KAT ABDALLAH
ADRIAN ADAMO
ELVIS ALVES
BETHANY BALL
ARIANA BENSON
ERIC CALLOWAY
AARON CAYCEDO-KIMURA
AARON COLEMAN
QUINTIN COLLINS
JIM DANIELS
KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ
EMDASH AKA EMILY LU GAO
(高璐璐)
YALONDA JD GREEN
BASIL JAMES
ROWAN MACDONALD
CYNTHIA MANICK
TEREZ PEIPINS
GEORGIA A. POPOFF
DAN PRENISZNI
JULIE SARKISSIAN
MARK SIMPSON
JASON TOUGAW
TARA TROIANO
ANNA ZILBERMINTS
JAMES K. ZIMMERMAN
Manhattanville University
MFA in Creative Writing
Editor
Iain Haley Pollock
Managing Editors
Rob DelVecchio
Rye Fitz
Creative Nonfiction Editor
Rebecca keith
Fiction Editors
Jessica CIOSEK
ROB DELVECCHIO
ANGIE FAIEQ
Hybrid Editor & Editor-at-large
Daniela Perez
Poetry Editors
Rye Fitz
Stephanie kleid
Designer
Rob DelVecchio
Cover Artwork
ERIC CALLOWAY
Inkwell Journal 40
© 2025 Manhattanville University
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.
Published in the United States by The Manhattanville University MFA Program, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase, NY 10577.
inkwell@mville.edu
Inkwell seeks work in a variety of forms, both experimental and traditional, from a variety of authors, established to emerging. Literary diversity and representing the wide range of voices currently writing in America is particularly important to us. For full submission guidelines, visit https://www.mville.edu/english-creative-writing/creativewriting-mfa-inkwell.php.
Purchase, New York • Summer 2025
basil james For once, I am the pearl—
james k. zimmerman Wabi Sabi
ariana benson Swimming Lessons (in conversation with Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus)
elvis alves The Barefoot Prophet
kristine esser slentz The Americanized / Meaning of Marriage
bethany ball Small Time
terez peipins The Exact Terms of Joy
MARK SIMPSON The Cremation of Barbara Bloom
kat
Policies from Human Resources (Revised)
quintin collins The Syntax of My Body Writes the Word of God
JIM DANIELS Lost Keys in Deep Snow
Rowan MAcdonald The Second Birthday
aaron caycedo-kimura Face Study
yalonda JD green Music for Torching
An Interview with Poet and Translator Aaron Coleman
Tara Troiano Commodity Women
Anna Zilbermints Cognitive Dissonance
EMDASH AKA Emily Lu Gao (
) Capsized Pills
Adrian Adamo She/Me
Cynthia Manick Letter to the Archetypes for I Thought You Were Gods
Dan Preniszni Mother at the window.
Jason Tougaw To Protect a Hen
Georgia A. Popoff Fetus in Fetu Aberration
Julie Sarkissian Cry it Out
Contributor biographies
basil james
For once, I am the pearl— for jonah
beloved without adornment. for once their eyes look into mine under the unmitigated light of the sun and i let it happen. i let it! and still, the water breaks upon the lake’s edge, the grass flickers, and the passersby mind their own without paying us attention, speaking in chorus the simple truth that it is easy to be loved, that it is easy to be known, and there is no pomp and circumstance to becoming the fruit of the earth, hungered and held close without a catch.
james k. zimmerman
for JS
all is broken before it begins a cup sees its own crazing a ring knows its stone will sometime disappear
no thought ever comes to mind without its own forgetting, no birch tree whitens without heartwood that foretells a fall to earth to beetle, to fungus
I cherish each ache, each broken tooth, each crease along my cheekbones
my body becomes familiar with its chips and cracks, its hangnails and encrusted skin
each breath commingles blood and mist and dust in rhythm with the cycle of becoming and falling away
ariana benson
(in conversation with Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus)
I am not an actual historian. I’m an unreliable narrator. I sort of let characters or caricatures sort of emerge.
–
Kara Walker
I didn’t learn how to swim until I was thirteen years old. The distinction I make here between learn and know is crucial because I never tested my knowledge of swimming, of how to swim, enough to arrive at any certain conclusion about its inherent existence within me. The knowledge of how to swim is one of few that humans lose, and so naturally possess, before we (re)gain it. We’re born understanding the physics of submersion; understanding that a body can be most at rest in its mother water (as in mother tongue).
The amniotic fluid at the beginning of this journey is now transformed into mother’s milk and lifeblood. Mother, wet nurse, whore, saint, Host, lover—she is the daughter of waters.
–
Kara Walker
I can pinpoint exactly when and how swimming came back to me. I was working as an intern in a pre-school classroom, dumping rotten strawberry preserves that slid out, clotted, from Mason jars under a running faucet. I was using water to make something usable—fillable—once again, and talking with a teacher. I casually mentioned, at some natural point in the conversation, that I had never learned to swim. The
teacher, a white woman, technically my boss, looked at me with a kind of shocked pity-horror I have seen rarely since.
At present, I would’ve been confident enough in my Blackness, myself, to remind her of the systemic segregation of public pools that left generations of us, to put it in her words, more in danger of drowning. At thirteen, I didn’t know how to explain that even if I had been taught, at some point, how to swim, I was always—would always be—in more danger of drowning than she.
In Walker’s sculpture, water is the source of power. On the lower basin of the fountain is the model of a fishing boat which has sprung a leak… Sharks circle the boats and ships… Walker has named this section of her fountain ‘The Physical Impossibility of Blackness in the Mind of Someone White.’
– from the Tate Modern on “Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus”
After one week of learning, I sat, cross-legged, at the bottom of the teacher’s saltwater pool. She had taught me everything she could about how to swim: cup your hands, scooping water away instead of raking at it; don’t bend the knee when kicking; turn only your head, not your body, towards the sun to breathe between strokes. When she positioned me at the precipice of the deep end, one hand a flat arrow atop the other, pointing the compass of my body to a bottom I’d yet to find, she expected me to jump, as most people do on their first attempt at diving, feet-first.
Again, I was surprised by her surprise. I had so rarely, if ever, had a chance like that. To lead with my eyes, my head, instead of my feet. To go into a new world presented—touched first—through my mind, and not my body. What she would never understand about the rarity, the unimpeachability of
such a choice, is that it was just that—not a matter of skill, of bravery, of instinct, but choice.
When given the chance to choose how I enter a space, to choose to be felt and seen first by what was above my shoulders, of course I dove. I chose never to merely jump again. When given a choice between resting on the pool’s floor and floating among the white shiver of bodies above, I chose, for just a moment, not to swim.
We cross the Atlantic in many ways. We Swim or we Sink. ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus,’ submerged within her misshapen shell.
– Kara Walker
Years later, I was in college, living what I thought was an entirely different life in an entirely different space—one specifically designed for me. For Black women. By my junior year, I had unlearned far more than I had been taught.
I got in the pool there for the first time as part of a swimming class. I stood in three feet of water and watched as more than half of my classmates floundered. They were afraid of even wading in water their breasts couldn’t broach. Too afraid to float, to be vulnerable enough to allow themselves to be held up and carried by something, someone, not themselves. What did this say about who we, even the most professedly confident and “evolved” Black women, thought we could trust? What did this say about who we believed we could rely on? If not ourselves, who else? What else?
…particularly around race and gender, I’m interested in grand themes and small human frailties—the macro and the micro.
– Kara Walker
I have pretended, at various junctures in my life, to have forgotten a great many things: among them, my knowledge of how to swim. Who was I, in the presence of my trembling sisters, to remember what they didn’t know they had once known? Even now, I struggle to uproot my concept of solidarity—by extension, black feminism or womanism— from the constitutive ground that demands all our sufferings must be shared and the same. Hadn’t we all beaten with the same hands, broken by the same men? Hadn’t we all crossed that ocean together? And hadn’t we survived, those that did survive, because we had each other?
And who was I without that having, that having that is less possession than a kind of holding, a kind of being held?
The Fons Americanus is an allegory of the Black Atlantic, and really all global waters which disastrously connect Africa to America, Europe, and economic prosperity.
– Kara Walker
I was seen, in a way I rarely have felt seen, by the Black man who was the instructor of that college swimming class. And, in an even rarer phenomenon, I saw him come into this seeing. Saw him watch me as I gently held onto the side of the pool, my knuckles not white enough to belie the kind of fear I was pretending to have. Noticed him hear me try to guide my classmates under my breath—next time you try to float, let your ears go completely under the water. Watched him decide many things about me, about who I was and what I could do.
The most eminently relevant of these conclusions (it’s my turn to assume) was that I could, in fact, despite my best
efforts at feigned helplessness, swim. This revelation, beyond baffling him, seemed to raise in him a personal offense. Why, if given the choice between paddling helplessly in the shallow end and treading water, feeling my feet search for something other than the ground, would I select the former? Who was I to get in that water and pretend I might drown? What had he come to learn, in his one and only body, about pretending, holding, drowning, swimming?
I never asked him what else he assumed about me—not because I wasn’t curious, but because I didn’t need to know exactly what he thought of me to understand how he called my bluff. He was a man, and/but he saw me. Sometimes, that’s explanation enough.
This is about the story I could tell with my own hand, which is perhaps second-class, and unseen or unheard, and the story that is larger than it ought to be, than it has a right to be.
– Kara Walker
Twice a week, I went to class. I’d shed my outside clothes in the locker room; underneath them, a maroon suit that felt as close to skin, as close to neutrality, as anything I’d ever worn, including my own flesh. I’d wet my hair in the shower, lest it absorb the more chlorinated poolwater, before stuffing it into a rubber cap. I’d sit at the edge of the pool, forcing my feet into a pair of too-small flippers, before slipping into the water.
Some chose to enter it slowly, letting their bodies adjust to the often colder-than-comfortable pool. I went in all at once. I wanted to get that part over with, and some part of me took pleasure in the full-body shivers that ensued. Took pleasure in not being entirely in control of my every movement.
Taking the form of scalloped shells from art historical depictions of the Roman goddess Venus, Walker’s [Shell Grotto] encases a weeping boy inside a well, almost completely submerged in water. His head floats just above the surface as if drowning or emerging from the depths, with pools of water running from his eyes.
– from the Tate Modern on “Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus”
There was nobody but me in that pool. The women who swam alongside me, with their golden stretchmarks and wet-blistered palms, were me. The lane divider drifting lazily with the current we created was me. The chemical sting that pinked our eyes’ whites, me. The smooth tiles, the rough grout veining through them, me. The red floatie ready to save a life, me. The liquid heartbeat soundtrack below the surface, me.
In that water, I was freed from my body. Freed from its womanness, the womanness that my Blackness, to many minds, negates. I was swimming in nothing but history and blood and possibility.
In that water, I was everywhere.
The well overfloeth its banks and changes course away, away from this island fort, towards a new world, taking with her gods and men and women.
– Kara Walker
I feel that same everywhere again when I, years on, walk below the vaunted ceilings of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. When I stand in the shadow of Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus—the Daughter of Waters. When I spend the
better part of an afternoon studying its imposing height, its impeccably detailed form. Like the sharks in the fountain’s lower level, I appear to be circling. But this circling is not in preparation for an attack; it is a way of trying to see, trying to form an image of what the water (the Atlantic I crossed to get there) is forcing me to confront. What the ocean has dragged into my current, my line of sight.
I am also being circled. Mostly, by droves of white children. They laugh, scream, touch the water, stare at my staring. They sit on the font’s edge as if it is just like any other bench, toss coins in the water as though the wishes the font would grant were just like any other wishes. Thirty minutes elapse before I can even bring myself to touch it. When I do, I recoil as if I expect it to burn or to dissolve my fingers.
I have created a space for reflection—joy, even—amid the miasma of conflicts: racial, economic, and cultural, which still lodge themselves into our collective gullet.
– Kara Walker
After an hour, I bring myself to look at her, the Venus atop the sculpture. Her throat is slit, spewing bloodwater. Her breasts, exposed, do the same—though against the grey walls, from the angle I’ve taken, the water flowing from them appears cloudier. In many ways, she is exactly and only a woman. In others, she never was one at all. I don’t waste time parsing the difference between the two. She sees me. We are everywhere. That’s enough.
elvis alves
after a photograph by James Van Der Zee
He sits in a room surrounded by the silence of the early morning. Soon, people will rise with the tunes of birds. He calls on God at this time, and every time. The barefoot prophet prepares to bring the word to the people with force. He wants them to turn from the wrong. That they should see themselves how God sees them. How he sees them, even though he is not God. He was unable to sleep again. His hair disheveled as his clothes. His eyes wild, always on the prize. It is not that he wants to go to heaven. He wants heaven and more. The more is what escapes him. Keeps him up at night. Makes him forget to wear shoes. He thinks about this and waves form and clash in his head. He knows the spirit lives there. But he is not God. He is a man with empty hands and feet. He is on a mission that is incomplete. He thinks about this while sitting, while standing, without sleep, with bare feet.
kristine esser slentz
Was the beignet worth it?
That dust really gets everywhere.
Sorry, I mean, sugar. Powdered your mouth just right,
sprinkled your lap against tight black jeans. Look around furiously for that paper napkin
with its well-known insignia to clean crumbs. Don’t worry—no one will know—
not that you thought to worry. Am I the tourist
here to enjoy the surroundings? Or was it the other way around?
After all, there were so many paid rooms with no permanent residence in sight.
What does a vacation look like anyway? Our generation stripped of married parents, mortgages, and mutual funds. Can we commit to anything common?
bethany bAll
It started one Saturday night when my friend Whitney called and asked if I wanted to meet Frank. She’d been dating Frank herself but they’d broke up. He likes redheads, she said. He wants to meet you.
I looked around my small room. Black and white TV perched on stacked books, a pile of dirty clothes I needed to haul over to the coin laundry. I thought about the bowl of cereal that would be my dinner and the pile of manuscripts I’d brought home from work. My cat cleaned herself on the edge of my futon before stretching and vanishing out the open window and into the airshaft.
Sure, I said.
Whitney told me to meet him at the VIP Room in Midtown. She rattled off an address, and I wrote it down on the back of my electric bill.
Frank will meet you outside, she said.
I hung up the phone and stood in front of my closet. I really didn’t have much to wear. I settled on a brown wrap dress my mom had sent me from one of the factory outlets in Indiana where she shopped. I tried on a pair of old pumps, but I kicked them off. I couldn’t face navigating the subway in heels. I slipped my feet into my old worn loafers and headed out the door.
