The Opiate
Summer 2020, Vol. 22
The Opiate
Your literary dose.
© The Opiate 2020 Cover art: Dan Bannino, “King Henry VIII” from his series, Still Diets Website: www.danbannino.com Instagram: @danbannino This magazine, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. ISSN 2381-859X
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.� -James Baldwin
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The Opiate, Summer Vol. 22
Editor-in-Chief Genna Rivieccio
Editor-at-Large Malik Crumpler
Editorial Advisor
Armando Jaramillo Garcia
Contributing Writers: Fiction: Nina Dunic, “Kin” 10 Chris Stanton, “Some Saturday Night” 16 Alexander Lowell, “My First Communist” 20 Khanh Ha, “Black Shoes” 36 Leanne Grabel, Husband: Chapters 1-7 39
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Poetry: Joel Allegretti, “Child Rapists in Hell” 47-48 Edward L. Canavan, “Reclamation” & “Dare to Breathe” 49-50 Cameron Morse, “Backyard Elegy” 51 Amy Baskin, “Lilith Runs Into Adam and His Trophy Wife in the Diaper Aisle,” “Lilith Nurtures on the Playground,” “Lilith’s Daughter” & “Later, Lilith Runs Into Adam and Eve in the Incontinence Aisle” 52-55 John Grey, “Tanning” & “The Only Sign of Life” 56-57 Thomas Wells, “Remnants” 58
Susie Gharib, “Hyphenated Words” 59 Victor Marrero, “Joker” & “Way Out” 60-62 Sherri Levine, “Intensity” 63 Antonia Alexandra Klimenko, “Serious Moonlight” 64-65
Criticism: Genna Rivieccio, “Cops & the Pig That Built His House Out of Bricks” 67
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The Opiate, Summer Vol. 22
Editor’s Note
From a pandemic to pigs, 2020 has thus far decidedly been the year of the P. My least favorite letter in terms of the onomatopoeic tendencies it possesses, its disgusting non-sonority. In any event, it’s odd to think that the police as an institution might have continued to cling to their unchecked power were it not for one little asshole (whose name you ought to know by now, which doesn’t merit being uttered here) getting “buck wild,” to use the understatement of the century. That if one man hadn’t been the straw to break the camel’s back, the outrage and “no justice, no peace” sentiments of the Rodney King riots might never have come to roost in cities far and wide. Something about it all speaks to the determinist nature of everything. And the irony of a white man so staunch in his belief that his power was immovable that he actually ended up proving quite the opposite. Or so we’ll tell ourselves for now. For there is always the chance that mere placations are made, and one must wait for an entire generation to die out before the true changing of the guard. Granted, there’s something rather bittersweet about that fact. That radical change can only seem to come when the death of one body of individuals born in the same era is complete. So difficult is it to alter people’s way of thinking once they’ve been rooted in a certain way of life for so long. And, as time goes on, it has become apparent that there isn’t much room for “different” ways of thinking when the script is all there laid out for you, designed to ensure that you will not offend or say the wrong thing (lest you get fired full-stop--that is, if you’re one of the rare breeds still able to hold down a job in this century of fake labor). In this regard, it’s easy to understand where a protagonist like the one in Nina Dunic’s “Kin” is coming from. She can’t relate to much of anyone—not family, not faux friends-—as a preadolescent and beyond, for the narrative is told in a flash forward sort of structure. The one person she does feel a connection to, Kinn, is a result of his delicate spirit, his aura of innocence. When others around her turn more and more nefarious, he remains the same unbesmirched soul he always was. In this way, she is comforted by his presence enough to keep going through the motions of school. But when an unanticipated event occurs, she finds herself feeling emptier than ever before--still performing the expected acts of one’s existence (namely, getting a job that is highly monotonous and unsatisfying), but finding no fulfillment in any of it. Once again, she is reminded that Kinn was the only person who lent a remote sense of calm and stability to her life, even if their bond was sealed in silence throughout the time she knew him. In direct contrast to calm and stability, Chris Stanton’s “Some Saturday Night” is the perfect representation of chaos feeding on itself. For all William wanted was to enjoy the company of a girl he liked after moving to the swamplands of Louisiana from Texas. Of course, simple things are always too much to ask of the Fates, particularly when a girl lives with a possessive alcoholic that chases him out into the dead of night with a gun. And so the seemingly “simple” act of going back to her house after a movie turns into an evening of terror as he tries his best to navigate through the muddy, insectridden topography of a land he knows so little of apart from this highly precarious landscape. Alas, every time he thinks he might be in the clear, some unforeseen force of nature intervenes. Not unlike the experience of living through 2020 (which, though we’ve only gotten halfway through, somehow already feels like two years in six months).
