Gladys SHARON DU

I think I’m stuck in a rhythm in my head almost, although I’m in a group now and we’re critiquing, and I’m kind of losing the rhythm, but it’s just something that I’m not regular. I wish I were regular. I wish I was like staff and got up every day at 4am and wrote a poem, but I’m not doing that. But I do force myself to do something. So it’s just a moment, something that stands out, a thought that I like, I’ll write it down, and hopefully go back to it within a week and turn it into something. But lately, I’m just into short—as I say, “flash” everything. I’m in a short everything. I’m in a short entertainment. I think everything’s too long. How’s the pandemic been treating you? What have you guys been doing?

JHW: Is there sort of a thing you do when you want to think about writing a poem? Do you go for walks? Is there a spot in your house that you always return to?

LG: I wake up in the middle of the night a lot. And that’s kind of my favorite time, like three in the morning. A lot of times, I’ll just stay in my office, I have a bed in there, or downstairs on the couch. That’s usually when things happen for me. The days start at five in the morning. But now, the husband doesn’t get up till eight. So that’s a lot of time, that’s five hours right there. Now I have this puppy who follows me everywhere and wants to go outside. It’s usually me and then I don’t know why I’ve never written about other people or animals or nature. I’m very internal. I’m just more interested in that. But I do as I say, I do try to be funny. I’m related to Jack Benny. And I think I inherited it because it was kind of like this dry, quiet, very few words to his humor but it kind of worked. Physical gesture.

So, poetry. I don’t even know how it happened. It was that moment in that open mic, the Earth Tavern on Northwest 21st. It’s now Muu-Muus, right near Cinema 21. There was an open mic on a Tuesday night, they’re always on Tuesday nights. And I just loved it. And our emcee was revealing, he was dancing around the stage, reading great words. And I just loved it, click, I want to do that. And that was it. And I have never detached from the poetry scene, but when it became the slams, it bugged me. And that was right when we phased out the café when the slams started happening. I didn’t really didn’t like slam poetry too much.

JHW: I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the Portland poetry scene and how you see yourself in relation to other poets in the city.

LG: There’s groups. But it’s kind of interesting. There’s the academic poets, there’s the open mic poets, and then there’s the new young, more performance-y poets. And everybody should be together right now, I feel like in the Portland poetry scene, it’s like the old posts, and the young poets, and then never the twain shall meet. And that’s dumb. I just think that’s so dumb. It’s always been the same. The poetry scene, there’s always open mics, there’s always the groups, and there’s never any melding. And for a second, like, when we had the café, there was some national attention on poetry and people came into the café and took pictures and stuff, but

it never really, poetry’s I just don’t think poetry is ever going to be anything but this sort of esoteric thing for a small group of people, actually. That’s why it’s so dumb for me to think I’m going to get famous. No, no, I don’t want to get famous. But I would like to get paid, like I’ve had a million things published. And you so rarely, as a poet get paid—that’s kind of the absurd thing, I think. But I guess that’s it. I mean, do you expect to have money for poetry?

EE: I don’t think it’s a particularly marketable form, no [laughing].

LG: That’s an interesting struggle, too, because as an American, where we don’t really value our art that much, especially not poetry, it’s hard to maintain confidence or belief in your art form—I’m talking for myself—all these years when money is what America values and poetry doesn’t bring in any money. So it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything valuable sometimes, when you’re in a bad mood. So that’s been a constant struggle, because, I mean, I think I’m pretty prolific and doing a lot of stuff. But then you look at what you make each year, and then it doesn’t matter. So that’s kind of a struggle, I think poets. Well, some poets go through. Some poets don’t expect anything.

I kind of do expect more, because of all the time and energy I put into things. But I sort of feel it coming, and things have started to fall into my lap. So, that’s fine. I like a slow life.

Gladys

Sharon Du

EVERY FEW MONTHS, THE WEATHER WOULD BE PERFECT ENOUGH AND I WOULD be drunk enough to dial her number from a public phone box, just to hear her voice saying her name. And after the beep, I would breathe into the silence. I would repeat this—dial, beep, breathe, click—until her voicemail announced it was full. It is only after this happens that I would feel certain she is gone.