It was raining of course by the time I arrived, and my feet were cold and wet. My wool coat smelled like wet dog. I saw a doughy faced well-dressed little man, bald, about 40, under the awning, leaning against the wall. He took a drag from a cigarette and then stubbed it out with his loafers on the wet sidewalk. He held out his arm to me, but I pretended not to see it. The doorman opened the door, and we walked inside.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the black walls and red carpeted floors. Men smoked around tables, the occasional woman
by their sides; their suits pressed against the backs of red leather upholstered chairs. They looked around, sullen and resigned, while girls on platforms undulated on red velvet risers. Their breasts were bare and of varying sizes. There were large soft ones and large hard ones and some of the women were flat as boards. Their expressions vapid, mouths half opened, eyes half closed, that signaled sex to the men seated at the tables. In college I’d been in love with a woman who’d stripped through college. I knew I didn’t have what it took to be one of them, but I’d envied her. Especially when she came home with fistfuls of cash. It seemed like easy money.
Frank ordered Manhattans, and I sipped mine and looked around. I waited for Frank to say something, make conversation, or engage me in some way, but he wouldn’t look me in the face. I could feel him study me, but when I tried to catch his eye, he’d look away. Finally, he said, You don’t wear much make up.
I guess not, I said. I smacked my lips. I wear lipstick, I said. But I guess it wore off.
I had the feeling I was auditioning for a part and in part because I had twenty bucks to my name until pay day, it was a part I desperately wanted. I drained the Manhattan and picked out the sweet little cherry at the bottom. The part I was auditioning for had perks: meals and drinks and bonuses if I did a really good job. I told Frank I had to use the ladies’ room, and Frank gave me five dollars for the attendant. The bathroom was clean. The counters were shiny black lacquer with bunches of fake red roses in vases positioned around the sinks. An attendant watched me sullenly while I applied lipstick. She handed me a tissue. You got a little on your teeth, she said. With some reluctance I handed the five-dollar bill to her and left the bathroom in a hurry.
When I got back to my seat, Frank waved a girl over. Get me a blonde for the redhead, he said. He shoved one neatly folded wad of cash into the hostess’ hand, and she led over a tall woman with yellow hair. The woman climbed over me and began to undulate her body in waves against mine. I sat in utter
mortification while she ground her pubic bone into me. She leaned forward and pressed her hard perfectly spherical naked breasts against me. Frank sat across the table with his hands neatly folded in front of his empty martini glass. He watched us, his lips parted slightly and his heavy eyelids half closed. I moved against the woman gamely, and she looked down at me with barely disguised disgust. After a few minutes, she was gone.
The Manhattan had gone to my head and before I knew it, we were on the street. Frank hailed a cab.
I gotta go uptown, Frank said. For a short errand.
We took Central Park West. I watched the park glide by through the rain dotted cab window. Frank lit a cigarette. When we got up into the sixties, Frank had the cab pull over. I climbed out, and he climbed out after me and shut the door. Frank slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. I’m going to walk around the block, he said. Whyn’t you go to the bodega and buy yourself some magazines?
Okay, Frank, I said. I stood under the awning and watched him stalk off into the mist.
The bodega had rows and rows of magazines and a fat tabby sprawled out over British Vogue and British ELLE. I picked up American Vogue. Giselle was on the cover. Bony and big breasted. I thought about the stripper. She was also bony and big breasted. I set the magazine down and pocketed the twenty. Whitney had got a hundred dollars for a Betsey Johnson dress once while Frank took his walk around the block, and I wondered about the differences between me and Whitney.
Frank came back around. He hailed another cab. I asked if he’d got what he wanted on his walk. He opened his jacket and patted the inside pocket. You’ll find out soon enough.
This time the car ride was oppressive. The cab driver ate a falafel sandwich from a bit of tinfoil, and Frank lit up a cigarette. He put his hand on my knee. I rolled down the window and gulped air through the crack, relieved when finally, after a long long time, we crossed Houston.
Whitney met us at Frank’s apartment in Soho. She was a cool blonde in a black sheath and sleek black boots fitted around her slim calves. Her blonde hair was neatly done and her red lips matched her freshly manicured nails. I knew she’d been on a date. We’d been friends in high school. She’d come to New York City first to marry John Kennedy Jr., and she was sure she was just one more man away from meeting him.
The apartment was clean and sparsely furnished. Two black leather sofas organized around a coffee table and a large television. There was nothing on the walls. No plants, no decorous touch of any kind. A kitchen table and four chairs. Blank blonde cabinets and on the Formica counters were arranged a row of amber prescription medicine bottles that made my fingers feel sticky just looking at them. I wasn’t above rummaging through a medicine cabinet for expired wisdom teeth pain pills or Valium.
Whitney bustled about making herself at home. She pulled champagne flutes from the cabinets and set them on the table. Frank opened the fridge and drew out a small wooden casket. This is something special, he said.
Are you spoiling us? Whitney said.
Frank uncorked the bottle of champagne with a dishtowel. This is Dom Pérignon, Frank said to me. He poured a glass. And it’s a very good year.
A very good year, Whitney repeated, with an authority I didn’t really believe. I knew where she came from.
I was still a little green from the cab ride, but the cold, dry bubbles revived me and when Frank broke out the mirror, and the razor, and a baggie from his jacket’s inside pocket, I was ready. I watched Frank and Whitney snort a line, but when it was my turn I took the straw, bent down over the mirror, and exhaled all the coke on the mirror into the ether.
Whitney laughed. Nice job, she said. That was about two hundred dollars’ worth of blow.
Frank carved another line, and I took the straw. I felt the burn and the itch dribble down the back of my throat. I straightened up. Whitney took a sip of champagne. I didn’t feel
anything, so I bent over the table and inhaled again. Frank took the straw from his fingers. Easy, tiger, he said.
Then it hit me.
I had a flash memory of a woman who used to babysit me. She beat her kids with a wooden spoon and her son bullied me. I remembered that suddenly and felt my heart quicken and the memory dissolve. I smiled. I felt utterly free.
Now you feel it, Frank said.
Just before Whitney left, she pulled me aside. Listen, she said. Frank isn’t going to hang out with you unless you put out. I’m just letting you know.
Oh, I said. Okay.
And I should warn you there’s a box of sex toys under his bed. It’s pretty terrifying, she said.
Whitney left and Frank wandered over to the black leather sofas. He grabbed the remote and scrolled through a dozen porn channels. He finally paused on three nuns making love, naked but for their habits.
It’d be better, I said, if there was a priest in there somewhere.
Frank turned to me and smiled. Why you naughty girl, he said. He turned and kissed me. Let’s go to bed, he said.
Frank led me into the bedroom. The bedroom was drab but clean. I lay down on the neatly made bed while Frank headed into the en suite bathroom. I had sobered up the minute my body hit the bed. There wasn’t a drug in the world that was going to turn me on in that moment. All the moisture had been sapped from my body. The door of the bathroom opened, and Frank stepped out with a towel around his waist. He was sallow and hairy with a hard, round belly. Hair tufted off his shoulders.
Okay baby, he said. He sat on the bed. Let’s see what we can do.
Frank climbed down between my legs and pulled my pantyhose down. He sniffed around between my legs for some time while I made appropriate sounds. Against my shin I felt
something soft and unpromising. I tried to pull him up, to get it over with. He climbed up and began poking around. He was sweating. Beads clung to the hair on his shoulders. Come on, he said under his breath. Come on, come on. I wriggled beneath him but after a while he flopped down beside me. Dammit, he said.
Next time, Frank, I said.
Frank sat up on his elbow and looked down at me. This is just the small time, he said. We haven’t met the big time yet.
I stayed awake a long while. The streetlight outside the window began to blink rapidly and then burned out. A pigeon scrambled on the window ledge. I thought about my cat. I couldn’t remember if I’d left the window open for him. I thought about him creeping around the city roofs, eating pigeons and rats, and then I fell asleep.
Frank had me meet him at Il Mulino a couple days later. We were ushered in by the maître d’. I have your table ready, he said and directed us to a table at the center of the restaurant. The maître d’ took my coat and smiled warmly at me.
Waiters swirled around us and for the next hour piled the table with every imaginable dish on the menu. I took a bite of everything, even the octopus, and the spinach, and everything was delicious. I had been starving when I’d arrived at the restaurant and now I was stuffed. Five desserts arrived on the cleared table with two forks for each and as I spooned up the tiramisu I thought I could get used to this life.
The owner of the restaurant came out to give Frank his regards. He was so tall and handsome and well-dressed that I felt embarrassed. He took my hand and gently let it drop and then he turned to Frank, and he said, I’m so sorry about your uncle, Mr. Galvino. He was a great man. We all miss him. We will never forget him. Please accept our condolences.
Frank nodded. Thanks, Jimmy, he said. Thanks a lot. The family appreciates it.
I nibbled at the crème brûlée while Frank lit a cigarette.
What did your uncle do? I asked.
Frank smiled to himself and stared at the cigarette between his fingers. He was a bookmaker, he said.
A bookmaker? I asked. I didn’t understand.
A bookie, he said.
I still didn’t understand so I asked Frank what Frank did for a living, and he said his family was in pools. A family business based in New Jersey. Originally, we were in concrete, he explained. But then we discovered pools were more lucrative.
Frank stood up to leave and the maître d’ helped him with his coat. I put my spoon down and stood up and the waiter helped me with mine. I caught the eye of a woman seated a table away. She was probably Frank’s age, and when Frank turned and put his arm on my back and kissed my cheek, she looked away in disgust.
We took a cab the two blocks back to Frank’s apartment. Then we took the elevator to Frank’s apartment. Frank disappeared into the bathroom while I pretended to get myself a glass of water. Really, I wanted to see what was in the amber prescription bottles. I opened the Valium and swiped a couple that I put into my purse. I took one and put it in my mouth and took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water and swallowed the pill.
I wandered into the living room and peeked out the big horizontal blinds that hung from the ceiling to the floor. The window overlooked Spring Street. I watched an attractive woman hustle her young daughter across the street. They disappeared into a restaurant. I picked up the remote and turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until I got to David Letterman. Madonna, who’d just turned 40, turned up in full cowgirl gear. Then Frank walked into the kitchen.
He pulled out the mirror, the razor blade, the bag of coke, and the straw and snorted up a line. Want some? He asked. I did. I really did. I took the straw from him and snorted a line.
Can I do another? I asked.
Better not, he said. Wait 15 minutes. I’m going to run
downstairs to the pharmacy and pick up some antacids, he said. Want anything?
I shook my head no.
The microwave clock said 11:45. That made it easy. At midnight I could do another line. But as soon as I heard the door of the apartment shut, I did another line. And then I waited.
I figured I was on the tall side and had a hearty constitution so at 11:50 I did another line and then another. I’d already built up a tolerance. I was sure of it. I really loved it. I was already making wild plans about the wonderful things I was going to do with my life. I swiped up some of the granules on the mirror and rubbed them across my gums like I’d seen in the movies. I carved out one more line and then Frank walked in.
Good you waited for me, Frank said. And we did another together. He held the straw for me while I snorted up two more lines. I was beginning to like Frank a lot. The coke, I thought, was incidental.
Frank, I asked. If I wanted to do coke all the time, could I?
Frank looked up at me crossly. You can’t afford it.
Okay, but if I wanted to, I said.
Let me tell you a story, he said. Once I was dating this girl. Another redhead like you. I really liked her. She really liked me. We did coke together. Sometimes she even brought her own. One day, as she was pulling out her lipstick, a credit card machine fell out of her purse. Frank looked at me with meaning. I looked back at him confused.
What does that mean? I asked.
It means she was a hooker, he said. You want to know how you can afford coke? Become a hooker. That’s how.
Oh, I said. I see.
But you know, he said. I like you. We get along. You’re easy to be with and I think we have the same values. And I got an extra bedroom, extra space, see? Maybe if, you know, we get serious, you could move in with me.
I nodded. I thought of my own tiny sixth floor walkup
room and my little street cat. My position as an editorial assistant. My scrounging for quarters in pay phones, ordering soup with extra bread any time I went out with friends, and the caul of shame I carried with me almost all the time. All that shame had evaporated forever, it seemed.
Frank said he wasn’t feeling so well after the big meal, and he was going to take a trip to the loo. Be a good girl, he said. By which I thought he meant, do more coke. So, when the door of the bathroom shut, I snorted two more lines and then I staggered over to the black leather sofas, and I sank into the cold stiff cushions.
Only later, minutes later or maybe a lifetime, lying on his garbage bag sofa, my heart pounding, my mouth dry and wasting did I think seriously about his offer. Thinking that yes, maybe he was right. I could put paintings on the wall, some plants, fix up the place. Maybe I could move in with him.
I lurched off the sofa and past Frank who’d come out of the bathroom and was on the phone talking frantically to his pharmacist downstairs. I met this girl, I heard him say. A stripper, maybe a hooker, from the VIP Club. She’s like OD’ing. She looks real bad. You think I should take her to St. Vincent’s?
I found the bathroom and turned on the light. I was white as a bag of cement and my lips were dried up and purple, like old dates. My temples thudded visibly behind my eyes.
Frank burst through the bathroom door. Take two Valiums, he said. He thrust them into my hand and pulled a tiny Dixie cup from his dispenser stuck to the bathroom wall above the sink. He filled the cup with water and handed it to me. We watched each other in the mirror. I focused on the three or four greasy hairs that reached across his skull.
I tried to speak, to say I was sorry, or thank you, or save me, or fuck you, but my throat was too dry to make a sound. My breathing slowed but my heart pounded, fierce and alive. That furious little muscle.
Every once in a while, I think about it. It was a stupid
thing that happened. That’s all. But the other day walking down Spring Street, I saw Frank. He’d been old back then, ten or so years ago—he was hardly older now. A tall girl in heels tottered over him. I watched him guide her into the front door of his apartment building. I wondered if he’d replaced the garbage bag sofas. I wonder if he’d traded coke for Adderall or ecstasy or ayahuasca. I wondered if he could get it up. I wondered if there was still a box of horrors—the dumb girls who didn’t make it, maybe—still under his bed, waiting for the big time.
You here, through piling snow, a winter trap. And yet, another loss, closer each time. We inhabit the edges of old age, I repeat Mother’s mantras to fight fear, so yes, my father will make it home from the city. I learn worry and watch your breath each night.
The unbreathing will not give up its last breath. An infinity, the way the breath goes on, the body continues.
The flame and what it does:
a means, not an end. The dust a continuation, a breath, a body alive in its own way.
kat abdallah
All employees are required to report known or suspected incidents of sexual harassment or sex & gender-based violence to human resources, and all supervisors are required to report all forms of discrimination to human resources.