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It makes one yearn for more analog days, to be sure. Like, say, Paris in the 70s, which is the place and time Alexander Lowell’s “My First Communist” transpires. Detailing the events that led to Alex taking the risk on moving overseas, those who have experienced the expatriate life-—or even just
traveled alone--will empathize with the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that can overtake you when you’ve moved to a city and country where you don’t really know anyone. That even despite the giddy feeling that comes with having escaped your homeland, you still can’t quite solve the puzzle of how to be alone with yourself. Luckily--or perhaps unluckily--Alex has an encounter with a mysterious woman named Zahra, who is quick to inform him of one very important fact when they return to her apartment from the café: she’s a communist. To think, there was a time when that would scandalize rather than titillate an American. As things in her abode get progressively weirder, Alex grows increasingly impatient with his mercurial host--and yet, he has to wonder, as everyone in Paris does: could this be true love? The common thread between this story and the next, Khanh Ha’s “Black Shoes,” is the often inevitable need to work a service job in order to make ends meet. In this instance, our leading man is at the mercy of the paternal chastising of “old George,” the maître d’ of the restaurant he works at in Manhattan to make a bit of extra cash for school (soon to be a defunct or reinvented institution). While old George is “nice” enough, he keeps hounding our waiter with demands to wear black shoes while on the job, something that was never mentioned during the interview. Then again, because old George seems like the type who would be part of a mafia family, our black shoes-evader takes his instruction to heart--with his own special loophole to it. Loophole-navigating is also a skill one must learn to cultivate in a marriage, as Leanne Grabel shows us in the first seven chapters of her latest addition to The Opiate (after we serialized Brontosaurus, concluding in Vol. 20), Husband, which we look forward to publishing more of in the future (if there is one, that is). For those who make it in advance of the “the future”—a.k.a. the “great beyond”—we have plenty of, let’s say, spiritual images conjured in the poetry section. Take, for example, the commencing poem, “Child Rapists in Hell,” by Joel Allegretti. Invoking the power of Dante to effectively condemn, who else, child rapists (sometimes better known as Catholic priests), Allegretti’s vivid representation of hell is one you will not soon forget. To lighten the promise of eternal hellfire for select knaves, Edward L. Canavan’s “Reclamation“ offers perspective on the inherent interconnectedness of all things, even those entities that seem unlike one another—so it is that “the briar and the rose are all part of the same plan.” His second piece, “Dare to Breathe,” proposes a much needed angle on the collective viewpoint of the moment, with everyone so frantic to return to a “normal” that no longer exists. Canavan reminds us, “We [find] out where we are/once we let go of where we’ve been.” Cameron Morse’s “Backyard Elegy,” too, enlists a similar theme of letting go, with the symbol of an “old dog giving chase” to the same tired things eliciting the bittersweet feeling we’ve all known: continuing to go after something that doesn’t necessarily serve us any longer. Sort of the way God seemed to feel about Lilith in relation to Adam. So it is that Amy Baskin brings us back to the biblical with a quartet of poems centered on Lilith and some of her awkward encounters with Adam... and Eve. Though of course she has her own separate time from them, nurturing children, as the Original Woman is expected to do. For un certain summer feel, at least in title, look no further than John Grey’s “Tanning,” an eloquent allegory for the body’s ultimate return to the soil. A similarly sparse yet striking poem by Grey called “The Only Sign of Life” follows. In many ways, for those who have watched Dark, it will remind one instantly of the fictional (yet all too real) town of Winden, Germany.
