TheSummerOpiate 2024,
The Opiate
Your literary dose.
© The Opiate 2024
Cover art: La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, 1830 This magazine, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. Contact theopiatemagazine@gmail.com for queries.
“Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking.”
-Jenny Holzer
The Opiate, Summer
38
Editor-in-Chief
Genna Rivieccio
Editor-at-Large
Malik Crumpler
Editorial Advisor
Anton Bonnici
Contributing Writers:
Fiction:
Jason Escareno, “Cornucopia” 10
Danila Botha, “Complicatedly Jewish” 22
John Whalen-Bridge, “Secret Love” 30
Kevin Brown, “Unstable Frames” 35
Joseph Couchet, “Delicate Features” 42
William K. Burke, “Braden” 47
Nonfiction:
Joel Savishinsky, “Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei” 63 Poetry:
Frankie Laufer, “Enthusiastic Indifference” 85
Stephen Barile, “Eating Reds & Drinking Beer” 86-88
Rich McFarlin, “Broken Hearts” 89
Heidi Joffe, “Homemade” & “Etymology” 90-91
Stephanie Watkins, “Magnolia” & “Fault Line” 92-94
Dale Champlin, “My Hips Don’t Lie,” “First Fuck” & “I Love You More Than the World” 95-97
Dina Fiasconaro, “Infinity Plus One” 98
Sophie Roy, “When do you get to be angry?” & “B.O.W. (bitch, obviously wait)” 99-103
Susan Richardson, “Where Pain Drops Dead,” “Ugly Girls” & “Isolation Tank” 104-108
Velibor Baco, “Away” 109
Frank Freeman, “Of Toulouse-Lautrec,” “After the Phone Call,” “New Wine” & “Psycho” 110-113
Ron Kolm, “The Cutting Room Floor” 114
Ella Middleton, “The Cat Business” & “Poem For the State of the World” 115-117
Criticism:
Genna Rivieccio, “The Only Thing That’s Timeless Is Totalitarianism Justified Through War: Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song” 119
Editor’s Note
“Time is a flat circle.” That’s what Reggie Ledoux, one of the many creeps in the first season of True Detective, told Rust Cohle before his partner, Marty Hart, shot the guy’s brains out. Malevolent human trafficker/drug supplier or not, he wasn’t wrong. While some would simply state this Ledoux-backed aphorism as, “History repeats itself,” the “time is a flat circle” notion is more nuanced than that. It isn’t just about history repeating, but individuals themselves repeating the same behaviors. Not only repeating them, but being damned to. As Rust put it, “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”
His philosophy (a nihlistic one, of course) is a riff on what Friedrich Nietzsche initially postulated in The Gay Science. A theory based on “eternal return.” In other words, “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’” Of this scenario, Nietzsche asks, “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”
For many people (the sort who insist they wouldn’t want to be vampires [or caught in a different kind of eternal life scenario à la Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp in Death Becomes Her] and live forever), there is no moment so “divine” as to make it worthwhile enough for them to want their existence to keep repeating interminably. Especially when those few moments of so-called divinity are more than made up for by all the horrible, unspeakably cruel ones. Ones that we’re seeing amplify at an increasing and alarming rate as 2024 progresses. It isn’t just
the war between Ukraine and Russia, or the war that has quickly made that one fall by the wayside in media coverage: the Israel-Hamas war (as They are calling it). It is the wars we don’t hear about as well. The ones that either never cease or constantly reanimate, depending on your viewpoint. The ones in Sudan and Somalia, or Myanmar and Afghanistan. So many places where armed conflict does not get a media light shined on it. Either because those “conflicts” (to use understatement) are not centered around white people or because another, more “Western-related” conflict takes over the attention in the news cycle. Indeed, it’s beyond tragic that people have been conditioned to view wars and atrocities as part of a news cycle. As though, just because the media is no longer covering it, it means it’s no longer occurring. Or, to repurpose a popular platitude, “If a child’s face gets blown off in the forest, and a camera wasn’t there to document it, did it really happen?”
As far as the masses outside of the affected areas are concerned, no it did not. Then again, even with the cameras spotlighting fullon genocides, it seems as though most are content to either keep pretending everything is fine, or do their best to rationalize the brutality in some way. Not to cause an uproar by mentioning Woody Allen, but one of his lead characters, Boris Yelnikoff (Larry David, still beloved despite his erstwhile alliance with Allen), in Whatever Works, sums it up best when he remarks, “‘The horror,’ Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness. ‘The horror.’ Lucky Kurtz didn’t have the Times delivered in the jungle, then he’d see some horror. But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go, ‘Oh, my God, the horror!’ And then you turn the page and finish your eggs from free-range chickens. Because what can you do? It’s overwhelming.”
If it sounds disgusting (and, more often than not, like a sign of white privilege), that’s because it is. And that’s because humanity itself is. Not just because of the horrors people are capable of inflicting on others, but the sheer complacency in the face of watching it all unfold from the comfort of one’s own home. Like entertainment. This ouroboros of human iniquity is doomed to repeat until the species
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38 itself dies out.
In other words, when it comes to the breadth and ceaselessness of our monstrous behavior toward one another, “Time is a flat circle.” Some might view this perspective as a nihilistic (hence, Nietzsche’s involvement) or apathetic take on existence. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accurate one. Try as we might to soothe ourselves with talk of all “the good” that humanity is capable of. But it’s difficult to think of the last major example of that. It’s also difficult to understand why the term “inhumanity“ is meant to underscore particularly cruel behavior when, in fact, “humanity” is synonymous with the word “cruel.“
On the cover of this issue is the image Eugène Delacroix painted to encapsulate the July Revolution in France (the French flag is deliberately omitted from the image in this case, as pretty much any country can fit the bill for what’s going on here). Titled Liberty Leading the People (or La Liberté guidant le peuple), it is meant to signify that the proverbial common man will always triumph against his oppressor, that Liberty will invariably favor the oppressed in the long run---especially if they’re willing to fight for it. Cut to 2024, when France, a self-styled champion of liberty, is in its own oppressing, violent conflict with one of its colonial-era territories, New Caledonia. (Time is a flat circle.)
And so it would seem that even if the common man becomes “free,” he is condemned to fall into the role of oppressor once said liberty is achieved (see also: Israel and Palestine). Almost as though forgetting entirely what it was like to be subjugated, once upon a time. The implication of Liberty trailing a sea of bodies in her wake speaks to that fact. For one person’s freedom is, inevitably, another person’s annihilation...often literally.
Not pulling any punches, Genna Rivieccio
Summer 2024
FICTION
Cornucopia
Jason Escareno
Hecame back from Alcatraz like a man who had just gotten out of Alcatraz. Like someone who had aged in prison, someone who had celebrated birthdays in prison...
For his fiftieth birthday, he goes to Alcatraz. It’s a surprise. His wife arranges everything, she calls his boss and tells him her husband needs the time off. She arranges the flight, the car rental, the tickets. Her husband is in love with prisons. He’s infatuated with prisons. Obsessed with prisons. The idea of prison comforts him. All this evil we’ve managed to trap.
Though sometimes we send the wrong person there...
His favorite movie is about a prison, The Shawshank Redemption. It seems to him that movie got a lot of things right. He loves that movie. He’s seen it a hundred times. He has memorized the entire script.
He has no idea he’s going to Alcatraz until he wakes up that morning and starts preparing for work.
“No work today,” his wife tells him. She says her sister is coming over to watch the kids. “We’re getting on a plane in two hours and flying to San Francisco. We’re going to Alcatraz. Happy birthday!”
It’s windy on the boat ride to Alcatraz. He’s like a dog in a car with his head out the window.
“This is the best gift ever.” He really can’t believe it’s happen-
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno ing. “We’re actually going to Alcatraz.”
“I’ve been to Alcatraz a hundred times at least,” the guy beside him announces. He’s a local. He says that every time anyone visits him, they insist on being taken to Alcatraz. “It’s nothing special.”
There’s an army of Asians on the boat. Each with their own high-powered camera.There’s a young couple, wearing shirts that identify them as newlyweds. They’re in love. It makes him think: how long since him and his wife had sex? How long since they kissed? Since they held each other’s hand? Of course, it was no longer practical. Maybe not even feasible. They’re both overweight. It’s harder to do those things overweight. Those things don’t feel sexy anymore when you’re overweight. He could understand why a whale might beach itself.
“How come we never do it anymore?”
“Do you really want to?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Why are you asking this now?”
Inside the prison cafeteria, the tour guide reveals that it’s Joel’s birthday, and the group sings “Happy Birthday.” There’s even a cake and candles. The guy who has been to Alcatraz a hundred times is first in line for a piece of cake. Asians photograph his fiftieth birthday. Joel realizes he has an erection—a birthday erection. A prison boner in the Alcatraz cafeteria. What on God’s green earth is he supposed to do with that?
They spend the rest of the day in San Francisco, just walking around downtown. A homeless woman on the sidewalk breastfeeds her baby. A starving dog passes by.
It’s the best birthday ever.
It isn’t until after Joel comes back from Alcatraz that he learns about the idea of the flicker. The power of this idea is given to him by his priest.
“I want your kids on that bus,” the priest says. The bus in question is headed to a pro-life rally in Washington, D.C.
“I don’t know that they will be,” Joel responds.
“I’m telling you they will be.”
The priest is disgusted with Joel for not bringing his kids to church last week; he would punish Joel if he could. He would put his entire family on the wrong side of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych if he could.
“You cannot miss church. We live in evil times. Your kids cannot
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
miss church. It’s your responsibility—you are in charge—to make sure you and your family are in church every Sunday. I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation, the future is at stake. You have a sacred duty to preserve Christianity. Your family depends on you. You’re responsible for them.”
The priest likes explaining the catechism as though it were his sex life. The priest likes telling, and Joel likes listening.
“I am going to tell you something that will serve you for the rest of your life.” He made his voice big. “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old Earth keeps rolling. We can never stop worrying over
“He’s infatuated with prisons. Obsessed with prisons. The idea of prison comforts him. All this evil we’ve managed to trap. Though sometimes we send the wrong person there… His favorite movie is about a prison, The Shawshank Redemption.”
the flicker. If we let the flicker go out, civilization will end. The Church is the flicker.”
The power of this idea consoles him. Everything is different once he learns about the flicker.
The priest had known Joel’s wife her entire life, had baptized her and her sister. Had buried their father. Joel converted to Catholicism to get married. But he didn’t mind. He was very taken with the Catholic Church—its wealth, its traditions and its mysteries.
Joel and his son, an altar boy, had carried the monstrance in church today. Afterward, Joel had inquired about the need for the monstrance.
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno
The priest tells Joel about the power of the Eucharist, about transubstantiation. “There is a saint who lived thirty-five years eating nothing but the Holy Communion.”
His priest fills his head with the lives of the saints and martyrs, and Joel chases obediently after them.
Joel was already hard to be friends with before he went to Alcatraz. But when he came back from it, he was impossible to be friends with. He was always in a bad temper. I think I was his only remaining friend at work.
Where we work is the largest meatpacking plant in the Midwest, and it’s like prison. At this prison, pork is king. We’re the hog butcher for the world, like that poem. We process pork all damn day long, pig after pig comes to us. The drains fill with more blood than the French national anthem. We will never run out of pigs to cut. There are guards inside and outside the plant.
Joel has the instincts of an inmate. He was always saying, “Let’s make our escape.”
I’d gotten a job after graduation but, once they did the background check, the offer was withdrawn. I’d been brought back to the plant after my attempted escape.
Joel hated everyone but me—I think he hated his own parents.
Joel used to brag about his parents going to visit all fifty states. What they did is they made their way across the country by working at hotels. But now, they only had a few states left and Joel was not bragging.
“I pray that something happens to stop them from visiting all fifty states. It would really upset me if they achieve it.”
He told me that right now they are working at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.
“I know you like Stephen King,” he remarked. My parents are at the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining.”
“That hotel is in Colorado,” I reminded. “The Timberline inspired the movie, not the book.”
He didn’t even hear me.
“My dad said Bill Clinton is staying there. He gave my mom a hundred dollars for a bottle of water. I told my dad, ‘Good thing Willy didn’t ask her for a cigar.’”
Joel has spent thirty-two years at the meatpacking plant. He started when he was eighteen. He dropped out of business school to cut
meat. He should be eligible for sainthood.
Joel hates his job, he’s always hated his job. He lives off his wife’s income. She does the numbers for Boy Scouts of America or something similar. She brings home the bacon, he burns the bacon. She wears the pants. Joel doesn’t work hard. He’s making time. He’s playing that long game. He does the bare minimum.
“You don’t belong here,” Joel told me. “You’re not one of us meatheads.”
But I was beginning to think I did belong. Maybe it was all I was meant to do.
Joel mentioned that when he went to visit his grandmother in her nursing home last night, a ninety-year-old in a wheelchair confronted him at the door. “‘I ought to kick your ass,’” the old man said to me. I asked him why he wanted to kick my ass. ‘That flicker in your eyes,’ he said.”
Joel invites me to the bar where he is meeting his sister-in-law for a birthday drink. She’s bringing her boyfriend.
“You brought someone from work,” the sister-in-law notes. “I thought they were all idiots at work. You said everyone at work is an idiot.”
“They are, except him... Let the drinking commence.” Joel’s face is bloated already.
The sister-in-law is named Chris. She’s beautiful enough that I can’t be left alone with her. I can’t be left alone in the same room as her. Who knows what she might inspire me to do? I don’t trust myself, I really don’t.
Her boyfriend is a beefcake. He’s built. He keeps catching me looking at his pectoral muscles. I even caught him looking at his own pectoral muscles, like he was holding a good hand of cards.
The four of us are at a table. The conversation was initially awkward. It was like coming to a four-way stop: who was going to speak first?
Chris says, “I’ve heard about you. You’re the college boy.”
She was fit. She had a well-maintained body. The boyfriend shook my hand, but I didn’t catch his name. What did I need his name for?
“You’re the guy who got Chris to come back to church,” Joel offers.
He beams. “That’s me.” The boyfriend is big in the Catholic
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno Church, he’s Catholic Church royalty. He is the Mel Gibson of the Catholic Church. He paid for the bus that took Joel’s kids to the pro-life rally in D.C.
When the boyfriend goes to the bathroom, Joel starts in on Chris. “Are you going be a slut tonight? Are you going to sleep with this guy?”
I know from work conversations that Joel and Chris have a weird dynamic. What’s weird about them is she fills his head with her sex life. She tells him all about it. He is her diary. She spares him no details. She liked telling, he liked hearing. Her sex life excited him. The first time with a woman, the first time having anal sex. He is a witness to her sex life. She told him other things: when she was on her period, when she found a lump in her breast, her fear of death after losing her father. She told him everything. Joel listened. She had no one else capable of listening. She trusted him. He could see every one of her sins, no part of her was hidden from him.
“Joel hates his job, he’s always hated his job. He lives off his wife’s income. She does the numbers for Boy Scouts of America or something similar. She brings home the bacon, he burns the bacon. She wears the pants. Joel doesn’t work hard. He’s making time. He’s playing that long game. He does the bare minimum.”
Many times, he had prayed that Chris would turn ugly like her sister.
“I’m going to do more than that,” she declares. “I’m going to be such a whore. I’m going to be his personal whore. Whatever he wants, I’m going to do it.”
I can see the way Joel looks at her—the same way you look at San Francisco from Alcatraz.
“I hope he enjoys himself,” Joel mutters.
“He will,” Chris assures.
“You’re forty years old.”
“I know that, so what?”
“Nothing, I’m just telling you. You are forty years old. This guy you’re with looks like a kid beside you.”
“Fuck you.”
“He’s going to want kids.”
“He doesn’t. He just said no to kids last time it came up.”
“He also says no to abortions. I know that much. Have you told him about the abortion?”
The boyfriend appears at that moment. Everyone waits for him to talk.
“What do you do, Joel?”
“I cut meat.”
“That’s still a thing? With the apprentice and journeymen?”
“Yes. I don’t want to talk about my job. I hate my job.”
The boyfriend gives us a sermon on his success. Did anyone ask for this sermon? He talks like he’s the high school valedictorian: clear enunciation, room for applause. He’s thirty-one. He’s a realtor. He’s a bodybuilder. He started from nothing and now he is a freak of nature.
“I worked hard to get where I am. What you need to do in order to be successful is create goals,” he instructs. “You know what? You need to find a job with a union. That could be one goal for you. If you had put in all that time in a union shop, that would be invaluable.”
“I’m union,” Chris chimes in. She’s an elementary school teacher.
I know a little about these weightlifter types—sometimes they can’t lift their arms over their head. The muscles get in the way. He probably can’t lift his arms over his head. He can’t do the YMCA dance.
“This bar is lousy,” Joel grumbles. We had all run out of alcohol. “My goal is to get another beer.”
Then the boyfriend reveals he’s the owner of the bar.
“I own this bar.” He snaps his fingers and drinks appear. That sort of power was dangerous. If he asked for a head on a platter, that would appear too.
That sure changed things for everyone though. Chris is moved to know her boyfriend owns the bar. They will form a greedy pair.
There’s this boredom emanating from the boyfriend. He’s
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno
bored with this conclusion, this revealing of himself as owner of this bar—he’s done it a million times before.
“I’m not bragging,” he insists. “I didn’t want to tell you.”