When you write in a letter to a trusted advisor that a coworker groped you at a bar last week, she’ll write back that she’s busy working from home so she can watch the World Cup, so if it’s alright, she’ll meet with you later. She’ll say she can’t miss it, it’s only every four years. If you forward the letter to your direct supervisor, all he’ll email back is “Thanks.” If you go to his office to follow up, he’ll laugh and say “I wish not everything had to go through my office.”
Human resources is committed to conducting civil rights and Title IX investigations in a timely and effective manner, adhering to the principles of due process in all investigations.
Your advisor will tell you for days that she’ll have an update for you soon. She won’t update you until the next month.
Human resources facilitates civil rights and Title IX training, and publishes resources and communications regarding any new regulations or guidance from the Office for Civil Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and [REDACTED] State Legislature.
When the investigator says that he encourages complainants to pursue informal complaints and resolution because it can often serve as a wake-up call to correct the respondent, and
that informal resolution can include asking the respondent to take consent training, you’ll tell him that everyone in the department was required to take consent training at the beginning of the year. The investigator will say that he won’t assume everyone has been required to take consent training.
The purpose of this policy is to promote professionalism in supervisor-supervisee relationships, which require an environment of mutual trust and respect; clarify that consensual personal relationships between supervisors and supervisees that are intimate (emotionally or physically) or romantic or sexual in nature are in violation of this policy; and recognize that the voluntariness of a supervisee’s consent may be questionable due to the power differential that exists between supervisors and supervisees and may result in claims of sexual harassment.
Telling the investigator that the person who groped you outranks you and supervises a shared project won’t be of any interest to the case.
Such a report may be made at any time throughout the year, including during non-business hours.
The investigator assigned to your case will ask if he can postpone the investigation until after the holidays. Because it’s a hard time of year.
Any person may report sex discrimination, including sexual harassment.
The investigator won’t want to deal with your case, so he’ll refer you to his manager. His manager will tell you that their office “doesn’t investigate flirting.” In the spring, that manager will lead the seminar on employee reporting for Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
All members of the [REDACTED] community will create and maintain an environment that is free of discrimination and harassment and one in which employees are treated with dignity and respect.
You’ll stop going to staff meetings and hide in your office during the workday. You’ll stop going to department events and celebrations. Gradually, your coworkers will stop talking to you.
Human resources implements [REDACTED]’s discrimination grievance procedure and may help to resolve concerns through an investigation, informal resolution, or by providing support measures.
When you ask the bar if they have any security footage from that night, even though the investigator on your case said he already asked, the bar owners will tell you that the investigator never reached out to them. They’ll also say that this happens all the time.
Creating inclusive, respectful and supportive environments is a responsibility we all share.
The person who groped you won’t face any consequences. He’ll become a coach and work with teen girls.
Human resources is committed to ensuring equal opportunity and prohibiting illegal discrimination and inappropriate behavior in all aspects of employment.
But sexual misconduct is really hard to prove. They have to be impartial, after all.
God's fingers fiddled cosmic dust.
Each digit fluttered the grains, then swished and swirled the particles before pinching enough to herald my body into the Lord's palm. The dust cascaded to fabricate my limbs granule by granule. God crafted the scheme that I must not question—only prostrate myself before the mystery. And here I stand. My own cosmos of shifting atoms, faith, and doubt. I corkscrew through living while the unknown bays just off screen. I sputter to starts, screech to stops. Doctors record the Gospel of My Afflictions. Stretch my intestines straight; the span spells demise. WebMD is the Lord's most beloved prophet and false god. I pray for a miracle. On sleepless nights, I guzzle nihilism and the last dregs of Catholic guilt. Or Baptist.
Or the self-flagellation for sins I won't confess before a judge or the altar or the knife, for the syntax of my body writes the Word of God, and I cannot decipher the revelation. Liberate me from flesh to then ask the Lord how much salvation can I buy
with the blessings I labored to shoulder: a curved spine, deaf right ear, astigmatism, hyperactive thyroid gland, ulcers that punctuate my guts. Is the love prescribed in the pain or the healing thereafter? Believers say both.
I cathedral my palms, leave the door open for God. At the advent, I will crumble it all to rubble, scatter the dust to land where it may.
jim daniels
Another night of trudging through the deep snow of sobriety toward another celebratory occasion. A small apartment wedding, the groom’s mother serenely dying in a bed in the next room.
The dry saccharine supermarket cake wobbly on paper plates, spelling out it’s time to go before you kiss the bride. Nobody’s first go-round. His mother half-cheerful in her weak wave goodbye. No easy way to retrace
steps and plunge your hands into it, churning up a cold mess. You can’t go back inside to spoil their brief warmth on that dark, cold moonless night. You walk to where a cab might be conjured. Call the neighbor
with the spare key. The next day you carry your bike to a mechanic who torches off the lock. No spare for that. You ride it back to the car, careful not to lose yourself. Easy to get lost, hard to get found again.
That might be a homily after a service on some other timeless occasion.
Sparks fly as you stand at a distance. Your mechanic doesn’t charge you. You talk about the weather, nostalgic for thin ice. You keep clawing deeper and deeper. Nothing melting anytime soon.
Rowan MAcdonald
“Here’s to the last ten years,” I say, raising a glass of Coke.
“You look a lot healthier than back then,” my friend Jo says. “Do you ever miss it?”
I play with the edge of tablecloth, unease creeping in.
“Not really,” I say. “You know me—never do anything by halves.”
“I couldn’t do what you did,” she says. “I struggle just staying home on Saturday nights.”
Irony suddenly hits, a kick in the guts. Those closest to me are commemorating my ten years sobriety with wine and spirits. Even this celebration can’t take place without alcohol being front and centre.
I reflect on my alcoholic uncle’s funeral months earlier, how everyone was “having a beer for him.” I think of the funerals of heroin addicts. I wonder if guests pull out syringes and smack to commemorate the dearly departed. Doubtful.
A waiter interrupts my dazed reflection.
“Care to have a look at the wine list, sir?”
“No, thanks, mate,” I say. “All good here.”
It’s 2007 and I’m eighteen. Shot glasses line up, Jack Daniels overflows, Mötley Crüe blasts through the PA system.
“Knew this was a good idea,” I smile.
The bartender sighs, regrets the venue’s payment policies. “Standard fee, or bar tab,” the manager offers. For these eighteen-year-olds the choice is easy—drink more.
Warmth flows down the back of our throats, glasses slam onto the bar. Our eyes, already glazed, scan the shelves, looking for the next drink.
“I need help,” I laugh, and don’t yet realise how true that is.
Some bands have roadies to carry equipment. Not us. Instead, we require help transporting large numbers of drinks onstage. We experiment with different quantities, forever searching for the right amount, the perfect buzz to complement our performance.
The next day I wander streets, head pounding and mouth dry, trying to find my bearings, the quickest route home.
“Awesome show last night, man!” someone says. “Thanks,” I reply.
If not for photos and recordings, I might not believe that I once played in rock bands; that I lived such a life for years.
I’m twenty-one, and the drunkest in the room. I’m also their bartender. Drunk patrons hardly fear me cutting them off. Who would listen to rules implemented by someone that reeks of alcohol, sways more than them?
Colleagues don’t mind. Just need to work hard. This is Australia—and by extension, Western culture—where in certain industries and age groups it’s often more acceptable to be drunk than sober.
I watch non-drinkers get tagged “weak, dull, and boring.”
My days and nights revolve around alcohol. Each morning arrives with its customary hangover, an unsteady clumsiness. If working, I pour drinks for others. If not, I pour drinks down my throat. Sometimes it overlaps.
“Can’t remember anything,” I say to friends. “What
happened last night?”
They laugh, shoot knowing smiles, slap me on the back. My body screams for answers that never arrive, stuck in conflict with acceptance and encouragement of its condition.
“It was epic, mate,” they say.
We revel in toxic camaraderie, a kind of club, reserved for those with no recollection of what happens after a few drinks. We tell ourselves it’s just “living life” and “having fun.” We ignore the occasional person who dies or when blackouts increase to three or four per week.
A man slumps against a table near the bar, a young girl stumbles into a gutter, heels in hand. I observe their vulnerability, fear for their safety, ponder how they will get home. Yet, I remain unable to acknowledge my own vulnerability when found wandering bushland or losing clothes on nights out or turning yellow with jaundice. I wake beside pools of vomit or people I don’t know. Near-death experiences start piling up.
A family friend comes to visit, a fellow alcoholic; a man whose mother packed him beer for lunch each day. Months later, he’s discovered by people walking their dog. Washed up on a beach. Dead, drunk, defeated.
A cousin is found hanging in a garage filled with empty beer cans. We learn he spent every night in the garage, drinking by himself. I wonder how many of those discarded cans were consumed the night he died.
It’s a future that could easily be mine.
It no longer feels like a hangover, it’s something else. I feel like I’m dying. I try to forget about the blood-streaked vomit in my bed. I sit on the couch, choke down saliva, feel
faint. Heart palpitations spiral out of control, waves of nausea hit my body with the force of a freight train.
I stare at the TV in the corner of the room, struggle to focus. I learn Amy Winehouse has joined the 27 Club. She is dead. Succumbed to the same disease. I feel a tear roll down my sunken face.
“Oh, Amy.”
I’m alone. I’m scared. I’m shaking. I gaze out the window, as her voice echoes over newsreels in the background. Something clicks. I feel a hand on my shoulder, think of my departed grandparents, think of Amy. Intense waves of comfort flow from nowhere, an invisible arm wraps around me. Everything will be okay.
I sob harder, release inner demons, bottled emotions. A strong feeling of love and support wash over me. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know who it is. But I cling to it, like my life depends on it. Because it does.
“I promise,” I say.
I vow not to punish my body anymore. It doesn’t deserve it. I don’t deserve it. I want to live.
It’s five years later. I think of Amy Winehouse, then blow out candles on my birthday cake, the chocolate one for my 28th. It’s a privilege to be alive, to reach an age that others have not. I browse old photo albums, look at my younger self enjoying birthdays from years gone by. It was fifteen birthdays before I had an alcoholic beverage. I see myself laughing, surrounded by happy friends; the party hats and games and cakes, looks of contentment etched on our faces. I enjoyed those parties.
None of them involved us getting drunk. Somewhere along the way, the child-like ability to have fun without substances disappeared. Was it part of growing up? Or part of a larger cultural problem?
Australian culture collided with a toxic industry, and I fell victim. But I was lucky. I escaped with life intact, when many of my friends and heroes did not.
I re-learn how to experience life and embrace newfound freedom that comes with my head out of the clouds. With layers removed, I discover anxiety, then seek out different ways of managing it, methods that don’t involve alcohol. I take up walking, throw myself into nature and mindfulness. I apply for jobs and dive into new opportunities.
In time, I grow into this skin, start to look forward to each day, and finally admit that I can’t outrun myself or the challenges of life.
Waitstaff emerge from the kitchen, place a cake on the restaurant table; the one I sit at with friends and family. I glance at their wine glasses, smile to myself, and sink the knife into icing. I feel a sense of achievement.
It’s not my actual birthday, but it represents something else just as important, part of my identity. It’s a rebirth of sorts, the ten-year anniversary of the day I started a new life. A second birthday. A day I remind myself, and others, that it’s always possible to change.
I think of the many who aren’t as lucky with this illness. Sobriety isn’t easy. As a society, we’re bound to alcohol, entirely reliant on it. Our culture revolves around it. I think of others, suffering like I did and feel an urge to be that arm around their shoulder, to let them know everything will be okay, that they’re worth it and don’t need to punish themselves.
I look over at the old man sitting at the bar by himself, nursing a glass of bourbon. For the first time in a long time, I’m happy to be me.
aaron caycedo-kimura
Is it his chin?
His cheeks? He looks different. I can’t say how. As an artist, I should be able to— besides, he’s my father. The first time I sketched a study of his face I was eleven, seated at the kitchen table with a #2 pencil. Broad nose, pronounced orbicularis oris, eyebrows that peak toward the edges— devil brows he used to say. I see them in the mirror when I wash my face, shave. Otherwise, I look like my mother. Today, Mom wants Mari and me to take a picture with her standing behind
his body, boxed and dressed in his best gray suit, light blue shirt, bronze patterned tie. In a side room at Daniels Chapel of the Roses, the staff has accommodated Mom’s last-minute change of mind to take a final look before cremation. She leans in close, touches a cold cheek. Is it his forehead?
His mouth, his hair? That study I drew didn’t look like him either. Even with his dark eyes open.
Billie
Honey, how he still your man so low in his high pants yellow stripes slick shoes tipping in drunk covered in some heffa’s lipstick. Baby, you begging this strand of a man to let you keep him talking how you rather he beat you than quit you better he black your face than leave your bed. Cigarettes & gin don’t hide the heft of your hurt or the slope of your want Shame that blisters but never bursts hope that ambles when he calls you babe & coos your name so brazen he don’t even pretend to change
I know that falling. Been knowing that hush now don’t explain I’ve mistaken time for loyalty & longevity for love I’ve cursed a man while fixing his plate
Fixed my hair special candles & birthday cake waiting for a love who never came I still miss tasting that mean man some days his sweetness diversion as he broke me & gently hid the pieces I see the same fissures in you, girl that matchbox in your pocket tinder sorrow waiting to be convinced & pissed enough to bend down to help me gather him cradle him prop him up & drag this fine & mellow bastard away from your wanting door
Iain Haley Pollock: I'm here with Aaron Coleman, a poet and a translator who just translated Nicolás Guillén's The Great Zoo, out last year from University of Chicago Press and a finalist for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize. He also published his newest collection of poetry Red Wilderness with Four Way Books earlier this year.
Why don't we just hop right into it and start with the translation? I know Guillén to be a titan of African Diasporic poetry, but for folks who haven't been initiated into the cult of Guillén, can you provide some context about him, his life, his work? What do folks need to know as they sit down and read your translation of The Great Zoo?
Aaron Coleman: That's always a good place to start–absolutely a titan of Afro Diasporic literature for me. I didn't know enough about his later career poetry, and my experience of wanting to translate him was to try to get a better sense of his full body of work, to consider what his legacy might mean to us now. Guillén was born July 10, 1902, and he passed away in July of 1989–his life spans the 20th century. But his ways of making poems, his poetics–they transformed with the world over the course of the century. He's best known for some of his earlier work, like Motivos de son, which I might translate as Motives of son or Motifs of son–Guillén built his son poems from a Cuban or Afro-Cuban vernacular musical form that was big in the 20's and 30's in particular. He also linked up with Langston Hughes, who was doing his own work of exploring the Blues as a poetic form, and so in the U.S., people often think of Nicolás Guillén and his relationship to Hughes in that time period. They spent
some time together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, both working as journalists. And after that he continued to evolve through so many different books–a different Guillén in the 30's, a different Guillén in the 50's, a different Guillén in the 60's, and The Great Zoo is from 1967. I'm so glad that it's back on our minds today.
