautiful dress and a beak. When there is a winter, we can move closer to the garage. But now isn’t winter. We see pinkish flowers on the apple tree. There are many small things moving up and down the tree.

There are many much smaller things crawling on the backs of the small things. There is a book about this. The book is in the tree someplace. We feel sick now and will have to locate more encryptions. There is an encryption near the edge of the fence. It begins to sing. It has pinkness.

We can also sing. The second thing is red. The second thing is always releasing smaller things into our eyes. The smaller things on our eyes are like moveable electric lights. The smaller things are also encryptions. We can decode them and recode them in the dirt. When we are, we are.

This is what the message is: we are. The message is only specific to our node. Our node has one laced edge. On the edge there are smaller nodes. There is another encryption on the other side of the fence. This one is holding a smaller encryption. The smaller encryption is very different from the larger encryption.

The smaller encryption is going to become big and also paranoid. The smaller one will be like the bigger one. When we are simulating the second thing, we are making a different kind of thing. When the second thing is open, we can see how to make a worm-pain. A worm-pain is also soon in the dirt.

Then we will have to decide what to do. Now there are hollyhocks. There could be a new encryption about the hollyhocks. It could be of garbage or bees. We forgot about the coyote that we saw. Maybe the coyote was a wolf. Sometimes it is very difficult to tell things apart.

We are not always awake. Sometimes we are in the middle of the night.

This is like a dream like a laboratory. Maybe the dream is in a hospital but it is also about a hospital. A hospital is always a hospital. Sometimes a thing is not itself. Sometimes a thing is a thing about itself. We are not a thing about itself. We are a thing.

98

Mad Science

Because we are a thing, we also have an edge. We have never seen the edge. Now everything is yellow. There are many encryptions on the other side of the fence. There is a group. This reminds us of the computers in space. There are so many computers in space that they cannot be counted.

There are not enough computers in space because there is no edge to imaginary things. When we climb to the top of the fence, we will see the crowd of encryptions. We can sting the encryptions with our eyes. Over our eyes there are three things. She uses her teeth on the longest lines. When she does, she makes the edge of each encryption very clear. This can be an ironical process.

We are smelling all of the encryptions at once. Our face has many holes and many different parts. Now it is getting colder. We will have to move closer to the garage. The garage has white siding and is surrounded by plants. When it is warm, the plants are covered in small things. The small things are covered in even smaller things.

There are very many small things that can climb and ingest, and she helps them. There are lilies and there is a vine and there is mint. There is no such thing as waiting. Our body has many different holes in it. Our body has many different parts. The parts aren’t always together at the same time. Some of the parts are very far away and aren’t machinelike.

There are many small things under the ground. There are many smaller things inside of the small things. When it gets colder we can better simulate the third thing. When we come this close to the garage, we stop listening at the fence. In the cold we cannot make any more wormpain. It will be very bright for a short time. We will move as close as we can to the white siding.

When we have moved as close as we can, we will use our parts. We cannot look for any more encryptions. There are many different kinds of encryptions. Even in just one code there are many different kinds of encryptions. We will have to stop shitting out code for a short time.

But this isn’t really true. Because we have the three things, we don’t have to worry.

We can always be synthetic with you. Even when we go for a long time, we are always just pretending to go. There are many different kinds of things. There are the three things and the cold that is everything. Here is the garage and the water. Sometimes it is very difficult to tell things apart. One is the fence, and one is the middle of the night. We live behind the fence, and we wait for the encryptions.

99

COMPOSITE MAKE Literary Magazine

E

Mad Science

By Christine Maul Rice

The landline’s metallic ring startled Delia.

sure it would be yours. It’s your Aunt Maxine. Your mama’s

Who calls this late on a week night? And on the landline?

little sister.”

Probably a wrong number, but for some reason Delia felt compelled to answer.

Delia hadn’t heard from her mom’s side of the family since her mom left more than forty years ago but remembered

Before she could, her son’s lanky frame swung around

Aunt Maxine vividly. She remembered peeking around the

the corner to pluck the phone off the wall. Just seeing him re-

corner the night after Mom left to see Aunt Maxine, in a print

minded her how wonderful it was to be home. Present and so-

skirt and cool green blouse, across from Pops at the kitchen

ber. Out of that damn rehab facility. And she felt pretty good.

table. Pops couldn’t look up from crying and Aunt Maxine had

She did. Most of the time.

extended her hand across the table for him to take. He finally

Really.

slid his fingertips to touch hers and they sat like that, in si-

Joey handed her the phone, “For you.”

lence, for a very long time.

She motioned for him to lean down so she could kiss his cheek. “Finals tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

Whenever she thought of her mom’s family—which had been a lot lately because, in the 12 Step Program, they

“This is Delia.”

encouraged her to share, share, share—a jumble of emotions

Silence, then clattering, as if the phone dropped, and

ambushed her: anger, guilt, sorrow. Even though they had

then, “Hello?”

nothing to do with her mom’s decision to leave, to start up

Because there was so much background noise, Delia re-

with that widower, to raise his boys as her own, Delia hadn’t

laxed, convinced it was a wrong number. Just as she was about

been able to separate her emotions about her mother from her

to hang up, a woman’s voice said, “Heavens. Hello? Sorry. I

mother’s family.

dropped my phone. Is this Cordelia?”

“Aunt Maxine. Yes. Hello. Long time—”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know what we say,” she interrupted, “this side

“Oh, good, honey. Found this number online. Wasn’t

of the family only gets together for weddings and funerals.”

101

MAKE Literary Magazine

Delia took a sharp breath. Had her mother died? “So . . .”

“Yeah.”

she began, “which one is this?”

Aunt Maxine told Delia about how her mother had been

“Neither.” Her aunt’s voice sobered. “Rosie had a heart attack and she’s in intensive care. She’s in pretty bad shape.”

taking care of her husband Herbert since he’d fallen deeply into Alzheimer’s and how, she figured, the caretaking had just

Delia remembered liking Aunt Maxine’s no-nonsense ap-

been too much for her. “You know, honey, how your mother

proach. She’d always been kind to Delia, especially after her

never liked to ask for help. As the oldest, I suppose, she’d got-

mom left. She remembered Aunt Maxine’s heart-shaped face

ten used to going it alone.”

and blonde bouffant, so like her mom’s, and how she wore gardenia-scented perfume.

“No,” Delia admitted. “I didn’t know.” Out of habit, she tapped her pocket to find her keychain full of pills, but

Delia wanted to ask, “So what do you want me to do about it?” but, “Oh” was all she could manage.

of course, it wasn’t there. “What hospital?” The words came out involuntarily, but now that she’d asked, she supposed she

“She’s,” Aunt Maxine repeated, “in pretty bad shape.”

needed to go.

Delia suppressed the urge to hang up. She’d been in pretty bad shape, too, after Rose left and, of course, recently. She and Bernadette had been so young when their mom took off: twelve and eight. Delia had just started junior high, Berna-

The next morning, a steady rain accompanied her from New

dette, fourth grade, and because of Rose’s absence, Delia had

Canaan—north on I-75 through Flint, Mt. Morris, Birch Run,

postponed all the normal things kids do at that age: her first

past Frankenmuth—to Saginaw. Her mom and Herbert had

crush, going to sleepovers and birthday parties, cultivating

been living in Frankenmuth, an odd little tourist town fa-

a best friend. She couldn’t risk getting close to someone and

mous for its chicken dinners and German architecture. But

having to lie about her mother’s whereabouts. Pops had made

wasn’t there a closer hospital than this one in Saginaw? Pot-

it clear that they would get through this as a family and that

holed roads led her through once-grand neighborhoods now

families didn’t share their business with anyone—not with

rife with abandoned buildings and trash-strewn open lots.

friends, friends’ parents, teachers, counselors. No one. She

Busted-out windows, like hollowed eye sockets, marked her

now knew that keeping her confusion and sadness to herself

progress. She wished Richard’s big contract job hadn’t started

hadn’t been healthy, that it had manifested in destructive

today, wished he sat in the passenger seat next to her, wished

ways. But to Pops, family business was family business. Pe-

to feel his constant and supportive presence. He really loved

riod.

her. She knew that. But why? She’d wreaked so much havoc in At the time, none of it made sense. She knew that her

their lives.

mother was sad, but because no adult explained the situation to her, she just figured all moms were sad. The closest any-

Last night, before they’d fallen asleep, he’d asked, “Can you do this? Alone?”

one got was Aunt Maxine saying awkwardly, “Some people

“Yeah,” she’d answered.

get caught up in—” Aunt Maxine had paused, removed her

“You sure?”

glasses, and Delia remembered aching for her to continue. But

“No. But what choice do I have?”

Aunt Maxine just shook her head as if Delia understood. But

“You always have a choice.”

Delia hadn’t understood, not at all, and Pops was too wrapped

She’d nodded but didn’t really believe it. She hadn’t told

up in his own grief to see hers.

Pops about the call, but she had called Bernadette. As usu-

In the next few years Delia would start her period, have

al, her younger sister’s annoying self-centered blather about

her heart broken, start high school, get her driver’s license,

work, her wife, their daughter, and how she simply couldn’t

smoke weed, get drunk, drive too fast, get in that accident,

break away until the weekend made Delia want to tell Berna-

and live when her friend had not. She wanted to say all of this

dette to get over herself.

to Aunt Maxine but that would be ridiculous.

“Delia?”

But she didn’t. Instead, she’d promised to report back as soon as she’d seen their mother.

“Yes.” “You still there?”

As she turned into St. Mary’s parking lot, her dashboard clock struck nine am, but it was so dark from the storm that

102

Mad Science

the parking lot lights flickered and the main entrance glowed.

had Aunt Maxine told Colleen? Had she told her that Rose

Finding a parking space, she cut the engine and tried to

hadn’t seen her daughters in more than four decades, that

steady her breath but remembered how, after Joey was born,

Rose had another family, Herbert’s family, a real family? What

she’d written to Rose—repeatedly—without response. This

did that make Delia and Bernadette? Who were they to this

particular fact, that Rose hadn’t bothered to acknowledge her

woman? And why hadn’t Herbert’s sons brought Rose in?

own grandson, infuriated Delia.

It all seemed overwhelming. To top it off, the possibility

God damn her. Delia fought the urge to cry. She took another deep breath and opened the car door. Rain pelted her

of meeting Herbert and his sons almost made her run for the exit.

face, stung her bare arms. She ran past the polished-stone sculpture of St. Mary—head slightly tilted, one hand touch-

Colleen walked briskly around the nurse’s station. “Follow me.”

ing her heart—but stopped beneath the main entrance’s

Delia tried to match Colleen’s step but her heart beat

open-sided shelter. Shaking herself off, she turned to look at

wildly and her chest felt tight. Feeling lightheaded, Delia

the statue’s back.

stopped to lean against the wall. Colleen stopped too, and

“Fuck you, Mary,” Delia murmured before turning to enter the building.

she tried to tell Delia something but Delia couldn’t make out the words because everything swirled around and around her

Delia followed the orange lines to the elevators that

like that neighbor’s barking cattle dog that tried to herd her

would deposit her on the fifth floor, just yards away from the

and Bernadette that day so many years ago—picture day—on

ICU and her mother. The walk to the nurse’s station seemed

their way to the bus stop and the owner came out and tried

to take forever, as if the hallway kept extending to spirit her

to corral the dog but she couldn’t get a hand on it and then

farther away from her destination.

Rose came running out with a broom and cracked the dog

Finally reaching the circular nurse’s station, she found

on the back and it yelped and ran away and the dog’s owner

a nurse frantically hunting and pecking on a keyboard. Her

went running after it and, after the owner had retrieved and

nametag read “COLLEEN.”

leashed it, she came back to say how very sorry she was, how

Before Delia could speak, Colleen lifted her palm in the

she hoped the dog hadn’t scared them, that’s what cattle dogs

air as if to say, “Hold on.” Finally, the nurse looked up. “There.

do—they herd—and the dog, now docile and sitting quietly

Finished. How can I help?”

at her heel, didn’t mean them harm but only wanted to make

“I’m here to see . . .” Would she say, “my mother”? It felt wrong coming out of her mouth. “Rose Ehrlich.”

sure they were safe and, while the neighbor-lady talked, their mother tucked her and Bernie’s wild black curls back with the

“Oh!” The nurse brightened, tugging the shoulder of her

bobby pins she’d used to smooth out their hair, the thick black

scrub top. “Before I looked up, I thought you were a lost phar-

curls they’d inherited from their father, the curls Rose was

maceutical rep. They sneak up real quiet like you did.”

forever trying to tame, that had escaped from their moorings,

A pharmaceutical rep? If Colleen only knew. Wouldn’t that be something, though, a pharmaceutical rep and a recov-

so that her daughters wouldn’t look like wild animals for picture day.

ering Oxy addict.

Wild animals. That’s what Rose called her and Bernie in

Colleen looked at her computer screen. “Are you . . . Cor-

the morning when they woke, their black hair matted to one

delia or Bernadette?”

side, or when they came inside after a summer day of riding

“Cordelia.”

bikes on the forest trails around their house, fishing, or play-

“Okay. Maxine something-or-other brought Mom in yes-

ing Blue Gorilla with the neighborhood kids.

terday and—” she stopped abruptly, as if reconsidering the

Wild animals.

end of her sentence. “Let me review her chart, see how she did

“Delia?”

last night. I just got in a bit ago and was going over the night

Delia found herself in a chair, sipping from a plastic cup

shift’s notes. I was here when Mom arrived.”

of water.

Mom. Delia shuddered. In addition to how foreign that word sounded, she hated how medical professionals dropped

Colleen stepped back. “I thought you were gonna pass out.”

the possessive pronoun: not your mom but Mom. And what

103

Looking up, Delia managed, “I haven’t seen her since I

MAKE Literary Magazine

was a kid.”

cheekbones, the mole dotting her eyebrow, the scar on her

Just as Colleen was about to put her hand on Delia’s

jawline.

forearm, an alarm went off. Moving instinctively toward

The mechanical pulse of the ventilator breathed, “Hell.

the sound, Colleen called over her shoulder, “I’ll get a social

O. Hell. O. Hell. O.” She felt the urge to strike Rose and, si-

worker. Sit tight.”

multaneously, to bury her face into her neck, breathe her in.

Delia sat in the chair as nurses and doctors rushed past.

“Are you Cordelia?”

They were so light, focused, quick. They had a purpose, De-

Delia started. A birdlike woman, gray hair wild about her

lia mused, like the whirlybirds from her female maple that

head, a stooped back, with sharp blue eyes, stood at the end of

floated down each spring to blanket every square inch of

the bed. Where had she come from?

pavement, lawn, flower bed. They lodged in gutters. Stopped

“I’m Sister Weber.”

downspouts. Clogged drains. But, damn, if they didn’t know

Delia nodded, noting the too-cheery cartoon unicorn on

what they were about. They were built for efficiency with

the nun’s T-shirt. Was she real? Or simply a figment of Delia’s

their weighted seedpod and curved wing. When they landed,

imagination? Ever since going off the Oxys, she’d had a few

the seed hit first to seek out earth, take root, and eventual-

episodes where she saw people and things that weren’t really

ly send up a maple tree. These medical professionals—and

there.

99 percent of the people she knew—had purpose. She’d never

“She left when I was . . .” Delia fought the urge to start

really loved working at the family store, had always done it

blubbering. She never spoke about Rose. Not even in 12 Step.

out of a sense of obligation. She’d graduated with a physics

She’d always maintained her story: her mother was dead.

degree, had wanted to pursue research, but set it aside to help

“Very young,” she managed.

Pops. Besides motherhood, she’d never really felt a calling.

The nun didn’t respond.

And now that Joey was about to graduate, she felt incredibly

“Haven’t seen her since I was a kid.”

expendable.

“That sucks.”

Delia reminded herself to breathe and, as her heartbeat

Delia blinked.

slowed, she noticed her mother’s name scrawled on the white-

“And how old are you now?”

board directly across from her: Rose Ehrlich, R3.

“I’ll be fifty-five in July.”

From her vantage point, she could see the end of the

“Double nickel.”

bed where a sheet-covered bump appeared. She recalled her

Delia looked at Sister Weber. “What?”

mother’s beautiful feet, long and narrow and elegant. She

“Double nickel. Fifty-five.”

craned her neck to see more of her mother but the wall obstructed her view.

What kind of a nun said “double nickel”? Delia leaned over to touch the woman’s shoulder.

She stood. Had Colleen said she would send a social

Yes. Real.

worker?

“What was that for?”

Screw it. Rose might already be dead.

Delia sighed. “Just making sure—”

She walked into the room and steadied herself on Rose’s bedrail.

Sister Weber smiled. “I’m not a figment of your imagination?”

An old woman, long white hair strewn across the pil-

“Something like that.”

lowcase, lay in the bed, her chin tilted unnaturally to accom-

“I’m real all right.” She retrieved a tissue from the sleeve

modate the tube down her throat. The woman’s wrists were

of her cardigan. “I was here last night when she came in, be-

strapped to the bed and her blue-veined hands curled like

fore—” She pointed to the tube sprouting from Rose’s mouth.

lifeless talons.