It has been two years since Gladys blocked me on every piece of social media she owned, one year since our English teacher was arrested for statutory rape with another one of his students, and too many years since Gladys said, but did not say, to me—I am having sex with our English teacher. For the friends that Gladys and I still have in common, they say that she has never said my name after we parted. I was her best friend from high school, or, that girl I used to hang out with.

In the only photo I have seen since, her hair, once shaved to the skull, has grown long again, and she has a new tattoo, a Japanese crane on her left forearm. I don’t know what Japanese cranes mean to her, but in the photos that they have shown me, she is smiling.

In the beginning, I loved her, and I suppose I still do, despite it all: Gladys with the freehand hair and the percussive cough, wiping something from her lips, rubbing her

fingers onto her skirt, fingers that tasted like sand. Gladys, who walked to and from class alone, alternating her violin case from right to left to right, rhyming bruises on her legs that made my stomach churn. Gladys held a faintly crucified expression in her palms whenever our English teacher called on her, her eyes like sliced wildfires.

The first time, I can still remember. Once our schoolgirl carcasses—the green skirts we shortened with the same needle, the grey blouses with the jaundiced underarms, a question mark of laddered tights—were on the floor, I noticed the angry red stretch marks all over her thighs. It’s just how I grew up, Gladys said when I asked, and I almost believed her. Post-orgasm, her hands laid carefully at her sides, her fingertips softly puckered from where they had been inside of me. I waited a few inches away, my skin fizzing with pinprick prayers, terrified of her knifelike nudity and her impossible eyes. She was still looking elsewhere, like she had when she came—with a hard stare. Her hips flinching upward, as if she wanted to hurt me.

Just so you know, I don’t think we should do this again. She paused, considering. This was a mistake. It was good. But like, you know. She turned from me, not as if I disgusted her, but as if I wasn’t there.

Her bedspread was pus yellow. Her bookshelf was filled with dust, plastic trophies from tuition centers, and SAT practice tests. A SAT practice test in a[n Australian] girl’s bookshelf is always an escape plan, she joked once, when I first pointed them out. There were windchimes her mother had hooked to the curtain rods, but I never learned what they sounded like because we never opened the windows. Her father was a real estate agent, and he was always trying to sell an apartment with no kitchen, trying to sell a house with no garden. Listening to her father beg in Vietnamese, we always sat there on the same bed, doing the same chemistry homework. We sat above the bottles of alcohol Gladys kept under the bed, bottles that she had wrapped in chunky hiking socks, even though her parents never bothered to search her room.

She never threw those bottles out, and I never counted them. Instead, she would rewrap their carcasses in the same socks she had hidden them in, and so every afternoon I would go through each sock-covered bottle, shaking for one that was full, or at least not empty. By shaking them, I knew that Gladys drank a lot when she was alone. Still, I never said anything, I simply brought another bottle to her mouth when she asked. I rolled over like a dog when she touched me. When I think of what happened between us, I find myself living in the space at the bottom of an exhale, that dark and wordless hitch.

After we had sex for the first time, we did our chemistry homework. I remember that after a few minutes, she asked me a question about anabolism, and I answered it for her.

It should have been easier than it was. We both had immigrant parents that gave us elderly white people names, names adorned with backyard pools and retirements which would never be ours. Melbourne was a place too quiet for audible divorce, replete with mothers who

accused us of ruining their birthdays and fathers who never learned how to hug. Our lives bore the same creases before we ever laid on the same sheets—the same peeling doors and glow-inthe-dark stars, the same store-bought pasta and dead baby magpies. When Gladys felt anxious, she would slip her arm through mine, her fingers lighting and relighting on my arm like summer insects. At lunch, she ate beef pies with a plastic knife, hunched over legs that became streamers of wild gold. She stole reflexively—pots of La Mer face cream from private house parties, and once, an iridescent fishbowl that held a single Siamese fighting fish. It’s not good for the fish to be in a bowl. I read about it online. It gives them vertigo. It wasn’t vertigo. Three weeks later when I visited her, she had let the fish die in the bowl, because she couldn’t be bothered to buy the fish food.