IHP: Speaking of which, while we're there, this book, 60 years later, it struck me that there's a concern for justice and a global political critique that seems as relevant and pressing as ever. What do you think this book–as you said, published in 1967–holds for contemporary readers?
AC: Over the past decade, I have thought, as so many others have too, about the connection between our contemporary moment and the upheavals of the 1960's–not just in the United States, but globally, hemispherically. And at the hemispheric level, thinking about Cuba, the Caribbean, the Americas, and the world–The Great Zoo creates a context for looking at so many social issues: whether they have to do with colonialism and the legacies of neo-colonial realities throughout the Americas, whether it has to do with exoticism and how–via race, gender, culture–certain people are exoticized. He's created this concept where–because every poem in the book is a so-called "animal in a cage"–he can leap between these different concerns, and he's found a framework where we can look at all those things together. But as I step out of the book, I think about all the different kinds of cages we may be living in at different times, and it's a little scary to me how hard a poem like "Police" that he wrote in 1967 hits today.
IHP: That's interesting, the idea of cages. Could you jump into a little bit about how you read the metaphor of The Great Zoo? The folks in the cages are dangerous and Guillén
views them as needing to be separated from society, but the collection is also about the cage of identity, right? Is that how you're reading it as well?
AC: I think the thing that’s stunning and marvelous and terrifying is that all of the poems are in the voice of this speaker who is a zoo tour guide, showing you things that are caged in this zoo space. There's a shrewdness and a cleverness to that guide’s voice. There's also a seriousness and a knife-sharp, dark humor that makes it so that our thinking about the cages is never fixed. I don't know if I have just one reading; there's different ways to read the kind of capture that's happening and how these beings are put on display. Because sometimes the beings are as charged as the KKK, the police, a “lynch,” but there's also the North Star, there are also clouds, also a tenor, an opera singer who's not so generous with his arias. Wild, wild play! And a guitar, this singing teenage Afrodescendant guitar. So the cage creates a framework to meditate on seeing and being seen at the same time. The cage is all about what we see or don't see, how we pay attention to power, how we subvert power–that's what the concept of the book, the caging and the zoo makes possible. I see the zoo in the book, and then I see the zoo in the world.
IHP: I think that also speaks to why the book seems so present. We are in a culture where we're constantly seeing and being seen. And certainly there are power structures that need to be subverted.
AC: Right, right. He's taking this kind of voice that assumes scientific authority or nationalistic authority, and he's flipping it on its head to poke fun at it and to get us to question that authority–how it speaks, how it controls, how it defines–so that we wonder about other definitions, we wonder about other ways of being.
IHP: We went right for the marrow of the bone, so I want to backtrack a bit to Guillén's relationship to Langston Hughes. You mention in the introduction that part of the tradition that you're working in is one of "Black poets translating between Cuba and the United States." Can you say more about that tradition and why you wanted to work in it? Obviously, a healthy traffic has historically existed between Cuba and Black America, right?
AC: I'm thankful for the way you phrase it–it’s an archive that I'm trying to name and frame myself. I have to shout out the translator Esther Allen, who talks about how translators end up almost becoming biographers. I started with Guillén’s poems, and the poems of The Great Zoo led me to Guillén, and then learning about Guillén led me to learning about Langston Hughes as a translator. We know about Hughes, obviously, as a poet, but when I was starting, I didn't have a full sense of him as a serious globetrotter, of how many different languages his work has moved in. Hughes had a global context. Then, digging around, I stumbled into one of those seminal anthologies from the Harlem Renaissance, The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. In there, Johnson talks about translating Plácido aka Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, a writer from mid19th-century Cuba. And I could connect the dots between these efforts, between these different Black writers who were attempting to connect with Black writers in Cuba and to translate them so that we see ourselves not just in a national context but more broadly. This history of seeking Afro Diasporic connection is older than the United States. Any time we have a chance to situate ourselves in a broader, multigenerational, multilingual context–I want to do that because you walk around with that and it feels like a different kind of home.
I want to shout out a few other folks that I grew to love along the way–
IHP: Please.
AC: Victoria Santa Cruz, Afro-Peruvian writer, mid 20thcentury, blew my mind; Arnoldo Palacios, Afro-Colombian writer whose genre-bending work also blew me away; Soleida Ríos, from Cuba–a new translation of The Dirty Text came out recently with Kenning Editions in Chicago; Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico. If we understand ourselves in this broader network, we recognize that this Afrodescendant tradition is broader than any one nationstate.
IHP: Given the expansiveness of that tradition, how did you land on Guillén? It sounds like you had myriad people that you could have translated–why Guillén, and why this specific book? As you said, his earlier work is more well-known than this late-career work.
AC: The Guillén that I had heard about was the Guillén of the 1930s, the meandering musicality of the vernacular voices in Motivos de son. But the uniqueness of The Great Zoo drew me to that collection. And I think I also homed in on The Great Zoo because these poems are so different from my own writing. The poems are so concise; they’re humorous without being frivolous, too. I haven't really figured yet out how to let humor into my own poems. So, spending time with Guillén, his voice has become a part of my own writing now. The poems lit me up, and I realized, "Oh, this is another thing that poems can do."
IHP: You brought up the humor of his poems. It strikes me that Guillén’s humor presents a particular problem for a
translator. Along with poetry, humor is language at its most slippery, at its most complex. Humor and poetry depend on meaning that is deeply embedded in a cultural context. So, when you get this poet like Guillén, who's writing humorous poems, using political satire in this book as his main mode–that must have been difficult. How did you approach translating the nuance of humor-inflected work?
AC: It was an exhilarating challenge.
IHP: Because it comes through, your translation is funny, and I picked up on the humor, in ways that I worry sometimes I don’t in other translations of poetry.
AC: I appreciate that because that was one of the hardest parts: translating humor tilts toward that ineffable thing about poetry. Guillén was exiled throughout most of the 1950's–he moved around the Americas, he moved around Europe, and beyond. His exile, his multiple lenses–that's a part of the capaciousness of The Great Zoo, the way that he leaps around different themes and different places. I had to do research. This is the kind of thing that I love about translation and also about poetry more broadly: you'll never know what you'll end up researching to make the poem come to life. I learned about usurers, for his poem "The Moneylenders." The Great Zoo took me in so many different directions. Translating also took so much patience. It just took time to figure it out, it took conversations, talking with Nancy Morejón–who's incredible, I can't believe I didn't mention her yet. She was an important person in helping me to find my way into this work. It took me finding and developing a community of folks that had different vantage points on Cuban identity, Cuban culture, Cuban music–Diasporic cultures of various kinds. That was the way: time and intentionality. When you really dwell with the nuance of
a particular line, listening to it will lead you to all the things it contains. Sometimes I didn't full grasp the humor I was translating until the poem was emerging. Then, I realized, "Oh, that joke does work in both languages."
IHP: In addition to the linguistic difficulty of translating Guillén’s humor, he seems to pose formal difficulties for a translator. In the introduction, you refer to him as "maker and breaker of forms.” Can you speak to the formal invention that you perceive in his work? Then, how did you approach translating the formal qualities of his poems?
AC: That’s the million-dollar question. I have not fully solved the puzzle of how I would translate the musicality of those early moments in Motivos de son or Sóngoro cosongo. But the idea of "maker and breaker of forms" recognizes Guillén’s virtuosity. He’s performing these folk music forms in certain books, and then he’s creating these incredible, concise imagistic descriptions in The Great Zoo, which feels to me light years away from those early poems. The musicality’s still there, but it’s gone into the poem in a different way, it's camouflaged. And to add another point in the constellation of the different kinds of poetics that Guillén employed: his Elegías, in 1958, are these long, unfolding elegies for his hometown of Camagüey, for Emmett Till, for his last name—I’m translating that one now. Those poems are different from his 1930's work and his 1960's work. Seems like he was searching for the forms that spoke to what he needed to say in a particular moment. And I love that he gave himself permission to create the forms he needed, and then to let go of them and create new ones when he needed new ones. Maybe unconsciously I'm aspiring to that as a poet. I want to be that dynamic, to let myself go, let myself create the solution that I need if I don't feel like I have it already.
For me, the creativity that's needed to translate a poem is so similar to the creativity that's needed to write a poem, and so I have a difficult time describing the nuts and bolts, other than listening very closely and trying to be open to all the possibilities in the text. As I see it, to translate is to pay attention. There's the gestalt thing: a poem is more than the sum of its parts. But in translation, you have to attune to the individual parts. You also have to see the bigger picture. So, you're toggling between seeing the forest for the trees and seeing the individual trees. As difficult as that is, that’s the step-by-step process I use for translating. I read the book many, many times; I memorized some of the poems, so that I can feel the rhythm of them and walk around with that. Especially at times when I couldn't find a particular solution while translating a poem, I just had to walk around with it for a while. And then, at some point it feels like you find the key in the lock, and it somehow twists–“ah, yeah, that'll work for me.”
IHP: You touch on another aspect of your practice that interests me: your hyphenated role as poet-translator. How do those two disciplines feed each other? You said earlier that they work similar parts of your brain. But you also recently had a new book come out that is not a translation, that is your own work. Were you working on them concurrently, and did they influence one another as you were working on them?
AC: That’s a perfect doorway into that bigger question. Red Wilderness is my second poetry collection. In my first book, Threat Come Close, I came to my poems intuitively through sound. Or there's a turn of phrase that made me think, "Oh, write that down." That’s how the first drafts began and then, obviously, through revision, they go where they need to go. But so many poems in The Great Zoo, the first step in them
is an image–a crisp, concise image. Guillén’s work probably led me to approach images differently in Red Wilderness. This wasn't necessarily an intentional thing because the translation project unfolded over a decade, from the first poems that I encountered to getting the permissions to publication. These translations were always floating around in the background while I was writing my own poems. Then they’d flip into the foreground, and my poems were just there in the background. I'm still figuring out the relationship between the books. One's a zoo and one's a wilderness–I don't know what was happening there, but something’s going on. Something.
IHP: You mentioned getting permissions, which is a reminder that in a translation, while you can exercise some creative latitude, the work is never your own. Do you feel a different responsibility when you're working with someone else's work than when you're working with your own work?
AC: Definitely, definitely. For all the similarities that I talked about between writing poems and translating poems, I feel a different sense of responsibility when I translate. I want to be accountable as a shepherd to help guide these poems into places that need them. To spread the word of them. We have Cave Canem in common, and during my third-year graduation ceremony, instead of reading my poems that time, I read these translations. Getting to share the translations with a group of multilingual Black poets–that feels like a big part of the project: finding ways to connect art across the African Diaspora so we can see ourselves differently. And so that–that's the different responsibility that I feel in translating Guillén. I think, too, that a common pitfall, when poets are translators, is that they make the person that they translate sound like their own poems, you know?
IHP: These poems don't sound like you–as they shouldn't, right?
AC: I hope not. I hope the translation pays homage to the singularity of Guillén's voice because like I said, his musicality is different, his humor is different, his life is different, his time was different. But translations do this thing where they allow us to look backward and forward at the same time. I'm looking back at what Guillén did, but I'm hoping that these poems now will speak into the future, from our time. I love that–I love extending and adding to what he's already created, and I take that responsibility very seriously.
IHP: When you talk about Guillén’s poems, your love for them shines through. Do you think it's easier to fall in love with someone else's poems than it is to fall in love with your own poems?
AC: I'll say it this way: I feel like I'm listening to my own poems after they're done and trying to still learn from them, and that sense is heightened when it comes to translation. It was so important to me that The Great Zoo was a bilingual edition because I love that the poems and my translations–at least in the physical copy–are side by side, his Spanish and my English. I still wonder at them. There’s the English translation, there's the Spanish source text, but then there's also something that they create together, in the space of the book with each reader. Once the book is out in the world, you don't know what it will mean to people, but it's exciting to know that it's going places that maybe I didn't expect, that perhaps Guillén didn't expect–I just got a genuine love for him. I'm so grateful for his poems–grateful for the things I'm still learning from him. That’s where the love comes in.
IHP: Is there anything that we didn't get to in our
conversation that you would add?
AC: I just want to shine a light on the possibilities of what I'm calling Afro Diasporic translation. This translation can be a tool to help us see both similarity and difference across the African Diaspora, to help us consider the nuances of the African Diaspora. And I'll say this too: because of the Transatlantic slave trade, because of colonialism, we've been cut off from many of the languages and cultures that were–that are still–a part of our lineage, that are generations we can't quite know. The most beautiful and Black thing about this is Black writers taking the languages that were foisted onto them, that were forced on them, and we're making them anew, using those languages to speak to each other. Guillén has his version of Spanish, and with this English translation, now the languages that were once the colonial languages, we took and we made them our own. In this, I want to continue to recognize the agency of Black creatives of all kinds, and the ways that we make a way out of no way out here.
IHP: That's beautiful. That's a beautiful place to end.
AC: Yeah, feels right to me too. Thanks, man.
Tara Troiano
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
I sit before Father Paul in a new dress, reciting my portion of the script. But below a layer of clear gloss, there is no confession on my lips. The priest’s breath fills the confessional as he awaits the details of my transgressions. He taps a beat I don’t recognize on the arm of his chair. The man who condemns the gossips at the salon, who preaches that the Devil delights in voyeurism and judgment—that man leans in closer.
It's the hottest summer I’ve seen in Savannah. Even the straining AC can’t strip the heat from my skin. Sweat drips down my chest and gathers on my stomach underneath my yellow dress. It’s a marigold A-line that complements my complexion. At least, that’s what I was told by the dressing room attendant at the mall.
Before confession, we took the bus to St. Joseph’s, my mother and father on my right and left, my brother across the aisle, facing us. As he bounced his knee to whatever streamed through his headphones, I watched the reflections behind him. My parents’ faces were pulled long by time, continuing their slow descent to the ground. But their eyes were like mine, tired and distant. Sitting there with my mom’s hand on my knee, I felt like a caricature of a child: a woman cramming herself into a little girl’s dollhouse, aware she’ll never fit. The driver whistled and the floor rattled as the bus full of sinners crawled towards church.
We stopped at 22nd for two children whose heads bobbed above the seats as they ascended the stairs. One was taller than the other, clearly the leader. She handed the driver three folded up bills and led her companion to two seats near the front. The sleeves of her dress fell below her fingertips,
and she held a children’s Bible, which she opened once the bus resumed its route. I’d had the same Bible years ago. The kind with illustrations of the animals on the ark, scenes of Jonah in the whale’s stomach, Gomorrah burning to the ground.