“They had her in the cardiac unit first. Her sister—” Sister

Delia gasped. There must be some mistake. Was this the

Weber snapped her fingers to try to conjure up the name.

proud, beautiful mother who’d walked away so many years

“Maxine.”

ago? Delia stepped in, approached the bed. My God. It was

“Right. Maxine. She came in with Rose. Told me she

her mother. Of course, she’d aged. Yes. This was her face, pale

would call the daughters even though you were estranged.”

and drawn but there was her perfect nose, pointed chin, high

Sister Weber blew her nose.

104

Mad Science

That’s why Aunt Maxine had called so late. Her mother probably hadn’t wanted her to call at all.

to comfort you.” And, as if she needed reminding, repeated, “I’m here. To comfort. You.”

“Your Aunt Maxine said your mom’s family, your grandparents, were Volga Germans . . . from Russia. So were mine.”

Delia nodded. “I’m fine. Really. Feel free to go, to comfort someone else.”

“Never knew them. Died before I was born.”

Sister Weber scratched behind her ear. “Can I just sit

“And she mentioned that your father’s parents were

here”—she pointed to a chair against the wall—“until you’re

from . . . Syria?”

ready to leave? I won’t talk. Promise.” She brought her thumb

“Lebanon.”

and forefinger to her mouth as if turning a key but then

“Christians?”

thought better of it and turned it the other way. “It’s just that

Delia nodded.

Father Grand is in the ward, and this is only my second day

“Ah. Such different cultures, though.”

and I’m supposed to be comforting people. Trial basis. I was

“What?”

going to retire at the end of the school year and I need to keep

“The Volga Germans and Lebanese. Very different. Cul-

working until then to get my pension.”

turally.”

Delia closed her eyes. When she opened them, would

Delia really didn’t care. Weren’t nuns supposed to administer quietly to the sick and needy? Why did Delia get the

Sister Weber be gone? Had this been just a really messed up hallucination? She slowly opened her eyes.

nun who wouldn’t shut the fuck up? She wanted to say “Shut

Nope.

the fuck up” but took a deep breath and reconsidered. Forgive

Still there.

me, Delia prayed. Forgive me for wanting to tell this incredi-

“Okay? I guess,” Delia sighed.

bly annoying nun to shut the fuck up.

Sister Weber turned her imaginary mouth key before

Sister Weber continued. “Nevertheless . . . your people

settling in the chair.

and my people are most likely related . . . I mean we’re all

Delia heard the click-clicking of heels behind her.

related, of course, since 8 percent of our genome is viral DNA

Someone whispered, “Who’s that?”

anyway.”

Delia froze. Had Rose’s other family arrived? She spun

Sister Weber then went on to explain how the human genome contains viral DNA—from infection and retrovirus-

around to see Aunt Maxine and a younger woman enter the room.

es—that weave their way into reproductive cells. She blathered on about mitochondria and acquired bacteria that went

Aunt Maxine opened her arms. “Is that my little Cordelia?”

back millions of years and about how we’re all composite

Delia walked toward her aunt. Maxine took hold of De-

creatures, none of us pure, as the Nazis believed, and Delia

lia’s shoulders and, before locking her in a hug, Delia noted

found herself looking at Sister Weber as if she were a clown at

how much Maxine and Rose favored each other, even now, ex-

a birthday party: one you were supposed to find amusing and

cept that Aunt Maxine still dyed her hair blonde.

entertaining but instead found strange and sad.

“Well you’re all grown up! And your hair is—”

“Excuse me,” Delia said a bit louder than she had intended. “Right now, I’m not . . . I don’t care about this.”

“Gray, Mom. Her hair is gray,” the woman beside Maxine chided, “So’s yours beneath the dye job.”

Sister Weber’s forehead creased. She brought her finger-

Delia turned to the younger woman. She remembered,

tips to her lips. “I’m so sorry. Heavens.” She looked ready to

now, visiting Aunt Maxine after she’d had a baby. It was a year

cry. “I do this when I’m nervous. I—”

after Rose had left and the last time she’d seen that side of

Delia couldn’t believe this.

the family. Why hadn’t they kept in touch? Had they followed

“I’m a biology teacher. I mean. Was a biology teacher.

Rose’s lead in abandoning them, too, or did Pops forbid his

Until last week when I threw a chair at one of my students.”

girls from seeing them?

“Jesus. Really? You threw a chair?”

The younger woman extended her hand and pumped

Sister Weber shrugged as if this happened to everyone,

Delia’s hand once. “I’m Frances. Your cousin. We’ve never

eventually. “Yeah. Clocked him good too. Was reassigned

met because our family is emotionally stunted.” Frances then

here and—” she began but checked herself. “But . . . I’m here

opened the flap of a leather satchel to produce lip balm, which

105

MAKE Literary Magazine

she slathered on her lips. “It’s freaky. Seriously.”

Rose’s eyes moved beneath her closed eyelids, thickly

The two women were a study in contrasts. Whereas

slathered with ointment.

Aunt Maxine was a product of her time—with her perfectly

Colleen leaned into Rose’s ear, “Hey, doll. Time to wake

coifed wash and set, carefully applied makeup, Talbot’s cardi-

up. You have a tube down your throat but we’ll get that out as

gan—Frances wore a tattered T-shirt, square-toed boots, and

soon as possible. Don’t worry about a thing.” Colleen busied

pulled her auburn hair into a side ponytail.

herself while she spoke. “The night shift started weaning you

“Frances. Honestly.” Aunt Maxine shook her head.

“We’re not stunted. We’re just not—”

off the respirator, doll. You’re pretty much breathing on your own now.”

“Emotionally evolved.”

Maxine looked at Delia. “Take her hand.”

Aunt Maxine turned her head to look at her daughter.

“That’s enough.”

Delia did. It felt light and dry, like a paper cutout of a hand, not flesh and blood.

Frances raised her eyebrows. “See what I mean?”

Rose’s eyes opened, but only partially. The ointment

Aunt Maxine leaned around Delia. “Same as last night, I see.”

made the lids and skin beneath her eyelashes look red and swollen.

The women approached the bed. As Delia walked around the other side of Rose’s bed, Aunt Maxine and Frances no-

“Rose? Rosie? Delia’s here. She’s holding your hand.”

Aunt Maxine addressed Delia. “Squeeze her hand.”

ticed Sister Weber sitting quietly in the chair.

Delia did.

Sister Weber waved.

“Say something,” Aunt Maxine encouraged.

Frances looked at Delia quizzically.

Delia swallowed. A wave of nausea crashed through her.

Sister Weber stood and extended her hand to Frances.

“I’m Sister Weber. I was here when your mom came in with

She gathered herself and gently stroked her mother’s knuckles with her thumb. “It’s me. Delia.”

Rose last night. I’m here to comfort you.”

At that, Rose’s eyes opened wide, as if terrified, and she

Frances laughed. “Comfort us?”

tried to lift her strapped arms. Aunt Maxine patted her sis-

“She’s new,” Delia added, “at—”

ter’s hand. “Rose. It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.”

“I’m a biology teacher but I attacked a student and now I’m here.”

In a few minutes, Colleen had removed the breathing tube. Rose gagged and coughed violently. “She’ll be fine—

Aunt Maxine blinked. “What do you mean?”

groggy but lucid,” Colleen assured them.

“She threw a chair at a student who was misbehaving,” Delia added.

Delia wanted to run out of the room but felt rooted to the floor. She remembered her own time in intensive care af-

Frances nodded approvingly. “Right on.”

ter her accident, the terror of waking with an intubation tube

“Goodness,” Aunt Maxine breathed.

down her throat, how she’d thought she would suffocate.

“And then I threw a textbook at him.”

“Getting all of that stuff out of her lungs,” Colleen said

That was new and startling information. Delia held up

as she removed Rose’s wrist straps and readied the oxygen

her hand and, in response, Sister Weber settled back into her

mask. “We’re gonna put an oxygen mask on for a bit, doll.

chair.

Now just relax.”

Aunt Maxine took Rose’s hand in hers and spoke slowly

Rose’s eyes followed Colleen’s hands and, once the ox-

and loudly. “Rosie? Delia’s here, dear. But you probably knew

ygen mask was on, her body relaxed, her eyes closed. “I’ll be

that, didn’t you, Rosie? It’s time you saw her.”

right back,” Colleen said before leaving the room.

Colleen walked into the room and busied herself with

As soon as she left, a dark figure appeared in the door.

Rose.

“Hello, ladies.” The priest walked to the end of Rose’s

Aunt Maxine continued. “Rose. You’re in the hospital.

You had a heart attack but you’re going to be okay.”

bed, his back to Sister Weber, and put two bloated hands on the bedrail. His huge body seemed to take up most of the

Delia felt uncomfortable. “Can she hear us?”

cramped room. Thick glasses magnified small, black eyes.

Colleen nodded. “Most likely. She was chemically paralyzed but it should be wearing off soon.”

Aunt Maxine smiled. “Hello, Father Grand. This,” Maxine motioned to Delia, “is Rose’s daughter Cordelia.”

106

Mad Science

Instead of greeting her, Father Grand locked eyes with

ther Grand. Out here. Now.”

Delia. Delia met his challenge until he turned back to Aunt Maxine. “Has Sister Weber led you in prayer over God’s child

Father Grand released Delia’s hand and touched Rose’s foot gently before turning to leave. “Good day, ladies.”

Rose?”

He followed Aunt Maxine out of the room. Smiling awk-

Frances shot a “what the fuck?” look at Delia.

wardly at Delia, Aunt Maxine slowly and quietly shut the door,

“I,” Sister Weber offered hesitantly, “was just about to

turned, and unleashed her fury at Father Grand. Delia, Fran-

suggest that.”

ces, and Sister Weber watched through the glass as, the con-

Father Grand sighed as if he had expected as much. “Sister Weber, join us.”

versation muffled, Maxine’s lips moved animatedly, veins became prominent in her neck, her face turned crimson. Caught

Sister Weber rose to stand awkwardly between Frances and Father Grand.

unaware, Father Grand blinked and flinched at Maxine’s verbal onslaught.

Father Grand closed his eyes and extended his hands.

“Join hands.”

The shock of hearing herself referred to as “drug-addled” pulled Delia out of her body, blew her high above to peer down

Sister Weber put her hand in Father Grand’s and extend-

at the scene unfolding below: Aunt Maxine and Father Grand,

ed her palm to Frances. Delia looked at Father Grand’s hand

Sister Weber and Frances, the perfectly proportioned grid of

but didn’t move. He wiggled his fingers encouragingly until

the intensive care unit, the tops of concerned family mem-

Delia put her hand in his. His grip was too tight, as if he knew

bers’ bowed heads, the patients’ pale, unresponsive faces. And

she wanted to yank away, tell him to fuck off.

at the center of it all, Rose.

“Heavenly Father,” he began, head bowed, eyes closed,

Beeps and pings and mechanical whirring mixed with

“you have said to us through your apostle James: ‘Are there

family members’ hushed voices and patients’ agonized

people sick among you?’”

moans. One particular moan slammed Delia back to reality.

Aunt Maxine and Sister Weber, eyes closed, played along

The noise, more of a growl, emerged from deep within her

but Frances remained wide-eyed, staring at Delia, a smile

mother’s chest and grew in volume until Rose’s hand moved

curling her lips. She nodded and mouthed “yes” in response

slowly to her oxygen mask.

to Father Grand’s question.

Removing the mask, Rose looked squarely at Delia and,

“Let them send for the priests of the Church, and let the

in a hoarse but resolved voice, demanded, “Get out.”

priests pray over them.”

Delia flinched and staggered backward, each step accom-

Father Grand went on and on and Delia felt a freakishly

panied by Rose’s mantra: get out get out get out.

strong urge to bust out laughing. She had to look away from

Once outside the room, Delia placed her hands on her

Frances, close her eyes, swallow the laughter. She bit her lip.

knees, tried to breath. Fuck this. Fuck her. Fuck you, Rose.

Hard. This was not the time to lose it.

Did she say that out loud? Who cared? She stood, took a step,

Just as Father Grand’s prayer seemed to be winding

turned around. She didn’t need this shit. Just then, Rose’s

down, he took a deep breath, paused, and continued. “Look

voice stopped, replaced by a series of beeps. Within seconds,

over your child Rose and her drug-addled daughter, Cordelia.

the beeps turned into a warbling vibrato and, before Delia

The prayer of faith will save the sick persons, and the Lord

knew it, doctors and nurses, one pushing a cart, swarmed into

will raise them up; and if they have committed any—”

Rose’s room.

Father Grand continued, of course, but Delia instinc-

Frances and Sister Weber led Aunt Maxine out of the

tively looked to Aunt Maxine, who jerked her face toward Fa-

room, steadying hands at each of her elbows. Over her aunt’s

ther Grand, her jaw set tightly, her look murderous. Frances

shoulder, Delia watched a nurse lower paddles to Rose’s now

blinked, her amused smile replaced by a slack jaw. Even Sister

naked chest, watched Rose’s back arch, jolt skyward once,

Weber opened her eyes.

twice, three times as if something unholy struggled to escape.

Eyes still closed, Father Grand finished “. . . to watch over our sisters Rose and Cordelia. We ask this with confidence for you live and reign forever and ever. Amen.”

A pause and then Aunt Maxine turned to the door, “Fa-

107

MAKE Literary Magazine

FROM

KATÁBASIS / KATABASIS

By Lucía Estrada Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott

Peldaño V “La locura tomó forma de flor decorativa…”

P.A.E.Z. (Artaud en casa del lobo) Antes y ahora, el grito… Antes, cuando la vida entraba en tu cerebro ramificándose, haciéndose más densa, oscura, casi un torrente aceitoso de imágenes – piedras, cuchillos ardientes, todo al filo y en un instante consumado. Ahora, cuando intentas descifrar esto que ha caído de pronto sobre tu cabeza, formas, destrozos, lenguajes ininteligibles, el aullido de quienes no toleran el miedo y se arrojan a la boca del lobo antes que mirarlo de frente. Ahora, cuando tu pensamiento te “abandona en todos los peldaños”. Nadie estuvo tan próximo de sí mismo como ese animal sediento que te aguardaba en cada vuelta de hoja, en cada palabra incendio, brasa en mitad del paladar y de los dientes, insoportable, fiel… “jirones que he podido recuperar de la nada completa…”. Silencio de sustancias que brillan y salpican junto a tu sangre. Lo que otros dejaron de lado, lo que otros no llamaron por su nombre; lo que escondieron junto a la máquina de coser, y el paraguas y la mesa de disección. “La muerte sólo es completa para quien se entrega a ella”, para quien la construye de pequeñas infamias, de mentiras convenientes dichas al oído, de mezquindades, de falsos dioses de oro y barro. No hay nada qué argumentar, ni antes ni ahora, cuando los ojos mismos eran la sal que arde, la astilla y el ojo ajeno, cuando otros se reían frente al ecce homo, y esa mueca salvaje, aséptica y blanca era defendida entre alcoholes y recetas infernales, cuando ni la doble estrella ni el rayo pudieron cerrar el grito que eras todo. Entonces se trata de ti y de mí, de tu pensamiento bajando a tropezones por los peldaños que son el mundo, de tus palabras, boca de lobo, tragándose a sí mismas, regurgitándose, haciéndose improbables, inaceptables, sucias…

El pequeño poeta celeste que no eres, el que pende de un hilo, el que se desploma. La noche se ha llevado los desperdicios del día. La noche todo calma, grito silencioso y suave, la noche y tus ángeles que suben de la tierra…

“La vida es arderse con las preguntas” – dices – y una corriente oscura recorre el nervio, el hueso, la médula. Corta. Disecciona. Exhibe para nadie. Esto es tal vez una perfecta lección de anatomía “bajo esta costra de hueso y piel que es mi cabeza…”.