Joel looks like he might be getting sick to his stomach. He inhales a beer. He starts rambling about the flicker. He starts talking good versus evil. He’s speaking from an elevation, from a height. He’s on his high horse. He’s crushing Ottoman forces. Expelling Saracen opponents. Preserving Christendom from the Turks. It’s as if he is revealing himself to be the saint that spent thirty-seven years on a pillar.
But the boyfriend knows all about the flicker. He has forgotten more about the flicker than Joel will ever learn.
“Did you know that she had an abortion? That woman you’re sitting beside has had at least one that I know of. She is a baby killer. This woman sins without restraint,” Joel pronounces.
“Shut up,” Chris snaps. She had a look of pain on her face—an imitation of pain.
The boyfriend has had enough. He tells Chris he doesn’t think they should take things any further.
“This isn’t going to work,” he says to Chris.
Joel holds the back of his head—a pain is developing there.
“This place is a dump,” Joel seethes. “You own a dump.”
The boyfriend scoffs. “Get the hell out of my bar.”
I’m left alone with Chris.
“So how about a ride, College Boy?”
I’m thinking about the boyfriend’s chest and how many pushups he can do.
Chris lives in the middle of nowhere, way out in West Olive. She won’t talk in the car. She is no longer having fun. She doesn’t like my smoking. She is looking out the window thinking about what it would be like to have sex with me.
The first thing she does is pull down her visor to look at herself in the mirror. A Polaroid of a naked Black woman falls out of it. She’s offended. She acts like a snake slithered onto her lap.
“Sorry. It’s just a photograph of someone that I know.”
I’m depending on her for directions, but she soon passes out. It’s nothing but blueberry and poultry farms out here. It’s getting late. It’s getting pitch black. I have to work in the morning.
“You murderous bitch,” I call her. I just want to see if she’s really asleep.
Indeed, she is. Her forehead quivers. She’s a slab of beef. Aged beef. I start recounting my knowledge of aged beef aloud to myself. Then I get sidetracked, thinking about underaged beef. That is, veal.
“Veal is the opposite of aged beef, it’s underaged beef, it’s the child porn of the meat industry. These children are born in a swing, and never touch the ground.”
I’m driving for miles talking to myself. I’m okay spending time inside my own head. I’m talking about my job and being overeducated for it.
“I’ve cut meat three summers straight to get through college.”
The slab of beef is snoring. I think about throwing her over a bridge. I could tie a heavy stone around her neck and dump her in the Grand River. I even slow down when I get to the drawbridge. I tap my brakes.
The brake tapping wakes Chris up. Groggily, she asks, “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.” Now that she’s awake, I have to be quiet.
A deer leaps in front of the car and disappears before we can react.
Chris rubs her eyes. “Was that real?”
I don’t know the answer to that. I want to say that deer was a psychopomp. But I had never used that word in conversation before. I had only read it.
“What kind of teacher are you?”
“A gym teacher,” she replies.
“I know that. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is: do you put students in the hallway when they don’t behave?”
“Of course. That’s my job. I make them do push-ups.”
“You would have put me in the hallway. I was always in the hallway.”
Chris wiggles in her seat like she has something to say. “Um... what do you think of me?”
“What are you asking?”
“What do you think about a woman like me who does what she has to...you know, has an abortion?”
“In my book, it’s okay what you did. It’s your right. But it’s not my book you’re worried about.”
“If it wasn’t legal, I wouldn’t have gotten an abortion in the first place, the government should have never made it legal to have an abortion. They make it so easy.”
“You really don’t eat meat?” I ask this like it has some bearing on her abortion.
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno
“No. If I had my druthers, people wouldn’t eat meat. Turn here. I live down this road about four more miles.”
“Druthers” is another word I have never heard in actual conversation. But now that I’ve heard it, it’s mine all mine.
There’s nothing but dense, deciduous forest on either side of the road, occasionally a mailbox and a long driveway.
“‘I am going to tell you something that will serve you for the rest of your life.’ He made his voice big. ‘We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old Earth keeps rolling. We can never stop worrying over the flicker. If we let the flicker go out, civilization will end. The Church is the flicker.’ The power of this idea consoled him. Everything was different when he learned about the flicker.”
“Pull over at this produce stand that’s coming up. On my side.”
When I do, Chris gets out of the car. She lifts the plywood covering the front of the produce stand and gets back in the car with two T. S. Eliot peaches.
“It’s okay. I take stuff from here all the time. The family doesn’t care. I know the family. The kids are in my class. They’re chubby,” she laughs.
She hands me a peach and I’m overcome by the smell of it. It’s so cold. I take a bite and nearly veer off the road. Juice runs down my chin.
I drop her off at her house. She doesn’t invite me inside. She has school tomorrow, she says.
“Tomorrow I’m testing kids for the Presidential Fitness Test.”
As soon as I start backing out of the driveway, I get to thinking
about that produce stand. I was going to drive past it on my way back home. I knew right away I was going to have to stop there and get some fruits and vegetables. It was like a switch. All I could think of was that produce stand, and there was nothing holding me back.
I look in both directions for oncoming cars. There’s no one out here. I lift the plywood. It feels like I’m lifting a dress over a girl’s head. I start taking things, putting them in my back seat. Baskets of tomatoes, peppers, green beans, squash, cucumbers—cukes, they call them. Then I pile on the fruits. I should have thought about this before I started. I should have put vegetables on one side and fruit on the other, but it’s too late.
I see there’s a sign with prices listed. This is the honor system, just like the old days, the beginning days. There’s another sign that says, “Pay Here.” But I’m not going to pay. There’s never any question in my mind. I’m not going to pay for this produce.
I take everything. I wipe them out. Watermelons, muskmelons, honeydews, these all went two-by-two into the backseat like they were going into the ark.
There’s no way to get caught. I start thinking that I’m going to treat my family to these fruits and vegetables. I would need their help eating this bounty. I think about how my dad likes to salt his fruit before he eats it.
There’s an aluminum cash box. It rattles with change when I shake it. I’m not interested in taking money.
I start to wonder, during the various trips back and forth from the produce stand to my back seat... How would this look? If someone saw me, a college graduate, stealing produce? Imagine if someone saw me—if my family saw me! It would shock them to see it. They would be horrified. My social worker sister would be brainspotting me.
I try to picture the family that owns the stand. The kids waking up the next morning, overjoyed at first to see everything gone. Calculating in their pretty little heads how much money should be in the cash box. They’d have the money spent in their heads before they even realized it wasn’t there. I contemplate putting a note in the cash box. They deserve some explanation. What should the note say? After a few minutes, I write “cornucopia” on a slip of paper and place it in the cash box. That would set them thinking. They would probably say that word out loud. They would ask their parents what that word means. Their parents would say, “I know what the word means, but I don’t know what this slip of paper means. I don’t know what this note means.” But it would be their word going forward.
In the end, they’d treat this like a highway robbery. They would
Cornucopia - Jason Escareno
tell others with produce stands in the area to be careful. “There is an animal on the loose. Darkness was here yesterday.”
I was leaving more tracks than necessary. I might even inspire copycats.
I put at least a hundred pounds of produce in my back seat. It’s so dark I can’t see everything I’m stealing, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not causing anyone to starve. This is surplus produce. That’s important to me—no one’s starving here.
It’s so easy, as if they wanted it to get taken. I can’t believe how easy it is, and that it didn’t bother me to do it. I didn’t get upset with myself. There is no moral dilemma to wrestle with. If I get caught, then I might be forced to wrestle, but not now. If I get caught, people would be upset at first, then they’d let it go. They’d even feel sorry for me. They’d feel sorry that I had to steal fruit. Even the family I was stealing from. They’d say I needed help—I needed therapy. Then shock therapy if regular therapy didn’t work. Even that might never fix me. But people do little things like this all the time. They still get elected. We still vote for them.
I now have to keep the windows down because the smell is pungent. I’m freezing to death. I make sure to obey the speed limit the entire way home. I can’t risk getting pulled over. How would I explain it? I was constantly preparing for getting pulled over in those days... If a cop did pull me over, he’d approach my car carrying a big flashlight that he’d shine in my back seat. I’d put my hands over my head. I would give the only explanation that made any sense: it was her fault. She gave me fruit.
Complicatedly Jewish
Danila Botha
When I first met Tiff, she assumed that, like her, I also had a parent who wasn’t born Jewish, or maybe still wasn’t. I guess with a last name like Larson, and the way I looked, I couldn’t really blame her.
People had been telling me that I didn’t look Jewish for most of my life. Sometimes they said it like it was a fact, and other times they said they meant it as a compliment, like I dodged some kind of genetic bullet.
“Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed that,” it was often said.
I never quite knew how to respond.
Sometimes I was proud of myself for blending in, for becoming a blank canvas who was safe from the worst kind of assumptions. But other times, I actually felt insulted.
Larson wasn’t even really my last name. It was my ex-husband Paul’s, and we were in the middle of getting divorced. I didn’t tell her. I knew she was married and had kept her own last name, and I didn’t want her to think I was a bad feminist, on top of everything else.
I hadn’t really told anyone anything, apart from my sisters and my parents...who might have outwardly celebrated me cutting Paul loose if I hadn’t spent the whole summer sobbing in my childhood bedroom.
Being cheated on is embarrassing enough, but if the person has been publicly putting you down for years, the shame is enough to make you keep pretending that everything is okay, that you are who you say
Complicatedly Jewish - Danila Botha
you are and everything is fine, or will be. So sure, my name is Tara Larson. I’m a sculptor who’s just graduated from a prestigious MFA program. My main mediums are mixed media, wire, found objects and, occasionally, wood.
No one in my professional life needed to know that Tara was short for Atara, that I’d come incredibly far from the world I found myself in now and that, despite everything, I was still happier with where I was going.
Tiff was tall and thin, with dark, violet-streaked, wavy hair that came down to her waist, and olive-hooded eyes that she lined with thin charcoal wings. She wore no other makeup, only expensive organic oils
“I thought of something a friend of mine once said: ‘I’m complicatedly Jewish, but isn’t everyone who’s Jewish complicatedly so?’”
that made her skin glow, a homemade mix of rose and sandalwood oils on her wrists and a labradorite and amethyst charm that hung on a strand of leather around her neck. She was easily the most striking woman I’d ever met.
I’m not sure how the subject of being Jwish came up. Maybe it was the mention of her old school Jewish first name, Tiferet, which appeared on her business cards...alongside the words “Gallerist” and “Art Advisor.” The name meant glory, and it really seemed to suit her, even though she insisted that she’d always hated it.
She’d started out as an intern at the gallery, worked her way up and was presently a co-owner of the space. She was, by all accounts, a great talent scout. They’d had more sold-out shows in the last few years than in the gallery’s history.
When I submitted my work, I had a good feeling about it, but Paul told me he didn’t think my work was ready yet, so I forced myself to apply in spite of his discouragement, then was shocked when she actually emailed me to accept it.
“Yeah, well, technically I’m only half-Jewish,” she said while
looking away. “My dad’s Jewish.”
I thought about the large-scale Star of David that I’d made out of wire, in shades of bright yellow and faded blue, bent in all directions but still standing. She’d really loved it.
“I’m not explicit about its meaning in my artist statements,” I added.
She insisted, “Look, all press is good press, even if they don’t get it, and it’s an avenue we shouldn’t ignore.”
I shrugged. “Okay. If you really think so.”
We walked along Bloor Street, past the 7-Eleven, across the street from the Jewish community center.
“I actually joined there for a year,” Tiff mentioned as she tucked a strand of hair that had come loose from her messy ponytail behind her ear.
“Really? But places like Good Life are so much cheaper.”
“It’s so close to where I live. Anyway, you know how it is. The Jewish community is always trying to suck us back in,” she laughed airily.
Another time, she told me that she’d always gone to public school, but her parents sent her to a Jewish after-school program where the kids were materialistic and mean. During undergrad, she’d gone to a Chabad dinner on campus where she was uncomfortable, but getting by...until having a discussion with the rebbetzin, who told her a little too gleefully that she wasn’t technically Jewish, but should definitely consider an Orthodox conversion.
I thought of something a friend of mine once said: “I’m complicatedly Jewish, but isn’t everyone who’s Jewish complicatedly so?”
She shook her head when I repeated it. “A lot of things aren’t actually that complicated.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, and she shrugged.
We ended up back in the gallery, where she showed me the flyers and told me about the other three artists who were also part of the show.
Her husband, Ray, a floppy-haired playwright, was waiting for her at the front desk. He kissed her and then nodded at me.
“I’m here to help, love,” he told her, and she motioned to some colorful, large-scale paintings she wanted him to hang along the back wall.
“These are by this amazing Anishnaabe painter we just discovered recently,” Tiff remarked. “You’ll meet her at the party tomorrow, she’s incredible.”
She pointed out a giant installation. It was a huge, detailed watermelon, covered in glass beads and bright red, with black and green flashing lights.
Underneath it, in small, beaded letters were the words: “None
Complicatedly Jewish - Danila Botha
of us are free until all of us are free.”
“When art can actively oppose injustices, it’s so powerful, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, of course,” I agreed.
“And the consequences of these people speaking out, losing their jobs in the arts that they worked so hard for. Their contributions and empathy are so important. I mean, if anyone knows exactly what it’s like, it’s them, and they’re being punished for it.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s wrong, and their experiences are important, Tiff, but the situations aren’t completely the same. Jews have always been connected to Israel, religiously, archaeologically—”
She cut me off, waving her long, silver and green-painted fingernails in my face. “I always want to say to people: if you’re not speaking out now, for Palestinian rights, where would you have been when my great-grandparents were being murdered in the Holocaust? I can’t stand the complicity. I can’t stand the selfishness and the cowardice. But even worse, I can’t stand it when Jews hide behind antiSemitism. It’s not a reason to engage in the same behavior, you know?”
She led me to a back room, full of photos and graffiti.
I only caught one slogan, “Resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied,” before she pulled me into the last room. My sculptures were there, prominently displayed among more photos and another light installation.
“Don’t you see the synchronicity here?” she asked excitedly. “It’s important for people to know that you can be Jewish and actively oppose the occupation. You know, that’s it’s not anti-Semitic. In fact, living a life of justice is an inherently Jewish value.”
I smiled at her. “You mean like tzedek, tzedek tirdof?”
She looked at me blankly. “I have no idea. But I knew you’d understand.”
There is so much I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her that one of my sisters and I were born in Tel Aviv, that my parents are both doctors who finished med school there before coming to Canada to do their residencies. I haven’t told her that all my cousins and some of my close friends live there, that we’re Sephardic, that some of my mom’s family who lived in northern France were killed in the Holocaust, and some on my dad’s side were killed in the Farhud in Iraq. I wondered if she knew about the Spanish Inquisition, if she really believed that it all started and ended with World War II. I thought about the millions of Jews who lived there now, and wondered where she thought they should go, if she thought their lives were collateral damage, a natural consequence of past injustice.
In my parents’ neighborhood at Bathurst and Steeles, there were posters everywhere with the faces of Jewish hostages who were abducted on October 7th. In the art world, no one has mentioned them. Some have questioned whether the Israeli government’s facts
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could be trusted, if twelve hundred people were really killed, if it wasn’t just an inside job. Others doubted the testimonies of released female hostages who shared that they’d been sexually assaulted.
One of my professors refused to say why she wouldn’t mention them even once and accused me of not caring about Palestinian lives when I asked her to.
“People had been telling me that I didn’t look Jewish for most of my life. Sometimes they said it like it was a fact, and other times they said they meant it as a compliment, like I dodged some kind of genetic bullet.”
She also started a petition, along with two other professors in other departments, demanding that an upcoming visiting Israeli artist and writer be canceled, because she thought it was wrong to platform the wrong perspective. She also suggested getting rid of a scholarship founded by a Jewish academic because he’d once mentioned being a Zionist. She emailed the petition to everyone in our cohort and, including some undergrads, got hundreds of signatures.
I tried to talk to her about it one day during her office hours.
“It’s just, there’s been a lot of anti-Semitism lately. My nieces go to Jewish schools, and there’s cops outside them everyday, and swastikas at their bus stops. It just seems like acknowledging what’s happening to us is also part of the story. I think ignoring that is wrong.”
She glared at me in disbelief. “If you think, as a woman of color, that I wouldn’t know what prejudice is like, you really need to reconsider your white, Jewish privilege. My whole career, my PhD, has been dedicated to studying and fighting social injustice. I don’t think you have any idea who you’re dealing with, but you should. Every time my colleagues and I take the initiative to do the right things, every time we go to rallies, every time we post about it publicly, every time we write petitions, we risk our job security, our livelihoods and our reputations.”
“But you’re not connected in any way to this particular cause. You’ve never been to Israel or Palestine. You have no lived experience with any of it. At least all you’d lose is your job. No one is threatening your life, or telling you that you should go burn in the ovens, which they have said to Jewish academics. Being safe is a certain kind of privilege. Someone should complain about you. This is a university, you should at least be open to other perspectives.”
Her eyes flashed. She told me in a mocking, computer-like voice that my complaint had been registered, then burst out laughing and reminded me that she’d just gotten tenure. I stopped showing up to her class, knowing she would probably fail me, no matter what I said or did, and it took me an extra semester to make it up. I never did bother complaining.
Tiff put her arm around me. “I’m so glad we took a chance on you. We were a little nervous. We had a Jewish artist last year, and one the year before, so we want to make sure we don’t have too much of any one group or community.”
I stared at her. “But I knew you had a fresh perspective, I sensed you were a kindred spirit, and I know this will be great.”
I thought about Paul, and my professors, who seemed surprised that I’d gotten this opportunity. I knew I couldn’t afford to mess it up.