She read to her sister and pointed at the pictures, explaining in a reverent tone how Eve tricked Adam. The younger’s face mirrored her sister’s seriousness, but her eyes wandered when we passed a flock of pigeons. The colorful pages stuck together, and the Bible bounced on the child’s knee as we pulled up to the stop beside St. Joseph’s.
It would be misleading to document my marigold dress, perfectly pressed, and not mention the remaining details of my appearance that day. Because while Donna, the sister who sits at the desk, complimented the flattering knee-length of my skirts as I entered the church behind my father and brother, she did not notice the smaller infractions I’d spent the morning covering up: the dirt under my nails hidden by muted pink polish, the bruises on my neck concealed by a string of pearls, the razor burn on my thigh and small tattoo on my hip. I smiled at Donna’s compliment, sliding the praise into my handbag for later, hoarding the small validation. But as I entered the sanctuary, I wondered what she concealed under her billowing dress and habit. It seemed a shame that someone with so little to hide had so much room to hide it.
Today the sermon was given with the same condescension as any other. Father Paul stood behind the altar in a white robe that draped over his shoulders and slid off his belly. His shadow mimicked the candles that lined the room.
“There were two men who drove to work every day,” he began, addressing the congregation as we fanned ourselves with hymnals. “One morning, the first man ran a stop sign but was not seen or apprehended by an officer. He
continued on his way to work. Later, the second man ran the same stop sign but hit a child playing in the street. The child died and the man was arrested and charged with murder.
In our world, the man who hit the child receives a greater punishment than the man who did not. However, both men committed the same offense. They both ran a stop sign; they both disregarded a rule. But our laws judge by consequence, not action. A man who disobeys at the cost of a child’s life is treated differently than a man who disobeys without mortal effect.
In our world, these men are different. One receives punishment for his sins, the other walks free. But in the eyes of the Lord, all sinners are the same.”
Later, as Father Paul waited for my confession, the dead child ran around in my mind.
Before that sermon my mother twisted my hair into a braid, directing the waves into a pillar down my spine. She brushed black on my lashes and color on my cheeks. She offered a tube of lipstick with a smile.
“You’d look so pretty with red lips, Maggie.”
She looked away when I politely declined.
To make amends, I forced my limbs into the dress she’d placed atop my comforter. Avoiding my gaze in the mirror, I painted my cheeks a deeper shade.
We hadn’t danced this routine for months. As my mom rummaged through a jewelry box, I walked the perimeter of the bedroom, careful not to disturb the artifacts of my youth. Pencils and books lay on the desk, items I’d held on countless occasions that no longer belonged to me. Beside Sunday dresses, abandoned school uniforms hung in the closet, four copies of the same garments.
Father Paul’s wheezing pulls me back to the present.
“It has been four months since my last confession,” I admit.
I can feel him nod behind the screen. I touched my
forehead, chest, and shoulders, and folded my hands in my lap.
The first time I lied in confession, I did not understand why. The guilt in my chest had no name but Lainey. In the summer breaks of high school, we sat in the long grass, our elbows digging into the ground. We put rosary beads in our mouths to feel the cool metal on our tongues. We swam in the river to escape the sun.
She told me she loved a boy named James and practiced kissing him with her lips against mine. Before school dances I stole my father’s bowties and spun her in circles in my bedroom. After class I wrote love notes for her to stick in James’s locker. And we laughed because in those years permanence was neither considered nor valued. Even the heat dwindled eventually, swallowed by autumn. Over time our sunburns peeled away, and we stepped out of our summer skins. By December, we could no longer recall the feeling of sun on our hair or burning asphalt against our feet.
In the winter, Lainey held my hands when they grew cold. We stayed up all night on the phone, trading jokes and secrets and dreams. On the weekends she stayed at my house, making conversation with my mom over casserole. They talked about school and church and the lunch lady who’d had an affair last spring. After dinner, we showered one after the other, and when we curled into bed with wet hair and fresh faces our bodies smelled like the same coconut soap.
“Feel my legs,” she said giddily, and I ran my fingers over the soft skin. “James’s are hairy. So are his armpits.” I crinkled my nose, and she giggled at me.
“You’d better get used to it, Maggie. You’ll have a boyfriend too one day.”
That night, as I laid awake imagining coarse-haired bodies, she whispered into the darkness, “I’ve never had a friend like you.” She kissed my forehead and turned over to sleep, and I ignored the ache it caused to be held so tightly
at arm’s length. I knew she was asleep by the rhythm of her breathing. In the morning she got up earlier than I did. When I opened my eyes, she was gone but her pillow was still damp.
The night we began tenth grade, my mother showed me and Lainey how to peel the hair from our lips and brows. She spread warm wax on our skin, and I felt, perhaps, that was what it meant to be Woman. To rip away one’s childhood for something smoother, something bare. Something pleasing to touch.
On the first day of school my mother presented me with my new uniform, clothes fit for a young lady. She showed me how to roll up my socks to my knees and pull down my skirt to my shins. To cover the freshly primed canvas with a sheet of linen to discourage stain or smudge.
That year we learned to conceal the bumps on our faces to make boys want to kiss us. But to never allow them close enough to touch. We learned to mold our bodies into something smaller, something that wouldn’t take up too much space. There were diets and juices and cleanses and workouts. There were sermons about gluttony and sermons about submission and sermons about chastity and piety.
At school we read sonnets about women with pearl teeth. Commodity women with bodies to fight wars over, worth more than gold. And it was not hard to imagine being placed on a pedestal so high that your voice gets lost on its way to the ground. I’d always valued words, so I don’t suppose it was a surprise I kept far from men bearing pedestals.
And although the sonnets made my stomach twist, I did my best to become a girl worth committing to ink and paper. And as I got older, the scrutiny grew, and I could tell how my mother yearned for her daughter to be captured on the page.
One summer, my Aunt Linda asked me to be my
cousin’s Godmother. When I held the baby, the one they named Marianne, my mother smiled to her sister, a glance bloated with expectation. As I cradled the fragile thing in my arms, I considered how she would be passed from person to person until there was no one left to possess her. She babbled in my grasp as the adults spoke about her future.
And although it was imperfect, I told myself that I was free in the clear expectations of those days. It was a time where there were never secrets too big to keep. A time when I could place all my troubles neatly in my mother’s lap, confident they would be solved by morning. To love without pause and never doubt reciprocity. And it never felt like a sin but when Father Paul asked for my confessions, I only thought of her.
But of course, I didn’t understand what it meant because desire was a word never offered to me. It was handed to my brother with cigars after dinner, and he bore it between his teeth with pride as the commodity women opened suitcases on TV. And even though I saw the women just as he did, there was no word for the flavor on my tongue. I was not taught to look with hunger, although the feeling was never a stranger.
But when I sit before the Father on my seasonal pilgrimage home, I do not speak the name I mean to confess. And they would not expect it from me, anyway. I have broken rules, that much is true, but never the ones I agreed to keep.
When I was twelve my father gave me a ring, and in exchange I gave him a promise to keep my white dress clean of stains. And it all seemed very funny to me in the evenings after school as Lainey lifted ivory skirts over my head in the back of her car, the Honda that smelled like spearmint. We’d curl naked into each other’s arms, jewelry discarded in the cupholder, pop-country on the radio. For years we went on like that, straddling the ravine between desire and
expectation.
Outside the confessional the organ picks up, and I rub my palms against my legs to rid them of sweat. Time is running out and I can’t stall forever. My skirt has wrinkled in the humidity. I press it against my legs to remove the lines.
“Maggie, you may begin your confession… unless you’d prefer to recite the prayer of contrition first.”
Years ago, my theology teacher told us that Judas betrayed with a kiss, and perhaps so had I. But they did not tell me how sweet it would taste. And perhaps my heart was greedy for the things it was never allowed.
So, I let her name remain on my tongue, stand from my seat, and leave the small room. I do not confess to Father Paul that I slipped my father’s ring off my finger last night before reaching for the one Lainey wears. I do not confess the prayers I whispered against her skin, the same ones I’ve been repeating since high school. I do not describe the dress strewn across her floor or her lipstick streaked across my chest. And I know it’s not what my mother wanted, but after kissing her I finally felt pretty with red on my lips.
I tried to describe to her how it felt a thousand times, but she tiptoed around the words. She ignored the glances and sighs. She bent my phrases into something that felt more comfortable in her hands. She twisted my promises until they looked foreign to me. But she was never more than a phone call away, so it hardly seemed to matter.
On the ride home from St. Joseph’s, the sun has set. The lights in the bus make it impossible to see out the window, so instead I stared at my brother across the aisle. He texts with his head hunched over his phone, the light reflecting on his sweat-slicked face. The tie around his neck is loose, and his shirt is untucked.
My phone buzzes with a message from my aunt.
Can you babysit Marianne tomorrow morning? Jim made reservations for brunch and our sitter called in sick. It’ll be good
practice! ;)
I type out a quick response.
“I’ll be at Aunt Linda’s tomorrow morning. She asked me to look after Marianne.”
My mother nods. “When you’re finished at Linda’s, I’d like you to come to the store with me to pick out a wedding gift for Lainey and James. They registered last week. I’m sure we’ll be able to agree on something nice.”
She strokes my arm, sticky with sweat, and smiles to herself.
The bus empties of people the farther we get from St. Joseph’s. At each stop a group departs and humid air fills the spaces they leave, curling its fingers around handlebars, and sinking its body into seats. After fifteen minutes only my family is left.
As we approach 22nd, I hold my breath, imagining the two children sitting in the crosswalk, considering illustrations of David and Goliath. The younger giggles as the giant falls towards the earth, struck by a tiny stone. The older sounds out the words on the page, underlining each phrase with a confident finger.
The bus driver, distracted by his thoughts, speeds towards them, whistling along to a song on the radio. As the kids’ features become clearer, angelic in the approaching headlights, I do not cry out. I do not pull the yellow cord. I do not request a stop. I simply watch, relieved, as the front wheels lift slightly, crushing the children underneath and saving them from a world of sinners.
When we arrive home, I watch my family ascend the stairs of our apartment complex. By the time I reach the entry, they are only ankles and shoes. I stop to unlock the small metal box on the first floor marked with our unit number. I gather the catalogs and envelopes inside.
“Maggie.”
I do not turn at the sound of her voice.
“I saw your family get back from church. I thought you might be here.”
Somewhere upstairs a door closes.
“I know you’re upset at me, but I want you to come to the wedding. It wouldn’t be the same without my best friend.”
I can picture the wedding, the rose petals on the tables, the children in clip ties and relatives itching to overindulge. I can imagine the pastel bridesmaids’ dresses and the Dollar Tree doilies beneath each plate. The tiered cake with a smiling bride atop.
I cannot see myself there.
“Maggie.” The pity in her voice makes my skin itch. “It never could have been us. Please, just try to be happy for me.”
I do not answer and eventually I hear her turn and walk away. I hear her climb the stairs and open a door on the fifth floor.
If I were still a child, I could have stayed there all night in the imposing Georgia heat. I could have slept in the stubborn warmth that refused to disappear with the sun. I could have rested in the embrace of the humidity that crept through my hair and mixed into my blood. But in this moment, I need to escape.
As I walk upstairs to my childhood home, I flip through the mail, pulling out a catalogue. On the cover, two women with California smiles show off their new blue jeans. The waxy pages stick together under the rising moon.
Anna Zilbermints
Your first existential crisis sets in while washing the smell of latex and formaldehyde from your hands in the school bathroom.
When you try your first cigarette, you won’t know how to inhale properly—your saving grace. It won’t hurt, and you’ll enjoy the smoke curling away from your lips. This will be the night you’ll get caught in a downpour with her because, for some reason, taking that walk in your pajamas will seem like such a good idea. You’ll both be entirely soaked through by the time you’re back at her house, and she’ll lend you her underwear, a sign of true friendship. Sitting on the covered stoop and watching the clouds, you’ll smoke for aesthetic, and she’ll smoke to thrive.
The man at the concert will offer you a dollar for a cigarette. Go ahead and accept it—offer him a light, even. Don’t think about what you’d make if you sold what you had left.
You thought about how the scientist held up two lungs: one from an eighty-year-old woman, and one from a thirtyyear-old man. For the rest of the school day, you thought about how you couldn’t guess that the black, shriveled one was from the man. That makes more sense, you kept thinking. Why would someone with healthy lungs die at thirty?
Repeat to yourself: at least you’re not a smoker.
Your first kiss with him will taste like cigarettes.
The lungs probably scared you the most, but you couldn’t shake the feeling of the brain placed in your ten-year-old hands. That was a whole person; their thoughts, feelings emotions. Who were they? What were they like? Were they a smoker? Who did they lie to? What might’ve spilled if you dropped it?
She will look at her cigarette and explain her plan to quit. Tell her that you believe her, that once she turns 18, she will buy her first and last legal pack of cigarettes. Smile at her. Say you’ll do anything you can to help. She’ll take another drag and you’ll stare off at the clearing night sky.
You will still like him despite him saying he doesn’t like girls who smoke while inhaling his own. Laugh nervously. Debate putting the filter back between your lips, then go ahead and do it. Your friend will call him out for being hypocritical, and he will nod, awkwardly smile, and agree. Stay quiet.
You vowed to never try a cigarette.
AKA Emily Lu Gao ( 高璐璐 )
I sucked at taking pills until an adult advised: Swallow pills like you’re trying to kill yourself! I learned hyperbole that day too. Before then, I’d stand forever or sit pigeon-toed, head tilted back pill afloat inside my chipmunked mouth. This tongue has capsized myriads of pills, giraffe-tall cornerless rooms. Nine nocturnal years of pills— promises promising promising premises —bipolar anxious buoyancy.
Lamictal is the pastel pink electrical outlet-shaped darling. In the past, I had Latuda (a Wellbutrin lookalike). The difference was these white circles were tattooed with "L40.” Then Ingrezza was admitted: half-purple, half-white capsule assassin of Tardive Dyskinesia (TD)
TD is a side effect of Latuda: TD causes unconscious teeth grinding, chisels enamel into stalactites & stalagmites. Ingrezza was meant to solve TD but instead it swapped one side effect for another: severe drowsiness. → I got “let go” from a server job → dozed off in the restaurant’s giant freezer room → beside a crate of avocados → ABBA blaring Advil (Ibuprofen) is the best of the best: treacle, tiny, socially acceptable comrades you don’t have to deep throat like fish oil pills. Advil (Ibuprofen) lets you pretend, for a gulp, you're a kid in a candy store not an adult calculating when the Walgreens pharmacy line is shortest. Wish name brand and generic meds cost the same. Wish health insurance wasn’t such a clusterfuck of automated messages. Wish I could swap my knowledge of pills for Chinese medicine, mink eyelashes & BDSM. Wish I was SZA’s normal girl and had a hot funny girlfriend who loved swapping poems, cooking together, and eating me out. Dammit, I forgot to take my pills and it’s already 11:15 PM. “Take them first thing tomorrow,” Photopsias says. But I survived spun hours into shapes kettle still singing
Adrian Adamo
She looks just like me, but she’s not me. Same vivid red hair, same small nose, same deep, dark brown eyes. But she’s smarter, more cunning, quicker on her feet. She outwits, outsmarts, and outshines in a way that’s kept me on my toes my whole life.