Te decantas, escuchas del árbol su estremecimiento. Antes y ahora, el grito. El pequeño poeta en casa del lobo. Comerá quizás “el corazón oscuro de la noche”, y caerá tres veces, ecce homo, peldaño a peldaño, antes y ahora, ahora y después “haciendo el mismo ruido, el mismo ruido, el mismo ruido que la noche y el árbol al centro del viento…”

108

Mad Science

Stairstep V “Madness took the form of a decorative flower…”

P.A.E.Z. (Artaud in the wolf’s house) Then and now, the cry… Then, when life was making its way into your brain, branching out, becoming darker, denser, almost an oily stream of images—stones, red-hot knives, all on the brink and all of a sudden carried out. Now, as you’re trying to decode what has just fallen on your head, shapes, blows, jumbled languages, the howl of those who can’t handle fear and throw themselves at the wolf’s mouth before looking him in the eye. Now, as your thoughts “abandon you at every level.” Nobody was as close to themselves as this thirsty animal waiting for you on every turned page, in every word set to flames, ember in the thick of palate and teeth, unbearable, loyal… “scraps which I was able to rescue from utter nothingness…” Silence of matter shining and splashing together with your blood. What others set aside, what others didn’t call by its name; what they hid right next to the sewing machine, and umbrella and dissecting table. “Death is complete only for those who surrender to it,” for those who build it from minor slurs, convenient lies told to ears, ill will, false gods made of gold and clay. There’s nothing to argue, not then not now, when even eyes were scorching salt, splinters and someone else’s eye, when others laughed facing ecce homo, and that wild grin, white and aseptic, was shielded among liquor and hellish recipes, when not even the doubled star or the lightning bolt could shutter the cry that you were everything. So, it’s about you and me, and your thoughts stumbling down the stairsteps that are the world, your words, wolf’s mouth, swallowing whole, spitting themselves back up, becoming far-fetched, out of line, filthy…

The little celestial poet who isn’t you, the one hanging by a thread, the one bursting. Night has made off with the day’s scraps. Night all calm, soft, silent cry, night and your angels rising from the earth…

“Life consists of burning up questions”—you say—and a dark current runs down your nerves, bones, marrow. Slice. Dissect. Show nobody. This might just be a perfect anatomy lesson “under this crust of bone and skin which is my head…”

You make up your mind, listen to the tree quiver. Then and now, the cry. The little poet in the wolf’s house. Maybe he’ll eat “the night’s dark heart,” and fall three times, ecce homo, stairstep by stairstep, then and now, now and later, “making the same sound, the same sound, the same sound of night and tree in the middle of wind…”

109

MAKE Literary Magazine

Peldaño III La luz rueda silenciosa sobre la piedra y alcanza una ventana. En ella funda su reino, sin importar quién, desde algún rincón, pueda celebrar su epifanía. Dentro, alguien intenta una fórmula, una aritmética de lo que apenas intuye, y obliga a su cuerpo a corresponder ese abrazo de arcilla inquietante. Nada de lo que ocurre en el secreto de las cosas podría ser invocado por el azar. Así las acepta y las ofrece al ritmo vertiginoso del tiempo.

Bajo el techo que ningún cielo sostiene, la vida transcurre de otra manera. Un río subterráneo de formas voluptuosas, un río que apenas sí se advierte en la penumbra. Cuanto resplandece adentro, cal y arena, suaves curvas que acogen como un vientre el sueño y los misterios de la carne, alimenta el rabioso mediodía de las terrazas; el mar rutilante que va y vuelve allí abajo, las constantes e invisibles precipitaciones del afuera. Dentro, seguirán hasta el fin las mediciones, las largas esperas entre números y pequeños dioses chispeantes.

Los ojos no han perdido de vista ni un instante los cambios geométricos de la luz, como el cazador a su presa, o el zahorí el llamado insistente del agua. Así, oscuramente, la noche, el oído atento. La luz es apenas un fantasma en la rugosidad del muro. Pronto se llevará la ventana, la redondez de un vaso, el ángulo exacto de la mesa. Quedará el mar, su música galopando en el espacio negro. Un mar imaginario como las cosas que empiezan a desaparecer, como el brillo opaco del compás, como las manos… Sí, al final sólo quedan las manos, su quietud de hueso, prueba de que hubo algo, ni grande ni pequeño, abriéndose a la noche, sucediendo sin testigos, sucediendo – sencillamente – como la luz, o el peldaño que no continúa la escalera, y que muere, perfecto y distante, ante tus ojos que se apagan.

Stairstep III Light silently wraps around stone and reaches a window. That’s where it founds its kingdom, not caring who, from some corner, was there to praise its revelation. Inside, someone tries out a formula, arithmetic they barely know by heart, and forces their body to return this unsettling clay embrace. No part of what happens in things’ secrecy could be called on by chance. Just like that they’re accepted and offered up to the dizzy rhythm of time.

Below the rooftop held by no sky, life plays out in another way. An underground river with sultry shapes, a river that can barely be made out in the penumbra. What shines inside, lime and sand, soft curves that take in like a belly sleep and mysteries of flesh, feeds the raging midday of balconies; the sparkling sea coming and going right below, the steady and see-through rainfall outside. Inside, the measurements will go on until the end, the long delays between numbers and clever little gods.

Eyes haven’t lost sight of light’s geometric shifts for a single second, like hunter and prey, or dowser and the incessant call of water. Just like that, dimly, night, alert ear. Light is barely a ghost against jagged walls. Soon it will make off with the window, the roundness of a glass, the sharp slant of a table. The sea will still be there, its music galloping in black space. A sea dreamed up like things beginning to disappear, like the lackluster shine of a compass, like hands… It’s true, in the end only hands are left, their bone-like stillness, proof there was something, not big, not little, opening itself up to night, taking place with no witnesses, taking place—simply—like light, or the stairstep not drawing out the stairs, and dying, perfect and cold, in front of your eyes as they get switched off.

110

Mad Science

Peldaño II Para Paula No hubo historia. Sólo ruinas de palabras, grietas, pequeñas insinuaciones de la muerte.

Esperar de pie, atravesados por el duro viento de los días. Resistir como si de las palabras brotaran raíces, como si en el aire húmedo se abriera de pronto una promesa. Pero no hay lugar para estas cosas. Sólo grietas. Grietas por las que resbala la luz. Grietas abriéndose desde dentro del cuerpo; tantas como para reventar tu corazón; como para congelar el vacío a la altura de las manos y del vientre, para hacer de la angustia una presencia sólida. No hubo nada. Ni siquiera palabras Sólo un cuerpo cansado y oscuras constelaciones intentando un orden dentro de tu cabeza. Cuerpos y más cuerpos dentro del cuerpo cayendo entre los tréboles y las necias preguntas de los otros. Resistir, y sin embargo romperse. Como la quilla de un barco en altamar, como la soga atada desde siempre alrededor de tu inocencia. Resistir al otro lado de la realidad, cayendo desde ti misma sin lastimar a nadie. Preguntándote cuán verdadera era la verdad con la que tropezabas a diario, cuán confiable su estatura. ¿Ves cómo la muerte ondea en este paisaje? ¿Escuchas cómo canta sibilina por entre las piedras?

Aquí no hay sombras ni tiempo; tampoco promesas por las que caer arrastrando la sangre, la sal, el deseo que no tuvo dónde hacer pie ni un destino al que dirigirse.

Resistir, aunque el cuerpo esté lleno de grietas, aunque la ruina haya alcanzado tu respiración. Voces ahogadas, soles resplandeciendo detrás de la noche.

Resistir porque existe el mar y dos o tres cosas que sostienen su pulso sin consultar a nadie.

Algunas parecen firmes, inventan nuevas formas de huir sin dañar la escasa belleza que hemos logrado. Entonces, dices, todo es perfecto como nunca. Saltas. Son las voces. Sólo las voces, pequeños insinuaciones de la muerte que quieres atender.

Ahora, frente al mar, tenemos las manos vacías. Estamos quietos sin querer resistir, sosteniendo ruinas de palabras, silenciosos que no darán cuenta de nuestros pasos. Todo ha sido devuelto una vez más. Casi nada, en este juego de azares y promesas, alcanzó a tener un nombre, un argumento a su favor. Casi nada, ni precariamente, donde no hubo historia…

111

MAKE Literary Magazine

Stairstep II For Paula There was no story. Just scraps of words, cracks, little hints of death. Standing around waiting, the days’ rough wind passing by. To put up a fight as if roots shot up from words, as if a promise suddenly took shape in the humid air. But there’s no place for these things. Just cracks. Cracks where light trickles in. Cracks opening from inside bodies; so many your heart could burst; emptiness could freeze over, matching up to hands and belly, to turn heartache into solid being. There was nothing. Not even words. Just a tired body and dark constellations trying to come together inside your head. Bodies and more bodies inside the body falling among clovers and other people’s dumb questions. To put up a fight, and still fall apart. Like a boat keel in open sea, like the rope forever tied around your innocence. To put up a fight on the other side of reality, falling from yourself, hurting nobody. Wondering if the truth you stumbled over daily was true after all, if you could trust its size.

Are you seeing how death ripples in this landscape? Are you hearing how it sings, mystifies among stones?

Here there’s no shadow, no time; no promises to fall from and drag blood, salt, desires with nowhere to stand, no destination to set out for.

To put up a fight, even if your body is full of cracks, even if scraps have reached your breath.

Drowned voices, suns gleaming behind night.

To put up a fight because the sea is there and so are two or three things that hold its pulse and don’t check with anybody. Some look steady, make up new ways to escape without ruining the little beauty we’ve achieved. You say, so everything is perfect like never before. You jump. It’s the voices. Just the voices, little hints of death you want to mind.

Now, facing the sea, our hands are empty. We’re motionless, not wanting to put up a fight, we hold scraps of words, silences that won’t account for our steps. It’s all been returned once more. Almost nothing, in this game of chance and promises, managed to have a name, an argument on its side. Almost nothing, not even precariously, where there was no story…

112

Mad Science

Último peldaño Escribo como la última luz que me asiste. Pero no es fácil. Su rumor áspero trepa por las paredes, hace menguar la luna y los espejos. Siempre he temido a la doble noche de su mar en sombras. Al pulso que aprieta la garganta. Resistiéndolo, cabalgo por encima de mi cabeza para luego caer salvajemente, allí donde sólo existen los brazos extenuados, la boca cubierta de sal, el olvido atroz de todo lenguaje, donde no hay lugar para las palabras. Escribo para darle forma a la muerte, pero también a los pájaros que cruzan el cielo en lentas migraciones.

Intento aferrarme con los ojos a este pequeño reducto de consciencia, a la realidad que tiñe de bruma cualquier posible horizonte. Pero los ojos no resisten. Sucumben a su vocación de peces que se dejan arrastrar por las olas. Escribo para despreciar su abandono, para devorarlos hasta el silencio. Algo quedará en la página. Una estrella invisible, un mapa de agujeros negros, un grito sumado a la voracidad de otras aguas, de otras oscuras navegaciones.

Last Stairstep I write with the last light at my side. But it’s not easy. Its uneven hum scales walls, makes the moon and mirrors dwindle away. I’ve always been afraid of doubled night, of its shadowed sea. Of the pulse tightening its throat. Fighting against it, I ride on top of my head and then tumble wildly, over there where only exhausted arms live, mouth covered in salt, terrible oblivion of all languages, where words have no place. I write to give a shape to my death, but also to birds crossing the sky in slow migrations.

With my eyes I try to cling to this small bastion of consciousness, to reality coloring any possible horizon in haze. But my eyes don’t put up a fight. They give in to their calling as fish that let themselves be swept along by waves. I write to brush off their abandonment, to swallow them until silence. Something will be left on the page. A see-through star, a map of black holes, a cry added to the gluttony of other waters, other shadowed routings.

113

MAKE Literary Magazine

Age

By Giuseppe Caputo Translated from the Spanish by Kolin Jordan

I

have hips—and the other half is my hair, shining and black.

It’s not night, but I manufacture the night: I tear up

I sing. And the microphone? I don’t have one,

garbage bags that are made of black plastic, and I

I don’t need it. My voice is strong. I sing. And the

stick them to the window with gutta-percha, which

audience? There’s a multitude: four armed turtles—

is also black. Long trails of tape meander across

they talk and know how to fight—and a smiling ro-

the window: they stretch from frame to frame and

bot named Bop-Bip, who is as big as my legs. Next to

from the edges to the middle, each path sustaining

him, a whale, Lola, and an egg with eyes and a mouth

a bag, each bag sustaining the night.

that I’ve been caring for as if it were a baby: also a pi-

I’m not a woman, but this is how I become

rate and his boat; a roll of toilet paper—the woman

a woman: I make a dress with the bags that are

in a long dress—and many rabid soldiers, who stop

left over. I put my head in one and struggle until I

being so angry upon seeing me in concert.

break it—and then struggle harder to get my arms

I sing. “Why should it be?” I sing. “And when

out. Another bag becomes my skirt. And, even still,

we make love, we eat each other alive.” Everyone

I don’t like how I look in the mirror. Something’s

dances, they’re excited. I ask them, “How’re you all

missing: the hair, the belt. So I take out another

doing tonight?” and then, “Aren’t you hot?” while I

garbage bag that I cut in half: one piece is the belt,

put my plastic wig up in a bun. I sing. “You have to

which I immediately tie around my waist—now I

endure the silence, the wound. Hide in the crowd.” I

114

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

shiver, they shiver. All together they say, “We don’t

dirt—all the water in the world in one flowerpot—

care whether or not we belong to anybody.”

and I stretch out my arm to hand it over, keeping

Before the grito, I tell them, “You’re the best,”

my body as far from their body as possible.

and I blow them a kiss that reaches them all. But

III

the grito . . .”What are you doing?” and then, “Now what are we going to do with the garbage? Do you think there’s infinite money to buy more bags?”

They ask me, “How many times do I have to tell

The grito. “Take that off! You wasted the gut-

you not to play with my things?” and immediately,

ta-percha, too!” And the day enters and my night

“Come here. What do you have there?” I hold my

ends and I say, “I was playing, I was playing,” and

arms to my sides, closing my armpits. I say, “Noth-

also, “I’ve already done my homework.”

ing, take the bowl,” but they insist, “Is that hair?

They leave my room screaming at someone, at the world, “I can see him now, just a whore on the

Come here. Show me. You’re too little to have so much hair.”

streets,” saying, “Terrible,” saying, “That boy, that

I take off running, saying, “No, I’m just dirty,”

boy!” But I return to my audience, who had cov-

and they yell at me again, “So come here. I’ll clean

ered their eyes. I say, “Let’s sing,” but they don’t

you up with a scouring pad.”

sing. I say, “Let’s continue. Let’s sing,” in spite of

From that moment on, if I want water and the

the silence. I take off my hair, the dress. “Let’s play

glass is in a high cupboard, I drink directly from

something else,” I try, “let’s go back to war,” but

the pitcher. “Pig,” they say, “Slob.” Anything so as

they stay silent, covering their eyes. The toys are

not to raise my arms.

mirrors and each one speaks of solitude.

If we’re playing cops and robbers they say, “Caught you! Hands in the air,” I don’t lift them

II

up and I cheat and escape from any policeman— cops and robbers all over again. “Cheater,” they

The shelf is the world and they are the only ones

yell, “I’m not playing with you anymore.” Nothing

that inhabit it. Each one has its place on the shelf,

matters as long as I don’t raise my arms.

in the world. The four turtles live together, each

In school, if they say, “Raise your hand if you

one his own house. On the other hand, Bop-Bip,

know the answer,” I stay quiet even if I have the

the robot, is the house where the soldiers stay; in-

solution. They might see the hairs that have start-

side, in its stomach, they all sleep piled up.

ed to grow. They might see them if I raise my arms.

There’s no water on the shelf, and as a result,

They say, “You’re invited to a party. There’s

it’s a world without an ocean. The whale is dead

a pool,” and I lie and say, “I don’t want to go,” but

and the pirate in his boat is sad, eternally run

they make me go. “You need to make friends.” At

aground. And so, my idea: to make an ocean. I

the birthday party I have an idea. “Too much sun.

find a soup bowl and fill it with salt and water—an

I don’t want to get a sunburn,” and I jump into the

ocean—I set it on the shelf and put the boat inside,

water with my shirt still on. They say, “Give it to

and it floats as if it had never stopped. I congratu-

me. It’ll get ruined,” but I become a mermaid and

late myself. I blow a kiss to the pirate, who blows

dive into the chlorine. I surface to breathe—you

one back to me because he’s happy (still, his face is

have to breathe—and I hear, “Do you think I have

a twisted scowl). Lola has stopped being dead and

money to buy you more clothes?” and so I pretend

does pirouettes in the water.

to drown.

But they come back and say, “We’re going to

They say, “Bang, bang! You got me.” Kids play-

eat now. Hand me the bowl,” and as if cursed, my

ing with water guns. “Bang!” I grab one too. They

beautiful ocean again becomes a bowl. I pour it

say, “Get out of there already. You’re the only one

into the flowerpot where there are no plants, only

with a shirt on.” I aim at their faces. I’m afraid but

115 115

MAKE Literary Magazine

I’m strong. They say, “What are you doing? Put

care, open up now.” And I say, “I can’t, I can’t. I’m

that gun down.” I’m afraid and I’m strong. They

taking a shit.”

continue, “Aren’t you ashamed? Everyone’s watch-

I finally open the door. They hug me and say,

ing you.” They yell, “Shoot, don’t be a baby, shoot!”

“You almost made me want to smoke.” I say, “It’s

There is laughter. They say, “Let’s go home.” They

not broken,” over and over, over and over. In the car

say, “You’re going to listen to me,” but I pull the

they take my hand, “It’s so good to see you alive.”

trigger and spray water.

Later, telling the story, they complain, “And how

“Piece of shit kid,” they yell, as soon as they understand the power of weapons.

about that scare you gave me?” They say, “Twenty years old and you pull something like that.” They also ask me, “Still such a baby at your age?”

IV

Every time they go back to that story or every time I tell it myself, I’m sure to make myself

“It’s broken,” I hear them say, years later, “It was

younger to avoid some of the shame. Sometimes I

kept in the cabinet in the bathroom.” They start

say, “I was fifteen,” and other times, “I was nine,”

to put it together when the security guard leaves.