“Thanks again so much for having me,” I said, and she smiled.
The night of the event, the gallery was packed to the rafters with people, artists and their friends and families. Only two of my friends showed up. I was on better terms with my family, but I knew they wouldn’t be there, which was kind of a relief.
A tiny woman with chestnut hair, long orange and red-beaded earrings and bright blue eyes took to the stage.
“Hi, I’m Kate King. I’m sure you all know who I am, but in case you don’t, I’m the founder and owner of this gallery. Today is my birthday and I can’t think of a better way than to celebrate it here tonight with all of you. I myself, as you know, am half-settler. My mom is a white settler from Poland, she came here with her family just before World War II, and my dad’s family are Métis from Killarney, even
27.
though he grew up right here, in Tkaronto.”
I remembered Tiff telling me that Kate’s mother was Jewish, that they’d actually bonded over being Jewish when they first met, so I’m curious why she doesn’t mention it now.
“I think it’s our responsibility to do more than just read land acknowledgments, to create space for indigenous artists and make sure their voices are amplified. It’s our responsibility to acknowledge all the wrong, to fight colonialism and give land back. Art has the power to change the world, to really, actually make a difference. Fifty percent of our profits tonight go directly to Gaza, and all the brave people fighting for freedom, as well as all the innocent people who need our help. End the occupation. That’s all I want, today and always.”
She started singing in an increasingly powerful, surprisingly beautiful voice. “End the occupation, end the seventy-five-year occupation...” And all around her, everyone joined in, “...from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.”
Kate then announced, “And do me a favor, today especially. If you want to be on the wrong side of history, if you want to ignore ethics, you can do us all a favor and leave now. Unfriend me on social media. Block me. You’re not welcome here.”
Now I want to introduce my business partner, Tiff Weintraub.”
Tiff looked eight feet tall beside her. She introduced two of the other artists, who were much more established than me, and they came onstage and spoke beautifully and humbly about their work and their process. I found myself agreeing with them, inspired by their innovation and immense talents.
Then there was a break, and music played while people milled around. Stickers started showing up next to some of the art, to let us know they’d been sold. I was not surprised that mine hadn’t.
Tiff came up to me to let me know that she was going to introduce me soon. “I’m going to share things about our Jewish backgrounds, so that the audience can connect.”
I felt my palms getting sweaty. I reached into my bag, and found that my wire cutters were still in there. My sculptures were in the back, no one had paid much attention to them.
While she introduced the other artist, I found myself cutting the wires in the back, slowly dismantling my Star of David sculpture from behind. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I knew I had to.
When Tiff got up to introduce me, I started cutting from the front. I heard her saying, “Tara Larson is a Jewish settler who grew up Orthodox and as an adult became critical of everything she’d always learned. As someone who was raised Jewish myself, I know how hard it is to break free of certain kinds of thinking, of viewing ourselves as the victims of every narrative.”
Complicatedly Jewish - Danila Botha
When she realized what I was doing, she started applauding wildly, saying that this installation aspect was “adding an incisive layer of commentary to her work.”
I’d always thought that I’d never be the right kind of Jew and now I realized that maybe there was no such thing. That I didn’t want to acknowledge it as a flawed part of my identity, I was angry about parts of it, but I didn’t hate it all together and I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t a part of who I was.
I’d never be able to explain how the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis both devastated me, that innocent children dying and starving and being kidnapped or tortured or hurt enraged me deeply.
I didn’t know how to explain the most obvious things, that I wanted freedom in every sense for everyone, and peace and coexistence.
I didn’t know how to explain that Judaism and Islam were fundamentally similar, from kosher to halal, from zakāh to tzedakah, from doing a mitzvah to doing a sunnah. We were cousins, for God’s sake (literally), I wanted to yell, we should love and respect each other.
I couldn’t say that I’d started praying again recently, that words about returning to Jerusalem felt strangely good. I didn’t want to deny any connection I had anymore. I couldn’t explain that even though I wanted to be Jewish on my own terms, I wanted to be allowed to be proud of it, even if with my tattoos and lifestyle I would never look Orthodox again. I wanted to tell her that the Star of David, made of found scraps from the wire hangers of a Jewish dry cleaner’s business that burned down, was actually a symbol for Jewish resilience.
But I knew I couldn’t.
I found myself quietly and quickly backing out of there, disappearing in the coffee shop two doors down, hiding in their bathroom.
Tiff texted me: wtf, where are you?????
I felt bile rise in my chest. I felt my phone drop out of my hands, into the toilet bowl, and I felt relief when dirty water splashed my bare legs and the bottom of my new dress.
I picked it out with my hands and tossed it into a tampon dispenser.
I turned around and started walking home.
Secret Love
John Whalen-Bridge
It was only a secret to me. Grammy always came to dinner with her friend. George Marx. Despite his name, he preferred Nixon, but he hadn’t really liked anyone post-Truman, who “was a man.” George was not a macho ass—don’t get me wrong. He was a working-class gentleman. He had been a bus driver. Showed me the nice gold watch given when they retired him. Some resentment there—a watch in lieu of a pension? I was a kid, didn’t know. He gave me a quarter if I cleaned my plate, veggies and all. Then I’d be in the “Clean Plate Club.” “Uncle,” he was sometimes called.
I worked for moving companies in the summers during college. I was a “college boy” to the full-timers, but I could parallel park a twenty-eight-foot straight truck and work the forklift. I could swear properly and appreciate diner food. When George had a stroke, I visited him. He wasn't going to recover. I spoke to him in the way we speak to people in a coma: “just in case.” He seemed to groan at one point. I imagine he was afraid of being stuck in that state.
At that point, my father let slip that he and Grammy had been lovers for years. Dolt! How good we are at not seeing what’s right in
Secret Love - John Whalen-Bridge
front of our faces. I knew Pearl, my maternal grandmother who went to Saint John’s every Sunday, got divorced way before it became normal. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. Pictures of the pope and JFK were on her special shelf in her tiny apartment. She had been a maid while I was growing up, but was retired and had blue hair now. Or rather, then. She gave me prayer cards. Like the one of Lucy, who I thought must be the Saint of Two Eggs Over Easy. I don’t know why she gave me Lucy instead of Jude or Francis. I’m sure she didn’t hope I’d start going to church. Anyway, I knew she was a real Catholic lady. Nothing lapsed about her. Later, when I was planning to get married, my mother said, “If she wants to get married in a Catholic church, let her.” My mother didn’t want to have six or eleven children, but I suppose there was some guilt about that. Can’t ask now. They’re all gone.
Why did Grandmother Pearl and Grandpa Howard (who I only met twice) get divorced? I move pieces around, playing out different chess outcomes. On a TV show, the stray bits of evidence can add up to a nice certainty in twenty-three or forty-six minutes, but in our lives, our families, we live in ghost villages made up of guesswork. My mother (named Marion, which means “bitterness,” whose idea was that?) said the nickname for her father was “Hitler.” A screamer, I would guess from one or two stories.
When I was a toddler, and this might be one of my first memories, he’d put a transistor radio on the kitchen table and say, “Don’t touch.” Entrapment much? His second wife (Eleanor, no complaints about her) had a Chihuahua that barked and bit. Hence, I remember. I asked my mother if he was an alcoholic later in life, as this may have been a family tradition. No, he never drank after the divorce. Howard was a plumber. I remember a sentence fragment to the effect that maybe my father, who graduated ABD (all but dissertation) from Columbia and was a high school teacher, would have been seen as “an asshole with a slide rule.” No love for the educated among the blue-collar scrappers. I don’t know. I’m rubbing the edge of a shard to see if it’s a crack or a design.
Another puzzling piece: Pearl told me “Howard and George was asshole buddies.” She answered my letters written from my college dorm desk, and I’d guess she had a fourth-grade education. She grew up on a farm, which I only know because of the story of how disgusting she thought it was that a chicken farmer would pick up an egg from right under the chicken and crack it open over his mouth and swallow a very underdone egg. Mind you, she liked an egg, but they were seriously fried, almost so that you could snap it. The bacon had to be well-cooked, and then laid out on brown paper bags to drain the extra grease. If you visited her, she’d make you a bacon and fried egg sandwich before you noticed she was moving, and it made you love life
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a lot.
“I move pieces around, playing out different chess outcomes.
On a TV show, the stray bits of evidence can add up to a nice certainty in twenty-three or forty-six minutes, but in our lives, our families, we live in ghost villages made up of guesswork.”
I thought the divorce was about Eddie’s death. Official narrative: we visited Eddie’s grave some Sundays, maybe his birthday or the anniversary of his death, but I think it was more often. Pearl placed flowers and plucked weeds, and my mother, who was the youngest of four children, helped manage that bit of lawn. Eddie was the firstborn, and then there were Chuck and Ray. Chuck died of cancer, then four months later my grandmother had her stroke, then four months after she died, my mother died from an aneurism. Like clockwork, as they say. One after another, the links to the Irish, Catholic, Canadian side vanished.
Someday, I could see from the space on the granite stone, my grandmother would be buried next to her firstborn son. How did he die? Ray and Chuck both died of cancer—I guess I should get some tests, come to think of it, but Eddie didn’t live long enough to die of natural causes. Underage, he signed up for the Navy. Pearl Harbor, headlines and outrage, and the sixteen or seventeen-year-old lied about his year of birth so he could rush off and be a hero. Who knows how he thought about it. Everything I know is here. He didn’t get to ship out, though. Howard found out and took his boy home. That’s certainly what I’d have done.
Then things get murky. A narrative: Eddie died in a crash, or
did he? Uncle Chuck, who lived in Maine for some reason since 1947, came back to town and started asking questions. He didn’t believe the police reports at all. During a world war, there are shortages, and with shortages, a black market arises. That ends up being run by people you don’t want to cross for too little. Chuck thought Eddie was murdered. My father said, “Why?” Skimming? Talking? Or maybe that story—any story—is better than the random violence of accidents and everyday life.
I like to ask a reasonably stable child, “Who is better, your mom or dad?” Kids are trained well. We’re supposed to say we love our parents and our children equally. (You can rank your teachers and national leaders.) When my mother asked my grandma, “Did you have a favorite?” she did so with the assumption that the answer would be, “Of course not, dear, I loved you equally.” Or maybe, “You were the baby of the family, and the only girl.” Whoops.
“Of course I did,” Grandma Pearl said to my mother. My wife is a lawyer. She cautions that a good lawyer should not ask a question to which she or he did not already know the answer, at least not to a witness on the stand. But my mother was a high school graduate who was steered away from college prep courses because, at that time, if you were Irish, you could only be from the wrong side of the tracks. No JFK...yet. It was the mid-fifties when my older sister was born. She was a “mongoloid,” as they called it in those days. “Retarded” was the polite term while I grew up, but you’d get scolded for that now. My mother told me once she felt tremendous guilt, at least until my younger brothers were born. They are fraternal twins, and the differences in their personalities were obvious from the first few hours of their existence. Nature, not nurture. Not a punishment from Gawd (which is how my grandmother always pronounced it). My brothers and I accuse each other of being the favorite, but it might have been me. I followed the differently-abled child, so how could I not shine?
Back to our story. Eddie is dead. But in Pearl’s mind, he’d be alive if Howard had not retrieved the underage boy from the enlistment center, or wherever he found him before Eddie had a chance to ship out. My grandmother was lovely, but we can’t always be fair: in her mind, Howard killed Eddie. She wept and he drank, and, now and again, he beat her. I only have a few pieces of the story. Things happened in one order or another, and the brain is occupied territory. Voilà—there was a divorce, and I wonder what the priest said or if she ever went to confession. How many fights did they have before calling it quits? According to my dad, George and Pearl fell in love somewhere along the way. It should matter if it was “before” or “after” according to most moral math. He might have protected her from his “asshole
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buddy”/best friend with his big bus driver hands. Other people knew such things, but when you’re old enough to know the right questions, you’ve missed the boat on asking them.
Now my parents are dead. I doubt my brothers know more than I do. We think we walk on the ground, but there’s a layer of fabrication between our feet and the certain dirt. Like an anthropologist with two bones, a pottery shard and a circle of stones, I posit a social world. Some parts, surely true, can be verified today. A few grave markers. The apartment building in which the lovers lived four doors apart may still stand.
But all the knowing witnesses are gone. At George’s memorial, his daughter (who I’d never met) from the early marriage I’d never heard about, laughed easily and told stories that didn’t match the man I called “Uncle” because “Grandpa” would have been too true. He gave me quarters, encouraged me. One day, as he sipped his Johnny Walker and soda while the baseball game played in the background, he told me I could be a farmer or a vet, but that, either way, I’d have to work.
He was with Grammy Pearl until death parted them a secret love. It could be happening all around us.
Unstable Frames
Kevin Brown
“Pause the tape just right, just a second before that plane hits,” Alton muses, staring at the TV screen, “and think of all those people you save.” Taking a shot of bourbon, it dribbles down his chin, the front of his shirt, and he says, “Freeze it just right, you still got the towers.”
He pours another shot, his hand trembling the bottle and sloshing liquor on the floor. Everything he says echoes through the empty house, bounces off the bare walls. His wife, Melody, took everything. The furniture and appliances. Their daughter Memorial’s toys and clothes. All that’s left are grooves in the hardwood floors, imprints in the carpets. The sheetrock pocked with spectral square-shaped marks where family pictures had hung. A couple of lawn chairs and her wedding ring. His little girl’s Minnie Mouse TV/VCR.
And the tape of Memo’s birthday party.
The tape we’re watching now.
I use my fingernail to peel the label off a sweating beer and look at the ceiling, the window, the stairs by the foyer. Anything to keep from seeing what’s happening on the screen. What’s about to happen, about to start everything that ends with us sitting here in this gutted house, I’ve already seen. Live and unedited. And I don’t want to see it again.
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“Stop the Zapruder tape at frame 207,” he says, “and history’s rewritten.”
“Why do you keep doing this?”
Not taking his eyes from the television, he replies, “Take his brother. You keep him at the podium, he’s not gunned down in that kitchen.” Downing the shot, he adds, “He’d always be ‘On to Chicago.’”
My eyes cut to the video. Away, then back.
On it, framed in the fourteen-by-twenty-one-inch screen is a shaking mini birthday party with a mini clown in the background twisting pink balloons into a tiny poodle. Kids zipping before the camera with party hats cocked sideways. Adults in lawn chairs, the same way we’re sitting now, waving at the camcorder. We see a picnic table lined with paper plates and party favors, plastic sporks and presents piled in a leaning tower at the end.
Everything formatted to fit your screen.
The cameraman’s voice says: All right, guys. The camera stirs and the voice says: We ready for cake and ice cream?
Alton’s voice.
The screen reads: 12:29:10PM.
And these scaled-down kids swarm together like feeding fish, wild and loud. Parents step behind their sons and daughters, their knees or elbows or half-faces all that’s visible. My hands reach from out of frame and rub my son Kaden’s head.
Melody enters screen left carrying a large Dora the Explorer cake with five candles flickering. She sets it on the table before Memorial and everyone else sing “Happy Birthday.” Alton’s voice is the loudest near the camera mic.
The song ends and she closes her eyes. She leans over, hooking dark curls of hair behind her ears. Her cheeks puff out and she blows the candles into five mousetails of smoke.
Everyone cheers.
The screen reads: 12:38:22PM.
His voice croaking, Alton says, “There’s that tightrope walker.” He takes a drink, shrugs. “Hit pause while he’s teetering on the wire, he doesn’t drop ten stories just seconds later... He stays balanced up there forever.”
I prop an elbow on my thigh, forehead on my fist, wishing to be outside these walls. “He still dropped,” I admit. “He just won’t again.”
On the TV, Alton’s voice says: Sorry, Memo. We forgot to get you anything this year.
And Memo cocks her hips, a hand on her waist. Hair blowing across her forehead, she smiles and wags a finger. Daddy Daddy Daddy,
Unstable Frames - Kevin Brown
she cries out. You’re really silly!
Alton rewinds the tape, Memo’s finger wagging in quick reverse. Hips straightening, her hand leaves her waist, and he hits PLAY.
Daddy Daddy Daddy, and then Alton says it with her: You’re really silly.
The screen shows: 12:46:44PM.
I stand and pace, my footsteps hollow over the floor. “I’m just
“Sipping my beer, I say, ‘The future you’re seeing is in the past.’ Alton smiles and drinks and shakes his head.
‘The camera’s our fountain of youth. You can make the old young again.’”
saying, video doesn’t stop something from happening.” I crouch on my heels beside him. “It’s just proof that it did.”
Onscreen, Memo’s peeling back pink wrapping paper. Ripping it high above her head and letting the tatters fall around her as her eyes go wide, mouth wider.
Melody claps and Alton’s voice says: What is it?
Tickle Me Elmo! Memo squeals, and squeezes its tummy so it quivers in her hands.
Twinned backwards in Alton’s enameled eyes, two mini Memos tear open Dora and Diego dolls.
An Easy-Bake Oven.
The Little Mermaid sticker sets and Sesame Street coloring books.
A Minnie Mouse TV/VCR.
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And she keeps digging until the tower of gifts is gone.
Then, Alton’s voice says: One more!
And Memo looks around, a finger to her lips.
Looky there, Teddy Bear. What’s it Mom’s got? Alton’s finger enters the frame, pointing toward the house where Melody’s pushing a Hello Kitty bike around the corner. A large red bow tied across the handlebars.
Gasps and clapping. The clown squonks a horn. My son looks up at me and I squat into frame, smiling before the camera swings to Memo skipping toward her trike, squealing.