She looks just like me, but she’s not me. She’s smaller, more careful, she takes up less space. Men give her more attention, a fun distraction, but never what she really wants.
She’s my longest relationship, my constant companion. We share stories, memories, insider knowledge of a life no one would ever understand but us. Our bond is closer than sisters. But our relationship is a tumultuous one, and with her, I’m never quite sure where I stand.
She and I don’t share a birthday. She was born over time, rather than all at once. She first stretched and yawned in my childhood, awoken by overhearing a pediatrician tell my mom that I, a chubby, happy first grader, was in the “overweight” BMI range. She grew taller and stronger when, as a preteen, a ballet teacher grabbed my underarm and pinched some loose skin, wiggling it back and forth in front of the other girls in the class as a cautionary tale. In college, the first time I tried a crash diet, she grabbed my hand and proclaimed we would be the very best of friends.
The first time a therapist asked what my eating disorder looked like, I stared back at her blankly. Some people like to visualize their eating disorder, she explained. Some even name it after something—or someone—they don’t like.
I tried to picture what that would look like, or who that could be.
But I couldn’t picture anyone with that much power over me. A bad boss? A middle school bully? These people had no clue about my driving forces, my innermost desires, or my most paralyzing fears. They couldn’t weaponize that most intimate knowledge. No one I had ever known could seduce me with the lure of control, build me up with promises of happiness, and tear me down brickby-brick behind my back. No one, that is, but me.
My most fearsome protector and loathsome enemy. My eating disorder voice couldn’t be anyone but a harder, sharper, more dangerous version of myself. And with me, all bets are off. I get away with it in a way no one else can.
The darkest times were the years I let her speak for me. And boy, does she have a set of lungs on her. She barked orders of when to eat, sleep, and exercise—an authoritarian presence, military in precision. She was furious when we fell off schedule, whipping me back into shape with shame, regret, and the looming, unending threat of losing control. She found the neural pathways, already dug deep by trauma and the influence of the ‘heroin chic’ era of the ‘90’s’, got out her shovel, and settled comfortably in the terrain.
I couldn’t keep up with her, but I tried valiantly. I wanted so badly to feel that intoxicating sense of control. But there were too many balls in the air. I also wanted to get a meal with friends without fretting over calories, sit in the park with my face to the sun instead of ache in the gym, let myself fully enjoy the experience of falling in love for the first time. Unfortunately, the deafening voice of my eating disorder was impossible to ignore, and I wanted— needed—to keep the peace with her more.
Those years were like running downhill. I knew the fall was coming, but I couldn’t slow down enough to stop, couldn’t bear to give into it until gravity decided for me.
The fall was hard. I won’t sugarcoat it. A dark cloud hovers over those years in my memory, a zombie I don’t recognize walking around in my body, destroying relationships, destroying herself. And yet, I am distinctly aware that the fact that I’m here writing these words means I’m one of the lucky ones. Years of treatment, therapy, stubbornness, resilience, isolation, support, tears, and some sheer dumb luck later, I’m here. I’m alive and for the first time in a long time, fully living. But believe it or not, so is she.
In my experience, an eating disorder never fully goes away. Despite what makes other people more comfortable to believe, I don’t consider myself fully recovered. I’m reluctant to hope I ever will be. I’ve come to realize that for me, this type of recovery will be a lifelong process. My eating disorder voice is something I wake up to every single day. I hear her voice coaxing me, dripping with sweetness, dangling the carrot of how much better, easier it would all be if I were more disciplined, more rigid—more in control. Every day, I hear her. I acknowledge her presence. And make my most valiant efforts not to believe her.
So yes, she’s still here. But she’s quieter. And I’ve come to terms with her residency in my brain. She’s still my longest relationship and my constant companion. Still my most loathsome enemy, yes, but also my most fearsome protector. We share stories, memories, a whole life no one else would ever understand but us. She’s seen it all, and she is desperate to protect me from it. Her voice is a survival tactic, my brain's last-ditch effort to make sense of the senseless, put life together in a palatable way. In a peculiar way, she wants only the best for me. I have empathy for her, for myself. At the same time, I’m also far enough along to know she has some questionable methods.
So, every day, I wake up, make peace with her presence, and try not to listen to her.
Because I know how far I’ve come. And I know who I’m up against.
Cynthia Manick
I was never an Ariel I didn’t have long hair, a glittering tail for water waves or a voice suited for arias. Instead of a controlling father, mine was onequarter present half absent, and one-quarter imaginary.
Nor was I Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman for I had no bracelets of light or breasts that stood tall without a thick strap for lifting.
I had a thigh gap when I was 2 years old— then puberty happened.
In high school I got reeaall close to being a Facts of Life Tootie with the gift of gab. My sarcastic quips were thick as a heart and just as fast. And I was a shade close to Cosby’s dark-skinned Vanessa—who always looked
like she was thinking too hard about what to say and how to say it.
As if one misstep and she’d be banished up the stairwell with no plot to be found.
I was never the star of Moesha played by singer Brandy a star whose braids were oiled, never frayed. Was there ever an episode that showed them being put in?
The number of finger turns and hours it takes?
Or was it all TV magic?
Flipping channels it felt like you wanted me to slip into the plump box of Tootie’s best friend Natalie or Moesha’s Kim— who had no storylines except gut busting jokes designed for certain smiles, the shape of their bodies that never fit into size 6 Calvin Klein or GAP jeans.
Dan Preniszni
Looking up I see my mother in her brightly flowered blue and yellow blouse alone at her window guarded by the gated silver metal bars arching out like the swollen walls of a Victorian birdcage.
Perched on the sill she pecks at the greens of a summer cucumber salad and preens before her tiny round mirror.
When I ring the bell she jerks her head with quirky starts and stops then flutters.
I calm her soothe her freshen the water then cover her and tell her what a pretty girl she is.
Jason Tougaw
The previous day had been peaceful, until we heard it. When you live with hens, their language is a constant. Mostly you hear peaceful coos and chirps. If a hen gets separated from the flock—for example, that time almost every day right after it lays an egg—its squawk sounds like distress. It’s signaling to the group: Where are you? It’s easy to mistake the agitation in the squawk for the sound of danger.
Until you hear a hen scream danger, an altogether different kind of signal. This is the sound of terror, pain, and imminent death. In that sound, you can also hear a pessimistic plea for rescue.
When we heard it, my husband and I rushed outside. The deck was covered in snow. I was wearing only socks. David had shoes on. A red-tailed hawk had our Rhode Island Red pinned under a shelf unit where we keep our recycling–in a space about six inches high. Their colors were similar enough that it was difficult to tell their bodies apart, until we saw those prehistoric talons—a trait it shares with its prey—pressing into the hen’s back.
The hawk glanced our way, looking decidedly ungraceful smushed under the shelf. Like all red-tailed hawks, though, it was a gorgeous creature, creamy white breast flecked with dark brown, wings dappled with brown, red, grey, and white feathers, its tail more copper than red. Its awkward posture did not diminish the evident strength of those wings. It seemed possible that it might raise them and topple the shelf.
A hawk gliding across the sky is pure grace. The bird is usually looking for prey, so it’s a hungry grace. When it spots a vulnerable creature, it glides downward, increasing in speed, and grips the rabbit, cat, vole, lizard, songbird, chicken—name
your vulnerable creature—with its talons. The hawk’s talons are its primary instrument for killing, either smothering or disemboweling its food. The kill is sometimes instant; other times, the hawk carries its prey to the perch of a tree, where it will do the eating. Or to a nest, where its chicks jockey for fresh flesh.
Chickens can spot a hawk in the sky and let each other know. Perhaps because of this, hawks sometimes use another strategy. They’ll hang out in a nearby tree, rather than flying overhead. The hawk will remain still and silent, waiting for the flock to get close enough that it can swoop so fast it’s hardly visible, like a vampire on TV, and grip whichever bird occupies the most vulnerable position. This may be the flock’s leader, out in front, or a straggler. (We’ve shared our daily lives with chickens for many years, and we learned early that we don’t like roosters. They’re noisy; they see threats everywhere; and they mount the hens constantly. None of these qualities suits the vibe of our household. Sometimes a hen will play the alpha role in the absence of a noisy, horny rooster.)
While we were in the kitchen, the hawk would have been stalking our hens. The raptor was either soaring overhead or alert in the oversized apple tree outside our deck. Then something had to have gone wrong for the hawk. Maybe our Rhode Island Red spotted it early and ran for cover. We’ll never know.
In this case, the hen’s mortal signal worked. I yelled, and the hawk flew into a tree a few yards away, maybe fifteen feet off the ground, regaining the grace it was accustomed to. It scanned the scene of its near-kill for a few minutes and flew toward the words, above the tree line.
It angers me when I read about raptors kept on leashes or in cages. Why would you leash a creature whose existence depends upon flight? Early 20-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term umwelt—to mean the species-specific perception and experience of its environment. Putting a raptor on a leash is seriously fucking with its umwelt. Sky and trees are the environments where hawks thrive. It was fortunate for our
Rhode Island Red that this hawk strayed from its optimal umwelt, contorting itself to stalk its prey into the cramped space beneath a recycling shelf.
The hen, who’d lost a lot of feathers, crawled out from under the shelf, paused, glanced at us, trotted to the end of the deck, leaving prehistoric tracks in the snow, and hopped off. David, with shoes on his feet, carried her to the coop. She spent the rest of the day there.
The next morning, we opened the coop to let the hens roam, as we do nearly every day. A mistake. We knew better, but somehow the knowledge slept.
It was a melty day, and they spent it picking through soggy grass and leaves, presumably munching on (and killing) whatever grubs and bugs they could find. The Rhode Island Red looked ragged with its missing feathers, but not evidently traumatized. (How does a human recognize trauma in a chicken? Or whether trauma is a chicken experience?) She pecked her way around in the mud with the flock.
For chickens, flocks are protection. Or insurance. A predator might emerge from the sky or the land, but it could likely pluck only one hen at a time, giving the rest time to find shelter. One of them sacrifices its life for the others. (It should be noted that chickens are omnivores. I’ve seen them fight over a mouse, swinging it by its tail with their beaks; I’ve seen them fight over a small snake.)
Late in the afternoon, I heard the scream again: high, loud, relentless, insistent. David had gone to the lumberyard. I couldn’t find the chicken or the hawk. After three frenzied circles around the perimeter of the house, I spotted the head of a black chicken (an Australorp) poking out from under the deck. She seemed to be trying to crawl out, but this hefty bird could never squeeze through the two or three inches of space between the deck and the earth. Ordinarily, she’d exit via the porch on the opposite side, where the
opening is higher. I was pretty sure I knew what prevented that.
I hesitated to leave the area, but I needed a flashlight. Once I’d found one, I laid flat on the ground and moved the light around under the deck until I saw the moving shape of the hawk. Because the chicken was black and the light faint, I could hear but not see it. As my eyes adjusted, the situation started to come into focus (like a conceptual artist’s experiment in perception). The hawk was dragging the hen around the dark, cramped space. Imagine being dragged around by a hawk right now and see what you feel.
I grabbed a pitchfork. Yes, that’s what I did. I laid down on the ground, placed the flashlight where it just barely illuminated the birds about three feet away from me under the deck. I tried to pry the hawk off the hefty chicken, eight or ten pounds, using the tines of the pitchfork as both tool and weapon.
It worked, for a moment. The chicken pried itself loose and crawled toward the edge of the deck, pushing its head and neck into the daylight. Sideways. One orange and black eye looked toward the sky. Or the apple tree above us. Or maybe nothing at all. Australorp feathers are black with green iridescence. The sight of green glinting in the sun felt like hope, if not quite relief. Within the few seconds it took me to slide the pitchfork out of the way, the hen’s head and neck slipped backwards into the dark. I dug dry clay with my fingers to carve out a concave area deep enough for the hen to slide through if it freed itself again.
By the third time I was caked in sweaty dust. I retrieved the pitchfork and started anew and tried one more time to maneuver it so the tines reached between the two birds. I thought to myself, “I will kill this hawk if I have to.” It felt like war. I knew the hawk was only doing what hawks do to live. I mean—come on—I eat chickens too. But I live with this Australorp, and it was very clear to me that I’d do anything to save it. This was instinct, but it was confirmed by conscious reasoning—albeit a rushed, adrenaline-informed kind of reasoning.
Prone and filthy, I continued to prod, poke, and stab at the hawk, through the chaos doing my best to avoid stabbing the hen.
A pattern started to form: The hawk would lose its grip, the hen would be free, and the hawk would regain its hold. I’d go back to work with the pitchfork. I lost the capacity to measure time. Had this battle been going on for ten minutes or thirty?
If I injured the hawk badly enough with the pitchfork, I’d have to finish the job. It’s legal to kill otherwise sacred animals if they’re preying upon livestock. I don’t normally think of The Ladies of Forman Road as livestock, more like ambient companions, but the gamekeeper would.
It was a shock when the hawk hesitated. Maybe it was getting as tired as I was. The hesitation gave the hen just long enough to make it to the edge of the deck, poking its head and neck through. I dug further into the ground to deepen the crevice, hoping it would crawl out.
When it didn’t, I put my hands around its neck to pull it through. I was already engaged in the tug of war before I realized what was going on: the hawk had the other end of the hen and was pulling with strength at least equal to mine. The heaviness of the hen, anchor-like. It was hard on the outside, but when I gripped, I could feel her pliable flesh. The fight was messy, the hawk and me its messes. I wondered if I was doing something stupid and reckless. I pulled. I dug. I freed one hand to stab at the hawk with the pitchfork. I pulled some more, worrying that I might crush the chicken between the wood and the earth.
Eventually, I pulled her through. She was in my hands, free of the hawk. She’d lost feathers, but there was no blood, and her green glimmered in the sun. I carried her to the coop and put her into one of the nesting boxes, wondering where the other chickens were. Hiding, no doubt.