“six.” They always interrupt me and correct me,

They recite numbers to me that I write down in

“No, sir. You were twenty.”

a quad-ruled notebook. “You’re staying out late a

V

lot,” they complain. “I don’t like you going out so much.”

A crack in the belly, a cramp. I say, “On my

I’ve also felt shame in the midst of love.

way, gotta go to the bathroom first,” and when I

The piñata is hanging there and ready to give

close the door, the surprise—what did I eat? What

birth. One, two good hits to bring forth sweets and

did I drink?—sitting on the toilet. The question is

armed toys—phosphorescent men taller than your

far away as soon as I remember the gun. “It’s bro-

thumb, permanently stuck to a machinegun: to

ken.” I’ve never seen one for real. “Broken.” I open

separate them from their gun, you’d have to pull

the cabinet and there it is. I take it and weigh it in

their arm off.

my hands. “Broken.” I start to play.

One runs and catches the other, who turns to

I think, “And how do you kill someone?” Like

ice. “Save me,” they plead, but someone says, “If

this! And I pull the trigger. Silence. “And what’s it

you’re frozen, you can’t talk. Frozen people don’t

like to put a gun in your mouth?” Like this! And I

talk.” I leave the living room, my birthday party.

pull the trigger, the gun in my mouth. I stand with-

Outside, a swing—it’s a swing I turn into a

out wiping and look in the mirror, the gun in my

chair—it’s rusty and I don’t want to swing. No one

hand and at my temple. “And what’s it like to kill

has played with me or maybe I don’t want to play

yourself?” I pull the trigger. Silence.

with anyone. The sand is dry, but the grass is grow-

When I open the cabinet to put the gun away,

ing. Later they come outside to say, “What are you

bang! A shot. What happened? What happened?

doing here alone? We’re going to sing ‘Happy Birth-

“It’s broken.” And they yell, “What was that?” and

day.’” As I move closer, they hug me. “Mi vida eres

I think, “It’s broken, it’s broken.” And they contin-

tú, solamente tú. I’m going to sing you that song.”

ue, “What was that? Baby! Open the door!” I think,

And then, an emptiness: it’s fear and it’s shame.

“I’m in trouble.” And again, “Tell me you’re okay,

I get up on a bench. They crowd around. What

make some kind of noise!” And in my head, “I’m in

kind of decoration is on the cake? They crowd

trouble,” and immediately, “They’re going to think

around. The candle, the flame. They start to sing,

I killed myself.” It’s fear and it’s embarrassment. I

“Happy birthday to you.” I think that no one se-

say, “I’m fine!” and they yell, “But open the door!”

riously wishes me anything, and that makes me

and I say, “I’m taking a shit!” And they say, “I don’t

blush. While they say, “And many more,” and while

116

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

they sing, “And many more,” I hear them say “Mi

who float, sometimes they swim. In that great tub

vida eres tú, solamente tú.”

the water is the water, and the soap, the seafoam.

I lower my gaze. It’s fear and it’s shame. I look

And I, a mountainous island. The soldiers scale

again and they keep singing. They let out a laugh in

me and become trapped in my armpits. My body

the midst of their love.

is also a toy.

They say, “Get out of there. Dinner’s ready,”

VI

and then, “Your whole back is wet. You don’t know how to use a towel.” So I grab the towel to dry my-

One hit and another. “Hit it harder. C’mon!” I de-

self off. When I look at my hands, the horror sets

stroy the piñata and the birth occurs: the sweets,

in: “I’m wrinkly, I’m wrinkly,” I burst into tears.

the armed men are born into the world, they fall

“I’m wrinkly, I’m wrinkly!” They laugh and say,

like rain on all the little heads. They fight over fla-

“That’s what you get for playing in the water.”

Without water, there is no life, but the water

vors and colors.

“Oh, good,” they say to someone, as if I weren’t

makes you old. The toys stay in the bathtub, each one the same age forever.

there. “I thought no one was going to come.”

Outside, the swing, old and alone.

IX

VII

I don’t recognize their face. The doctor says, They put their hands on their head, sometimes

“They’re very old and being sick makes them old-

shaved, sometimes grey. “Destroy me. Come on,”

er.” Then he says, “They don’t have long now.”

the old man begs me, legs spread in a leather swing.

I go into their room without knocking. They’re

“Give it to me hard, c’mon,” and he throws his head

watching the news. “How boring,” they say. “Every

from side to side—the skin, on the other hand,

day in this bed.” I grab the toilet paper—the wom-

moves on its own. We’re in a sauna, surrounded by

an with the long dress who hasn’t existed in ages—

men in towels.

and I start to wipe their saliva. They have spittle

Turned to ice, I say, “I can’t. I can’t get it up,”

all over their mouth. They complain again that

and they pass me toys. A black plastic cock, and an-

they’re bored. “What a spittoon,” they say. Then,

other, also black, twice as big. He says, “Let’s go,

an idea: “I’m going to buy you some word searches.

let’s play. No one has wanted to touch me.” More

Sound good? That way you can entertain yourself

men pass, they avoid us. I continue without touch-

looking for words.” They don’t say anything. I give

ing him. Tired of waiting, he says, “Give me back

them a kiss on the forehead.

At the store I ask how much the word searches

the toys,” and he leaves without looking at me,

cost. They say a thousand per book, each one with

looking at his watch.

a hundred puzzles. And so, the doctor’s words,

VIII

“They don’t have long now.” I ask them to give me all the books they have. I think, “The more toys I

From the old man, I have a memory of water: I

bring, the longer they’ll live.”

bathe in a large bath tub. I’m with Lola and the

Returning to their room I say, jokingly, “I’m

pirate in his boat. Bop-Bip, the waterproof ro-

back, and I brought presents.” I take out the books,

bot is there too, in my soapy ocean, and the four

one by one, and start reading the words that they

turtles that know how to fight. They’re so heavy

want you to find: countries that no longer exist,

that they’ve sunk to the ocean’s floor. Outside the

descriptions of people in present tense that should

water is the legion of rabid soldiers. Little by lit-

be in the past.

tle I bring them in. Sometimes they are dead men

117 117

They ask me to pass their glasses. “I can’t

MAKE Literary Magazine

into an abyss or I cut off their heads, they came back to life and continued on like they always did, with their heads back in place. Even so, they aged. Though they were immortal, at some point they stopped being the age they were when they were made. The turtles faded and the green was no longer a dark green but rather discolored with scribbles drawn in marker. The pirate lost his boat.

Lola, an eye and a fin.

Sometimes they said, “Those toys are very beat up. You don’t know how to take care of them.”

But I did take care of them. I made them houses— and in these houses they were protected. I took the same boxes they came in and turned the cardboard and plastic into roofs and beds. Books were also houses, homes with two walls. They slept, rested, and took breaks from fighting there. They still got old.

I wondered about how they felt, my toys’ feelings. They came in boxes with expressions that I didn’t choose. If they made them angry, they were angry forever. If they came happy, they lived life happily. Changing their expression meant breaking the toy, making it age. Change its face with a marker, draw tears—break the toy. I preferred not to do that so as not to make them old. So, being with them, I had to think about their lives, decide if while playing they would go through things that would make them either angry or happy—ultimateeven see with these anymore.” They become sad,

ly, stories that would coincide with the emotions

and leave the books to one side.

they came with. Things almost always happened that provoked their original expressions, although

X

eventually they’d say to each other, “Today was a good day, but you’re still angry.” Or, “You’ve suf-

How does a toy die?

fered a lot but you’re still smiling.”

A toy dies only when it is no longer found on the shelf, in the world.

Still, the smile disappears at times, just like the green on the turtle disappears: aging, aging,

If to live a toy needs electricity, it dies for a

without ever dying.

bit when the power goes out (that isn’t dying). And even if it never turned back on, it still wouldn’t be dead forever: the video game console became the ship the turtles used to fly around.

They fought, died, returned. I never played at burying my toys. Their deaths never mattered to me because they never really died. If they fell

118

Mad Science

From

THE STAR CABINS

By Sara Wainscott

The first time I held you I cry then-n-later

The kids become giants with huge fake ears

Wish I hadn’t stopped the video

An effect that flowers have on islands

Ice chips and worms

I picture the hot school moms

I thought my veins were

In khaki shirtdresses

Headed someplace

Mostly arable

I cross the painted expanse

Sun pitched over their hair

I attend to the physical systems

A nurse belays me from the bed

My bed a rowboat

A window shows real-time video of trees

A nurse brings me

With leaves of fried chicken skin or foreign coins

Mayo packets I’d had all my organs

Men back a truck over the lawn

Doubled then half of them extracted

I witness the turbines

Making room

Roll the clouds across the plains

For me again

Where quadrupeds snatch

I am stepping through a portal

Mouthfuls from alfalfa bales

Kids toe the rocks in search of tiny crabs

Among sea-green grasses the kids

A device takes my oxygen

Whip their big sticks around

And heartbeat is it me

A suitcase opens out comes a woman

Or have I gone ahead of myself

Out comes a sea lion we are on our way

Cooling the boiled water Even the trees have cruel diseases I’ll this moment throw back the hatch At dinnertime there’s one egg each

And get my pink buds out

We eat outside under an umbrella

119

MAKE Literary Magazine

You make it up Who needs care this year every

You bend the mirror

Cat hears me call and calling I Everyone can Buckle down resound so small

See you but you aren’t there

At six AM I think I am You were driving to Joshua Tree and burgers Resisting I believe my sounds

Were five for a dollar so it’s all you ate

Outlast the year even so Worms were hatching It feels fucking great to crank

In a warm place sorry suckers

The thermostat That’s biology Divine as modern life gets

Canaries were singing each others’ songs

Pinned up the velvet It’s no good simply knowing words Stars positioned into pictures

For kinds of knowledge you need to smell great

Of pursued and pursuer it’s not cool You need a break To seem uncomfortable in your body

Damn you’re doing everything

Fattened in your bone cage Around this place one solution And okay people listen up we

Is to quit your job but there’s also disappearing

Have lives to face people don’t get more Over mountains Than a dozen tries let’s have none of this

A silver ball glints light back

Baloney about being chopped From a mile up even once it stops From the wolf’s warm belly

Being a balloon

That’s not how the world works It sucks to be a person I mean say what you want

If you’re supposed to be a swan

But people are listening Worms can’t sing do they Even hear the singing With the kids in bed

It tugs the heartstrings but fear not

We eat sour gummy worms

The heart gets cut out later

Stars swing down hatchets trimming

Even birds in wilderness

Back the thick space swirl

Perish to protect their nests They know not talking Your way out is a power greater than kings

120

Mad Science

Possess yet talking your way

It telegraphs adult concerns

Into trouble can be part of talking

Worries with sound logic

Talk about a baby

Certain strains of music

Ride with people in an elevator

A panther’s blink

People you’ve seen in movies Mostly disaster flicks a woman knocks A good death that’s quick and over Every box of cake mix

At the right time belongs

From a supermarket shelf Not even to the trees take the shotgun Quit your job but find it’s only more time

You urged but of course

Spent avoiding I decline it goes like so much else does The internet try on a green

Without saying there are

Wool coat with leopard cuffs Things I won’t do things you Lake lace decorates barge wreckage

Won’t do or wouldn’t do if you were here

Friends stop in at dinnertime This mess would never stand They make a baby announcement

For one thing if you got time to lean

You double over You got time to clean but in ten years It’s weird to think

It’s more like hell why work when you can

Motherhood is meta-knowledge Read books why read books Of failure

When you can see the miniseries

Once we sat around a table A good life that’s slow Captured not with physical restraints

And over at the right time

But held in place by weariness the babies Belongs not even to the clouds Suckled without stopping even in sleep

They swell below

The kids caught a crab the kids The sky’s wet sheets memory might be Wandered the mall

The way to truly know another mind

Weightless If a man falls down well man he’s down With riches

But other structures don’t collapse I read about

How much An earthquake swarm I read about Snoopy Monster to show an audience

He’s writing an entire novel on his doghouse

People misinterpret fear

121

MAKE Literary Magazine

Or he will if the damn kids leave him to it

One meal a day more tigers

Close the door the rain the rain is falling in

Arrive in a nailed-up crate

And anyway it’s nothing but pages on pages

I don’t go to his party a little boy keeps calling

Of what a dog thinks

My cell I’m not your mom I tell him I’m not

I was born

It’s caused some personal problems though

Every day for weeks I’m memorizing Tennyson

They were hidden in me

I’m sorry I’m not I add him to my contacts

Already being programmed

I name him NOT MOM I’m not around

Turn on your big bright light take me

To lay down laws finally he quits calling

To the hospital at 3 AM I send a text

I’m very sorry I know not to answer

Close the door someone brings

You say you’ll blow down

White gardenias someone brings enchiladas

My house you never do it

I’m hungry going back a couple decades

Must be an admonishment

Cursive playing at the Foxfire Lounge

Driving in your car it’s Elizabeth’s

If it feels like this I guess I want to do it

Saturn wonder how closely my voice

All again go to the pretty shop look

Matches her voice I didn’t know the words

At miniature tin lanterns punctured in patterns

I think of Elizabeth unraveling her work It’s like fuck love but if you’re lonely Pry open the crate snap your fingers and

It’s not enough To tell things you have to know

The bus rolls up in the wet suspended morning I’m a mom now but he’s another boy

The pattern a tiger gets chopped up By shadows on the orange

I didn’t know the words Donald bursts a duck-shape through the wall

Cereal box it’s not a kind I like to eat When the Olympics are on

City officials in suits stand around white-clothed Cocktail tables they suck the candy coats

The tiger puts his human hands on an athlete’s Shoulder the lawns are small and full of shrubbery

From Jordan almonds they cut a cake a man Unloads crates of duck eggs from a truck

Both are wearing neckerchiefs I meant to say In the café I pretend to know some

It’s snowy on Argyle and he’s gentle When to begin the process is when I step

Silver Jews lyrics A cute guy falls for it I only eat

Past the blue part of the platform Just imagine he and I

122

Mad Science

Notice the same plastic grocery bag

Oh yes when I’m not quacked to

Dangled from the wires

I don’t quack

The weight of raw chicken parts

I let my eyes do the quacking

Twists its skin

Which is the quickest way To keep my take-backs intact Would this place do to put a flower

Out here without a magic cloak it sucks To be a swan if you’re supposed to be a person

If so does your agreement represent one Of the yeses does your assent say more About you than it does about

Please

The initial question Pull back pull out

I do I do

Things get cold it’s not a war zone Once you pass this point you

Not

Will never need to

Do Write another letter Please continue Not Wish

To exit your own discretion Is the subject’s final word once you

To go back This far

Push your bicycle along a lake path You can say you’ve done that

Gets difficult This far in time

Though you can say anything you like At any time in theory in the star cabins

In time in time The bell has

Ten years from now n-this-n-this Will fall away

The bell has rung for dinner The bell has the bell has rung

O pears twist off A little wrist action

Please it has wrung It has wronged is wrong why yes

A meal’s bites by mouthful That sweet mouth feel but bit yet

Is it true there are different kinds Of yes the bell the bell the bell bell bell

Yes bit by bit doesn’t it Interrogate what sweet that sweet bite bit

123

MAKE Literary Magazine

QUALITY ASSURANCE

Mad Science

By Anne K. Yoder

In the morning the factory workers lined up outside for the

Wash hands under running water: soap, rinse, then dry.

start of the first shift, entering in fifteen-minute intervals.

Workers stared at their reflection in the tall glass doors.

One door closed before the next door unlocked. One

When they opened, the workers walked in, down a hall, and

door led to another and another down a corridor. Bodies

gathered in a large room lined with lockers and benches. The

moved through, entirely covered except for eyes and necks.

sound system emitted a positive buzz from above.

Hands turned switches, recorded temperatures. Moved containers filled with powders, scooped and weighed. Blue

All entries were monitored. Signs were posted.

screens turned purple as the queue of products grew and soon began to blink red. Work faster! Work faster! they said.

GOOD PRACTICES MUST BE MAINTAINED

Speed first, but also accuracy.

AIM FOR POSITIVE PRODUCTIVITY

No error is acceptable. No error is an anomaly. The fac-

WITH TEAMWORK WE ACCOMPLISH THE

tory practices are good practices. Only the finest workers,

IMPOSSIBLE

only the purest product.

Distributed to neighboring towns and villages. Inquire

All clothes were removed, folded, and held in a locker

at your local counter, order through your online retailer.

until shift’s end.

Good practices are sober, clean, and sterile. Good prac-

White suits were put on in their place and were worn in sterile areas.

tices are controlled, replicable, and assayed often. Good practices assure the chemical composition is not adulterat-

Each morning a new suit was donned. Legs first, then

ed.

arms, then zip, then tie.

Cover head, tuck beard, cover mouth, cover feet.

From the delivery dock came box after box. One followed another on the conveyor belt, an underground birth canal.