The screen says: 01:00:05PM.
Alton sloshes another tumbler, kills it, then pours some more.
I grab a beer from the box, water dripping pucker marks on the floor. “What say we get out of here? Get some food.”
His knee pumps fast, vibrating up his torso. He asks, “Know that treasurer in Pennsylvania? The one that blew the back of his head out on live TV?” He raises the mouse-eared remote in his hand and says, “One click of a button, he’s immortal.” He smiles at his daughter laughing onscreen. “‘Course the gun’ll always be in his mouth, but nothing’s without sacrifice.”
I shake my head and drink, watching the crowd. My wife is not in it because she’s not at the party. And she’s not at our house. According to the date stamp in the corner of the screen, she’s at a new house with a new family. She’s surrounded by different friends, smiling and waving in different videos from other birthday parties. “Alton,” I say. “Going down this road, look what all it’s cost.” I raise my hands to the nothing around us. “Look!” I yell, and it slaps off the hulled-out spaces and repeats: Look!
He doesn’t.
Onscreen, Memo walks toward the camera with the giant bow in both hands. She brings it closer to the lens, closer to the lens until the screen shimmies and goes dark. Only bits of the party visible through the looped ribbon: a rainbow bouquet of strung balloons. The clown squirting some blocked face with a trick flower.
Over the dark, the screen’s stamped: 01:03:30PM.
“Video,” Alton declares, “is the modern crystal ball. It’s our New Age fortune tellers showing us what’s coming.” He chokes the liquor bottle and swigs, spilling it over the corners of his mouth in a frown.
“It doesn’t show us what’s coming,” I tell him. “It just shows what’s come and gone.” Sipping my beer, I say, “The future you’re seeing is in the past.”
Alton smiles, takes a drink and shakes his head. “The camera’s our fountain of youth. You can make the old young again.”
Unstable
Frames - Kevin Brown
I walk over, snatch the remote from his hand and pause the tape. He stands. On the screen, Memo’s riding the bike, hair lifted still behind her.
He holds out his hand. His face vibrating, eyes blood-red and thatched with burst capillaries.
“See what I’m saying?” I point, and he traces my finger to the screen, the static lines twitching across his little girl’s chest. “The video wants to keep going,” I tell him. “It has to. It’s what it does.” I lay the remote in his palm. “Nature takes its course.”
He sits and hits play and Memo resumes pedaling, hair dropping back over her shoulders.
The camera catches my yard next door. Kaden’s Spider-Man Huffy on its side, one training wheel gone. My ex-wife’s withered forgetme-nots lifting in the wind and the doghouse where no dog’s lived since she left. Seeing what remains in the background, I try to rewind our life together in my head: we’re ignoring each other and walking around backwards like erratic zombies.
Rewind.
We’re screaming and fighting in reverse. Walking away, she’s walking toward me with upheld hands lowering.
Rewind.
We’re making up with kisses before having first arguments, then minor disagreements, then faint frustrations. Everything ending before it begins, our separation remerges. Our rage and hate grows into unbreakable love.
Alton and Melody, my wife and I, we’re all taking food out of our mouths at a barbeque. The steaks on the grill uncook while Memo and Kaden skip in retrograde around us.
Then, we’re watching Kaden ride his new bike backwards. The dog running beside him, wagging tail first.
Then, we’re seeing our future new yard, my wife just weeks out from giving birth as we back inside the empty house. FOR SALE.
I blink it away, take another drink. In the video, the sky above the party turns the color of soaked tissue, clouds clawing through the worn frame’s distorted curl.
The camera tilts down where Memo’s pulled to her daddy’s feet. She cocks her head and smiles up, a front tooth missing.
The camera zooms in and Alton’s voice says: Can I ride?
Memo closes her eyes, rolls her bottom lip over the top one and says: You wish, blowfish!
She pedals back from the camera waving, then begins riding in circles. Alton hits a button and, in sped-up rewind, her loops reverse and she steers toward the lens flapping her hand before stopping at her daddy’s feet, head cocked. Bottom lip rolled over top unrolling, then
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
her closed eyes open with her gap-toothed grin.
Alton hits play and his voice says: Can I ride?
A tear beads one eyecup, rips over his smiling cheekbone, and he says in concert with his baby girl: You wish, blowfish.
The screen reads: 01:09:59PM.
I sit beside him, the nerves in my face cinched and throbbing.
“‘You really think about it,’ his voice cracks, ’video gives you the power of resurrection.
Just twitch one thumb and the dead come back to life.’ He trances on the screen. ‘In a world with no savior, video is God.’”
“Turn it off. Please.”
“You really think about it,” his voice cracks, “video gives you the power of resurrection. Just twitch one thumb and the dead come back to life.” He trances on the screen. “In a world with no savior, video is God.”
I study the scars shaping the old coffee table in the flooring. He tells me with the right timing, you can stop the Challenger from exploding. “That teacher’ll never make it to space,” he says, “but she won’t not make it, either.”
The screen shows: 01:10:28PM.
He sniffles. “You can stop bombs from detonating.”
Unfire bullets and uncrash cars.
Reverse cancer. Remove AIDS.
Unstable Frames - Kevin Brown
Just audible, he says, “You can single-fingeredly control fate.”
In the video, Memo is still wheeling in circles, her voice rising with each loop. The screen reads: 01:10:34PM.
:35.
:36.
The wind picks up and Memo throws her head back, giggling. Kaden chasing her around, hands Frankenstein’d out. :38.
:39.
“Pause Buddy Holly’s Beechcraft Bonanza as it’s lifting off,” he shudders, “and the music don’t die.”
:41.
:42.
Not sure if the singer’s takeoff was even filmed, I wrap my arm around Alton’s shoulders and he drops his head to my chest and begins to weep. I take the remote, watch my overgrown backyard shaking, dizzy and out of focus. Everything dark and dead or dying. I know video doesn’t show the future. It can’t make the sick well or the dead alive. The divorced married. And no matter how you work the analogs you cannot stop bombs from mushrooming or planes from crashing. Cars from speeding down neighborhood streets at the perfect wrong moment.
You wish, blowfish.
On the video, the tracking crackles and a single raindrop pops the lens and blears down over Memo finishing her loops, just the way it always did. Plastic wheels grinding over pavement, she pedals hard down the rear driveway the way she’ll always do.
Alton begins to tremor, and I press pause, silencing all our rising voices in the camera’s panicked flurry. Freezing Melody mid-scream as she begins to run. Saving Memo from riding into the street and away forever.
We really should go, I want to say. Get far away. See my son. Find some air anywhere else but here. But we just sit, locked in the white noise of grief. Where the video’s glitching to move forward. To do what’s next and take its course.
Where time has stopped at 01:10:45PM.
Delicate Features
Joseph Couchet
It might begin with an object. A slip of red silk flutters in the breeze. The sun’s rays cause a piece of jewelry or the chrome of a fender to glisten. An ember glows on a new hearth’s kindling, which ignites my desire. With each image, I feel closer to what I want. So many choices scroll past, and it eludes me again. I can’t say exactly what I need to be me, but I don’t have it, not yet.
Then again, a setting may fetch my gaze. Azure waters host a polished deck of revelers. Pouting mannequins and immaculate showrooms line a street teeming with available credit. Cut crystal overlooks a plush sofa and woolen runner. Each suggests contentment that is pure artifice. I’ve never even been to any of them, but “been” is only relative. I can make it better than the real thing, anyway. With a tap, I am in any or all of them. I just need you to want to believe me, and I was there. The rest is immaterial.
An enticing location is not worth much without a looker in it, though. A solid, square jaw and sparkling eyes are nice anywhere, but especially in the center of it all. I also wouldn’t forget some high cheekbones and an unobtrusive forehead. It always helps to look like one comes from a good breeding—no droops or slopes, please. And let’s add full lips, always pouting at least a bit...even when presenting a wry smile. Then there’s the wide-eyed expression of wonder at the unexpected joy that has arrived. Another favorite is the wrinkled mouth
Delicate Features - Joseph Couchet
and squinted eye combination of sneering confidence at what I’ve just accomplished. Perhaps a little polished accessory in the lip or brow can complete the features. If tastes change, and they always do, it would be easy to edit out. My fingers can do the walking to any jewelry store.
Of course, I can’t just be a floating head. The message needs a frame in threads. Some crunchy black leather to underscore terse confidence, maybe with classic jeans or something creased and hemmed to throw a stylistic curve. Turn the collar up or leave it down, depending on the mood. With just a bit of pasting and cropping, it can all be there for you to regard as I complement my surroundings. I mustn’t forget the feet, either. If you want to know something about a person’s money and status, look down. Polished leather mirrors the jacket, or it can be the rough-hewn look of a pair of trusty boots. Sandals announce a relaxed attitude in the warmth of the sun, whereas bare feet signal unadorned confidence. The key is to have the look that gets others looking, but not beyond my surface. Any action that glides along it comes from me.
Sometimes I could go for the alluring approach: “The light draft pressed the fabric against the light frost on my skin. Sultry nights bring out the best and worst in me. Wish you were here.”
Attainment can also hasten appeal: “Eighteen-carat quality really shines in the light of day. I knew how nicely it did while regarding the blue of the water just below the new hardwood deck, I would have bought two pieces.”
I might also want to combine both of them to create a longing to build something with me: “Relaxing by the fire after another long day. Sometimes, it’s important to stop and just enjoy the moment... someone special to share it only makes things better.”
The immediate question you may have is why I want to enjoy the moment, or be on a deck, or saunter through a breeze. I can’t directly answer, but I can generate enough backstory to seem plausible.
Commercial appeal: “A self-starter always going the extra mile to earn a commission, I cherish every opportunity to build trust. Your success is my success!”
Political bent: “Government is no longer by the people, for the people. Let’s change that together!”
Environmental concern: “We need to preserve and cherish what we have left of the Earth. Future generations will thank us—or blame us.”
Bubbly fun: “Doesn’t everyone just love a warm fire on a cold night?”
The options scroll and surf before me, and my selection depends on you even more than on my fingers. It needs you to relate to what flickers before you. Empathy is the quickest route to credibility. I
need you not just to nod as you sit there and gaze upon what I chose. Your fingers need to react to it. Emoticons are nice, but words are more likely to secure further responses:
I’m with you!
Can’t wait to get started!
I want one of those, too!
We need to get started before it’s too late!
And so forth and so on. I must admit that I generate a few of these myself, or at least it happens once the mechanics are in motion. If successful, anxious entrants enter on cue and obediently seek confirmation of their belonging. Eyes remain fixated, bound to what follows. Seizing an intention at hand, they scroll forward. In a certain regard, a familiarity with the narrative and its players arises, but not always by choice. This is when hope fuels probability.
The packet remains incomplete, however, poised at the brink of revelation. Remnants of the sequence linger on the pathway as dim musings glow, hastily tapped onto a board. A clenched fist and a thin, chiding smile offer a meager defense. We try to tell ourselves that it was over long ago, but a browse through recent history tells a tale of a different length. Anonymity offers protection without reward. Being counted provides a trace of the potential to rejoin as a whole without moving an inch. None ever stray far from the surface anyway. Resubmission only requires a simple touch, and I do my part.
“It will be different this time,” you predict once again. The truth is what we make of it. You just have to believe what is right in front of you, but out of reach. Pretend to join me or that you’ve been there, too, and we’ll reach it together. Whether we take action out there or not, our story can share a virtual space, one and all. You must want to join it. Then you believe the promise on offer. That’s what can really matter.
“Earn more rewards, now easier than ever,” the guarantee assures with pearly whites from here to tomorrow. It just doesn’t want us to make it there without them.
“Act now: the saving ends tonight!” I often wonder what I’m actually saving when every night is tonight. That is not for me to question. It can be whatever the content provides. Then it can be anyone, including you.
“It’s more than simple arithmetic,” the smile can also remind. “We save you.”
“From what?,” you may ask, but you know the answer.
“From yourself.” The reward is always the same, regardless of what it offers on the surface. That’s just a means to confront my senses. The first step to it is acceptance, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t admit to an emptiness. I could call it blissful ignorance or cheap thrills. It could just be the cynic in me. Numbers don’t lie, but people do.
Delicate Features - Joseph Couchet
You want to understand what brought you here, and I can provide that realization...or is it a rationalization? It doesn’t distinguish. Thinking too much might provide an answer, so I don’t. A still finger refrains yet cannot halt the progression. Seizing an intention with just the desire for a reward, users still forward it. So little physical pressure can give into much digital pressure to join the fray, and many can
“The options scroll and surf before me, and my selection depends on you even more than on my fingers. It needs you to relate to what flickers before you. Empathy is the quickest route to credibility.”
only remain anonymous for so long. An internal connection festers and grows. Some dimly lingering whispers from bedtime, musings from yellowing passages. Pent-up throbbing while tossing and turning. The angst extends to the nail onto the message and sends it along the pathway, a puzzle for the next mechanical mind to reassemble and decode.
I encourage following the lead. You can go from being a passive observer to taking action. Well, at least virtually acting. A perfectly round beam forms on a yellow circle with black dots for eyes. One dot might close for a bit of a wink, or the beam turns crooked. On the other hand, the response can assume the form of a thumbs up or even the laughing head of a kitten. Acceptance is the goal of what the packet has to offer. Strength is always in numbers, even if the total is an assemblage of the alone.
A still finger refrains, yet cannot halt the progression. Seizing an intention with just the desire for a reward, users still forward it. So
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
little physical pressure can give into much digital pressure to join the fray, and many can only remain anonymous for so long. An internal connection festers and grows. Some dimly lingering whispers from bedtime, musings from yellowing passages. Pent-up angst while tossing and turning extends to the nail to send it along the pathway, a puzzle for the next mechanical mind to reassemble and decode. Then you can share something greater than our shared solitude, or at least it can make you feel that way for a while. Even if it fades, the fact that you liked it lingers on to be counted, mined and sold.
But you don’t need to worry about all that. It’s not like you’re the only one. Anonymity was the last thing you really wanted anyway, so there’s no sense of protecting or denying it. What’s done is done and now has an unwinding life thread of its own. Your eyes remain fixated, bound to what follows. As for me, I automatically duplicate the process. It could advance the same message or a new one. They’re all the same to me.
It might begin with an object. A slip of red silk flutters in the breeze. The sun’s rays cause a piece of jewelry or the chrome of a fender to glisten. An ember glows on a new hearth’s kindling, which ignites my desire. With each image, I feel closer to what I want. So many choices scroll past, and it eludes me again. I can’t say exactly what I need to be me, but I don’t have it, not yet.
Braden
William K. Burke
You’ve got to keep him talking,” the detective said. “You were the only two there that night. Make him comfortable. Make him think you’re in this together.”
“Are we?” Carolanne asked.
“Just keep him talking. He only has to say it once.”
Maybe you’ll get lucky, the detective thought. And maybe my Aunt Sally will fly out my ass and make chicken and dumplings for supper tonight. What the detective had not said was that if the fathers did not make the admissions in their first statements, if the words “I picked him up” did not get into the doctor’s notes or the first patrol officer’s report, the case was blown. This was a bad one. The kid was on his phone getting advice from his shitbag ex-cop father while the girl thought he was getting the car to go to the hospital. The detective was juggling five cases today. She seemed like a nice kid...too bad she got mixed up with that particular asshole. He dialed the next number on his list.
Carolanne always picked cities that had rivers flowing through them. She would rent a cheap room, find a job at the first place that said yes, and work out a walking path that took her along the water. She had lived beside sewage plants and trash barges and oh so many old warehouses not yet reborn as “arty” condominiums. One furnished room had overlooked a county dog pound. She soon discovered that Tuesdays and Thursdays were dog burning days and took a long walk in the other direction.
Through repetition, she had gained the skills of a barista and carried with her a handful of phone numbers that could be called to prove that, yes, she was reliable, she was truthful...as far as anyone needed to know. You could count on her for a while. She spent nights reading novels on couches that she bought at second-hand stores or even found on the street. When it was time to leave, she left quietly. The occasional lover was dismissed, the cheap furniture put out in an alley or along a curb. She would give notice at her job and sometimes even stick around a week or two extra if she was needed.
This morning, after packing the car, she checked under the seat out of habit and had a quick laugh at her own expense. The gun was long gone. It had kept her company for twelve years but now lay in the mud beneath the great river. On the way out of town, she chewed her lip and tightened her shoulders before making a U-turn to stop at the coffee shop where she had been working. The new girl was the only one on duty. She rang up a coffee and bagel and offered Carolanne her change.
“There you go.” Her voice was pleasantly determined, as if she were daring Carolanne to intuit a hint at some connection between them. They had not met. Not really. While the new girl had waited for her interview, Carolanne served her tea then listened to her murmured phone monologue recounting the misdeeds of some guy, a Dave or maybe it was a Tony. Apparently he had crossed the last line for the last time. Carolanne often listened in secret to conversations around her. She liked deceptive intimacy with people who did not know she existed. Don’t let him come back, Carolanne thought as she waved off her change and handed the girl an extra dollar.
Before the coffee cooled, Carolanne had left the city behind. She followed the river north. She would stop just before the mountains and find a place to sleep. Tomorrow, she would cross the ridges covered in sawtooth pines down into the long sweep of plains until this river fell into the great river that led all the way, well...home was not the
Braden - William K. Burke
word. Not when you haven’t lived there for so many years. Eighteen, to be exact. She had her notebooks and her clothes and a cooler with sandwiches and everything else she needed. She was on the road! She reached for her phone to turn on music when the invisible vise crushed her heart again. She pulled the car over onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition. “I’m so sorry,” she chanted through the blur of her tears, her voice choking on itself until it was nothing but the sobs and moans of a woman alone and curled in on herself, laying across the front seat of her blue car with one green fender, a dent in the rear passenger side door and a broken headlight.