I went back to the scene of the battle, breathless and filthy, my nerves electrified. The air seemed to buzz. The hawk was standing near the edge of the deck, looking straight at me. It looked calmer than I felt. We stood a couple of feet apart. I yelled at it, and it didn’t move. It looked at me with eyes like ink wells. Was it hurt? Had I hurt it? Did I need to contact somebody who could
help it? I loved the idea that somebody might come and take this predator off our property. I called David. No answer. I called our friend Melissa. No answer. I kept the phone close.
The hawk went back under the deck. Why would it do that? I grabbed the flashlight but couldn’t see anything. Then, the mortal scream. Again.
There was another hen under the deck.
Flashlight and pitchfork in my two hands, I resumed my place flat-on-the-ground (not a great position for my umwelt). I found the birds with the light and saw my hawk opponent gripping our other Australorp. The phone rang. I told Melissa what was going on as I continued my jabbing. She asked if I needed help. I wasn’t sure, but her steady tone made the world seem real. Her curious and concerned voice reassured me. Someone else in the world knew what I was doing. A witness, even if only through telephone wires. I hung up, laid back down, and went to work with my weapon. The events of the second battle were nearly identical to the first.
I didn’t really believe I’d save the first chicken, and I felt the same about the second. But this time I knew it was possible, since I’d done it once. When I retrieved her, I was exhilarated, spent, and astonished. I carried her to the nesting box with her sister.
I made my way back toward the house, my breath labored and my gait wobbly. Had I ever been this dirt-caked or sweatdrenched? The hawk hopped onto the deck, then the picnic table, leaving prehistoric claw marks in the snow as it paced. It stared at me. I yelled. It flew into the screens of our porch a couple of times—as dazed as I was after all. It made its way back under the deck, but on the porch side, where there’s more height and more light—that area the Australorps couldn’t reach with the hawk on guard. I still didn’t know where the flock was, but fortunately there didn’t seem to be any more hens under the deck.
This week, while I was writing, we lost a chicken, presumably to a hawk or eagle. No feathers or blood, so it wasn’t
a fox. It was daylight, so not a skunk or racoon. In the past, we’ve managed to scare foxes into dropping hens they held in their teeth. A fox successfully stole away with Hawk Lady, named for her plumage. She was our oldest chicken. Ten years is a long time for a chicken to live. She was in charge, alert, agile. She was responsive to human interaction. Attuned. Early on, when we didn’t know what we were doing, a raccoon slaughtered several hens in a single night. Once, I chased a large owl until it dropped a hen. Our wins outweigh our losses.
David pulled into the driveway. I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite that relieved to see another human. I stammered the story. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t quite convey the primal drama I’d been involved in. I was freaked and wanted him to understand exactly how I felt—something one human can never quite do for another. He did seem astonished. We looked at the hawk together. It stared back at us. I called Melissa with an update. She said she was impressed. The truth is I was proud.
Reflecting on the day now, I have no idea why, but David put on hefty leather gloves and scooted under the deck toward our resident raptor. The hawk spread its wings. You’d have to call it majestic, even crouched under a porch if it weren’t sauntering toward your husband while he was splayed on the ground. He scooted out. The hawk halted and tucked its wings.
Now that there were two of us, I decided to look for the rest of our hens. We had only six at the time. A third had already entered the coop. I found the Rhode Island Red and two others (Buff Orpingtons) in the hedges in front of the house. By this time it was dusk, and they should have been heading into the coop. They didn’t seem to want to make the trek across the yard. Would you? I played the protective part of flock leader. Eventually, with some coaxing, they ran like hell. The sun had set, the chickens were safe, and the hawk remained under the deck, out of sight. We went inside.
My friend Gabrielle, who’s worked with raptors for years,
gave me this advice:
They do call them “Chicken Hawks” for a reason! My best advice (although it may be hard w/ your busy life!) is try to be out with the chickens when they are out, if you see ‘him’ yell, shake an aluminum can with change in it or festively shake garland! The upside is if the hawk doesn’t get ‘rewarded,’ eventually it will seek a better hunting ground. . . . I wish I had a better remedy, but as you know, nature can be cruel.
Yes, it can be.
We kept the coop locked for a couple of weeks. For much of that time, the hens tucked themselves away in the inner coop, a place where they’ve seldom hung out, except to lay eggs, eat, and drink.
Hawks flew over the yard a couple of times. We couldn’t know if we were seeing the hawk, but people tell me it’s likely that it had a nest nearby, possibly in the woods on our property. Nobody could really estimate how long it might be before the hawk would give up on our chickens as an easy source of food (perhaps to feed its chicks).
I’d have thought a red-tailed hawk (the famed “chicken hawk”) would have an easier time killing a chicken. I’d have thought a hawk like that would flee when faced with a human wielding a pitchfork. I’d have thought I’d lose any battle with a bird so fierce. I wouldn’t have known that I’d fight that hard to save a chicken. I have a hard time killing a slug. I did once have to kill a dying chipmunk maimed by our cat. One excruciating blow with a heavy rock. I cringe when I kill a carpenter ant, reminding myself that it’s eating our house.
Like I said before, this hawk was doing what it does to live. For its offspring to live. But hens depend on us for protection. So I was doing what I could to save them from becoming its food, its offspring’s food.
That day I became territorial, a local equivalent to the
nationalism I’ve always objected to. That day, I was willing to kill. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of animals, so in theory this means I’d kill a human in the right circumstances. I can no longer blithely condemn all war. Sometimes humans need to protect each other, land, values, ways of life.
Kill to protect. Soldiers kill to protect each other; farmers, livestock; pest-control techs, homes; people who stumble on violent crime, strangers; death doulas, people facing painful deaths; police, civilians in trouble and, like soldiers, each other. These scenarios can go fatally wrong. Human perception is inexact, shaped by culture and infused with emotion. It’s easy and common to imagine or exaggerate threats to life. Bias is hard to transcend.
We have it in us, if necessary, to kill. I learned this from a hawk, but the evidence is profuse if you look for it. How and when we kill is no objective matter. Who needs protection? From whom? By whom? These are not questions whose answers are subjective, dependent on circumstance.
Would I kill a human to protect David? Or Melissa? Or any number of people reading this? I’d rather not, but I think I would.
Georgia A. Popoff
My child breeds a fiery beast. He wails with this devil’s breath as he grows round as a melon. In his seventh year, we knew something was wrong. He thrashed on his mat throughout the night. Sixteen moons have since come and gone and he is larger and larger with each sunrise. My husband wants to lay with me to make more sons but I cannot allow demons to claim another of my seed. As my boy seethes green and gray with agony, I struggle to see the truth of him behind his bulging eyes. I shield his face from spring’s new brides so their wombs won’t turn arid before birthing. I have thrown the stones for answers, wandered the forest for healing roots, still I am helpless to stop his horrid cries. My husband wants to take him to doctors in Astana but I fear we will spread this hex like a fungus. I cannot let my son be battered in the back of the cart either. The road ruts might feed the bloat by bouncing him like a sack of potatoes. I dread that if they cut him open, we will never return to our once quiet world.
Georgia A. Popoff
It took more than a nutcracker to free that wretched cashew from my soft shell. I can never escape that I was not alone. My eldest sister taunted me that I was a boy who bred a monster whose head was misshapen as an octopus strangled in a net, with huge spooky eyes and tentacles where arms and legs should be. The nightmares robbed me of more than sleep. Now the scar slicing my belly like a crooked zipper haunts me. I hear a stifled breathing behind my wound late at night in the dark, a phantom rasp for which I am the sole audience. Soon after the horrid almost brother was cut out of me, villagers stopped their prayers. I learned to address the soccer ball with my foot like other children because I could finally see both. Still, my mother averted her eyes whenever I entered the room. I knew that I repulsed her, feared that she held me responsible for the failure of the mutual birth. My father explained that Mother could not bear her guilt for believing me demonic. He begged me to love her anyway, to wait until she could drop her veil and relent.
Julie Sarkissian
We had just moved out of the city to a place with lots of trees, but now branches from the neighbor’s tree were falling on our property. First onto our fence, which broke a post, then onto our car, knocking off the passenger side mirror, and finally onto a tree of ours, an ornamental cherry tree, collapsing it onto the ground. It looked like it had fallen to its knees.
We stood outside while a tree expert assessed the situation. My husband was holding our baby. Her eyes followed the man’s hand as he pointed to the perpetrator, the neighbor’s tree. “That’s your problem right there. It’s a weed.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “That it’s a weed?”
“It’s not native. It doesn’t have the room it needs to grow here. Eventually the whole thing is going come down.”
“Kind of like me,” I said. “I’m coming down.”
“You’re just tired.” He handed me our baby. “I’ve got to go to work. Promise me you’ll sleep when the baby naps. You don’t look good.”
The tree guy looked at me very quickly, then looked away as if to confirm that it was true, I didn’t look good.
“The tree has to go,” he said. “Those branches are just going to keep falling. And you’ve got the baby and everything.”
But he was wrong. There was no and everything.
We saw our neighbor the next day. She was an agile old woman who always wore long skirts and long sweaters. She was the only person on our street who shoveled her own driveway. She wore her skirts even then. They looked so heavy, those long, wet skirts, but they didn’t seem to slow her down any.
“I have to ask her about the tree,” said my husband. “It’s got to be cut down.”
He started walking.
“But look,” I said, following him. “She’s got about fifty statues of Jesus under the tree.”
“You heard the guy. It’s just a matter of time.”
The neighbor was under the tree, tending, in some gentle, deliberate way, to the statues. You could tell they were old. They had that worn-down, softened look of old cement. But they were painted with bright paint, fresh paint, which looked like they were in disguise. Except for their size and the colors of their paint, they were all exactly the same. All exactly just Jesus.
My husband introduced himself, then told her about our fence, our car, our cherry tree. He pointed to each one as he said it.
“It’s never fallen on my side before,” she said. “I’ve lived here for 50 years.”
It was true. All the missing branches were on our side.
“And what does it mean, that it is a weed? How can that be?” she said. “It’s been here longer than I have.” Then she looked at me, as if I were going to back her up, as if I were the only one who would believe her. “It’s a maple tree. This is Maple Grove Ave.”
The baby stirred in her carrier. I bounced from one leg to another and started shhhhing.
“Oh, is the baby waking up?” our neighbor said. “I always see you out walking with her in that carrier. I would love to see her little face.”
I looked down at her little face, but she had fallen back asleep. She slept all day because she didn’t sleep at night. I was supposed to do the same. Sleep all day. But I was afraid if I did fall asleep, I would sleep so deeply I wouldn’t wake up when something bad happened to her.
“We’re happy to pay for it,” my husband said.
“Pay for what?” I said.
“For the tree,” he said and gave me a pointed look. The look felt like it was meant for a different person, someone who understood him.
That night the baby woke up crying. She was supposed to be sleeping through the night. She never did. Instead, she woke every hour. Each time she woke I said, now this, this, I cannot handle. Now I’ve really had enough. Enough! But someone disagreed with me, the person that does the dishing out. That person thought I had not yet had enough.
I put a pillow over my head. “I can’t take it,” I moaned. “I’m dying a slow death of sleep deprivation.”
“You know what you need to do,” my husband said. He wanted me to leave the baby and let it cry all night alone. Everyone knew that was your only option, the only way you taught it to sleep, and you to live again. You had to let the baby cry it out, disabuse herself of the deep instinctual belief that her mother would come for her, the only belief she was born with. After she gave up that belief, then she could sleep. But it seemed backwards. It seemed once you gave up that belief, you would never sleep again.
“I can’t,” I said.
“This is no way to live.”
“This is what I’m made for, this is the whole point of me, that’s the whole purpose of my existence: not to be able to let her cry.”
No, he didn’t say, you are so much more than that. I went to the baby. She sighed with relief as she latched on. It was the closest I ever came to sighing with relief. I looked out the window at the tree. Underneath, the moon hit the Jesus statues in places, making them look like they were awake in a way that they were not during the day. An hour later and the baby was up again, wailing, and so was I, but silently.
Later that morning, while the baby napped, I wanted to write. Or maybe I wanted to want to write. I sat down at the computer and tried to read through a document I’d started before the baby, but the words kept scattering around the page like insects. They didn’t recognize me. They were words that belonged to someone else, someone who didn’t have a baby, and they did
not want to be seen by me. They did not want to be touched or organized by me. They did not want to give me meaning, or pleasure. And why should they? They expected to be taken care of, not abandoned, not called upon to take care of some stranger.
I had to do something else. It wasn’t possible, I told myself, that nothing was possible anymore. I decided to bake. That’s what I used to do when I wasn’t writing or waitressing. I could still read a recipe; I could measure and pour and stir. Nothing could stop me from this. Nothing. But something did.
I was out of baking soda. I looked at the mess I’d already made, the eggshells dripping all over the counter. I could never get the whole egg out of its shell. There was always that leftover messy part still clinging to it. This was the biggest mess I had ever made in my entire life, if I considered what it was going to take for me to clean it up, if I considered the way I was going to feel when I threw it away.
Maybe I could leave the baby sleeping and run to the store. My husband had just sent me an article about a woman in Brooklyn, in our old neighborhood, who had run across the street to the store and her house had caught on fire and her children had died. She had probably been out of baking soda. She had probably wanted to accomplish one tiny thing that day, the day her children died.
I waited for her to wake, but she slept, and she slept. It was because she was so tired from not sleeping at night. This much I knew. This much I knew exactly, in my head and in my bones. She was exactly as tired as I was. I tiptoed to her crib and watched her seem so innocent, in a way I could not imagine her being during the night. She needed to sleep, but I could not forget the mess I had made in the kitchen, and so I transferred her into the baby-carrier. The baby stayed asleep, and we went to the neighbor’s.
She was in the yard, under the tree, wearing a long skirt. She was holding a Jesus figurine. He hadn’t been painted yet. He was gray and old and crumbly.
“He’s new. My friend just brought him over,” she said. “She
collects them, and I restore them.”
“Where does she find them?”
“She tells all the secondhand shops to save her any Jesus that comes in.”
“I wish I had a friend,” I said. All my friends were back in the city.
“One day she will grow up and be your friend,” she said and touched the baby sleeping head.
No, I didn’t say, the baby and I have nothing in common except we don’t sleep at night.
We went inside. My neighbor knew just where the baking soda was. The house was cluttered, but she didn’t have to rummage at all. Our house was empty, but I could never find anything.
“Keep it,” she said. The box was unopened. “And take these too.” She gave me a pile of old children’s books. They were all about Jesus. Jesus and children and love and sacrifice and forgiveness, just exactly what you would expect. It didn’t feel right to take them, since I would immediately throw them away. I took them anyway.
“Thank you,” I said.
“We can trade,” she said. “You can give me a copy of your book.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I hear you’re a writer.”