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The Opiate, Summer Vol. 22 The notion of a hyper-intense form of reflection as a result of having the time to look back manifests again in Thomas Wells’ “Remnants.” Using the figure of Epimetheus (the Titan whose name can be translated to “hindsight”) to underscore the benefit of being able to start all over again, whether metaphorically or literally, with the knowledge of one’s past, Wells remarks, “In sobriety, I recall all my splinters and ruptures.” So do we all in this existence called self-quarantining. Allowing for plenty of hours to reflect on everything from systemic racism to the ruin of one’s love life, the effects of corona have been both general and broad, specific and niche. To contrast the mood again, Susie Gharib’s playful “Hyphenated Words” will surely appeal to every writer’s inner linguist as she takes us on a safari of wordplay by using primarily, how-could-you-not-haveguessed, hyphenated words. Among some of the hyphenated ones you might be familar with outside this poem are “money-grubbing,” which is what every institution is... even when the extraordinary circumstances of something like COVID-19 takes hold of people’s financial circumstances. To that end, Victor Marrero’s “Joker” details just how easy it is for one’s fortunes to change with the roll of Fate’s loaded dice. This motif transitions seamlessly into “Way Out,” Marrero’s exploration of humanity’s constant search for an evasion from the fact that, in life, there are “no backtracks. No side shows or detours.” It’s all one straight shot to death row... and 2020 has all the more intensified that unpleasant reality we so hate to acknowledge. Something in Sherri Levine’s visual poem (the first of its kind ever published in The Opiate) speaks to that sentiment as well. Her deeply moving image says more than quite a few prose poems, and is a lovely homage to her mother, who died earlier this year. Sherri has been kind enough to include the following eulogy to commemorate her passing: “Soon, I will enter your room and hold you in my arms, crawl into your skin. We can swim into the ocean, in the sparkling waves, our backs arched, somersaulting, tugging the tide, then letting go.” To round out the poetry is the always whimsical honorary Parisian Antonia Alexandra Klimenko with “Serious Moonlight.” A glorious homage to that luminous light that makes us all a little crazy at times as it pulls the tides this way and that way, along with our moods, Klimenko’s poetry could very well be adapted into a screenplay with lines that work like scenes, including, “Soon/who knows?/I may be driven to suicide!/The moon made me do it I’ll say/or why else would I marry a werewolf?” On a separate note, anyone worth their weight in camp propensities should see An American Werewolf in Paris. To keep in line with this issue’s cover, the criticism from yours truly, “Cops & the Pig That Built His House Out of Bricks,” reexamines the meaning of the classic fable, “The Three Little Pigs,” to fit within the modern lens of what is presently happening with the dismantling of the police as we’ve all (but, of course, mainly black people) come to know and disrespect it. But maybe, just maybe, if the concept of policing in America could be built on something not so effortlessly “blow downable” by protesters calling bullshit on the entire organization, well, then maybe effective change could really happen. So it is that we’ve come to the end. And the beginning at the same time. Ain’t that always the dichotomy? Sincerely,
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Genna Rivieccio
FICTION
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The Opiate, Summer Vol. 22
Kin Nina Dunic
1989
S
he was an angry and easily hurt child, face shut up like a fist, mouth snapped up tight. She was nine. She was taller than most kids, strong, with big arms and white legs. She was prone to a sore stomach, afraid to tell her mother and having to answer questions about it; she didn’t know how to describe it either. It didn’t seem to hurt all the time, but when she thought about it, it felt sore. Every day she walked to school through the damp, early morning grasses, soothed by how many quiet minutes she had alone between the loud, ugly interiors of her home and the crowded scenes at school. Most of the time, more than anything, she felt bored. She had nine stretches of sidewalk, four lengths of grass. The last length was the longest, across the undrawn soccer fields to get to the school. All along the way, lined by small townhouses. Standing and waiting with the others in gym class, she was too tall, looking down on all of their heads. Most girls fell into semi-formed circles, backs out, while the boys moved in and out of ragged assemblies, restless and loud. At recess she wandered with Ammia, whom she did not like
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very much, except that she was reliably present, hovering by the doors and waiting to walk out together. Ammia was ordinary, inside and out. And she knew already that she was not like Ammia, she was not ordinary. She could see it in the way the other girls looked at her—their eyes changed. She was too tall, distracted by strange moods. The boys did not look at her and she did not look at them. Ammia’s hair was a black bowl around her slightly fat face. “There’s a new boy starting soon,” she said, plainly. “My brother said.” She was trying to hit a small ball against the ground so it bounced up against the building and returned to her, dutifully. She was trying to find a rhythm with it. She was also counting in her head, although she was beginning to suspect it was not fun anymore—but still she was counting, and liked ending on fives. Ammia was standing off to the side, watching. She was focused on the satisfying pop-pop of the rubber ball against the concrete ground and the brick wall —and the counting. Ending on a five, taking a short break. Ammia didn’t say anything else. A few days later, a thin boy stood at the front of class. She looked at him, alarmed.