125

MAKE Literary Magazine

And so on. And on and on they went. And yet.

system, someone said. It could last an hour or two or stretch

Ingredients came from all over: sea extractions, valley

for a day. Maybe longer. Backup systems were in place but

dirt, freight from foreign ships. All contents delivered were

would likely take just as long.

first stored in a warehouse that spanned a full acre.

On a good day the pills rolled in a steady march like

The conveyor belts delivered each box to a specific des-

an army, each with its own target. Together they advanced.

tination. From there the contents were taken, unpacked, and

Today wasn’t a good day. A rumor spread among the

altered.

workers, words gone viral: a rogue chemical tainted the mix,

The workers made so much, with their beakers of liquid chemical, dry ice, pulverized powders.

an adulteration yielded the entire batch unfit. The morning’s vat of components remained untouched, now covered with

When the break time bell rang, a trickle of bodies exit-

plastic. The vat would have to be emptied and stripped. The

ed labs through a series of lochs, the opposite way they had

batch would be decontaminated and restarted from scratch.

entered. White-clad bodies gathered in a hall with tables the size of tennis courts. Most chairs remained empty. There was never enough time to exit, rest, and return to the sta-

We regret to say that this may cause some unforeseen delays.

tion.

Workers were only allowed to leave once the next shift

From the other room Harold heard his wife wom-

arrived. No exceptions. These were sacrifices that had to be

an-scream, “Adulteration at the factory!” Adulteration is not

made. For the good of the people, for the good of the com-

a form of adultery. He had no hand in it, and yet it seemed

pany.

that she was blaming him for even this. These two things,

Health and well-being first, they said.

whichever, both, neither, held no interest for him. If it were

Answers to all sources of inquiry were readily available,

up to him, their lives would’ve been like two newly formed

in chemical form. Manufactured and distributed widely.

stars forever held in a potential state: before the energy burned away, before they combusted against the night sky.

There were pills for sinners and scandal-makers, pills for do-gooders and the uptight, pills against neuroses and

None of that spark remained. No mark except meteorite, that drastic fall, that death wish.

inhibitions. There were pills for perfectionists and Type As,

However much he liked the ladies who smiled at him

for the habitual B-listers and bruised egos. Pills for learning

with teethy grins, Harold generally didn’t notice them. It

to love yourself, to accept that there’s no meaning beyond

wasn’t in him. His wife, she’d horned him again and again;

the everyday. Pills to cure loneliness, to learn to be alone,

he the ox, sadness filling his balloon heart when he gave it

pills to stop yelling at sports games, pills to soothe, to make

thought. This pill made him so full with feeling. Made him

you want to do. Pills to finesse, to forget about otherness,

feel closer to the door, his wife an empty closet.

to fill absence, emptiness. Pills for everyone under the sun.

Judy, his Jude, would have traded him for others he was sure, if only she didn’t despise so much mess-making. She

*

was a keep-it-together kind of lady. You could be sure she

We are one pharmaceutical, under God, with the

would clean it away.

permission of our insurance provider

If they were an atom, he thought, yes, an atom, then she

(see your policy for details or call

was the proton, he the neutron, and Hannah, their electron spin-

1800*RX*SOLUTIONS).

ning away . . .

Prior approval may be necessary. *

Judy came in and sat next to him distraught. He tried to convey his calm to her as they sat, all will resume as nor-

GOOD MANUFACTURING PRACTICES

mal soon. The best manufacturing practices, he reminded her.

In the factory, the computers were down. The assembly line

Hannah hadn’t come home yet. This ate at Judy. She hadn’t

was stopped every three hours for quality assessment, but

touched her plate of heart and liver at dinner, her salad wilt-

the conveyor belt hadn’t budged since noon. Glitch in the

ed in front of her. She shook her device, no messages. She

126

Mad Science

texted rapidly. They waited. She didn’t laugh at his wives’

be taken at their word.

tale about watched kettles.

The later it became, the more rapidly she fired. He tried

The burning started in the outer stations after the last

to bridge the distance by rubbing her shoulders, offering to

employees had fled. The fires consumed stores of suits and

get in the car and search for their girl.

booties and beard covers and somehow grew up and beyond

“No use. I can’t even ping her,” Judy said. Apparently

to fill the stations and circle the factory. Helicopters hovered

the girl knew how to lose them when she wanted. Judy sat

over the fire, and the workers gawked at the footage on their

straight line and deflected.

devices as the flames dancing behind them grew ( face away,

Plans were like a grid. They must be rigid. But they were also like a sieve.

they were told). It looked like there was a larger incinerator under the hill, as this burning spread with intent, through trees and leaves and blowing with the winds. Were large fans

As long as Harold took the pill, he could sit and listen.

hidden within? How was this happening?

Not always with words, not even half the time. He felt his failure but not only words fill distances.

How this was happening: The fire surrounding was soon mirrored within, with flames bursting from windows.

Time passes and creates more gaps.

Rubber melting, causing shriek and shelter, glass windows

He left Judy on the couch and got in the car, set his de-

popping, machines lowing and hissing as they sweltered.

vice to search mode, circled blocks while trying to sync with

Fire filled all empty spaces, spread into the depths of the

Hannah’s device. Smart girl didn’t want to be found. He didn’t

maze, except, who knows how long it took for the lochs to

really care if she were an apricot pineapple melon pie. As he

give. Fire the destroyer, the eviscerated structure falling in,

looked out the window, he saw sidewalks, empty houses, and

falling into itself.

the ominous glow from the factory hill.

The factory was transformed into a torch in the night sky, and still smoldered with the return of morning light.

The adulteration had spread. Adulterated powders were to be discarded in containers marked HAZARDOUS WASTE. All other powders were placed in the vault that was then sealed airtight.

Evacuation orders were in place. Workers were to follow procedures for cleaning and removal. Workers were given times to depart. Orderly exit, every fifteen minutes. Two pills and one plastic bag were handed to each as they vacated their places. A quick and efficient exit was imperative. They were to remove their suits, place them in the bag, place it in HAZARDOUS WASTE, then walk to the closest emergency post.

White tents already formed a circle around the factory.

The workers saw this as they exited, their white uniforms flooding the land like milk spilling over the hill. They gathered at the stations, floodlights beaming down. No one could say what had happened, just had blank faces, blank stares, arms in the air. They sprayed their outerwear with powder, then lined up for showers.

Precautionary measures. No reason to worry! Just in case!

It’s not a problem, just a run-of-the mill . . . said the supervisors, the healthcare officials, the facility managers. They were to

127

MAKE Literary Magazine

128

Mad Science

W

e live in a revved up, technologically dependent, ergies of celestial bodies. By the 1930s, melancholia had been industrialized world. And, stated simply, it’s ex- incorporated into a medical diagnosis: depression. hausting. But just how exhausting is it, actually?

Schaffner’s Exhaustion progresses historically through

Could contemporary life be, in fact, exhausting to a degree thematic chapters that bear titles such as “Sin,” “Nerves,” and unprecedented in the history of our species? Not so fast. “Sexuality,” captions that serve as thematic umbrellas under While Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) has only recently which the historical transformations of exhaustion—reflectbeen introduced as a diagnosis, in Exhaustion: A History, Anna ed both in literature and dominant language practices—unKatharina Schaffner traces the course of exhaustion through fold. From Geoffry Chuacer’s The Canterbury Tales to Lars

While modern technologies and the increasing speed of pro- tual forms, as well as the “moral” evaluations—from moral ductivity they promote certainly do cause their own form of blame to medical legitimacy—that are invariably assigned to burnout—our cultural obsession with life “hacks” reflects it. Throughout her volume, Schaffner carefully traces how this trend—Schaffner reveals how each historical moment these dynamic perceptions of exhaustion emerge thematicalexperiences its own exhausting forces and pressures, which ly in various genres of literature and film. reverberate through the rhetoric and literature of these bygone eras, right up to the present day.

In addition to documenting how the symptoms of fatigue have manifested and been perceived in various forms

Schaffner, currently a reader in compar-

historically, Schaffner also analyzes the light

ative literature and medical humanities at the

they shed on the historical production and con-

University of Kent, focuses her research—in-

sumption of literature, and on the demographics,

cluding her previous Modernism and Perver-

psychographics, and behaviors of populations of

sion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature,

ages past. In her analysis of Herman Melville’s

1850–1930 (2012)—on the portrayal of historical

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

phenomena in literature (i.e. how fictional rep-

(1853), for example, she examines Bartleby’s grad-

resentations embody real trends and cultural

ual refusal to work as the copyist he was hired

preoccupations). Like other recent works such as

to be, claiming simply that he would “prefer not

Elizabeth Haiken’s Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery to.” Bartleby grows increasingly lifeless over the course of the (1999)—which documents the move from corrective surgery story, first copying obsessively, then ultimately starving himto purely cosmetic procedures—and Clark Lawlor’s From Mel- self to death in the “Tombs,” the local jail. Falling under the ancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (2012)—a similar chapter “The Death Drive,” Schaffner contextualizes this exstudy of historical changes in the perception and treatment ample with Freud’s three major theories of exhaustion, offerof depression—Schaffner’s volume seeks to historicize cul- ing Bartleby as the “perfect example of someone giving into tural phenomena often assumed (mistakenly) to be of recent the death drive.” Read in a more political/economic light, we origin.

witness Melville—via his protagonist—commenting on the

Exhaustion traces a very long history. Schaffner’s analy- effects of the Industrial Revolution on production and worksis stretches back to ancient Greece, referencing medical phe- ing conditions, as well as on the will of the individual worker. nomena such as the bodily “humors” theory of Hippocrates

Following the historical progression of the condition rep-

(460 BCE—370 BCE), as well as literary representations of resented by the chapters’ thematic headers (“Sin,” “Nerves,” exhaustion, such as those found in the Greek epic poem Ar- “Sexuality,” etc.), Schaffner’s method also incorporates the gonautica. In the fourth century CE, during the period of the etymological analysis of a far broader set of terms that have decline of the classical world, sloth was a prominent theme in historically been associated with “exhaustion”: e.g. sloth, the theological treatises of the incipient Christianity, and was melancholic humors, neurasthenia, depression, “asthenic” classified as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Later, in 1489, Ital- nervous diseases, etc. The term acedia, for example, emerged ian humanist Marsilio Ficino would tie lethargy to the planet in Egypt in the fourth-century CE. The term’s definition, Saturn and proposed cures to exhaustion that drew on the en- linked generally to exhaustion, originally focused primarily

129

Exhaustion: A History

By Anna Katharina Schaffner Columbia University Press, 2016

of the phenomenon not just today, but in every bygone era. tion afflicts literary characters in myriad physical and spiri-

242 pages Reviewed by Deborah Harris

the history of literature, demonstrating the pervasiveness Von Trier’s film Melancholia, Schaffner explores how exhaus-

MAKE Literary Magazine

on the mental and spiritual aspects of exhaustion, and was as-

certain to get worse over the coming decades, Schaffner even

sociated with monastic lifestyles in medieval Europe. By the

goes so far as to suggest that we may soon find ourselves in a

tenth and eleventh centuries, a period that witnessed techno-

situation where the collective rhetoric of exhaustion may ac-

logical transformations that would give birth to early modern

tually measure up to the existential challenges imposed upon

Europe a few centuries later, it had evolved to incorporate

us by reality.

physical symptoms and laypeople.

Today we generally view exhaustion as a natural result of lack of sleep or overwork, and indeed as early as the late nineteenth century we find the rest cure prescribed medically to the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s groundbreaking short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Elsewhere throughout history, however, and indeed continuing up to today, we often find exhaustion viewed as slothful, even sinful.

One of the more compelling aspects of Schaffner’s study is its documentation of how exhaustion was often historically condemned morally or religiously. For the Protestants, for example, nonproductive activities are widely regarded as sinful, and resting viewed as a religious offense. Even in the case of other religions when a day of rest may be prescribed explicitly—the seventh day in Judaism, for example, is the Sabbath, a holy day of worship and reflection—still, rest is to be officiated and devoted to prayer, and is not regarded as a natural product of, and treatment for, exhaustion.

The strength of Exhaustion: A History is its ambition: it is both comprehensive in scope and highly focused, investigating an overwhelming—or, if you’ll forgive the pun, exhaustive—catalog of synonyms for exhaustion, presented via analyses of pertinent literary references that ensure all Cells, Interlinked

By Kathryn Fleishman

theoretical analyses are grounded in historical examples.

Throughout, Schaffner clearly demonstrates that the con-

I

first watched Blade Runner in my high school English class when I was sixteen years old, almost two decades after its initial release. We had just read Frankenstein,

and now my teacher, a large, brilliant man in his thirties,

temporary preoccupation with exhaustion is no new phe-

prone to slamming his fists emphatically on the table, wanted

nomenon, and indeed that exhaustion is an age-old condition,

us to compare the novel to this film. He had only been at our

granted one that has evolved etymologically, diagnostically,

school a few months, but his high expectations, unorthodox

and culturally, throughout time. While the present discourse

pageantry, and newly minted doctorate rendered his atten-

surrounding exhaustion surely does differ from that of the

tion rare and precious, like sunlight in the cold. We angled

past, Schaffner convincingly argues that this shift is marked

ourselves in the direction of his praise. I determined to say

primarily by context and cause, and signals no radical trans-

something about the film that would impress him.

formation in human experience.

Blade Runner entranced me. The dreamy, gloomy Los An-

In her epilogue, Schaffner hypothesizes what exhaustion

geles of 2019 was at once palpable and unimaginable. Its visu-

may look like in the future, and what catalysts will be blamed.

al details folded the voluminous pin curls and shadowy noir

She predicts that “climate change, human-made environmen-

shots of the forties into the bright billboards and exaggerated

tal disasters, and rapidly depleting planetary resources”—ex-

shoulder pads of the synth-drenched eighties. The result was

acerbated by compulsive consumerism—will be some of the

a weird aesthetic decadence, a future whose incongruity with

many stressors that will contribute to future exhaustion. Giv-

the present relied as much on nostalgia as it did on specula-

en the threats to our planetary resources we currently face,

tion.

130

Mad Science

In the replicants, man-made beings owned by humans and degraded as “skinjobs,” I glimpsed a celebration of the This is not a story of #MeToo. Not exactly. It is a story about powers of self-stylization: Rachael’s bangs, Pris’s spray-paint- the air we breathe, about forms of sexism so ambient that it ed lids, the delicate sequins embroidering Zhora’s skin. These took me years, and a movie sequel, to feel them in my throat. pleasures were laid out against the dystopian endpoint of con-

Seventeen years after watching the original film, at the

sumer culture: interminable cities, blackened skies, acid driz- zenith of media coverage of #MeToo, I went to see Blade Runzles, constant surveillance. In Blade Runner’s 2019, environ- ner: 2049. The sequel returns us to an even larger, darker Los mental disaster and radical dehumanization were a matter of Angeles, in which a seemingly less troublesome generation of course, part of the polluted air that Angelenos breathed. It is replicants, programmed into total obedience, has been born. understandable, the film whispered, maybe even necessary, to Our new blade runner K, himself a replicant, is, like Deckard delight in and to detest the society into which you were born. before him, tasked with gunning down the remaining old Blade Runner posited the glamour of Hollywood as both the models. While the first film stages an illicit relationship beheight and the nadir of an American aesthetic sensibility. Its tween Deckard and a replicant named Rachael, K is the owner relentless objectification suggested a liberating, potentially of an adaptive, holographic AI “wife” named Joi, whose enfeminist message: if fully conscious beings were conscripted coded desire for intimacy compels her to arrange a sexual enby an oppressive regime to do work and give pleasure, then at counter for K with a prostitute, during which she projects her least one’s body could also be turned toward resistance and own features over the sex worker’s. Watching the glitchy overexpression.

lay of Joi and Mariette, each programmed, in her own way, for

The shot that stayed with me was the death of Zhora, consent, my stomach turned. a “skinjob” and a stripper, whom our narrator-protagonist

Both Blade Runner and 2049 walk the raw edge between

Deckard, a shrewd detective turned “blade runner,” is hired critiquing a system of gendered injustice and abetting it. Take, to murder, or “retire.” As viewers, we are aligned with Deck- for instance, the crucial sex scene in the original. As Rachael ard, but as Zhora runs—the multicolored lights of the city re- plays the piano, Deckard tries to kiss her. She flinches, gets fracted in her eyes and across the panels of her clear plastic up, and walks away. He blocks the door, slams her up against raincoat—we feel her terror: her animal flight, her desperate a wall, and orders her: “Say, ‘Kiss me.’” Tearfully, she complunge through a series of plate glass windows, and finally her plies. “Say, ‘I want you,’” he continues. “I want you,” Rachael execution before an indifferent crowd at the edge of a garish repeats back, trembling. The scene depicts an at best deeply arcade. Trapped behind the glass, clad in black lingerie identi- coercive act, and at worst, rape. Under the conditions of Racal to hers, are rows of mannequins. In death, as in life, Zhora chael’s existence, what do such echoes of consent even mean? is an object among others.