“Well, I did write the one,” I said. “I don’t think I can write another one. I mean, it’s impossible to find the time with the baby.”
“She won’t always be a baby,” she said. I didn’t believe her. I knew that was just a thing people said to make you feel better.
“Next time you see her,” my husband said. “Ask her if we can cut down the tree.”
“No chance,” I said.
That night the baby was up again.
“Let her cry,” my husband said.
But not sleeping was the only thing of mine that I spent any time on, the only thing of mine that I was tending to. I kept a
running total of all the hours of sleep I had missed since she had been born. I added my hours to the list and went to her. Two hours later she woke up again, but not me, because I had never fallen back asleep.
The baby was exhausted the next morning. I tried telling her why. I tried explaining that it was all her fault that she felt this way. But she knew better than that. She knew she wasn’t responsible for it. She knew the way this worked was that it was her fault, but I was the one that was responsible for it. She had circles under her eyes and her lids were heavy, but her eyes were bright. Her exhaustion did not dull the love in her eyes, a love so strong it felt like it could burn a hole in my forehead. Love and something else, a look I came to the brink of recognizing, but then could not.
I sat on the couch to nurse her. I remembered a post from a blogger saying she had mastered typing while breastfeeding. I’m back! She told her readers. I went upstairs and got my computer and went back downstairs and perched it on the arm of the couch. The whole time I did these things the baby stayed latched, hanging on for dear life, like she was dangling from a cliff. I moved my arms around the baby’s body to the keys.
I opened a new document and watched the cursor blink. It felt like watching a timer countdown to zero, like each time it blinked something was about to happen, but nothing did, and then nothing did again, and then nothing did again, and then I closed the computer. Outside I saw my neighbor in her yard, under the tree with her statues.
The baby and I brought her my book.
“Isn’t that something,” she said. “But this isn’t your last name.”
“It’s my married name. I wrote it before we got married.”
“Before you were married? I was married when I was seventeen. I didn’t have time to do much before that. But I’m glad I met him when I was so young, because my husband did not have a long life. If we hadn’t married so young, I would have lived alone
even longer than I have.”
She knelt under the tree. She picked up one of Jesus. He was the one that had come in yesterday. He was restored now. The baby liked him. Her eyes lit up, and she smiled her gummy smile. Maybe it was the colors she liked, or maybe it was his patient and kind sad face, which was the opposite of what my face looked like.
“Oh, look at her. I finally see her beautiful face. I have fourteen grandchildren,” my neighbor said. “The youngest is twelve-years old now. I miss babies. I had seven babies myself, though one of them died before I could hold him. God wanted that one the moment he was born. I get to meet my last baby when I go to heaven.”
“I wish I had something to look forward to,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “But it has been a long time to have to wait.”
“Next time you see her,” said my husband, “Ask about the tree.”
“It’s not going to happen. She loves that tree. It’s where her statues live.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just wait until it falls on the baby.”
That night, when the baby woke, I felt as if my veins were racing with lighter fluid and her crying was a secret flame, one that only I could detect. I was consumed with anger. Not for her, but my weakness, for my human condition. I tried biting my pillow. I tried listening to music. I tried pretending I was hollow inside, that the sounds were meaningless to me, the sounds of just another species in a dark, full woods. But somehow, I had been stripped of any coping mechanism. All that was left was honesty, so I got up and nursed her, and then sat downstairs until the black of night turned to the gray of the morning.
The sky got no lighter that day. My nerves had uncoiled and were flapping in the wind. Any bit of breeze sent them this way or that. The baby was staring at me.
“I know you’re tired,” I said.
But she kept staring.
“Sleep,” I said. “I’ll carry you and you sleep.”
We went out. Our neighbor was in her yard. “Look,” she said. “Two more. I fixed these up this morning.”
She looked down at her two new statues. She moved one, then another, so they were sort of facing each other, the two new Jesuses.
Then she looked at me. It felt like the first time anyone had looked at me since the baby. I was always with the baby and the baby was the one people looked at. Or rather, my neighbor was the first person since the baby to look at me, except the baby. My neighbor was looking at me with the same look the baby gave me, that expression I couldn’t quite place. I had known the word for it once. I knew I had. And I’d forgotten it. I’d forgotten the word for this face.
“Are you a Christian?” she asked me.
“No,” I said.
“I just don’t know how I would go on if I weren’t a Christian,” she said. “How do you understand your suffering, if you aren’t a Christian?”
“How can you believe God loves you? He let your baby die.”
“Suffering is how we have faith. It’s how we can believe that things are real. Things that we can’t see right in front of us. If you never suffered, you’d never have faith.”
“But if we never suffered, we wouldn’t have to have faith. The ends don’t justify the means.”
“Oh, but they do. God needs us to believe in Him.”
“Why?”
“Because He loves us. We are His children, after all. He wants to be known for His love.”
We stood underneath the maple tree. It was tall and gray and ugly against the tall, gray, ugly sky. It was hard to imagine it ever had leaves or blossoms. It was hard to imagine it was even alive. A branch waved in the breeze, as if it had heard me think of it as dead. My fingers had started shaking at some point and
I never asked why. There was no mystery to me. There were no unanswered questions I had about myself. I wondered nothing. I moved out from under the branch.
“And that makes it worth it? You suffer, so you have to rely on God, and then God promises he will save you, and then you thank him and then he gets to feel loved?”
“Just like you,” she said.
“What is just like me?”
“Just like you want to be known for your love.”
“We need to cut down that tree,” I said.
She looked at the Jesus at her feet. They seemed so content there, on the ground. Not one had a wish to be moved even an inch from where he stood.
“And you are,” she said. “She sees you.”
“I’ve got the baby, and it’s right over our yard,” I said. “Or do you want to wait until it falls on her?”
The next day my husband and I were taking a walk around the block. I couldn’t make conversation. I could barely keep my eyes open. Or maybe my eyes were shut, and I couldn’t tell. The baby was napping in the carrier, slumped too far forward because I never put her in the right way. When she was put in the right way, her arms got pinned down and she couldn’t suck her thumb. But she didn’t even suck her thumb. I wanted her to. If only she would learn to suck her thumb… I thought but didn’t know how to finish.
“Oh, there she is,” my husband said. “Let’s ask her about the tree.”
Our neighbor came to us, and she spoke first. “I’ve thought about it, and you may cut down the tree.”
“You said it hasn’t been a problem,” I said. “On your side.”
But she was already gone, moving away light and quick, in her long, heavy skirts.
“That’s a relief,” said my husband. “Because they’re coming tomorrow to take it down.”
When the baby woke up that night, I left the bed. My feet
made no noise on the cold hard floor. I went downstairs, but I could still hear her. I went to the basement, but I could still hear her. I went outside and got in the car, the one with the broken mirror, but I could still hear her. Not with my ears, with the cells of her that still traveled in my bloodstream, that leftover part of her that couldn’t find a way out of my body, and also with the cells of mine that were in her, from my milk which was the only thing she ever ate or drank, or ever had.
I climbed over the fence. I found room at the base of the tree. I sat under the branches. I felt something stir. I looked up. But it wasn’t the tree.
It was the Jesus, all the Jesuses, stretching their arms over the fence, stretching into my house, up the stairs, and into the baby’s room. They held her as she cried, and she held on too. She held onto the only belief she had ever known, the belief that I was coming. But I was not coming.
I was waiting. Waiting for her suffering to turn into faith. She cried, and I waited. She cried, and I waited. Patient and kind, I waited. It was the longest and the hardest that she had ever cried. She cried for me, and she cried for all that she had believed life to be, that it was not. She cried to return to what she had believed to be true, that we would never be apart, that I would always come, that I could not bear to hear to cry.
She had been wrong about those things, but she hadn't been wrong about everything. I suddenly realized what it was. The word for the unnamed way that my baby looked at me. It was knowledge. And what she knew was this. That nothing would ever matter like love mattered. She knew it with all of her. She knew it every second of her life. She would soon begin forgetting it. That knowledge would come, and it would go. But for now, for a little while longer, it was everything she knew of life.
It was not her suffering that turned to faith that night. It was mine, and so I slept.
kat abdallah (she/her) is a Palestinian-American writer, educator, and advocate for refugees. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Kat is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared in Adi Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Sundog Lit, SplitThisRock, The Los Angeles Review, and Welter. In her free time, Kat is a storyteller in community theater and competitive cosplay.
Adrian Adamo is a writer and marketing professional living in Portland, Maine. She is a graduate of Emerson College and Boston University. Her work has been published in the Portland Press Herald.
elvis alves is the author of three full length collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Poetry Magazine featured Elvis’s poem “Parchman Prison” in its February 2021 issue on mass incarceration in America. Elvis also writes for The Good Men Project, an online site that calls attention to pertinent issues affecting our society and world and that seeks to redress these issues. In 2025, he was a finalist for the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize (Fordham University).
bethany ball was born in Detroit and lives in New York. Her novel What To Do About the Solomons was published in 2017 by Grove Atlantic. It was short listed for the 2017 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a runner up in the Jewish Book Council’s debut fiction prize. Her second novel, The Pessimists, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2021.
ariana benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
ERIC CALLOWAY aims to convey the cacophonous mind and aims to show the beauty in the noise. As an adult with ADHD, his thoughts fire a mile a second. His paintings are the best visual representation of them. He strives to capture each emotion and treat each stroke as if it was visual poetry.
aaron caycedo-kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. Caycedo-Kimura earned his MFA from Boston University and teaches creative writing at Trinity College.
Aaron coleman is a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African diaspora from Detroit. He is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025), Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the chapbook, St. Trigger (Button, 2016), which won the Button Poetry Prize. He is also the translator of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 collection, The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024), selected for the Phoenix Poets Series and short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
quintin collins (he/him) is a writer, assistant director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, and a poetry editor for Salamander. He is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival and Claim Tickets for Stolen People, selected by Marcus Jackson as winner of The Journal's 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Prize. Quintin's other awards and accolades include a Pushcart Prize, a BCALA Literary Award honor, a Mass Cultural Council grant, the 2019 Atlantis Award from the Poet's Billow, and Best of the Net nominations.
JIM DANIELS' latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, was published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn (Wolfson Press), Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press), and Comment Card (Carnegie Mellon University Press). His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
kristine esser slentz is the author of woman, depose (FlowerSong Press 2021), which was re-released as EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose in 2024, as well as face-to-faces, with Thirty West Publishing House, forthcoming in Spring 2026. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, a TEDx Salon, and more. She is the co-founder and organizer/host of the monthly experimental artist series, Adverse Abstraction, in New York City's East Village.
EMDASH AKA Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐) is a writer, artist, and daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes to heal, grow, and decolonize. They’ve earned funding from Sundress Publications, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers'
Conference, Jersey City Arts Council, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, and Rutgers University-Newark where they received an MFA in Poetry and taught undergraduates. They are Missouri-born, California-raised and based in anxiety—currently living under tilde keys worldwide.
yalonda JD green (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic librarian from Detroit. Her poetic work has appeared in TORCH, Reverie, Mythium, various anthologies, bus shelters, on stages, and other creative spaces. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and American Library Association Spectrum Scholars, a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center, and acceptance into the Delaware Writers Retreat for Fall 2024. As a versatile performer, seasoned educator, and former children’s librarian, Green loves to play. Often blending storytelling, improvisation, and song in performance, she also sings with the ensemble, Elevation, as a new member of Wilmington, Delaware’s rich creative community.
basil james is portrait artist, ex-English teacher, and poetry editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. They currently reside in Olympia, Washington. James’s work is featured in ellipsis… literature and art, Apeiron Review, OxMag, Watershed Review, and will soon be published in storySouth. James also has a couple English degrees hidden away somewhere in storage.
Rowan MAcdonald's short fiction has been awarded the Kenan Ince Memorial Prize (2023) and nominated for Best of the Net (2025). His words have appeared in various publications around the world, including New Writing Scotland, Bright Flash Literary Review, Paper Dragon and Sans. PRESS. He lives in Tasmania with his dog, Rosie, who sits beside him for each word he writes.
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay, was named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine, and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023. She is the author of Brown Girl Polaris (a Belladonna chaplet), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry.
terez peipins is a writer of Latvian descent from Western New York. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in publications both in the United States and abroad. She is the author of four chapbooks of poetry and four novels. She is the former Fiction Editor of The Adirondack Review. Her latest novel, River Clues, is the second book in the Dan Kiraly detective series.
Georgia A. Popoff is a special programs coordinator and faculty member of the YMCA of CNY’s Writers Voice, an editor/book coach, Poet Laureate of Onondaga County, NY (2022-2025), and Academy of American Poets 2024 Poet Laureate Fellow. The Under Discussion series editor for the University of Michigan Press, her fifth collection is Living with Haints (Tiger Bark Press, 2024).
Dan Preniszni (MAW ‘11), Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Elizabeth McCormack/Inkwell MAW Award for Fiction, is a former Associate Editor at the Reader’s Digest. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, and Inkwell, among others. One of his stories became an episode of CBS TV’s Cagney & Lacey. A former Ad Man, his award-winning radio and television commercials have been heard and viewed by millions. But don’t hold that against him.
Julie Sarkissian is the author of Dear Lucy, published by Simon & Schuster and nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her essays, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Huffington Post, The New York Observer, and Flavorwire, among others. Sarkissian runs special events at the Westport Writers Workshop in Westport, CT.
MARK SIMPSON is the author of The Quieting (Pine Row Press) and Fat Chance (Finishing Line). He lives on Whidbey Island, Washington.
Jason Tougaw is the author of a memoir The One You Get, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience (Yale UP), and Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel. He is co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. He writes a regular column for Psychology Today, and he hosts a weekly radio show on WJFF Radio Catskill. He is co-founder of The Queens Podcast Lab, where he hosts QC POD. He teaches creative writing, podcasting, and literature at Queens College, CUNY.
Tara Troiano is a queer writer, poet, and law student at Georgetown University Law Center. She received her master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh where she also served as an editor on the literary anthology From Arthur's Seat. Her work has been published by Pen America, Periphery Literary Journal, From Arthur's Seat Literary Anthology, and TeenInk Print Magazine.
Anna Zilbermints (she/her), a daughter of Jewish immigrants, is a graduate of the University of Iowa in English and psychology, where she also earned a Russian minor and
writing certificate. She is a poet of both the written and spoken word varieties. She has taken over as host of the Des Moines Poetry Slam, and has been published in Poets' Choice, Wingless Dreamer, Sheepshead Review, and more, both online and in print.
james k. zimmerman is a neurodivergent, award-winning writer and frequent Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is author of Little Miracles (Passager Books), Family Cookout (Comstock)—winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize—and The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen (Poetry Box).