After the worst had passed, and she came back to her body, Carolanne sat up. “Who do you think you are?” she asked herself. She turned the key and the car started again.
***
She had named him Braden. He had thick black hair that the nurses brushed off his calm, round face when they checked his ports and catheter. His eyes were always closed. That hair and his dark tan skin showed he was Jayz’ son. His arms and legs lay still and flat on top of the bed. He could not have a blanket. He had a ventilator tube down his throat and an IV in his right leg. A nurse wearing gloves and a mask gently massaged the skin and slack muscles of his legs and shifted his body to a new position. The nurse left the baby and carefully avoided looking at the weeping women on her way out the door.
A counselor had come to keep her company while she watched Jayz’ family say goodbye. The counselor turned the pages of a book every few minutes like he was reading it. As soon as the hour was over, he would go to the cafeteria for a black coffee and write down all his notes. He had explained that he wanted to capture some comment, to get something that might help Carolanne out with the cops. Jayz had come by with a couple of his crew. He stood in the doorway and watched his son on the bed, his wailing aunts and weeping mother and Carolanne and the counselor sitting by the window. Jayz did not make it a minute before he turned around and left.
***
Carolanne had been strung out that night. When Jayz came back with the tight-wrapped baggie, her heart lurched with joy. She tucked Braden in his crib and went out to the living room where of course Jayz had on his headphones to play some game on the TV.
Making her wait. It was one of his tricks. He could be such a dick when he was holding. Still, it was a nice apartment. There was a living room and a couch and the big TV Jayz had brought home in the middle of the night. Don’t ask, she had told herself. He was working for his dad. Construction, he said. She and Jayz were going to have a life together. All to themselves. He had a gun and three thousand dollars in a shoebox in the closet. ***
She had made a good day’s drive and found a spot to park along the river, just past one of those middle-of-anywhere towns where everyone wants only to have the same day, the same year. Carolanne had lived in a bunch of them. Suspicion, tolerance, friendship, goodbye. “Maybe it’s you that is always the same,” she had written in her journal.
She adorned her right wrist with eighteen bracelets that she had woven by hand, one a year, on breaks from various jobs, watching sluggish rivers trudge downstream. When she was calm, or wistful, or anxious, or excited—really any time she was alone—she liked to run her fingers over them, to look at them and let her thoughts go. The tiny weave created a blur of colors that could vary with the light. Now, at twilight, her wrist seemed swathed in gray, green and blue. She looked up from the bracelets and studied her reflection in her car’s mirror. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes had settled in to stay. The strands of gray among her black hair were old friends. Her forehead was strangely unwrinkled. That’s because you never worry, she thought. You just keep living.
The river was brown and wide here, surging through its channel and tearing away chunks of bank and whole trees. The orange and yellow of the sky bled out and faded to violet and charcoal. The first stars winked awake. By then, the river had turned black. When the moon broke free from a line of distant hills, the tiny waves glinted and swirled like a dragon’s hoard of jewels. She remembered being young, the lights and lies and all that came with pretending the night could last forever and mean something in the end. It had been so fun to always make the wrong choice. No one had been there to tell her that heeding the anger that had choked her heart since she was a little girl, since her mother first said she was no damn good and never would be, was a really bad plan for living life, that it led you places like the dark that waited in Jayz’s eyes.
“Not that you would have listened,” she said to the empty car.
Braden - William K. Burke
It was not the first time that day, almost every day, that she wished she had someone, or something, maybe just a dog, to listen to her.
She used her phone’s flashlight to write about the river in her notebook, along with a page and a half description of the taste of the bagel she had for breakfast and the look on the face of the old man who took her money when she stopped for gas. Pesto crust and cream cheese filling and a hopeless emptiness that told you that nothing on
“There would never be any- thing like that first time she shot up. Nothing mattered. Nothing could ever matter.
Just thinking about it was better than most of life. She let a great river of peace carry her away. It was alright. Ev- erything was alright.”
Earth could ever matter.
“Lick yourself. You want it so bad.” Carolanne was sick of Jayz and the stuff was weak; at least it was taking its time to really hit. They were both frustrated. Probably why he made the suggestion. He grabbed her wrists but she looked him in the eyes. You want to start something? She did not even have to say it. He was a scrawny little bastard and used to his dad throwing him around. Carolanne did sports in school and felt the tensing strength in her shoulders. He let go of her wrists and stomped his feet like a pissed off little kid as he left the living room.
Sometimes she held Braden and thought this was it. The last time. She would take her baby, get clean and leave this asshole. She
would have to move in with her mother for a while. That would be alright. Better than this. She could do it. She had stayed clean after she learned Braden was inside her. Not even a beer. After the baby was born, Jayz showed up with a gram to celebrate.
Jayz came back into the room with a beer bottle already halfempty. He stomped around the living room yelling the way he did when he got like this. He had hooked up with an ignorant little junkie bitch and now he was stuck. Why didn’t he listen to his dad and use her ass and move on?
“Why do I always have to be the nice guy?” That was his cue to send the bottle spinning through the air, splashing foam in a wild circle.
“I’m going out. I’ll be back.” Braden’s crying erupted in the back room.
“You woke the baby! You take care of him!” Carolanne called, hearing the screech of selfishness in her voice as she played this scene in her memory.
“Sure, always me,” Jayz mumbled and turned away from her. As his white t-shirt was swallowed by the darkness of the hall, she reached for the drugs balled up in the plastic bag.
For years, Carolanne parked outside Jayz’s house the evening before Braden’s birthday. She would watch through the night. She saw the wife of Jayz (he probably went by James now) hauling two boys in and out of a surprisingly sensible Subaru Forester. Jayz had a new truck every other year. Then the wife, the boys and the Forester were gone and there was a little red car and a new woman, younger and walking on heels even when she was lugging around bags of groceries. She lasted two years and then it was just the truck. The nights when the house was empty except for Jayz never seemed to end. Sometimes Carolanne took the pistol out from under the seat and loaded, unloaded and cleaned it to keep her hands busy until all the lights were out in the house and she was sure Jayz was asleep. It had been so easy to buy that gun. Just counting out money and letting the clerk give her a quick lesson at the range out back. It was a relief the year that Jayz was gone and a family piled out of a minivan, the dad carrying a pizza box and a boy and a girl running for the door while a pregnant mom trudged after her family with a giant bottle of soda in one hand. That night, Carolanne dropped the gun in the river before she drove off to her next life.
***
When the needle finds the vein, when the cloud of blood bursts up, it’s like coming home. Carolanne lingered in that thought and fought off a glimpse
Braden - William K. Burke
of the stupid little girl who had not known a thing, who had waited all her stupid life for Jayz to open the car door for her, to take her to the place by the river where they found each other and everything else. “You want to try something?” he had asked.
Braden wailed from the bedroom. Goddammit. I have to get up and get him back to sleep. I’ll have to hold him while I make formula. He’s getting grabby. She let her weight settle into the couch cushions. Her eyes closed. There would never be anything like that first time she shot up. Nothing mattered. Nothing could ever matter. Just thinking about it was better than most of life. She let a great river of peace carry her away. It was alright. Everything was alright.
Quiet filled the apartment like a sigh. She found the strength to lift an arm but had to let it flop back onto the couch before she tried the other one. Hey! It worked too. Now both at once. Just rest a bit. Savor the warm dark. Braden had stopped crying. Soon she would be ready to try her legs.
The sound of someone walking into the room roused her. Jayz stood there with an odd, flat expression on his face—not a smile or a frown, but maybe just a hint of fear in the way his eyes were wide and staying wide.
“You better check on that baby. I think there’s something wrong with it.”
Carolanne got in a good sleep in the car beside the river. She opened the window about half of a finger’s thickness to let in some air. The soft, gurgling sound of the water lulled her into her dream world. Soon enough, she was riding a horse through a field. Her favorite dream! Green everywhere. Beneath her and ahead of her. She thought about looking behind her. Where was that sound coming from? Something tapping and tapping.
Why do they always use the butt end of their flashlight? The sun was pretty much up anyway. Carolanne pretended not to see the deputy’s other hand. The one that rested on her pistol.
“Honey. You can’t sleep here.” The deputy had auburn hair pulled back tight under her wide-brimmed patrol hat and held her mouth in a soft but tight professional smile.
“Thanks. I just needed a nap. I have to cover a lot of miles today. Do you mind if I pee real quick in those bushes?”
“Sure honey. I’ll be back this way in half an hour. Just make sure you’re gone by then.” The Deputy had finished scanning the car. Just everything some girl owned. Nothing worth any paperwork going on here.
Carolanne was glad for the break. Sometimes people could be
nice. Like that counselor in the hospital. She told him she liked to read and once thought about being an English teacher. What a job! Your own apartment and car and a room to talk about books every day for the rest of your life. Go on with your life. For him, the counselor had said. You hold him and then go have your life. People were nice sometimes. Did that mean anything? Carolanne postponed thinking that one through until after she found a place to squat.
Breath in short, soft bursts. Get air into Braden’s tiny lungs. Carolanne remembered that from the CPR class that summer she held a job as a lifeguard. Braden was in her lap. Jayz drove fast and Carolanne kept hoping a cop would stop them, then they would get an ambulance. Of course Jayz had not let them call one to the apartment. When Jayz ran out to get the car she had gathered a blanket and the diaper bag before she understood that nothing mattered except her baby breathing. She latched her mouth over her baby’s tiny lips and filled his little lungs with air. Two breaths then push the soft ribs, feel the cartilage give way under her fingers.
Carolanne ran into the hospital crying and screaming. She found a nurse and screamed at her that her baby had stopped breathing. The nurse took Braden. Everyone rushed away from her. Carolanne stood alone in the crowded emergency room. She had made it. She had saved her baby! Soon enough, a young man with a clipboard full of forms approached her.
“Are you the mother?”
He wore blue scrubs with short sleeves that showed off a tattoo of a black cat. When he moved his arm, the cat arched its back and she imagined it hissing and spitting. She took the papers and the pen and set to work. Parents: Carolanne Louise Wannamaker and James Zachariah Conor. Address. Phone number. Patient: Braden Conor. Date of birth. Now lots of questions with boxes for yes and no. No, he did not have arthritis or glaucoma. No, he did not take non-prescription drugs.
She was halfway down the page when she felt a surge of power, a mysterious energy through her hands and up her arms into her head. She was electric! She was alive! She had saved her baby! She heard her name being called. When she looked up, a doctor followed by a large orderly and a larger police officer were coming for her. ***
Carolanne always made the calls from the parking structure at the hospital. She walked up concrete steps that reeked of urine to the
Braden - William K. Burke
top level where nobody parked. She stood at the corner where she could see a park with a gold-roofed gazebo tucked under a circle of wide oak trees covered with dark green leaves. After a few breaths, after making sure her feet were under her knees, she pressed call. Jayz answered on the third ring.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Yeah... Okay.”
“It was not the first time that day, almost every day, that she wished she had someone, or something, maybe just a dog, to listen to her.”
The detective had told her Jayz would take her calls. He would not hang up or avoid her. That’s not how it was done.
“Did you do anything today?”
“Played some Call of Eagles. Hung out. I might be going to rehab. Dad says I need it before I go to work full-time.”
“Remember when we brought Braden home?”
“Pretty well.”
“You didn’t have a car seat. You had to call your aunt. Then you nodded out waiting for her to show up.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I couldn’t wake you up. I was afraid the nurse would see. But after a while, I slapped you to wake you up.”
“I remember you were mad ‘cause you couldn’t get high.”
“You said you would bust my ass if I pulled that stunt again. Like you could bust anybody’s ass.”
“I don’t remember that. He looked cute when we got him in the
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car. We had to make that...stuff. You shake it in the bottle with water.”
“Formula,” she prompted.
“Yeah. ‘Cause right after he was born, you had me bring you stuff to get high. Remember? You had me sneak it into the hospital. Then you couldn’t nurse him. You used to squeeze out your tits and pretend they were dry.”
“That last night. Remember? We were fighting and you woke him up. You were going to settle him back down. Did something happen when you picked him up? You were high. You could have forgotten.”
“I think you got it mixed up. That last day, you took a big dose. Maybe too big. You were mad ‘cause I had been out all day looking for work. You said I needed to pay more attention to you. You insisted on changing the baby. I tried to stop you. You kept mumbling ‘my baby, my baby.’ I left you there. I should not have done that. I went to make some formula and then I heard a loud noise like you dropped something, and you came in and said we had to go to the hospital.”
“That never happened.”
“I’m not surprised you don’t remember. You had a lot that night.”
“Can’t you bring in an expert?” Carolanne asked. “The doctor at the hospital said there was only one way to cause these injuries. Extreme blunt force trauma. Probably slamming Braden’s head on the floor.”
The detective held his phone away from his ear to check the time. Victims watch too much TV. They think we gather in teams to discuss the latest case, to plan our next trick and wrap it all up. He thought of the pile of uncleared files on his desk. Sure she was a little junkie, but she didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. “Deserved” was never the issue, but people have a tendency to think it ought to be, that way they can tell themselves this world means something.
“Sorry. If we bring in an expert, they’ll bring in two to say there are a thousand other ways those injuries could happen. The wire is the only way this case happens. You have to at least get him to admit he picked him up. That he was upset and picked up the baby. It’s the only way.”
The detective was staying on task. Staying professional. Showing sympathy. His tone was that of a clerk in a government office telling her she needed a second ID. That was just the way it was. You had to give them something to do. This kid had no conscience and his dad was coaching him, so they weren’t going to get him. The bastard would not be saying the words that would send him away for fifteen years. The detective believed the girl. He prided himself on the cop’s skill of telling the shitbags from the decent ones. She was just a sad,
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unlucky person. The detective had already moved on. He was tending the victim on a waste-of-time file.
***
After the supervised visit for Jayz’s family, after all the court hearings and Jayz saying and then saying again that his baby should not be allowed to die and Carolanne thinking yes not until you get the last bit of your defense locked up you bastard, after that hate passed into her heart and she heard the calm explanations of the treating physicians and the final pronouncements of the hospital ethics committee, Braden was unhooked from all the machines and brought to Carolanne. For the first time in five weeks, she was allowed to hold her baby. Evidently, risk of infection was no longer the main concern. Everybody had promised not to sue the hospital when her baby died, so now she got to hold him. The counselor led her to the room that had been set aside for her and Braden. A nurse and two orderlies followed them. In the hallways, nurses and doctors talked to each other and looked at charts and avoided looking at her when she walked past.
Braden could not eat. The muscles of his arms and legs lay slack. She swaddled him the way she had learned on YouTube. She held the tight little bundle in her arms and sat on the bed. The counselor waited outside the room. They had given her a corner suite on the tenth floor. The sun was setting over the West Hills. “Hell with this,” Carolanne said. She tucked Braden in her arms and headed out to walk the halls. One of the orderlies was holding a doll-sized black plastic bag with a bright steel zipper. He tucked it behind his back when Carolanne caught him looking at her.
Then something happened that nobody expected. Braden breathed on his own. She curled up in the bed with him and watched a few stars break through the city night. The streets sparkled white and red as everyone drove to and fro on their urgent errands. She told Braden a story. Once there was a princess and her baby locked in the dark dungeon of a castle. She heard the key turn in the lock and the laughter of her captors. But she knew if she just waited long enough, if she just loved him enough, that the castle walls would fall away into nothing and they would be able to run off into wide green fields. It wasn’t much of a story, but she was in a hurry to get to the part where they just lay in bed and listened to each other’s breath.
“Can you talk to the county for me? I’ve done everything you asked.”
The detective let a long, empty breath pass over the phone. How to get this girl to understand that this was the last time they would speak? What the hell. Give her a little bit of truth.
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“I’m sorry. There’s a protocol here. If we don’t file, if the case remains open, County Protective Services finds against both parents. If they don’t do that, everybody gets sued. That’s how it works.”
“So because I didn’t get Jayz to confess, I will be called a child abuser for the rest of my life?”
“It’s just protocol.”
“He thought of the pile of uncleared files on his desk. Sure she was a little junkie, but she didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. ‘Deserved’ was never the issue, but people have a tendency to think it ought to be, that way they can tell themselves this world means something.”
When Carolanne fell asleep, the nurses would check on her and the baby and tuck the blankets to keep his head propped up. She would wake up and there he was: her baby. She liked to imagine his ears worked, somewhere his soul was holding on, giving her this little bit of time. On the morning of the third day, the aide brought her the menu to choose her breakfast. She checked every box. She ate it all, too. Toast and eggs and bacon and corn grits with cheese and spinach and pancakes and a hamburger. Two Danishes (one prune, one cheese) and coffee with milk and hot chocolate and a dish of yellow Jell-o with white fluffy stuff on top.
When the aide came to clear the trays, it took two people to hold all of it. Carolanne asked if they had miracles like this very often. The aide smiled and called her “honey” and said she would be back in an hour to help with the baby’s bath.
Later, as Carolanne drifted up from the dark depths of a nap,
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she heard the counselor talking to a doctor.
“Do you think she would be more comfortable somewhere else?” the doctor asked.
“Such as?”
“With family maybe?”
“I don’t think she has anywhere else.”
“I understand. I just have to include in my notes that we asked. For insurance purposes.”