As a teenager, I had remembered this scene as intense-

The narrative parallels to Frankenstein were clear: the ly romantic. Deckard was teaching Rachael about her desire, mad scientist, rendered heartless and inhuman in his quest awakening her as a sexual being. But what does it mean to for dominance; the sublime, that Romantic concept of over- be taught desire? We are told, as women, that we want to be whelming inundation, resurrected in postmodern fashion; thrown against a wall, roughened up, contradicted—that we and of course the monstrous and vengeful creation, both might resist at first, then fall limp—that ecstasy is a female fearsome and sympathetic, who must be destroyed. Late in body taken over by someone else. Women, of course, can enShelley’s novel, the monster compels his creator to make him thusiastically consent to this sort of thing. But there’s a cuna female mate. Frankenstein begins to knit together this Eve, ning science in teaching women to desire their own coercion, but as he works, he comes to fear her potential vanity, selfish- to remain inert or come to life under a man’s masterful touch. ness, and most of all, reproductive capacity; she could even It is a form of alchemy, too much like magic to be real, that crossbreed, in which case “a race of devils would be propa- men so easily transform women into objects. Tell us, again gated upon the earth who might make the very existence of and again, that you can either sunder or sew together our bodthe species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” ies, that our resistance, then our acquiescence, turns you on, Frankenstein tears her sutured body into pieces, places them and it will become the air that fills our lungs. in a chest, and sinks it to the bottom of the sea.

131

MAKE Literary Magazine

bering; now I feel unsure of what is mine.

Watching the Blade Runner films in the midst of #MeToo, I think of all the times I squeezed my way through a crowded bar or train and felt a disembodied arm around my waist, a

In 2049, the LAPD tests K’s “baseline” whenever he re-

hand between my legs, a slap or a grope or a squeeze. I think

turns from a kill. He is forced to recite a series of lines from

of the men I yelled at in bars for things they said to my friends,

Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, interspersed with questions de-

and all the times they called me a bitch, a hag, or a slut for

signed to elicit an emotional response, during which time a

speaking back. I think of the stranger who stopped his mo-

machine analyzes his “levels”—that is, his ability to quash

torcycle to pin me against a wall and run his hands under

his feelings, to remain emotionally detached from his own ac-

my thick winter coat, between my legs, calling me a whore. I

tions. The lines, which recall the sensation of suffering a heart

think of the co-worker who called me an “uptight little cunt,”

attack, at the nexus of life and death, are taken from a poem

the second date who shoved me out the door shouting “cock-

written within the novel:

tease,” the family friend who slid a hand on my thigh under the dinner table, or the one who groped me from behind as

And blood-black nothingness began to spin

I opened the fridge. I think of the PhD student who reached

A system of cells interlinked within

under my dress in a crowded room full of colleagues, of a pro-

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked

fessor who invited me to sit in his lap, of another who showed

Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct,

up at my house uninvited and drunk, asking to stay the night.

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

I think of a handful of male students, their essays blistering with the odd invective about female arrogance or promiscu-

These “cells interlinked” are the hinge point of the

ity, their teaching evaluations peppered with bile: “I enjoyed

natural and the artificial in Pale Fire, Nabokov’s play on the

her delicious goodies,” one wrote. “Pun intended.”

many meanings of “cell”—a biological unit, a prison enclo-

I think of that inspiring high school teacher, the one who

sure, a still film image, a clandestine political group. What

screened Blade Runner in class. He was indicted for perjury

K is meant to suppress, in reciting them, is his ability to be

and sentenced to jail time this year following allegations of

moved by beauty, to be reminded that his own life might be

sexual misconduct with a student. Reading the reports of

interlinked with anyone else’s. As a blade runner, as a repli-

other, younger women who had been his students, my face

cant, and as a man, K’s livelihood depends, even thrives upon,

burns. I see, almost verbatim, the conversations I had with

his disaffection.

him during his first two years as a teacher. His “personal reading assignments,” from Vladimir Nabokov to David Schick, surface in my mind, almost all of them stories of underage girls having sex with older men. I remember his invitations

When I watch these films now, I watch the women. In Blade

to watch movies at his house while his wife was out. I think

Runner: Rachael, a secretary, pressed up against a wall; Pris, a

of him blasting The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,”

pleasure model, shot dead in an empty mansion; Zhora, a sex

leaning over to smell my hair, and asking what perfume I was

worker, falling through sheets of glass. In 2049: Joi, a holo-

wearing. I think of a dozen other little moments just like that,

gram girlfriend experience, zapped before her lover; Lt. Joshi,

never quite over the line, simply part of the air I had breathed,

a police chief, stabbed to death in her office; the ghost of Ra-

being female, since the age of eleven or twelve.

chael, resurrected by Wallace, only to be shot while Deckard

I spent half my life imagining him as a model for my own aspirations. There is truth in that; he was an extraordinary

watches; Luv, a henchwoman of the patriarchy, strangled by K and drowned in the penultimate scene.

teacher. His confidence in my intellect shaped my teaching,

The female body is not just cut down, but cut to bits. A

my pursuit of a doctorate, even my particular investment in

skyscraper-high ad projects a massive eye, lip, or thigh. The

Nabokov and in film. But now the power he breathed in me

desert is strewn, in a revision of “Ozymandias,” with met-

catches, polluted, in my throat. Now I feel ashamed, remem-

onymic statues—a towering high heel, a mammoth buttock.

132

Mad Science

Wallace, the mastermind behind the new, obedient brand of be mordant critique or a regressive ode to the pious ideal of replicants, cuts a grown woman, just born, from her plastic maternal sacrifice. A nostalgic Rachael model does briefly bag, then slices into her uterus to check for a fetus while Luv reappear in 2049, only to be murdered. Like the scene with looks on, trembling. He fingers the woman’s wet, fully formed the sex worker, the filmmakers created Rachael’s facsimile by body before killing her, as if unmolding the clay of life.

layering young actresses over old images and recordings of

At the end of 2049, we are left with a brotherhood of Sean Young. Young herself, who does not appear in the se“good men”—Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford—stumbling quel, joined the chorus against Harvey Weinstein this spring. to safety on the beach. We are also left with questions. Are She is also on record saying that she wept after the filming of there female blade runners? What have sex and gender meant her sex scene with Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, more than for replicants if only one has ever reproduced? And why is ev- thirty-five years ago. eryone white? It is virtually impossible to imagine a future American hellscape of slaves and sex workers that doesn’t deploy replicants of color—how else would society naturalize their dehumanization?

Both Blade Runner and 2049 treat their women like objects.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, made of parts whose ori- That is part of their beauty, their argument, and their cry gins are forgotten in the final creation, slavery lurks hidden against injustice. But if you make women into objects to ilin the world of Blade Runner, which owes the dynamism of its lustrate a point, they never really become subjects at all. They dystopia to a very real material history that is whitewashed are reified; they become the means by which men measure out of its diegesis. #MeToo is itself a phrase coined by a Black their own humanity. One lesson of Blade Runner, intentional woman named Tarana Burke a decade ago, only to be revived or not, is that our most cherished aesthetic objects—includinto fame by white celebrities. As Burke has said, “It wasn’t ing women—can be hard to look at closely. Like Pris, hidden built to be . . . a hashtag that is here today and forgotten to- in an arrangement of automatons until the moment of attack, morrow. It was a catchphrase to be used from survivor to sur- they begin, uncannily, to return that gaze. vivor to let folks know that they were not alone and that a

The hope, the sequel in our imaginations, begins with

movement for radical healing was happening and possible.” what we see at the close of 2049: an underground cell full of Survivor to survivor. Cells interlinked within cells inter- women, human and replicant alike, who have failed to obey. linked.

Cells, interlinked, form prisons, chains, borders, but also

Only one major female character survives each film: Ra- bodies, movements, stories. The nostalgia of Blade Runner’s chael in Blade Runner and her daughter Ana in 2049. In the aesthetic, and that of its sequel, is digital. I mean digital in original, we last see Rachael getting into an elevator with the sense of screen and hologram technology, but also in the Deckard to flee the city. Thirty years later, in a bubble-like sense of our hands, in the heightened desire for meaningful space, the pale, virginal Ana sits projecting a world, isolated touch—our fingers searching in the dark, a haptic nostalgia from the air everyone else breathes. She has Galatians dis- for textured fabrics, handmade objects, fleshy bodies, and ease, she tells K. Whether this refers to Galatea, Pygmalion’s reels spinning thousands of separate celluloid frames into own ill-fated pleasure model, or to the Bible—“But the son of one fluid tale. the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the

For what is a film, a person, or a revolution, if not a series

free woman was born through promise” (Galatians 4:23)—re- of cells, interlinked? mains unclear. Ana is cut off from the public sphere, performing the magical, reproductive work of mothers everywhere— making the memories of birthday parties and songbirds that will be embedded in the minds of replicants.

By the time of the sequel, Ana’s own mother has died, and died giving birth to her, no less. In a country with the worst maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, the film’s depiction of female martyrdom to childbirth might

133

MAKE Literary Magazine

Time, which romp through the pre-history of the

Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton

timeline, from early Christian chroniclers and

ask in opening their history of the

genealogists to Renaissance cartographers. We

timeline, Cartographies of Time. We can hardly

encounter historical moments figured across

speak of time without spatializing it. “Tomor-

bears or dragons (fig. 2 shows the events care-

row, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in

fully mapped onto appropriate body parts as

this petty pace from day to day,” Shakespeare’s

aide-memoires), time overlaid on geographical

Macbeth soliloquizes. “Time’s wingèd chariot”

maps, histories traced over trees, streams, and

hurries along, Andrew Marvell warns his reluc-

building facades, and events chronicled in tables

tant mistress. So readers will be surprised to discover that

and matrices so elaborate that the introduction of the index

the timeline we now take for granted materialized relatively

was hailed as a major development. In each case, temporal

recently, in the last 250 years. Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart

representation depended on spatial metaphors. But these

of Biography, representing the duration of the lives of famous

spatial metaphors were not standardized graphically; that is,

men, followed by Priestley’s 1769 A New Chart of History (fig.

space and time were not yet united in a visually intuitive way.

1), were the first known charts to represent time graphically

Why not? This question lies at the heart of Cartographies,

by orienting the time axis horizontally and regularizing the

and though it’s difficult to answer fully, Rosenberg and Graf-

distribution of dates.

ton offer fascinating suggestions. It’s clear that Priestley’s

These features are now so familiar as to seem beneath our

drive to grasp information in aggregate marks a sea change in

notice. But in the eighteenth century, a horizontal axis with

how humans perceived time. Rather than cataloging a series

evenly distributed dates was revolutionary. So how did histo-

of discrete moments, Priestley maps time as continuous, uni-

rians organize and understand time before the timeline? This

form, and irreversible. One driver for this change is secular-

question occupies the first three chapters of Cartographies of

ization: in a pre-modern world, centered by the birth, death,

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline

By Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton

Princeton Architectural Press, 2010 272 pages Reviewed by Margaret Kolb

“H

ow do you draw time?” Daniel

134

and the predicted second coming of Christ, it's hard to regard were influenced by the "equi-secular" timeline introduced by all historical moments as equivalent. But this explanation is Priestley. only partial. Priestley himself thought homogenous represen-

The emergence of the timeline enabled increasingly

tations of time would reveal God in the world, rendering visi- technical and inventive visualizations of time, including Florble a divine order previously unrecorded.

ence Nightingale’s groundbreaking charts of causes of death

Perhaps even more pertinent, then, is a shift in how read- during the Crimean War and Charles Joseph Minard’s chart ers approached historical information; increasingly over the of troop strength in Napoleon’s army during his invasion of eighteenth and early nineteenth century, readers hoped for Russia (fig. 3). Both Nightingale and Minard made historical revelation from graphics, or, to put it another way, to uncov- causes newly legible through graphics. Nightingale showed er patterns and trends by reading history. As a result, regu- that disease and infection caused more British deaths than larized representations of chronology—rather than dragons, battle, while Minard dramatized the dwindling of Napoleon’s trees, streams, or tables—grew increasingly meaningful as troops as they faced Russia’s brutal winter. ways of understanding and recalling history. As Priestley’s

Priestley’s timeline enabled these kinds of historical rea-

contemporary and fellow innovator William Playfair put it, soning. But it also revealed profound difficulties in charting “a man who has carefully investigated a printed table, finds, history, which both Nightingale and Minard confronted even when done, that he has only a very faint and partial idea of as they deployed Priestley’s new method. Since the ninewhat he has read; and that like a figure imprinted on sand, is teenth century, a growing awareness of deep geologic time, soon totally erased and defaced.” While earlier methods (like evolutionary history, and the history of the universe have the family tree) persisted as ways of understanding time, they challenged the human desire to see all of history at a glance.

135

Figure 1 (previous page): Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769), which regularizes the distribution of dates and orients the axis of time horizontally.

Figure 2: Johannes Buno’s 1672 universal history, which locates events anatomically on the body of a dragon.

Mad Science

MAKE Literary Magazine

possible,” diagramming narrative time in the novel as jagged and loopy, rather than linear (fig. 5). As Sterne points out, the shape of the timeline tends to exclude narrative digressions, diversions, and qualifications. In other words, time is more complicated than linear representations might suggest. Indeed, the history of how the timeline has been bent—through scale, curvature, or plots like Minard’s of the relations be-

Figure 5: Chapter XL of Tristram Shandy

tographies, which reveals both what the new form afforded, and how ingeniously it could be adapted.

Cartographies of Time joins a cadre of info-graphics books beautiful enough to earn a spot on the coffee table.

Figure 4 (bottom): Ray Kurzweil’s “Countdown to Singularity”

Figure 3 (top): Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812

tween synchronous events—is the signal achievement of Car-

Paramount among them, Edward R. Tufte’s now-classics Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations (1997), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001), and Beautiful Evidence (2006), tell a broader story of how information of all kinds has been visualized through human history. Other such works include John Bender and Michael Merriman’s The Culture of Diagram (2010). Rifling through Cartographies of Time allows for fascinating forays into graphical techniques of all kinds, just as Tufte, Bender, and Merriman’s books do.

Ray Kurzweil’s recent “Countdown to Singularity” (fig. 4) de-

And yet Cartographies of Time stakes out new territo-

picts exactly such difficulties by using a logarithmic scale to

ry with a productively narrow point of focus, paired with a

chart all of human history—even our future—from the dawn

broad historical range. By focusing on how we visualize time,

of life to the moment at which artificial intelligence surpasses

Rosenberg and Grafton pose fascinating questions about hu-

that of humans.

man experience, the nature of time, and how our attempts to

In tracing these, and other, consequences of Priestley's

grasp time have changed over the centuries. Narrow enough

innovation, Cartographies chronicles the long history of riffs

in topic for casual reading, deep enough for serious contem-

and reflections on the timeline, revealing at once the form's

plation, Cartographies of Time deserves endless—and by no

flexibility and its limitations. Laurence Sterne’s novel Tris-

means strictly linear—dallying. It is worth picking up and

tram Shandy, for example, figures the timeline as “morally im-

putting down, moving through backward and forward, opening up in the middle, and reading straight through. However loopy your course through Cartographies, your time perusing will be time well spent.

136

Mad Science

R

eading Track Changes, Matthew Kirschen-

tame them. The title bills it as a “history” of word

baum’s deft and detailed foray into the

processing, and Kirschenbaum provides valu-

history of word processing, reminded me

able insights into where word processing came

inevitably of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s criminal-

from both materially and socially; he has a whole

ly underrated drama about tech entrepreneurs

chapter, for instance, about how the technology

in the 1980s. More specifically, Kirschenbaum’s

emerged from a gendered history of white collar

book transported me back to a great scene at the

labor, as a tool for secretaries—the first “word

end of the first season, when Joe MacMillan—one

processors”—who were compartmentalized in

of the protagonists, a Don Draper wannabe with

separate rooms and entrusted with increasingly

Steve Jobsian pretentions—wanders through a

regimented, computer-like tasks. But Kirschen-

something truly, horrifyingly new. Like a statue of the Virgin cessors on literary production: what happened to writers and Mary, the machine is surrounded by candles and pilgrims. At their writing—materially, formally, even psychologically—affirst it looks like any other computer, if maybe a little cuter: ter computers became available as tools of the trade. a gray box encasing a cathode-ray screen. But then it speaks:

Why does it matter that Stephen King used a Wang Sys-

“Hello, my name is Macintosh.” And Joe just stands there, tem 5 word processor for more than 15 years; that Amy Tan dumbstruck, as though he’s seen a vision of his own death.