Kin - Nina Dunic
1990 Kinn, that she could see, did not talk to anyone at school. Ever. Teachers asked questions of him and he quietly answered, but there was nothing else. She watched him, carefully, for months. She waited to catch him break from his game. She rarely saw him at recess—he went to a hiding spot somewhere, or maybe stayed in the school, she could not figure it out. Once in awhile he was outside, wandering around, looking at boys but not going to them. She wasn’t sure why she watched him. She examined the speck of it, carefully, not knowing what it meant. She would turn away, scratching her arm, looking at the rows of houses beyond the loose collection of trees. Then she would turn and look back. Kinn was slim and dark, with thin arms and legs; he had tight black hair and eyelashes that seemed to flick upward at the corners of his eyes. He was slight but moved slowly, like a much larger animal would. His neck like a deer. The other children streamed through the halls and fields, crowding and dispersing in noisy herds, chasing and laughing. He was a small thing at the edge of her vision at all times—apart, and unwounded by it. Mostly she was curious to watch him start talking, feeling she would notice something that was special. But he held still, and silent. She hadn’t been counting days, but eventually she realized she could recall his first day of school —the day and the month it was. It occurred to her while she was in class and she waited until she got home to count the days on a calendar, and then she kept the number in her mind, adding one as each day passed. It was her new game. When he finally spoke, it was on a five.
He walked over to some boys and they spoke to each other. She was too far away to hear what they said; she stood halfway across the field and froze as if a dark doom was approaching in the sky. “What is it?” Ammia said, pulling her juice box down from her mouth. She didn’t hear the question. She went home after school and put her bag down on the pile of shoes by the front door, kicking off her own, hurrying to be alone in her room. One of her brothers stopped in the hall, holding a bag of chips and chewing. His hair was lighter than everyone else’s in the family, blondish, spiky. He saw where her backpack fell, shouted, “Not on my fucking shoes!” and picked up a tissue box from a nearby side table. He whipped it at her. The box didn’t have enough weight to get close; turning gently in the air, it fell to the ground. Her mother, sitting in the adjoining room, said nothing. She moved her bag roughly, off the shoes, and went upstairs. She closed the door and crawled onto the bed, turning and lying on her back. Her blood was moving quickly and when she thought of Kinn it started to slow down. All this time, she could have spoken to him herself—and he would have spoken back. It was curious that she did not think of it before. Now she saw everything within this frame. The dead rabbit she found along the edges of backyards. The neighbour’s fat dogs, how it was funny at first, but not later. Her three brothers, mean and loud. She thought of what she could tell him, thinking of the words, choosing them, choosing them again. But in the days and weeks after, she did not speak to him. When he was around, she went into a black mood—grasping at something, becoming angry and silent. She found she could not. Kinn soon talked to the boys regularly. She watched, not having anything to count, from different parts of the school field.
Ammia was drifting away from her, toward other girls, joining the edges of a group with a loud girl in the middle. She noticed it but did not follow her. Already the teacher was telling her mother she was different, and she was sensing that other people were noticing and distancing themselves. The empty space around her was growing.
1992 In seventh grade, Kinn stopped talking again. They had come back from the summer and assembled in restless packs in their same familiar hallways, moving to different rooms. She saw his delicate shoulders, long neck, his head set slightly forward and always looking in that direction, straight-gazed— she felt again, as she felt before, that he was older than everyone else. But unhurried. In those loud halls—quiet and potent. The summer had been a long, bland stretch of time that she did not count, until it was closer to the end. Five weeks left, four. She had spent some time in those months reorganizing her closet and refolding her clothes, then watching television into the evening. Her eldest brother was growing quieter, lost in thicker moods, sensing manhood in some of his peers and older boys in the neighbourhood. He ignored her. Her other brothers still sought her out for occasional lashes of cruelty and she avoided the living room, where they often languished in the heat. At night, she stood in the backyard with her small, brown dog wandering around the edge of the fence, sniffing, and waited for him to relieve himself. His name was Pancho. She studied the stars and thought they didn’t look real, or at least it didn’t seem possible. The summer had passed slowly. And now, standing in the hallway, lined up to enter a class, she saw the back of Kinn’s head—a short
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