As with people you haven’t seen for years and will never see again, my memory of her smudges like oil pastels when I try to lay a finger on her. What did she sound like? What did she look like? I can only sketch the corners—her ears cup handles, her hands lie flat-top mesas, her hair an afterthought. Sometimes, I still meet girls with the same lip curve, and they slam me back to the past with a smile. From the inside of an hourglass, Gladys is fourteen in a Methodist skirt, seventeen in a rented gown, and nineteen with pierced nipples. In the years before we touched each other, we had a routine. In winter, we would wait for the slow paralysis of rain in ramen shops with plastic menus; in summer, we’d lie on playground equipment until our bodies blushed and dented from the iron. We would walk home together along the street laced with rotten grapefruit, their dark juices sizzling on the concrete.

In later years, she grew bored of her undressing, although I never did. Gladys became interested in compassion, meditation, and vegetarians who looked as though they could play the guitar but definitely couldn’t. They were always older, with spaniel-colored hair and names like Julia and Theodore, and I would dutifully befriend each of them for the month they lasted, in comfortable knowledge that they were never interested in her. In response to this disinterest, Gladys started reading reviews—Pitchfork and Stereogum and Sounds Good the Music Blog— because she was terrified of being wrong, even though no one knew what being wrong meant at the time. Her favorite director was David Lynch, and then it became Chen Kaige. Her favorite shirt was the color of a peach peel, and she lost this shirt at Brighton Beach, where we searched for hours under a lunchtime sky. She was furious with me when we didn’t find it. She walked back to the train station alone, in her yellow bikini top and her soaked blue jeans.

Knowing all this was a responsibility. Knowing her favorite director was a responsibility. Her cup-handle ears and peach-peel shirt and her dead baby magpies were a responsibility. Because how could I not know what was happening to her?

She never said anything. I keep groping through my memories for clues, squeezing the body for the tumor that will eventually kill us. Gladys says, I don’t get why people won’t buy that house [my father is selling]. Why would you buy a garden anyway? A garden is just a lot of dirt, and a lot of things that are gonna be dirt very quickly. Gladys says, Fuck off, I’m trying to do work, your

hands smell like cabbage. Gladys says, After we graduate, we should take a year off. Let’s go hiking near Lake Barracoota; let’s go to the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.

We never went hiking in Lake Barracoota, and we never went to the Great Barrier Reef after graduation. Last year, the National Geographic declared Half of the Great Barrier Reef is Dead.

Over the years, our desire had made us furious with each other. We would argue about movies or masturbation until we had to take the last train home, and throw ourselves into seats next to each other, watching drunk businessmen on the opposite side of the carriage undo their ties, shoelaces, and shirts. She would make a pointed effort to ignore me at school for the next day, waiting for the minutes to chew through my pride. After that, I started giving her books and makeup, hoping she would love what I couldn’t. In response, she started stealing perfume testers from department stores, half-empty bottles of Guerlain Mitsouko and Jean Patou Joy, museum scents that made her neck taste like shit.

A few months later, Gladys began telling me things mid-step—in the doorway, leaning out of the car, one foot already pushing down on the bike pedal—as if she couldn’t bear to say anything to me unless she could leave right afterward. I copied your answer to question eight, so you might get suspended for plagiarism. I took $20 from your wallet; I’ll pay you back on Tuesday. I’m sorry I got Eliza’s phone number, I know you hate her—look: I’m not going to text her back. It was mid-step from the train carriage to the saffron lights of the station that she confessed to me, I’m in love with our English teacher. Our English teacher was a heavyset man with rosacea who had taken interest in my writing until he didn’t. She was in love, but she wasn’t happy. She was in love, so she wanted me to stay away.

Still, sometimes I would catch her mid-step. Still, sometimes she would turn back. Gladys became the first person I learned the heartbeat of, and her pain was as heavy as stars. She would do things that made me want to treat her better. She would cover her face with my hair when she slept because it made her feel safe. She would sob into my chest until I couldn’t hear words, only watercolors. But eventually, we’d just end up in bed, doing whatever was on the radio right then. It was during these months that she began making me the playlists that I didn’t listen to until long after the last time I saw her—in a Fitzroy nightclub, in pink laughter that would have splintered had she seen my face.

Just before graduation, I had found condoms in her bag, ripped packets that stunk of Joy. When she didn’t reply to my accusations, for days I couldn’t see a word without hearing how she would pronounce it. It seems a long time ago now, but once, when I questioned an inexplicable purple mark on her thigh, Gladys closed her eyes in hot tears and said, You know, it was going to be you, unless it was me. Gladys says, No, there’s nothing wrong. Gladys says, I can’t seem to make anyone happy, no matter what I do. Gladys says, I’m sorry I’m like this all the

time. You should hate me. Gladys says, Let’s drop out of school and go hiking near Lake Barracoota.