That afternoon, Carolanne was telling Braden about the insurance porpoises and how they can jump through flaming hoops and take a fish right out of your hand. “And they can flip backwards through the air! Three of them at the same time.” She paused to let that image hang in the air of their imaginary world. In that pause, she noticed his little lips were turning blue. She held her hand in front of his face long enough to know he was not breathing any more. She cuddled him to her so her warmth could go right from her cheek to his cheek. She would keep him warm for a while. He had something to tell her. She just had to listen. They would let her hold him as long as she needed. It would be her decision when to hand over the body that used to be Braden to the nurse. ***
After she left the hospital, Carolanne walked north until she was out of roads, then crossed a field full of those tall, white, weedy flowers that look like patches of lace. The field ended against woods of tall trees with soapy green leaves. It was the time of year that white particles drifted down like snow from the trees and collected in heaps and drifts along the path. The ground grew sandy and, gradually, the rocks replaced trees and shrubs and then she was suddenly sitting by the river, just watching. It was so big she could not see it move.
She took all the creams and diapers and spare bottles out of the diaper bag and filled it with four weighty rocks. One was a soft, red stone with flecks of gray and black and green embedded in it. After she slipped the bag’s straps on her shoulders, Carolanne stepped into the river, just a tiny step. She stopped and felt the water filtering through her high-topped shoes to soak her socks. She saw herself standing there. A stupid girl with nowhere to go. Her socks were filled with water. Cold crept up her legs.
***
The counselor handed in his report on time. He tried to be straight about the father, but, knowing the family had lawyered up, the report turned into a dry list of inarguable facts devoid of details. Like how Jayz never stepped into the room during the negotiated visit or
that Carolanne willed Braden to live for three days. She seemed like a nice kid. He hoped she wouldn’t end up ODing.
The rock had been there for eighteen years. A soft, red stone with flecks of gray and black and green embedded in it. That day, long ago, she had left the river and come to this clearing. Her shoes had squelched water out of the eyelets and over the high-tops on the day she placed it at the foot of this tree. She had understood something then. She had heard it in the fluttering leaves and the cars swishing past on the freeway on the other side of the woods. Just keep going. That is the miracle. One little breath, then another, and if you are one of the lucky ones it adds up to a life.
She took out a fancy, old-fashioned jar from her knapsack. It had stars all around its sides. She twisted off the cap. He would have been bringing girlfriends around now. Carolanne liked to think she would have been the nice, hip, friendly mom who made room for her baby boy to be a young man out making his place in this wide, wicked world. A friendly and happy mother who never saw this rock, never came to these woods beside the river except maybe to eat some sandwiches and play with her little boy. On a day when he was little. A day so long ago. She poured the last of the ashes into a hole she carved under the rock with her fingers. She put the empty jar back in her knapsack.
She gathered sticks and piled them in a heap. Twigs, then bigger twigs, then dried branches that she snapped and heaped until the wood piled over the rocks. Who cared if this little meadow and woods or the whole world burned? She was never coming back. She tucked balls of notebook paper among the heap of dry wood. She lit a match and held it to one of the crumpled paper balls. She heard something in the brush behind her. Just a racoon or something. Ignore it, she thought, but the noise grew more frantic. Something whimpered. Tucked against the bush where it had been tethered, a brown puppy shivered.
“They just left you.” Carolanne said. The puppy had ears that could not decide whether to stand up or flop against its head. It cried louder. Fifty thousand years of puppy evolution told it Carolanne was its last chance at life.
“Sorry bud.” A cloud of smoke drifted past her head. Her fire had leapt into the grass and was gearing up to swarm the meadow. This was it. The final moment. She could lose at last.
The puppy smelled the smoke and cried louder.
“Fuck it.” She unhitched the puppy from his hopelessly tangled leash and tucked him under her arm. The puppy did not struggle while she stomped out the fire. He relaxed into her arm as if he were fine with the whole plan. As Carolanne realized she was going to save the meadow at the price of her Converse, she started to laugh. What a silly
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picture!
She chased the last thread of the fire towards a small thicket and, just as she finished it off, found she was facing a family out for a hike. A red-haired father with a well-tended beard, a blonde mother, hair pulled back wearing running tights and bright yellow and blue shoes. A boy and a girl. The boy had blonde hair. The girl was taller than her brother, for now. She had red hair her dad had given her to soar through life. The mother’s hands went around her children’s shoulders. She gathered them to her, keeping them safe while she studied the foliage to see if Carolanne had anybody else lurking about.
“Don’t worry. It’s only us,” Carolanne called. She held up her puppy to prove to the family that she was safe, just a woman in the woods.
NONFICTION
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei
Joel Savishinsky
Summary
Thisessay comes out of the experience of using literature to teach about the anthropology of aging in different cultures. It focuses on the life, poetry and career of Yuan Mei (1716-1797)—one of the most famous writers of his generation—and how his development and aging offer a window into both Chinese culture and the universal aspects of creativity over the life course. Particular emphasis is given to passion, ambition, aesthetics and reputation, and the way American college students reacted to these features in both Yuan Mei’s life and the Chinese society of his era.
Prelude
They could see no point, no passion, in being old. It was understandable, even forgivable, for students who were mostly eighteen and nineteen years of age. I would not, and could not, tell them how to live, or what to live for, in their later decades. They were mostly majoring in the humanities and the health professions. I thought poetry would help and, to a point and in a manner, it did. We had read some wonderful, powerful works about the aging process, including
Dylan Thomas’ rage-filled “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and the often-quoted speech by Jaques on the “Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It, ending in the dyspeptic “second childishness and mere oblivion;/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” I also gave them T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” W. B. Yeats’ meditation on the special qualities of long-term friendship in late life, “Secrets of the Old,” and a less well-known, but highly effective work on regret called “An Old Man Sits in A Café” by Greek writer C. P. Cavafy, whose title character complements Thomas’ plea for vehemence when he “thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him” and now “mocks senseless caution.”
Nonetheless, something remained undone, unconsidered and unexplained for the people in the class. It was not just the poetry, but the lives of the poets they seemed to need to help them understand how biography and creativity worked together. They had probably never heard of the New Criticism, but had evidently absorbed, or independently discovered, the arguments of its critics. What their questions indicated to me was a desire to know how, and why, a writer would choose to dwell on the secrets, the passions, the regrets or the losses that aging entailed. It was as if they wanted poetry to be demystified and humanized. The challenge was to show them that poetry does not fall out of a random cloud and settle itself neatly, coherently on a page. It is not a cartoon, a disembodied act of creation. It grows out of a person’s life; it changes as people age. The personal growth, their creativity, their use of language, the very way they experience desire, how they channel passion and art, and cope with the inroads that time makes on the body and mind, are all shaped by their culture.
So I determined I could give them something of the life and the work of a poet that they were unlikely to encounter in either their English or their gerontology courses—not some silver-haired, airbrushed poster child from a slick AARP-ish magazine, featuring “successful,” “vital” or “active” seniors. No, someone obscure to them, of a deeply different place, time and culture, who would nevertheless offer recognizable aspects of our current world, and confute, amuse and seduce them too. Someone whose life could also reveal how culture shapes desire, including the will to create, and the means to sustain it right to the end. I put up just one slide, a spare pen-and-ink portrait of Yuan Mei, a person, I explained, for whom the art of life was embodied in the art of writing. And I invited them to take a metaphoric walk through four doorways that would lead us to his last poems.
I. The Examination Hall
As a child, Yuan Mei was neither naïve nor negligent, knowing his wits, his charm, his writing brush and his brain were his sharpest weapons. Despite his family’s genteel poverty, its members were cultured lovers of literature, and included ancestors who wrote poetry.
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
Of his grandmother, Chai, who spoiled him and recited classical verse out loud, Yuan Mei later wrote:
I grew out of baby clothes, but she was eager to hold me; At the age of twenty, I still slept in her bed. Her topknot cast a shadow beneath her red lantern; The sound of my reading echoed before her white hair. I often acted cute to get gifts of fruit from her; Whenever I played hookey, she saved me from being whipped. She respectfully offered dainties to bribe my teacher,
“They could see no point, no passion, in being old. It was understandable, even forgivable, for students who were mostly eighteen and nineteen years of age. I would not, and could not, tell them how to live, or what to live for, in their later decades.”
And padded cotton jackets for her little boy.
She protected and cherished her precious pearl; Hoping I would soar high like a stork on a chariot.
At the age of six, Yuan Mei had begun a lifelong habit of copying verses he admired. The first he wrote down—a choice that may have prefigured his adult interests in both moral irony and ghost stories—was from a poem about a Tang dynasty general wrongly accused and condemned for disloyalty:
It is not true that Huai’en betrayed his prince’s favor; Historians have failed to right the wrong done to his name.
Far away at Ling-chou, amid the wild steppes
Until now by night a hero’s ghost weeps.
After his literary encounter with General Huai’en, at age seven, he began writing poems in imitation of the classics he had read. On outings, he and his classmates would practice composing poetry and playing literary games. These were prescient skills and sensibilities to develop at a young age. Before becoming eligible for the rigorous First, Second and Third Degree examinations set by the State, the qualifying tests Yuan Mei had to take as a teenager were very different from those set for an American college student of English. Applicants were not required to analyze or explain a poem, but rather, to write one in a particular classical style, and do it on a given theme, and to a specified length and rhyme scheme. A music major in one of my classes pointed out that such strictures were more reminiscent of the challenge set for someone studying composition, who is asked, for example, to write a sonata in the style of Mozart, or a trio that echoes the voice of Haydn.
In the year 1736, a prodigy at the age of twenty, Yuan Mei walked through the doorway of the examination hall to take the test for his First Degree. Though he had some command of the language of the empire’s new Manchu rulers, neither then or later did he perfect his fluency in it. He also had too much aoman, too much conceit or hubris, to pay the Sishu, the four books of the Confucian canon, the sufficient respect required in his answers. He failed the test. The mandatory essays required of him were called baguwen or “eight legs” because of the prescribed number of sections and types of arguments they had to develop. Stung by his failure, he spent the next two years practicing writing such essays, and eventually published a collection of them—a set of model exam answers—which became a widely used and highly lucrative study guide for future candidates. To make a lot of money as a result of not passing a major test, “now that”—another of my students once remarked—“that is poetic justice.”
Two years later, in 1738, age twenty-two, Yuan Mei passed the critical State exam on his second try, in the process making an ally of the elder assigned to question him about his essays. Such men were in the habit of forming a father-son bond with those they examined and passed: the latter became the older man’s scholastic children. Yuan Mei thus acquired one of the earliest well-placed patrons he would collect in life. The sequence of defeat, success and succession he had been through was itself a lesson in both discipline and deference: an education in forms of etiquette and in the wisdom of being Confucian in comportment and content when it was opportune. He knew that the start of a government career bore the seeds for the kind of homeland security sought by all the hopeful poets of his generation. He also recognized how deeply indebted he was to those examiners who had
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
overlooked his shortcomings. Decades later, he wrote how one of them, the staunch Master Teng,
...had rescued me out of my dark abyss.
Do not say I had earned it by my literary powers...
Do not say that my horoscope was good... [Parents] have not the power to place [a person] among the chosen few. Only the examiner can bring the young to notice, And out of darkness carry them up to Heaven!
Well after his early failure and subsequent success, and in the midst of his own career, Yuan himself served as an examiner and wrote critically about the cruelty of the whole system of tests:
The fancy chamber of the thorned hall opens wide; Men swam like armored ants at the pitch of battle. The Examiner faces south, a towering cap on his head; His Aides sit behind tables, rowed east to west. There are eighteen men with eyes black as lacquer, Eighteen writing brushes, like iron ramrods.
Red smudges on paper make the examiners’ eyes glow— You would say it’s the blood from the candidates’ hearts!
During the early stages of Yuan Mei’s own pursuit of high office, successful candidates for degrees underwent further study at the most prestigious state-sponsored school, the Hanlin Academy, which Yuan Mei entered at the very young age of twenty-three. Wherever they served, whatever their department, graduate academicians like Yuan Mei became servants of the throne, and wore the robes of court dress when performing their official duties. The poets among them also joined a de facto bureau of writers, a state within the State, a literary brotherhood spread across the vastness of the Middle Kingdom’s great spaces.
One mark of this literate Chinese elite was the ubiquity of poetry as a form of expression: Manchu governors, generals, ladies of the court (even prostitutes), actors and singing-girls, composed and shared their poems...a quality reminiscent of how aspiring Elizabethans and Japanese samurai were similarly trained and accomplished as poets. Not only was poetry viewed as an aesthetic pursuit, its practice was valued as a way of fostering focus, discipline, and—as epitomized in haiku—economy of style, precision in thought and action. The Chinese saying that “every coolie is a poet,” though an obvious exaggeration,
reflects how writing, reading, or at least appreciating poetry, was found among many classes in that country, be it to celebrate iconic scenery, family birthdays or an honored guest. Among China’s upper echelons, government officials and military leaders often traveled with a trove of books when they were on the move. Along with those in less prestigious positions, they took poetry to heart...and to the bank. It was the social medium the aesthetic currency of court and classroom, battlefield and bedroom.
Lacking money at first, but not talent or ambition, Yuan Mei learned early in his career to put poetry on a par with politics, to finesse,
“...in those spasms of royal housecleaning and ideological witch-hunting, authors, styles and ideas could rise, fall, die or disappear as the Mandate of Heaven changed moods or hands. Books were burned, and property confiscated if a person’s once-acceptable opinions, allusions or even references fell out of favor. Authors were imprisoned, exiled or executed. Through prudence and good fortune, Yuan Mei escaped persecution, but remained mindful of his occupational hazards.”
when needed, the games of favors and flattery, to keep both high standards and a low profile when the country’s shifting dynamics of power unleashed one of the Qianlong Emperor’s literary inquisitions. In those periodic rituals of correctness and purification, in those spasms of royal housecleaning and ideological witch-hunting, authors, styles and ideas could rise, fall, die or disappear as the Mandate of Heaven changed moods or hands. Books were burned, and property confiscated if a person’s once-acceptable opinions, allusions or even references fell out of favor. Authors were imprisoned, exiled or executed. Through prudence and good fortune, Yuan Mei escaped persecution, but remained mindful of his occupational hazards. As the centuries have shown, in Manchu China, as well as in the twentieth century’s totalitarian Spain of García Lorca, the Germany of Walter Benjamin
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
and the Russia of Osip Mandelstam, writing itself can be a deadly sport. You learned to hide or play it well, or you gave up your art, your livelihood or your life.
II. The Magistrate’s Chamber
In Nanking, inside the building where officials such as Yuan Mei presided, his room had two doorways. Above the lintel of the visible one, the characters read “Magistrate’s Chamber.” Unseen, under the robes of his court dress, and inscribed over the entrance to his heart, he had placed the words of the essay theme he had written in 1738—at age twenty-three—for his Second Degree. Taken from the Sixth Book of The Analects, the text instructed an official to be “scrupulous in his own conduct and lenient in his dealings with the people.” This was good advice for a jurist, wiser yet for a writer.
Just as a Chinese poet tried to be a man for all seasons, occasions and landscapes, by extension, in Yuan Mei’s role as an administrator, he also served his city in a variety of ways: distributing justice in court, decisions in disputes, relief during floods, locust plagues and droughts and food during the region’s frequent famines. Of the latter experience, he wrote graphically:
People can bear a hundred ways of dying, But the worst thing about starvation is it takes so long. Wild dogs carried skulls of humans in their jaws, Together with wasted bones devoid of flesh.
Though he excelled as a clear and elegant narrative poet, some of the poems from this phase of Yuan Mei’s public life read like a chronicle of his official duties, a record that included the waiting supplicants and litigants he regularly faced. He also pleads exhaustion from daily responsibilities and the need to work late into the night on reports:
When at last I manage to get home the lamps are beginning to Be lit;
Through the dusk I trundle to the fold, as do the cows and sheep. Women folk holding their brats block the entry to my house, And while the children tug at my skirts their elders make excuses: “We all said what a pity it was that you were kept so late; It never occurred to anyone that that you had not had your supper.”
In the course of his tenure as a magistrate, Yuan Mei learned to parse people’s pleas and poses, their cases and their characters. On one occasion, he described his work as an application of the Chinese
principle of “i,” meaning common sense or reason; he tempered a strict application of the law when that would do more harm than good in the community by applying a kind of common sense for the common good. There were anecdotes and even ballads and operatic dramas written by his admirers about his legal decisions and what today we would call his judicial temperament. A champion of respect for common people and their rights, he was praised too for invoking historical cases and literary examples to explain his decisions. One of his supervisors observed that it was preferable to have a prefect of such wide learning, someone like Yuan Mei who could leaven the bureaucracy with humility, humor and tolerance.
His poems show how catholic Yuan Mei’s sensibilities were. He could, for example, be eloquent about the loss by fire of a famous and ancient gingko tree that he witnessed during a journey:
At depth of night there is a cry of birds and the sky suddenly glows.
On the bare hill there are no houses; the light is in a tree! Torn shoots rise and scatter in clouds of yellow gold; From the Nine Heavens ashes pour; the thick smoke curls. Bursting and crackling in the darkened wind its heart’s blood runs dry; Branch on branch and leaf on leaf flake the snowless sky. Root and branches, alive and dead, share one breath; Blazing it falls straight down, three thousand feet.