(like Ralph Ellison and Michael Chabon) was an early adopter

The scene is a little corny, but it allegorizes a master-plot of the Osborne 1, the first truly portable personal computthat courses through the history of technology: the inexora- er; that George R. R. Martin uses, to this day, the ancient ble defeat of jagged freedom at the hands of hegemonic pol- software WordStar; or that Jonathan Franzen still prefers ish. Despite his slim-cut power suits and corporate airs, Joe is the company of a chunky early 2000s Dell laptop? In some

Belknap Press, 2016 368 pages Reviewed by Matt Margini

warren of hotel rooms at a PC convention and stumbles upon baum’s larger goal is to contemplate the effects of word pro-

a vaquero in personal computing’s Wild West; the machine he sense, these details matter for the same reason we cannot and his nimble, hungry team have been building, with blood help but fetishize Austen’s writing desk, Dickens’s cat-paw and borrowed money, is a device for enthusiasts who know letter-opener, or Darwin’s humble chamber pot: they humanhow to delve into the innards of the beast. They’ve built a car ize empyreal geniuses, bringing them back into the world of Macintosh is something different: a black box in the truest But word processors do not interest Kirschenbaum merely sense, rendering its own inner workings invisible beneath a because (like these other fetish objects) they were attached layer of ersatz friendliness. It is experienced as accessible pre- to the writing lives of interesting people. They interest him cisely because it is inaccessible; anyone can use it, but only be- because they were both easy and hard for these interesting cause it is obdurately, beautifully opaque. The show lingers on people to work with, creating new sparks of frisson between the Macintosh’s debut not just because it flummoxes Joe, but man and machine that inspired writers just as much as they because it portends what consumer computer interfaces will improved, or complicated, their workflow. become in their current form—in other words, the friendly

One point of particular interest for Kirschenbaum is

and all-powerful opacity with which they greet us now. When the way in which the arduousness of working with the earwas the last time you knew what your computer was actually liest incarnations of the digital word processor made visible doing, under the hood? When was the last time you stopped the miraculousness—the sheer ontological strangeness—of to contemplate where and how the electrons move?

what they actually do. First of all, Kirschenbaum’s excur-

Such questions lurk in the background of Track Changes: sions into the early years of word processing show us how, A Literary History of Word Processing, a study which, like Halt though all forms of writing allow the writer to play God, as it and Catch Fire, can feel downright elegiac in the way it evokes were—granting the author the ability to create worlds out of a world before the polished hegemony of Google Docs and words—the phenomenological experience of this cosmogonic Microsoft Word—a world in which computers were exasper- capability is wholly different to the writer typing away at her ating, brutish, demanding in their quirks, yet also somehow computer. Presenting text suspended in a void of black, early liberating in the way they granted power to those who could word processors were especially capable of turning the act of

137

Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

for people who know their way around the engine. But the everyday materiality from which they seem to have departed.

MAKE Literary Magazine

writing into an eerie facsimile of the Word, of God’s creative

labor of creating word-worlds in a void was facilitated by the

labor. In word processing, “text blinks on and off, winking in

painstaking real-life labor of tinkering with the machine,

and out of existence with comparative ease.” Haruki Muraka-

memorizing the right commands, listening to the disk, brac-

mi’s 1Q84 thematizes this idea by depicting a writer whose

ing for catastrophe. For the word processing pioneers, the

computer brings literal “whole new worlds into being” in

profound freedom of the new medium was yoked dialectically

the form of parallel universes; similarly, Stephen King’s sto-

to experiences of difficulty and estrangement.

ry “The Word Processor” depicts a King-like author using a

Most of the anecdotes Kirschenbaum relates are about

word processor—King’s own Wang—to delete his wife and

writers in the early ’80s becoming tinkerers, either because

conjure a more desirable family. Virginia Heffernan describes

what they wanted to do—poetically, typographically, collab-

the effect in her own paean to the medium: “You rocket out

oratively—stretched the limits of the extant hardware and

into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of

software, or simply because “the degree of hacking, improvi-

yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens

sation, and problem solving the early systems required meant

‘Star Wars.’”

that the borderlines between innovation and convention,

The writers in Kirschenbaum’s study were obsessed with

novelty and standard operating procedure, were frequently

this idea that the word processor brought with it a new kind of

blurred in practice.” The anecdotes expand into lavish detail

freedom—the freedom to create and delete word-worlds with

when the interface—which is to say, not just the software in-

abandon, in a void-like environment without any of the lit-

terface but the human-machine relationship—becomes a site

eral, material, or psychological frictions of the written page.

of friction. Kirschenbaum spends multiple pages, for instance,

They were obsessed with the way it could let them escape not

reconstructing a “typical session” (circa 1973) between John

only the materiality of writing, but its temporality as well: the

Hersey, the author of Hiroshima, and an early word processing

layers of history—revisions; words scratched out; a trashcan

program that ran on a half-million-dollar PDP-10 mainframe

full of painstaking false starts—that encrust any manuscript,

at Yale:

attesting to long periods of difficulty and anxiety. As Daniel

The second line of the book begins: “The tight-packed

Chandler has written, “writing with a word processor . . . ob-

column of citizens four abreast stretches back along

scures its own evolution.” Especially with track changes off—

Church Street toward the corner of Elm.” Hersey made

and track changes, Kirschenbaum reminds us, is a fairly re-

no changes from his handwritten draft except for the

cent feature—word processing can produce pieces of writing

addition of the word “back,” which was performed

that appear “perfect,” suspended in the cosmic glass, stripped

with the Editor. To accomplish this, Hersey would first

of the complex histories of painstaking revision and emenda-

have had to maneuver the cursor (more Control-com-

tion from which they emerge. It can produce pieces of writing

binations!) to the blank space between ‘stretches’ and

that are themselves like “black boxes,” seamless and opaque.

“along.” He would have pressed ESC, then entered “5,”

(Edward Mendelson once called Microsoft Word “Platon-

then chorded the Control and the A keys. This would

ic” because it tries so ardently to forge the ideal document;

have inserted five blank spaces into the document, one

Kirschenbaum dwells, in a similar vein, on the symbolic reso-

for each letter of the word plus one additional. Only then

nances of “WordPerfect,” the name of Microsoft Word’s big-

could he proceed to type “back” into the spaces he had

gest early 1990s rival.)

thus petitioned for.

And yet, as Kirschenbaum reminds us, word processing

As he reveals in his exclamatory asides (“more Control-com-

in the early ’80s was a frictional, material technology like any

binations!”), Kirschenbaum is getting into the nitty-gritty

of its predecessors, and perhaps no one was more aware of

here, dilating his prose, partly in a bid to capture the almost

that than the early pioneers who could only seek transcen-

comically labor-intensive texture of Hersey’s working rela-

dence by wrestling with the medium’s brutish beginnings.

tionship with the Yale mainframe Editor. He personifies the

Indeed, the stories he tells—most of them clustering around

Editor here as a stern despot to be “petitioned,” not a ser-

the early ’80s, and particularly the year 1981, when word pro-

vant to be commanded or a friend—like the Macintosh—

cessers first became widely available to consumers—tend to

who might do you a favor. And yet, oddly enough, the verb

be meaningful precisely because they show how the Godlike

“petition” also captures what’s magical and new about this

138

Mad Science

human-machine relationship: the way it turns writing itself into something executable, something closer both to code and, weirdly enough, to orality. “Let there be ‘back,’” says Hersey,

F

rom an undisclosed space and time after the end of the world, Alexis Pauline Gumbs issues lessons in breathing, being, and creating. Following Spill, the

and “back” appears before him. But only at the behest of an first missive in Gumbs’s planned triptych, M Archive: After the inhuman intermediary whose language must be learned.

End of the World is the second installment of a “speculative

Because Kirschenbaum is scrupulous about avoiding documentary” project that loops and threads and loops and freshing, given that books about writing and tech tend to be and academic research (imagined and real) into an intricate either luddite jeremiads or techno-utopian rhapsodies—he literary vessel. In it, Gumbs marshals imperatives, warnings, doesn’t quite make a unified argument about the ultimate ef- admonitions, laments, and praises, into a text/missive/gift fect word processing was to have on writing. But the meaning that proclaims an essential truth—“there is a sacredness to (or at least meaningfulness) of the medium of word process- every day. every time”—and beckons us to contemplate the ing itself becomes clearer, at least in a fragmentary and kalei- possibilities and impossibilities for Black life “with [and after] doscopic way, when he takes us back to a world of computing our present apocalypse.” that is no longer recognizable: stories of first contact, even

Gumbs presents M Archive as the project of an imagined,

first love, between writers and their clunky, temperamental, unnamed archivist. The archivist investigates the past and complicated amanuenses. We no longer live in that world be- the near and distant futures in order to examine the causes cause word processing is no longer new, and because we live, and consequences of the societal, environmental, psychoto such a large extent—despite the Raspberry Pi; despite the

logical, corporeal, and spiritual cataclysm that birthed the

cult of iFixit; despite the STEMification of education; despite wasteland of a “brown planet” in her present day. M Archive

232 pages Reviewed by Dr. John Murillo III

technological determinism—a cautiousness that feels re- threads and pulls poetry, witness (prophetic and ancestral),

encomiums to Net Neutrality and open-source everything— acts as the collection of findings produced by the archivist’s in the black-box future that the Macintosh portended. This investigation. She arranges the project into several archival may be the reason why Kirschenbaum doesn’t have much to sections: four sections she names for the natural elements of hegemons that so effortlessly process the critical mass of con- two more she devotes to investigating just how the narrative temporary words. Because they are so seamless, so familiar, of the (post-)apocalypse is woven, and one that both narrates and so fundamentally opaque, they offer few opportunities and ruminates on the overall outcome of the researcher’s arfor their users to contemplate them from the inside out. Still, chival project. Across them all, Gumbs, through her archivist, the loss of that world makes it thrilling to inhabit, if only in attentively and intentionally pursues what she describes as fragments.

a “Black feminist metaphysics” that speculates

At the end of Track Changes, Kirschenbaum

upon the ongoing disaster and marvel of Black

takes it upon himself to defamiliarize his own

life in this antiblack catastrophe called “the

word processing by describing its inner workings

world.”

in intimate detail: “A writer—say it is myself, say

In part, what Gumbs and her archivist of-

it is right now—presses a key and completes a

fer is a descent, or fall, “into the archive of our

circuit and a spark of voltage flashes through a

failure,” a set of sobering, surgical musings on

silicon chip to open a logic gate that illuminates

and diagnoses of the failings of a world that cat-

a pattern of pixels on a liquid crystal display

aclysmically crumbled out of a dual, collective

screen (could the terminology be more wonder-

refusal / inability to really believe, embrace, or

ful?).” But these attempts to recapture the strangeness of dig- otherwise demonstrate any care for Black women (referred ital writing only end up raising an elegiac prospect: word pro- to here variously as “the reaching-hands-women,” the “physicessing will never be new—or glorious, or difficult, or simply cal metaphysicians,” the “doers,” and the “basket weaver[s]”). strange—again.

An entry in “baskets of no,” the sixth archival section of M Archive, for example, gestures forcefully and definitively toward a truth that burns like a thread of flame through history

139

M Archive: After the End of the World

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs Duke University Press, 2018

say about Microsoft Word or Google Docs, the two black-box the ancients—Dirt (earth), Sky (air), Fire, and Ocean (water),

MAKE Literary Magazine

and the text: this species, and in particular those who yield

documentary” is, truly, a wholly collaborative, “constellar,”

disproportionate amounts of power over it—clamoring to

nebular project.

destroy itself and its denizens while trying to take the Earth

Ultimately, the collective, collaborative capacity for

with it—very well may be doomed by the foolishness of those

practicing what Gumbs terms “candle calisthenics”—our

who refuse to acknowledge that our fate is, in a very real

creative breathing, burning, and being together—will be es-

sense, completely dependent on the love of all Black women,

sential if we are to survive the “end of the world” and to con-

and “fat Black women specifically.” That the necessity to “lis-

tinue to evolve through its aftermath. Acknowledging this is

ten to, trust, and care for/about Black women (of all ages)” is

imperative. To speculatively document, or critically fabulate,

an imperative that screams through the recent cultural-grav-

or destructively write, the lessons that will guide Black be-

itational events in Black speculative creation (Black Panther

ing—through the ongoing and forthcoming disasters of late

and A Wrinkle in Time) is no accident, and only reinforces the

capital, environmental destruction, and antiblackness, and

centrality of this message throughout M Archive’s content,

into the creation and sustainable inhabitation of a whole

method, and motivation.

other world—Gumbs marshals the community of ancestors

As her chosen method, Gumbs employs what she calls

with whom she collaborates across time and space, the com-

“speculative documentary,” a form of speculation that plays

munity of contemporary Black feminist metaphysicians that

with the format of documentary research. As I understand

collectively and often thanklessly do this work, the fractured,

it, “speculative documentary” is an inherently collaborative

fraught, and fluorescent community called “us”—all the Black

approach, but one that collaborates across all of spacetime.

of us. Across history and geography, for we for whom both of

For her, this form of writing is necessarily “not not ancestrally

those terms crumble, everything is at stake, and so Gumbs and

cowritten, but . . . also written in collaboration with the survi-

her archivist bring everything to bear in these crucial lessons

vors, the far-into-the-future witnesses to the realities we are

in breath, being, and becoming anew.

making possible or impossible with our present apocalypse.”

At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes

In this sense Gumbs’s approach adds another star to the con-

gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that dev-

stellation of radical, creative Black feminist methodologies

astate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of com-

developed in the service of the project Christina Sharpe de-

plicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always

scribes as “keeping and putting breath back into the [Black]

loving in, between, and across every single word—the beau-

body.”

tiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues

M Archive most avowedly indebts itself to M. Jacqui Alex-

the constellar work of radical Black feminism’s ongoing proj-

ander, whose Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism,

ect of “imagining the unimaginable.” Gumbs performs this

Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred profoundly influenc-

difficult work in order to imagine the violent and uncertain

es Gumbs’s writing and thinking here. In particular, Gumbs

creation of an “otherworld” that Black beings in general—be-

draws from and builds upon Alexander’s theorization of the

ings “beyond the limitations and luxuries of what some call

transatlantic slave trade, both as a violent geographical and

‘the human,’” and Black women in particular—must evolve to

metaphysical displacement of millions of Black lives, and

survive. As emphatically as I can stress this, Gumbs’s work—

as a “movement of energies and elements into a relationship

here, in Spill, and surely in the final work of this triptych—is

that persists, a material and conceptual relationship we nav-

necessary to our project of Black survival, growth, and cre-

igate with the potential and compelled crossings we make

ation, up to and even after the end of the world.

in each moment” (emphasis mine). Beyond Alexander, there are resonances with several other forms of Black feminist breath-making and giving: Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” and what I have tentatively described as the “destructive writing” of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! And beyond the contributions of those few one finds evidence in M Archive of the influence of countless other Black feminist metaphysicians. Gumbs’s “speculative

140

Mad Science

S

hakespeare was born in 1564, some two months before Miranda, and usurp his dukedom. He and Miranda narrowly Galileo Galilei, who established the principles of the escape from Milan on a boat that their counselor Gonzalo scientific method, and died in 1616, over sixty years has filled with clothes, food, water, and—most importantly—

before the publication of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Natu- magic books. When they first arrive on the island, the only ralis Principia Mathematica, which demonstrated to the wider other inhabitants are Caliban, the son of Sycorax—a witch world modern science’s power to comprehend and transform who ruled the island until her death several years before the the world. Accordingly, in Shakespeare’s age, during the late present of the play—and Ariel, an airy spirit. Both inhabitants pre-history of modern science, the division between art and quickly become, in their own ways, bound to Prospero: Calscience was far more fluid than it is today. The term “science” iban is enslaved by Prospero after he attempted to rape Miexisted, but did not refer to the natural or physical sciences randa, and Ariel is bound to assist Prospero with his feats of as we now know them, but referred instead to any recognized magic in recompense for Prospero saving his life. With Ariel’s area of knowledge or study. The term “art” existed as well, help, Prospero conjures the illusion of a tempest that appears recognized area of knowledge or study. Prospero, the central Alonso (the King of Naples), Prince Ferdinand (Alonso’s son), character of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is in this sense a sci- and some other attendants and ship crew—the play’s concluentist of the occult whose art manifests as illusion. Sumptu- sion later reveals the ship to be completely intact—and sets ous feasts, Roman goddesses, vicious hounds, and, of course, the revenge plot in motion. the titular tempest, all appear and disappear out of and into thin air at Prospero’s command.