No one says this to me. Not for another two years.

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. It had been three weeks since graduation, and it had been three weeks since Gladys stopped replying to me. I had spent those weeks waking up in cold spiders of panic, in a sweat that smelled like hot metal. My friends who had seen her wanted to tell me that she was enrolled to study fashion, that she had shaved her head, that she let people at parties touch her head. But I didn’t really want to know. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only that the glass had broken.

In the months that followed, I was waiting for trains in the night so I could cry in front of a kaleidoscope of strangers, betting with myself which ones would look away and which ones would stare. I was falling asleep in the backseat of my car in a parking lot, my boots squeaking against the window. There was the week I went without brushing my hair. There was the unconcerned concern of a woman holding plastic bags of grocery store box dye: “Honey, are you okay? Do you want me to call someone?” I was telling people I hadn’t spoken to in months that I was never speaking to them again, blocking their numbers in buses, trains, Ubers, and taxis. I was working department store hours that felt like surgery, waiting for the perfume testers to go missing even though they never did. I was waking up from alcohol poisoning in hospital, convinced I was going to die in a cold room with hot lights.

I was watching people mix new cement for old roads. I was watching the rain for five hours. I was watching my phone ring. It was my mother calling, but I couldn’t go home to a pillow that still smelled of Gladys’s scalp. It was my father calling: He hadn’t seen me in a month, and had made dinner—would I eat it? I was in an alleyway eating microwaved mincemeat with a plastic fork. I was at a college interview with a woman who had terrible dandruff, who said, “You know, someone someday is going to be so in love with you.” I was staring at myself in a public bathroom, in one of those scarred metal mirrors no one can destroy, watching myself get fucked from

behind by a man whose name I had already forgotten. I was realizing weeks later that he had rosacea, just like our high school English teacher.

I was pausing outside because I saw a girl with frizzy hair and a green corduroy jacket. In front of the bar we used to go to, where hands would test our bodies like we were fruit at the supermarket. Behind the alleyway where we used to smoke, next to the weatherboard church with the neon sign. By the ice-cream shop with the greenhouse windows, where our ankles would touch at the basslines. In the park where we saw an old woman tanning in the nude, where you laughed at her sunset skin. I was pausing because I saw a girl with frizzy hair and a green corduroy jacket. But then I would remember that Gladys had shaved her head, and some hairdresser had swept all of her hair into the garbage, without knowing or caring for the hours my fingers had been in it, braided it, combed it, pushed it behind her ears.

In all the years since then, I never learned exactly what happened between Gladys and our English teacher. To tell you the truth, a part of me does not want to know. There is a part of me that wants to keep us on her pus-yellow bedspread forever, next to the bookshelf with the SAT practice tests, under the windchimes that never sounded, her father’s Vietnamese still pleading in the background.

But from the friends we have kept in common, I know that Gladys and our English teacher were in a sexual relationship. I know that it was as “consensual” as it could be, for a sixteenyear-old high school student with failing grades and her forty-seven-year-old teacher. I know that it began during our junior year of high school, and that it lasted until a few months after graduation. I know that his wife divorced him when she found out about Gladys, although she did not report it to the school or the police. I know that despite all those years with him, Gladys said she wasn’t in love, but she wasn’t not in love either.

That is all I know.

Since then, I have traded my high school years for a pristine college in the United States, replete with quick, water-saving showers and a dessicated lake. There, I go to lectures five minutes early so I can sit at the front and I enjoy the cashmere of Californian sunshine on my skin, during the seasons that we have it. My life retains the trappings of normalcy. Every weekend, an Uber takes me past the rising ribs of new homes in my college town. I go to sunny Palo Alto to see a beautiful therapist who wears coral-colored nail polish and patent leather shoes. The therapist likes to tell me I hear you, over and over again. She keeps fresh flowers on her desk that smell like nothing, and a photo of her hypoallergenic Labradoodles framed in silver, and she emails me every time there is a suicide on campus. She says that she is thinking of me, but I’ve never really felt her care.

In response, I have diligently gone to friends’ birthday parties, where I make conversation