The administrative responsibilities Yuan Mei carried were not always an ideal fit for his temperament or personal priorities, and could be jarring for someone who could write so emotively about a lost part of the natural world. The petty aspects of his positions got in the way of what he cared about most, namely, his pleasures and his poetry. The irritation that peppers his verse and his letters from that time of his life reminded a sophomore I had of the complaints she had overheard from certain professors of hers who moved quickly through their classes and lectures so they could get back to their lab, their desk, their studio, their study. This work-life tension, and Yuan Mei’s failure to achieve high government posts, contributed to his decision to leave the bureaucracy and, at age thirty-six, begin what would become an extraordinarily long, almost fifty-year retirement.
The devotion Yuan Mei showed to his craft and to selfexpression could be total, yet embellished with respect for convention and precedent, and a taste for novelty and eclecticism. His poetry is
notable for adopting as its voice the colloquial spoken language of his era, which has helped to make him not only the most popular Chinese poet of his century, but one of the most quoted and reprinted of all time. He made his own ink, collected and anthologized the bon mots and memorable lines of others and—late in life—even published a volume of the ghost stories that were a lifelong fascination of his. As did other writers of his era, he also brought out a volume entitled Sui Pi (Jottings), which contained his notes and reflections on the books he had read— more than half the entries coming from his younger years.
In another type of work, his Shih Hua (Poetry Talks), he takes issue with the Confucian idea that books need to have a moral purpose, arguing rather that they are their own domain and should express an individual’s personality. He quotes with approval P’u-hsien, who wrote that good poetry “is born in the heart and made in the hand,” whereas bad poetry is “the hand doing the heart’s work.” While Yuan Mei frequently quoted and paid homage to his poetic ancestors, he criticized those whose poetry was merely imitative of older styles: “If you resemble the ancients,/Where are you to be found?”
He earned a great deal of income from his books, and owned the woodblock characters for them which the engravers had cut. He kept those blocks at his home and—in a prefiguring of modern-day bookson-demand—hired printers to make new editions or copies as needed. He was thus his own publisher, in addition to being paid handsomely to write prefaces for other people’s books. He turned his reverence for the dead to profit by also applying it to his contemporaries, both those who were deceased and those still aging. Families hired him to write biographies of their late relatives, which he once explained he sold to get the money “for wetting my writing brush.” His renown also brought him well-paying commissions from the living to compose, in advance, their funerary and tomb inscriptions. These prepaid obituaries, meant to literally enshrine a person’s legacy for progeny and public alike, sometimes necessitated a certain poetic license with literal truth or accuracy. When obliging a friend in this way, it turned Yuan Mei into the creator of the historical record.
While attentive to making money by these means, he also managed to make enemies and scandals. Well-known as a libertine and sensualist, he had (and wrote about) both male and female lovers, including a succession of boy-actors who would accompany him in his travels to the famous places he wanted to write about. His paramours also included singing-girls, prostitutes and a series of concubines— these women were his “moth-eyed” ones, whose attraction for him he described with the euphemistic Chinese phrase “looking at flowers.”
In his later years, he continued to shock people and convention by accepting younger females as his pupils, taking, in the process, a quiet delight in simultaneously violating barriers of both age and gender. Furthermore, he dismissed Buddhism’s rejection of the sensual as immoral and—with a gentle touch of Ch’an (Zen) in his poems—he could mock the faith’s postures of renunciation and righteousness:
To learn to be without desire you must desire that. Better to do as you please: sing idleness.
Floating clouds, and water running... Where’s their source?
In all the vastness of the sea and sky, you’ll never find it
What mattered to him, as he expressed it in Suiyuan Shihua, his book on the nature of poetry, was personal feeling (xingqing), inspiration (xingling) and technical perfection: “I frequently say that poets are people who have not lost the heart of a child.” Elsewhere, he expressed this with a more adult comparison: “I once said that the radiance of a beautiful woman can nourish the eyes, and the poetry of a poet can nourish the heart.” For all these liberal behaviors and attitudes, he was seen by some as a danger to his pupils and a corrupter of the young— thus enjoying some of Socrates’ reputation without ever suffering his fate.
If he did not hesitate to enjoy his own reputation, Yuan Mei often had trouble curbing his brush and tongue, and with flattering his superiors. Maturity did not ease his discomfort with propriety. He continued to have little patience for the niceties, the rules, the etiquette of hierarchy, for cranking out—like a grumpy laureate—a poem by command when the emperor came to visit his jurisdiction. Invoking the quintessential Chinese form of obeisance, he once claimed:
I’m still a newcomer to this constant bowing. It’s hard to write the tiny characters required for forms; My knees creak loudly from learning to kowtow.
At times moody and intemperate, iconoclastic and provocative, neither he nor his writings were to everyone’s taste, and so in the course of his abbreviated career, he sometimes lost positions and promotions. With his wife, children, mother and concubines in tow, he would then
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
move from one post, one patron and one poem to another, a revered minstrel without portfolio, a voice for his generation—someone perhaps destined by attitude and artistry for an early retirement. When he left government service in his thirties, he had some land and the income from his writings to help support him and, in his later years, a degree of fame which had spread from China to Korea and Japan, leaving him both grateful and reassured that his renown had kept pace with his longevity.
III. The Home: Suiyuan
For all his restlessness, aspirations and decades of travel, Yuan Mei was also, at heart, a homebody. He was deeply attached to Suiyuan, the house and estate he had bought and then rebuilt in Nanking, the cultural center of Chinese life at the time. He wrote about it with yearning when on long journeys. Once, stuck in the intense heat of Xian, he wrote:
Suddenly my thoughts turn to the south, and my ten acres of mulberry; I am pillowed high at my northern window where the cool wind blows.
What I am doing here in the heat I cannot understand— I have found nothing but scorched earth and the memories of ancient kings.
He was not above mythologizing his home’s fame and location, claiming, questionably, that it was associated with the great poet, Li-Po, who had presumably been there one thousand years before, and that its garden was the same one as the “Prospect” or “Grand Contemplation Garden” described in China’s most famous novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. Looking out through his front entrance, Yuan Mei’s doorway doubled as a picture frame, enclosing an exterior scene from his youth. The view had been designed to recreate, on the reduced scale of a gracious estate, a revered panorama he had grown up with in his birthplace of Hangzhou, a highly cultured and picturesque city that the Chinese of his time considered a paradise on Earth for its beauty and refinement. In what Yuan Mei came to call his “Harmony Garden” or his “Garden of Contentment” or “Accommodation,” there was a miniature version of Hangzhou’s famous Western Lake, with replicas of the causeways, dykes, pagodas and pavilions that graced its waters and shores. The design and rhythm of its structures, kiosks,
boats, peaks, grottoes and vegetation all had to harmonize with one another and the contours of the land. As did other wealthy Chinese, he paid to have huge, towering candles of rock, draped with irregular wax-like shapes, moved to his home from great distances to replicate, in his estate’s rockeries, the sense of a mountain scene. And he enjoyed the pace at which he worked on his creation. He mowed, pruned and planted “only as the desire takes me, for no longer am I under anyone’s thumb” or have to “toady to the powerful or seek marching orders from my superiors.” Artifice and money had turned the vista fronting his home’s doorway into a poem, a child’s garden of memory.
In Yuan Mei’s own journeys and wanderings, landscape itself was never just scenery: he felt it was incumbent on each generation of poets to visit the renowned places that those before them had seen and written about. Even more casual, less accomplished travelers to such sites would leave their poems tacked up at nearby pavilions. Each time Yuan Mei went to one of these locations, he felt obligated to compose a verse, a bow of respect both to the setting and to those who had lent it literary immortality. At least once, however, he demurred, and wrote about a visit to an ancient burial ground:
With high mounds, the hill is thickly spread; I gave them a glance and drive swiftly by. A Poem is here, but I cannot bring myself to make it; Too many poets have tried their hand before.
His collected poems show, however, that on most occasions, the need or desire to fix his visit in writing was indulged, sometimes taking the form of a very Zen reflection. Describing the spare beauty of a small hamlet with its stream, plantings, roofs and rural tranquility, he asks rhetorically:
How many lives would I have to live, to get that simple?
And in a poem titled “On the Road to T’ien-t’ai,” he invokes a different conundrum:
Wrapped, surrounded by ten thousand mountains. Cut off, no place to go... Until you’re there, there’s no way to get here. Once you’re here, there’s no way to go.
Still later, he acknowledges a new source of his need to write: Old, and still traveling, I’m afraid
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
I’ll forget what I see. So I make these little poems as travel notes, day after day.
As he aged, a life on the road leveled a different kind of toll. Once, returning to his home after a lengthy absence, Yuan Mei despaired at the sorry state in which he found his long-vacant house and its neglected property. Seeing him faced with the daunting efforts of
“Well-known as a libertine and sensualist, he had (and wrote about) both male and female lovers, including a succession of boy-actors who would accompany him in his travels to the famous places he wanted to write about. His paramours also included singing-girls, prostitutes and a series of concubines—these women were his ‘moth-eyed’ ones, whose attraction for him he described with the euphemistic Chinese phrase ‘looking at flowers.’”
restoration, a friend suggested he instead buy a mature estate with wellestablished trees and plantings and a home he could simply move into. Yuan Mei rebuffed the idea, explaining he could only live in a house and amidst a garden and grounds that he himself had nurtured. They were like a favorite poem in the process of becoming, he explained. Whether landscaping or writing, he loved to go at his own pace, bow and scrape to no one, and allow the imperfections to remain while they patiently waited for correction, repair or editing. Unless nature and art both bore his personal stamp, either one might feel like an imposture, an act of plagiarism: “there would be nothing of myself in it,” he protested. Composing his own will at a later time, and reflecting on the possessions he would be leaving to others, he wrote, “However fine an object, one does not treasure it unless one has crafted it with one’s own hands.”
He wrote extensively about his garden in both his poems and
in prose descriptions of the process through which he developed it. He revised these texts as the garden evolved, and rather than surrounding it with walls, allowed the public—as if the grounds were a lovely poem or performance—to visit and enjoy it on special occasions and festivals. When a student of his unexpectedly brought him some jade peach trees, he wrote appreciatively:
It’s obvious that in the realm between Heaven and Earth, Events that please us frequently just occur. My good luck was chance, and no one arranged it; Before the peaches blossom, my heart starts to “bloom.”
During the thirty-six thousand days of a human life, How many times is your heart able to flower?
In a different mood, but still drawing on his beloved image of flowers, he wrote from his garden:
What affairs in this world break our hearts most of all? Beautiful flowers being blown down and good men dying.
And in another verse, he references the complementary nature of variety and unity:
A thousand flowers bloom on a tree, Joined by a single trunk.
Yuan Mei could alternately be profound and funny at different moments. In one Zen-like poem about his garden, he writes reflectively:
The flowers themselves brought the spring season to me, But when it leaves, it doesn’t take them with it. Clouds flow together with all the water. But it doesn’t make the clouds stay behind. I want to ask why things happen this way, Yet there are no people in sight—only tall trees above me. Under the trees I muse idly about these questions, Precisely the spot where the spring and clouds left me.
Years later, beginning his eighth decade, he answered those who mocked him for continuing to enhance his estate:
Seventy, and still planting trees... Don’t laugh at me, my friends.
Of course I know I’m going to die. I also know I’m not dead yet. The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
For some in my class, especially those from cities, it was Yuan Mei’s obsession with his garden that puzzled them far more than any of his poems. But then a classmate, who had just returned from a semester in London, set them straight—or at least a bit straighter—by talking about the gardens in Kew, the Cotswolds, Kent and Essex, and how central the aesthetics of these places were to the British sense of beauty and order and heritage. I was grateful that she needed no prompting to point out, parenthetically, that Virginia Woolf did some of her best writing in a tower-high study overlooking Vita Sackville-West’s estate, Sissinghurst, and its expansive greenery and flower beds.
The artistic investments and indebtedness Yuan Mei felt extended, I noted, not only to his poetry, his home and the famous places he had observed, but also the humbler members of his own household. He wrote lines about his doctor, his cook and others who had worked to maintain his health and his hearth. They were subjects as important as the exalted views or the great poets of the past celebrated in his verses. When the carpenter, Wu Longtai—who had built and maintained his home for years—unexpectedly died, Yuan Mei devotedly constructed the box that he was laid to rest in, followed by a tribute to him that made a respectful bow to existential irony:
It fell to you to make my house; It fell to me to make your coffin.
Expanding on his emotions about this turn of events, he again invoked the proprietary nature of creativity:
I buried you in a corner of the garden, And having done so, felt at peace with myself, For I felt as though you still came and went Among the things your own hand had made... Here forever you shall be our Guardian Spirit, Unsaddened by the murky winds of Death.
Obligation, acceptance, transcendence—the words of the poem echo the Chinese sense of mia, or fate, applied here to a reversal of roles, an inversion of who would build for whom. With both couplets and coffin, Yuan Mei the master, in a kind of poetic noblesse oblige, uses his own skills to serve his servant.
IV. The Study
The last period of Yuan Mei’s own life had a long prelude, one in which enthusiasm, duty and loss were each recast in a different light. Well before his ninth decade, the aging of his mind and body had been preoccupations. For many years, as he records in his poems, he had a
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The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
weak stomach and debilitating, annual bouts of malaria. In his fifties, he writes about how he had begun to lose teeth, energy and concentration. As his sixties got underway, he dyed his hair, started to use spectacles, and complained of absent-mindedness and a loss of sleep, appetite and the ability to keep track of things.
By his eighties, he had closed the door on most of his passions, including his travels, concubines and offspring, as well as the company,
“At times moody and intemperate, iconoclastic and provocative, neither he nor his writings were to everyone’s taste, and so in the course of his abbreviated career, he sometimes lost positions and promotions.”
the conversation, the wine, the ghost stories and even the food he had once written of in a now revered volume of gastronomy, with meditations on the preparation, aesthetics and literary associations of various recipes. Near the dawn of his ninth decade, when the members of his household responded to his forgetfulness and frailty with irritating attentiveness, he protested in a poem:
Whatever I do, someone is sorry for me; That is what makes being old detestable.
In his last years, he also let go of his earlier obsession with mirrors—he owned over thirty of them—explaining why he preferred shadows to reflections:
Now that I am old, unable to endure seeing myself in the mirror, I have thought of a way to escape the sight of my own decrepitude. Kinder to me, when I dress my hair, is the shadow from my lamp; It shows me on the wall, yet does not show the frost that lies on my brow.
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
Reading and solitude were exceptions to those lost arts of pleasure. He came to resent the intrusions of visitors on his concentration and creative time:
A month alone behind closed doors, forgotten books, remembered, clear again. Ideas come, like water to the pool, welling, up and out, from perfect silence.
In another poem, he confesses that what he most loved holding in his hands now were not his grandchildren, but the volumes from his library:
I had far rather live with sticks and stones Than spend my time with ordinary people. Fortunately one need not belong to one’s own time; One’s real date is the date of the books one reads!
Even as young as his fortieth year, he claimed to find less favor or flavor in sensual delight, observing, as he had already done in childhood, that he found his greatest pleasure in books. A literature major in my class—who told us how his peers teased him for writing detailed marginalia in his books—said his favorite story about Yuan Mei was about his special appreciation for those who valued texts the way he did, including a good friend, Lu Wen-ch’ao, who was a dedicated collector, corrector and annotator of the volumes he bought or borrowed. A mutual acquaintance wrote to Lu: “Most people read books merely for their own advantage. But when you read, the book benefits as well.”
Of those volumes Yuan Mei himself owned, he said, “I have lived with them in intimacy.” Perhaps there is in that phrase an echo of someone he may have never read or even heard of: the European medievalist Erasmus. A man who once proclaimed, “My home is where my library is.” Yuan Mei devoted an entire room of his own home, his “Poetry World” chamber, to the manuscripts his contemporaries sent him of their original verse. But, by this time in his life, Yuan Mei suggested that even this private pleasure of collecting and reading was one he was getting ready to relinquish:
Today I have had a great tidy-up, And feel I have done everything I was born to do... It is good to know the people in the books Are waiting lined up in the Land of the Dead.
In a little while I shall meet them face to face And never again need to look at what they wrote!
In his final months, when Yuan Mei went through the door into his refuge, his study—a place he had named the “Cool in Summer and Cozy in Winter Room”—where, then, did it really lead him? By his own admission, he was entering the last chamber of his aging art. In his poems, he looked back at the trajectory of his life with a wistfulness about its seeds in childhood:
Sometimes I sit alone, and smile upon the child I was, in memory now distant and a friend.
Elsewhere, he explored that train of thought with two rhetorical, theatrical questions:
Memories come one after one. It’s my soul, not the ice, that’s melting. Youth, pretty child, where did that actor come from? The one who played this life of mine straight through?
Although Yuan Mei had no regrets about having lived a hedonist’s licentious and disreputable life, as his transformed self, he was also free from an earlier faith that the sensuous path was the one most worth walking. His poetic lines about freedom from passion could be Zen-like in their brevity:
All the heart needs is a home in which to dwell in quiet. The flavor of desirelessness lasts longest.
While he could still enjoy shocking people by being an aged enfant terrible, inviting his young female students—as many as thirty at a time, his “moth-eyed” academy—into his garden, he did not try to bed them. Rather, with nods of approval from some of the women in my class, he insisted that they perfect and publish their poems, and do so under their own names. He even decided for himself that it was imperative to stop writing about the revered “scenes” of the physical world which, he reasoned, all people could see for themselves, and
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
instead focus on human nature and emotions:
Everybody’s surroundings are practically the same But only the individual understands what his feelings are!