The portrayal of magic in Shakespeare’s play is complex and multifaceted, and in the character of Prospero we witness

Before the invention of the modern disciplines of phys- Shakespeare interrogating the idea of what it means to apics, chemistry, and biology, the study of magic was not re- proach or achieve the heights of human wisdom. By presenting

By Jeanette N. Tran

and referred to the practical application of the principles of a to shipwreck Antonio (Prospero’s brother and nemesis),

garded with the same derision that it is today, in part because, Prospero’s study of magic as both the cause of his demise and have a practical application. Magic, which derives from the to power, The Tempest blurs the line between madness and Persian word for wisdom, magia, was considered by many to mastery, decency and depravity. Even as Prospero’s work is be the highest form of natural philosophy. To quote Sir Fran- driven by his ability to imagine a better world—in this case, cis Bacon—a cofounder, along with Galileo, of the empirical one where the guilty are exposed and justice is served—the method—magic was “a sublime wisdom, and the knowledge realization of this vision requires that he commit acts whose of the universal consent of things.” The study of magic was consequences compromise the moral high ground he holds generally held in the same, if not higher, esteem as geometry, over those he enslaves (Ariel and Caliban), and those he seeks grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. retribution upon (Antonio and King Alonso, who has failed to In the renaissance, to be “mad” about something was to be punish Antonio for his usurpation of Prospero’s dukedom). overly enthusiastic or infatuated with it. Thus Prospero, ob-

A crucial part of Prospero’s revenge plot, for example,

sessed as he is with the occult, can be read as an early example involves putting Miranda in the position to be the next Queen of the “mad scientist” in literature. The modern reader may of Naples by marrying her to Ferdinand. In order for Miranbe tempted to dismiss Prospero’s illusions as mere sleights of da and Ferdinand to fall in love on what appears to be their hand, but Shakespeare’s play is determined to demonstrate own accord, Prospero and Ariel plot an elaborate courtship in how even illusions can have real consequences and inspire which Ferdinand is separated from his father during the illureal action.

sory shipwreck, each man is led to believe that the other one

The Tempest is, on the most basic level, a revenge story. is dead, and Ferdinand—ostensibly free to choose his own It begins on an unnamed island, where Prospero (the Duke of wife—is led to Miranda, whom he will woo. In addition to usMilan) and his daughter Miranda have been living for the past ing his own daughter as a pawn in his revenge scheme, the twelve years. Years earlier, before they fled Milan, Prospe- collateral damage suffered by both Alonso and Ferdinand— ro—obsessed with his “secret studies”—had failed to antici- the very real grief each suffer during the time they believe the pate his brother Antonio’s treasonous plot to murder him and other to be dead—is made clear prior to their reunion, with

141

Arts and Sciences: Exploring the “Rough Magic” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

like the modern scientific disciplines, it was understood to the mechanism by which he restores himself and his daughter

MAKE Literary Magazine

Ariel’s plea to Prospero to break the magic “charm” and to

ro, the mad scientist, and Shakespeare, the playwright, so too

have mercy on the shipwrecked men who are “brimful of sor-

are there differences, the most striking of which is that while

row and dismay.” Hinting at the ways in which Prospero’s re-

Prospero’s art fades, Shakespeare’s endures even to this day,

venge demands that all those on board the tempest-torn ship,

moving audiences and inspiring critical debate.

even the most innocent such as Gonzalo, must suffer, Ariel

At the play’s emotionally fraught conclusion, Prospero

says: “If you now beheld them, your affections would become

arranges the marriage of Miranda to Ferdinand, the Prince

tender.” “Dost thou think so, spirit?” Prospero asks, to which

of Naples, and takes back his dukedom from Antonio, then

Ariel replies, “Mine would sir, were I human.”

abjures magic by breaking his staff, drowning his books, and

Though Prospero’s obsessive desire to learn how to al-

freeing Ariel. All ends happily ever after it would seem. Ex-

ter the nature of things should lead to wisdom (magia) and

cept for the fact that all is not quite so neatly resolved. Indeed,

transcendence, instead it dehumanizes and damages him

it is easy to get distracted by the play’s comedic resolution—

and everyone he comes into contact with. As Ariel is tasked

in which those who were thought dead turn out to be actually

with teaching Prospero how to extend the same compassion

alive, a marriage is proposed, and those who were in exile or

and kindness to his fellow countrymen that Prospero himself

lost at sea somehow find their way safely home—and forget

sought during his twelve years in exile, it seems that Prospe-

about Caliban.

ro has not learned much at all. Prospero’s studies have left

The character of Caliban is among the most complex

him full of knowledge of the universal “consent” of things,

and problematic of Shakespeare's oeuvre. The son of a witch,

but bereft of empathy. It is only after the non-human Ariel

he is introduced as a primitive, sexually violent, half-human

speaks to him with compassionate words of the suffering of

when the play begins. Indeed, one of the first things we learn

those around him that Prospero begins to understand what

about Caliban is his attempted rape of Miranda, for which he

harm he may have done, and how to rectify it. And so, when

is enslaved. And yet, rather quickly, our conception of Cali-

juxtaposed with Prospero’s occult science, the primitive art

ban evolves. Consider, for starters, that it is at the hands of

of drama—the ability to produce wonderful effects, such as

Prospero, the “civilized” European, that Caliban is enslaved.

empathy, through imagination, poetry, and storytelling—is

Likewise, during his enslavement Caliban reveals himself ca-

seen as having its own form of power.

pable of not only learning English, but of speaking in stun-

The Tempest—the first recorded performance of which

ning lyrical terms. Caliban's fate at the end of the play is left

took place on November 1, 1611, before James I and the English

ambiguous. While all other character storylines are resolved,

royal court—is often referred to as Shakespeare’s “farewell to

his is not. The final line he speaks is the remorseful and rue-

the stage” because it was his last solo authored play (he would

ful: “I’ll be wise hereafter.” What are we, the audience, to

die 5 years later in 1616), and features a protagonist whose

make of this? We are not instructed, but are instead left to

final gesture is a promise to drown his (magic) books. We feel

ponder, along with his fate. Our ability to grapple with and, to

close to Shakespeare in The Tempest, his most seemingly bi-

a degree, identify with Caliban, despite his otherness, is a tes-

ographical play, and to Prospero, the “hero” of his play. Both

tament to the superiority of Shakespeare’s probing, inconclu-

magician (Prospero) and playwright (Shakespeare), after all,

sive empathetic science, his art that is always an interrogation

are illusionists who trade on feigned death. Moreover, in a

of itself and its maker.

speech that follows his final display of magic—the conjuring of the goddesses Ceres, Iris, and Juno—Prospero muses upon “the baseless fabric of this vision.” “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / the solemn temples, the great globe itself,” he speaks, “shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” The speech highlights the similarities between Prospero’s “art” and Shakespeare’s. The “great globe,” as well, clearly refers to the Globe Theater where most of Shakespeare’s plays were performed.

And yet, while there are significant parallels between Prospe-

142

Mad Science

143

MAKE Literary Magazine A NYFA Poetry Fellow and CantoMundo

Olivia Cronk is the author of Skin Horse

Fellow, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s poetry

(Action Books, 2012) and Louise and Louise

collection turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (2019)

and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press,

was selected as Agape Editions’s Editor’s

2016), and co-editor of The Journal Petra.

Choice. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with

She teaches writing at Northeastern

Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by

Illinois University.

the National September 11 Memorial in Zachary de los Dolores is a poet,

NYC. Find her at 7TrainLove.org.

translator, and Spanish professor.

Giuseppe Caputo was born on the Caribbean

He edited Kloaka: antología poética

Coast of Colombia in 1982. The English

(Amargord, 2014). Zachary has published

translation of his first novel, An Orphan

the poetry collection Robos, Setas &

World (Un mundo huérfano, 2016), will be

Sombras (Huerga & Fierro, 2014). His

published by Charco Press in 2019.

latest poetry collection is Termites: the illegal occupation of paradise

David Carlin’s latest books are The

(Hesterglock Press).

After-Normal (Rose Metal Press) and 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder

Peruvian poet and translator Mariela

(Open Humanities Press). He is a professor

Dreyfus is the author of seven poetry

at RMIT University, Australia, where he

books, published together last year in

co-directs the cultural exchange program

the volume Gravedad. Poemas reunidos

WrICE and the non/fictionLab.

(Artepoética, 2017). She currently teaches poetry and literary translation at New

Liliana Colanzi was born in Bolivia. She

York University in the MFA in Creative

is the author of the short story books

Writing in Spanish program.

Permanent Vacations (2010) and Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). She

Lucía Estrada (b. Medellín, Colombia,

teaches Latin American Literature at

1980) is the prize-winning author of ten

Cornell University.

books of poetry including Las Hijas del Espino (2006), El Ojo de Circe (2007), La

Nisha Coleman is a writer and performer

noche en el espejo (2010), and Cuaderno

based in Montreal. Her work has been

del ángel (2012). Her latest collection

featured on CBC, PBS, RISK!, and The Moth.

Katábasis by Tragaluz Editores won the

She is the author of the memoir Busker:

2017 Bogotá Poetry Prize.

Stories from the Streets of Paris (Hagios Martín Felipe Castagnet was born in

Press, 2015).

Argentina in 1986. Bodies of Summer Cristina Correa’s works have been

(Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), his first

published by the Missouri Review,

novel, won the Saint-Nazaire MEET Young

TriQuarterly, Western Humanities Review,

Latin American Literature Award. He was

and the Best New Poets series. She teaches

selected for the Hay Festival as one of

writing at Cornell University.

the Bogotá39, the most promising Latin American authors of the new generation.

Joel Craig is the author of The White House (Green Lantern Press, 2012) and a

Kathryn Fleishman is a doctoral candidate

collection of poems forthcoming in 2019.

in English and film & media studies at

He is the poetry editor for MAKE.

UC Berkeley. Her dissertation argues for

144

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad a new mode of reading the postmodern

Elvira Hernández (b. Chile, 1951),

aesthetic in American fictions since 1945.

pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary

Krista Franklin is a writer and artist

critic. Her most important works include

whose work has been published in several

¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (1986), La bandera de

literary journals, anthologies, and book

Chile (1991), Cuaderno de deportes (2010),

covers. She is the author of Under the

and Pájaros desde mi ventana (2018). She

Knife (Candor Arts, 2018) and Study of

is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier

Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012).

National Poetry Award (2018) and the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018).

Carmen Giménez Smith is the co-director for CantoMundo, the publisher of Noemi

Kolin Jordan has translated three books

Press, an English professor at Virginia

of short stories for 7Vientos Press:

Tech, and, with Steph Burt, poetry editor

Saturnalia by Rey Andújar, Flowers &

of The Nation. Her poetry collection Cruel

Mishima’s Illustrated Biography by Mario

Futures was published in the City Lights

Bellatín, and Caracas Muerde: Chronicles

Spotlight Series in 2018. Be Recorder is

from a Relentless City by Héctor Torres.

forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019.

His first book of short stories, Feeling Less Wrong, is forthcoming from Curbside

Philip Good’s chapbook Poets In A Box or

Splendor.

Pluto In Motion (2018) is available from Reality Beach. His poems can be found

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary work

in Hurricane Review and InFiltration: An

has transpired across the US, Cuba, Japan,

Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the

Kenya, and Europe. Her books include the

Hudson River Valley (Barrytown/Station

text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice and The

Hill Press, 2016).

Sexual Organs of the IRS, a collaboration with Bernadette Mayer. She teaches

Deborah Harris is a continuing lecturer in

creative writing to immigrants at Truman

the writing program at UC Santa Barbara.

College and curates the Red Rover Series.

Her book Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection (Routledge, 2014) explores the

Margaret Kolb got her PhD in English from

transformation imperatives advertised

UC Berkeley. She is working on a book

by the media, especially in the West.

analyzing the history of probability, both

Her research interests include medical

mathematical and literary.

rhetoric, materialist rhetoric, and composition.

J.B. Kuzmanchuk is an essayist. He is known for his website www.kuzmanchuk.com.

Katherine M. Hedeen’s latest translations include night badly written (Action

Olivia Lott’s translations of Colombian

Books, 2017) and tasks (coimpress, 2016),

poetry have most recently appeared in

both by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and

Brooklyn Rail In Translation, Mantis,

Nothing Out of This World, an anthology

Río Grande Review, Waxwing, and World

of contemporary Cuban poetry published

Literature Today. Her book-length

by Smokestack Books in 2016. She is the

translation (with Barbara Jamison), The

poetry translation editor for the Kenyon

Dirty Text by Cuban poet Soleida Ríos, is

Review and teaches Spanish and literary

forthcoming from Kenning Editions.

translation at Kenyon College.

145 145

MAKE Literary Magazine

Sara Ludy is an American artist working

Dr. John Murillo III is an assistant

in a wide range of media including video,

professor of African American studies

sound, animation, VR, AR, websites,

at UC Irvine. His research interests

audiovisual performance, sculpture,

include Black literature, afropessimism,

painting, photography, and installation.

and theoretical physics. He is currently

Her work showcases hybrid forms emerging

working on the manuscript, Impossible

through the confluence of nature,

Stories: On the Space and Time of Black

architecture, abstraction, and the

Creation forthcoming from Ohio University

unconscious.

Press.

Matt Margini recently received his PhD

Ivan Puig (b. Mexico) holds degrees in

in English and Comparative Literature

both art and science, and works in a

from Columbia University. His essays have

wide variety of media in both public and

appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,

gallery spaces, and borrows methodologies

and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He

from fields as diverse as enthology,

is currently working on a book-length

anthropology, and engineering.

critical study of the game Red Dead Christine Maul Rice’s novel Swarm Theory

Redemption.

(University of Hell Press) made PANK’s Betty Martin’s work has appeared in Luna

Best Books of 2016, was included in

Station Quarterly. She is currently a

Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup, and was

student at Arcadia University, working

a Chicago Writers Association Book of

toward her MFA.

the Year Award finalist. She launched Hypertextmag.com in 2009 and recently

Bernadette Mayer, widely regarded as

founded the social justice nonprofit

one of the most innovative experimental

writing workshop Hypertext Magazine &

writers of her generation, is the author

Studio.

of over thirty collections. Works and Days (New Directions, 2017) was a

Frances Riddle lives in Buenos Aires

finalist for the Nation Book Critic Circle

where she works as a translator, writer,

Awards. Find out more about her work at

and editor. Her book-length translations

BernadetteMayer.com.

include Plebeian Prose by Néstor Perlongher, Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, A Simple Story by Leila

Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk

Guerriero, and Bodies of Summer by Martín

(Sarabande Books, 2014). He lives in

Felipe Castagnet.

Indiana.

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias (b. Cuba, 1984) Anthony Michael Morena is a writer from

has won the Julio Cortázar Ibero-American

New York who lives in Tel Aviv. He’s

Short Story Prize and the Casa de las

the author of The Voyager Record: A

Américas Theater Prize. Her book Miami

Transmission (Rose Metal Press, 2016) and

Century Fox won the Paz Prize for Poetry

assistant fiction editor for Gigantic

in 2016. In 2017, Alfaguara published her

Sequins. Find his writing in Flapperhouse,

novel, Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog

Hobart, tweets at @anphimimor, and more at

francés (My Favorite Girlfriend Was a

anthonymichaelmorena.com.

French Bulldog).

146

M AD Science SCIENCE Mad

Jacob Saenz is the author of Throwing the

Jared Stanley is a poet and artist. His

Crown (American Poetry Review) and winner

books include EARS (Nightboat, 2017) and

of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Ignore the Cries of Empty Stones and

selected by Gregory Pardlo. He serves as

Your Flesh Will Break Out in Scavengers

an associate editor for RHINO.

(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2018). He teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018–19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the

Jeanette N. Tran is an early modern

first recipient of the Ambroggio Prize

scholar who teaches at Drake University,

from the Academy of American Poets. They

Iowa.

have authored five full-length poetry books. Their book lo terciario/the

Sara Wainscott is the author of Queen of

tertiary was on the 2018 National Book

the Moon (dancing girl press, 2017).

Award Longlist.

Nicole Walker is the author of Julia Sanches is a literary translator

Sustainability: A Love Story (Ohio

of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and

State University Press, 2018) and the

French. She has translated books by Noemi

forthcoming book The After-Normal from

Jaffe and is currently translating works

Rose Metal Press.

by Geovani Martins, Daniel Galera, and Anne K. Yoder’s writing has appeared in

Claudia Hernández.

Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other Suzanne Scanlon is the author of two

publications. She is a staff writer for

novels, Promising Young Women (Dorothy,

The Millions and a member of Meekling

2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi

Press, a collective micropress based in

Press, 2015).

Chicago.

Alec Schumacher received his PhD from the UW Madison in 2017 and is an assistant professor of Spanish at Gonzaga University. His research focuses on Chilean poetry of the neo-avant-garde, in particular, Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translation of Hernández’s La bandera de Chile is forthcoming from Kenning Editions.

Philip Sorenson is the author of Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018) and New Recordings (Another New Calligraphy, 2018). He is the co-editor, with Olivia Cronk, of The Journal Petra.

Cajetan Sorich is a college senior studying creative writing and philosophy at Roosevelt University, Chicago. She is writing her first novel.

147 147

MAKE Literary Magazine

Permissions “A Short Report on Evolution” is an excerpt from The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet by Nicole Walker and David Carlin, published by Rose Metal Press in 2019. For more information go to rosemetalpress.com.

From Katábasis / Katabasis Lucía Estrada Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott The quotations in “Stairstep V,” with the exception of the epigraph, all come from works by Antonin Artaud. The English translations “my thoughts abandon me at every level,” “scraps which I was able to rescue from utter nothingness,” “life consists of burning up questions,” and “under this crust of bone and skin which is my head,” are taken from Heather Weaver’s translation in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, published in 1988 by the University of California Press. The translation “the night’s dark heart” is taken from Victor Corti’s translation in Antonin Artaud: Collected Works, published in 1968 by Calder and Boyars Ltd. All other translations are the responsibility of the translator.

MAKE Literary Productions, NFP, is a 501c3 nonprofit supported in part by The MacArthur Funds for Arts & Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the generous support of individual donors.

MAKE Literary Productions, NFP supports, promotes, and engages contemporary writers, artists, and audiences through publishing, multidisciplinary arts events, and international cultural exchange.

148