In disarming lines addressed to himself, he asked, at eighty, “Can it be that though my body sinks to decay/My writing brush alone is still young?” And at eighty-two, frail, he was still composing poems, “Chanting them aloud till the night is far spent.” He felt there were still things worth saying, that they merited the effort to find the right words to say them with. Describing how his imagination persisted in playing with sound and image, he continued:
Shall it be “push the door” or “knock at the door”?
I weigh each word, each line from beginning to end. I see to it that every phrase is alive; I do not accept a single dead word. Perhaps the fact that this habit has not left me Shows that I still have a little longer to live.
That was written in his last year and was among his final poems. Its concluding lines could have served as his epitaph. The poem’s title: “The First Sign of Farewell to Life.”
Coda
The writings of Yuan Mei outlived him because, like few gentlemen scholars of his time, he lived through and for his poetry. It was perhaps not incidental that the phrase he toyed with in his last lines focused yet again on the imagery of a door and an almost Taoist conundrum of how to set it in motion with words. In the course of a long life, he had crossed the thresholds of examination hall, magistrate’s chamber, a beloved home and a cherished study with clear purpose in mind. The body of his work, I suggested to my young students, was itself like a fifth doorway, beyond which we can see, unlike Shakespeare’s Jaques, the shape of passion no longer rooted in the senses alone. Throughout his life, Yuan Mei wrote as a craftsman, and closed his last efforts with keen attention to the nuances of wordcraft. Although the critics of his era accused him of perverting and corrupting the morals of the young, of indelicacy for writing explicitly about his dalliances and concubines, he was, in his democratic sympathies for commoners and women, in opening his cherished garden to the public and in his use of a colloquial voice as a poet, as much of a liberal as a libertine. He countered his moralistic detractors by asserting that it was more important to tell the truth of life as it is than follow some artificial
rules of propriety.
Whatever regrets he may have harbored at the end, adherence to a code of Cavafy’s “senseless prudence” was not one of them. As noted before, if he had earned something akin to Socrates’ disruptive reputation, it proved to be a less lethal judgment in practice, and he died in peace rather than by state-mandated poison. In the next century, the nineteenth, he was even praised for that un-Socratic virtue of defending women’s rights by taking on female students and encouraging their talents.
Whether he lived to write, or wrote to live, he was in love with his craft and perhaps, as one of my seniors suggested, a bit in love with himself and the irreverent, mischievous, impudent image he had devised. A classmate, studying drama, added the thought that Yuan Mei’s character and reputation seemed as carefully cultivated as his art and his garden. Inarguably, his writings and his persona were both his invention, each part of the contract he made with his creativity. Another student observed with admiration that while he was “a creature of his time, he was also very much his own person...and stayed so right to the end.” I suggested that one can read, in Yuan Mei’s efforts to balance propriety and provocation, sensuality and literature, the influence of Chinese culture’s historical emphasis on achieving dynamic harmony, be it in one’s life, one’s garden or one’s writing. The candor of his verse, his books and his correspondence also argue that he wrote for the full range of reasons, both noble and mundane, that mark the lives of most writers: to earn money, fulfill commissions and flatter and deflate others; to pay his moral debts, celebrate his garden and tastes and honor teachers, mentors and patrons; to humor and amuse himself, and indulge his daemon; to respect and occasionally reinvent the past, as well as foster a legacy; and, at the conclusion, to make the best peace possible with sensuality and mortality itself. Whether pushed or knocked, the door of his art had been opened, and he walked right through it.
Four Doorways: The Last Poems of Yuan Mei - Joel Savishinsky
Note: For the translations and many of the biographical details in this essay, I am indebted to the following: Campbell (ed., 2017), Dunlop (2008), Schmidt (2003), Seaton (1997) and Waley (1956).
References/Works Cited:
Campbell, Duncan (ed.). 2017. Yuan Mei’s Garden of Accommodation. Wairarapa Valley, New Zealand: China Heritage Annual.
Dunlop, Fuchsia. 2008. “Letter from China: Garden of Contentment,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2008.
Schmidt, J. D. 2003. Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism and Poetry of Yuan Mei. (1716-1798). London and New York: Routledge.
Seaton, J. P. (Translation and Introduction). 1997. I Don’t Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press.
Waley, Arthur. 1956. Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet. New York: Grove Press.
POETRY
Enthusiastic Indifference
Frankie Laufer
The relentless march of ants, full of abundance. Black and Red but never Lime Green.
Work is Worship.
Wide awake they march to duty and the Queen. But don’t these six-legged bent antennae know that by law they are entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks?
This is government work at its best, but not a time clock in sight.
An owl wearing a dog collar watches this performance piece but mistakes it for a gender reveal party.
The pretty kitty licks its chops but it’s nap time, again. The cloud that could care less passes by.
Of course, there are casualties but that’s yesterday’s news...or tomorrow’s.
Like the Moon but not as fickle, they devour the landscape. A cricket announces this voyage is over.
Enthusiastic Indifference rises in the East to greet a new day.
Eating Reds & Drinking Beer
Stephen Barile
I came home to learn My collaborator from high school, Bob, was strung-out on “reds.” What I mean to say, He was addicted to Seconal. “Reds,” “red devils,” “red dillies,” Sleeping pills. Five, 100 milligram, Lilly F-40s capsules, Red/orange colored, bullet -shaped Pulvules, every day. The same pills with alcohol Killed Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t judge him For his drug addiction Unless I tried it, Took the drug myself. The stuff was easy to obtain Almost anywhere in town, Even the chief of police Was trafficking red pills. I went with Bob one morning In his ’68 Volkswagen bug To an apartment on Clinton Avenue, Last one, near the carport. Of a 19-year-old wife with a child He was making it with. Also, his supplier of “reds.” She was wearing a loose bathrobe. Annoyed by my presence, “Who’s he?” she asked indignantly. “A friend.” He got his supply, She folded the contents in a Kleenex, Put it in his front jean pocket. We left before her husband came home. Her spouse was suspicious, Thought their baby Bore no resemblance to him.
After dinner, Bob picked me up.
In the car, he swallowed three pills
And smiled like a circus clown.
He handed me two, I took one.
We drove to a beer bar
By the state college.
The jukebox blaring, Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising.”
Mostly male students drinking
$1.25 pitchers of draft beer (about 2 ½ 8-ounce glasses).
After a few drinks
I began to feel less anxious. Drunk quicker than usual, Not the usual drunkenness
From beer consumption.
The effects of the red pill, I was intoxicated. Drugged.
When I stood up to toast friends,
My speech was slurred.
Time expanded & contracted,
Anxieties disappeared, faces warped.
I became surly & belligerent.
Wanted to fight someone,
A guy whose looks I didn’t like.
After three pitchers each, Bob was ready to leave.
I was dizzy, tried to walk upright And appear somewhat lucid. He wanted to drive to her place
Except her husband hadn’t left
For the midnight shift yet.
When he got to the car, Bob left the chauffeuring to me.
Driving away, I seemed capable.
Streets I’d driven hundreds of times
Now looked different, however.
I didn’t recognize anything.
“Where are we going?” he asked,
From a slumped-over position.
“To her place, I think.”
My condition was worsening, his too. Known locations became unfamiliar.
We were lost at 3:30 a.m.
Driving around for another half hour, I turned left into a parking lot. Then right on the sidewalk. It was dark, no one was around. I drove the VW summarily Between the building fronts, Telephone poles, fire hydrants, Under a sign that read: CLOVIS POLICE DEPARTMENT. I was on the street post-haste, Got the hell out-of-there. Trying hard to drive straight At a semi-reasonable speed, Being cognizant of traffic signals. When things began to look the bleakest, I made it to Bob’s parents’ house. I shook him, pointed him to the door, Left the keys in the ignition. I staggered home in the night.
Broken Hearts
Rich McFarlin
So, I will build great battlements around my broken heart, Walls of stone and steel designed to hide the tender part. It’s not anger that comes bubbling up like mist to suckle wet and fertile ground, But disappointment that rises as thickened smoke from the ashes of the feelings I once had found.
I will hide the awful hurt and heartache within high set castle walls, Just like days of old, times when knights and maidens fair did roam the land, Seeking out adventures, slaying dragons hid in caves, And coming home to boulders hewn to squares and walls by hand.
Like a fortress rising from the mists, caused by coldest seas, With walls as wide as roads, patrolled by men in chariots, Protecting those who dwell within from those whom entrance seeks, And taking care of fragile things, with archers set along its parapets.
I had once been open with the feelings of my heart, Giving love freely to those who called my name out loud, But those who took my love so easily before, See now the pain and heartache I suffer and they without a sound.
They go about their daily lives, so innocent and pure, Knowing nothing for the hurt they’ve caused, they bring, No cause for self-reflection could make them less than sure, No inner work, no questioning, could make them shamed to sing.
And I reflect upon the walls of fortresses I’ve fashioned strong, Realizing that time was wasted waiting for the give and take, Hours and days and even years spent hoping beyond hope, Not understanding that with passing each the inner heart did break.
But now I see how it must be, the way it’s always been, It’s only you for you and never you for me, but when, There never was a give and take, not even waiting seen, That it was always only take and never in between.
Homemade Heidi Joffe
Metamorphosis of a Plate.
Rubber-ups pounded patterned tissue onto my green skin, precise, glaziers dipped and poured, dressed me in glass,
at six hundred degrees Celsius, the kill, clay to pot, irreversible, chemical and physical reaction elements white hot wares glow though the peep hole, a universe spinning through my fire, every molecule bounces and spews its last drops
thumbed, spun, cast, within saggars, my bones fire-licked, delicate to hard, an odd man stokes the wood, holes up the wall, cooks up breakfast in a number eight shovel: bacon and eggs spluttered in my flames.
Seventy feet high these chimney kilns, bunged up to the roof, an oss to climb rung by rung to the fancies: ornaments and souvenirs and tiles necked up as we vitrify, some of us just shards of worse seconds, pin-holed, not imperfect enough for a midden of thirds and lump.
Etymology
Heidi Joffe
Etymology of photoalgia: when light hurts.
Remind me about light as it refracts on water light from ships heavy with freight, anchored mid bay. Raining here and my roof sprung a leak. All decks lit, imagine the seamen at their dinner, phoning home. In a documentary on this industry: hundreds, Filipinos, on the water for six months or more, no shore time for sailors. I imagine them looking out those portholes at lights of the city, maybe mine, that glow of table light, shadows of family living in these boxes pressed into mountains, enclosed in trees, night streets quiet as I dig my tongue into that memory, aboard a ship, embarking, passage away, arms holding me, my sadness, flashed in one silver scratched
frame, that circle broken, slippage of kin, myself fractured in them, slipped into place with dust, water, worn smooth, I reflect back.
Magnolia Stephanie Watkins
I’m now on a list—
Lovers that once held you(r) attention
Prized affection I kept hidden In the depths of my teenage bedroom
Phone calls in the midnight hours
Long drive to your house
“Let’s get matching tattoos” Drunken suggestions, left me with Scars, instead of art
Capitalize our demise
Separation, now moved on To someone older [than myself]
Erased me your hands you’ve washed So meticulously Of us, though magnolias and “darling” bring you back Everytime— My mind a minefield
I’m now on your list— You asked if I was in love A grown man should’ve known, Silence stringing through phone lines
Enough to make you pretend I no longer exist
Your attention I possessed As nostalgic as my teenage bedroom.
Fault Line Stephanie Watkins
He, a distinguished professor I was in my second year
Lost in a world of literature and Creative Writing when it began that late autumn.
“Don’t rest on your laurels,”
He’d urge I relished his belief In me
Passing by each other Stolen glances
Campus greens, spirited lectures
Heads down, after office hours
I’ve always been good with secrets, With his secret, Careful not to dirty hands of a man, so careful
He poured me a drink as I thumbed through his prized first editions
“You’re a promising young woman,” he whispered, placing a strand of my hair behind my ear
A paper cut, deep crimson spreading like ink across the snow white pages
He read Russian literature to me, over coffee
Embers glowing in the fireplace
Pen in hand, I watched him grade papers
Red ink stains on his fingertips as I sat across from him in early morning light, while wearing his oversized Oxford shirt
Light blue
I skipped Friday morning class
We drove through the mountains, Cold air ruffling shedding trees
A weekend holiday
A pretend professor’s wife Gin and rose tonic
Days flowed into each other
We talked, falling asleep to each other’s voices over the phone
We discussed Shakespeare and he spoke of his parents who lived upstate “They’ll love you.” I felt safe and warm, Despite the slick of diamond-like ice that blanketed the campus
“I love you,” I confessed the night before winter break I walked to his office in the sleet hugging his coat tightly around me
He didn’t look up, only closing his book then turning his gaze to the window which was frosted with small ice crystals
I rubbed the small scar on my thumb “I’ll never meet your parents, will I?” Silence stung my flushed cheeks
I stood for a moment too long, Then left his coat on the floor by the door
I saw him again one afternoon that next fall He, standing by the ivy-covered hall, talked with a girl, with a high ponytail and a “Frosh Week” sweatshirt She laughed, as he placed a stray strand of blonde behind her ear
Red ink stains on his fingertips.
My Hips Don’t Lie
Dale Champlin
Even after so many encounters I require the relentless beat, the intoxicating tango, the trance of our tangle a drawn out lullaby indecipherable in words—
and all the while, above us the shell of sky lays bare a black shroud looming—littered with a faint dusting of stars. Venus, Saturn and Mars spin at arms-length— aligned or misaligned
and the sun waiting, always waiting, as if holding its breath for the kiss of an eclipse. Reverberating—our breastbones—shell-smooth as water pushing over stone.
There is something to be said for a feast after starving how we grind and then catch on this raft barely holding us afloat—how we survive the chrysalis of night— lifting with each inhale.
First Fuck
Dale Champlin
And why not? Mom and Dad do it every so often, Malory does it with all the boys (she claims) and gets away with it! My brother has a girlfriend and I’m pretty sure they do it. Curiosity is killing me—all those unanswered questions. I never once wonder if it hurts. It’s the mechanics of the thing that puzzle me. If it doesn’t happen soon I will be left out forever. My body feels grown up—the way my tits jounce when I run around the track at school and that queasy sensation between my thighs when I sit on the bleachers. Showers take a lot longer than they used to. I wash and shampoo then wash again—my face stripped of makeup, my body of hair and sweat, I shave my eyebrows and my pussy and begin my artistry. I draw my new brows with a fine eyeliner—a hundred strokes each. Peroxide my hair and dye it pink plush, add two pom-pom panda ear wiglets, false caterpillar eyelashes tipped with mascara, magenta eye shadow. Too bad I don’t have any tattoos but I powder my boobs and add shadows beneath my cheekbones and in my cleavage, put on my mom’s slinkiest dress. Oooh! Finding a boy who will do IT should be easy. I sling my Barbie purse over my shoulder, pretty sure I look at least fourteen.
I Love You More Than the World
Dale Champlin
in our public displays of affection, a reflex, anyone watching—a raven say, or a priest,
might find such extravagance suspect or louche— my hand tucked into your back pocket,
my tongue in your mouth, our eyes screwed shut. We refuse to be respectable in all respects, preferring to grope in plain sight. How we stumble radiant. Onlookers eye us sideways and curse their humdrum propriety. They wish they were us—meandering lovestruck, winding
and rewinding a mix tape from years together until the tempo twists and kinks like a tiny orgasm
or a labyrinthian knot. The world stays busy out there, chock-a-block with desire, envious
of what it is missing. You are my world— I won’t dismiss your mouth, your bum, your heartbeat, for a single second. We amble on exuberant, ecstatic, immersed in lust.
Infinity Plus One
Dina Fiasconaro
I’m the mom
Who walks ahead of her kid Because I’m always making up for lost time
When do you get to be angry?
Sophie Roy
Emma’s birthday party
Aftermath
Open a window
Burn the green top in the sink
Watch it burn.
Axelle’s birthday party
Smash his head through the living room’s window
The girls will thank you for it tomorrow morning.
Women bond over pain. Is it okay for me to say that? Am I allowed to be angry?
14th of july, nice day for a miscarriage.
Bloody tiles; Bloody Mary.
Wanna go to the pool? Cannonball style
How far can you see inside a glass child?
When do I get to be angry?
Tell me, how much? I’ll take it.
I know, I need to sleep; But do you want to hear about my future baby names list on my phone’s notes app?
When do I get angry?
I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
You are him; I hate him. Take off the Virgin Mary pendant from the Vatican. Don’t punch with your thumb inside, you’ll break it. I broke my thumb once, somebody slammed a door on it. My gods are girls in bathrooms.
We bond over pain. Those urging the beauty in suffering get death in paper cuts. I could break your arm.
I have been eighteen for four years now. Getting into clubs on looks. I am allowed to say it, I’ve been ugly enough for it to be defining before. How darling.
I’ve always wanted a pet.
And if I hold both colonisers and colonised in my wine’s blend, what am I but the fruit of supposed hatred? I am outside the building and I will crawl through the walls once I’ve smashed enough windows.
You will say my name one day. Not the easy one, The one in foreign tongue, The one you will have to repeat, I will hold you to it. As the birds taking off at dawn hold knowledge. And when the sun offers the epiphany of life, I hope you realise it’s your mother opening the curtains of your childhood bedroom.
Care is a privilege.
I am not given the bliss of walking the streets with my eyes shut. Let it be known I speak because they only silence us by strangling. I will not be the one choking on my own spit.
Wipe your mouth of the blood you’ll draw biting your tongue until I am done talking. Taste iron this once and again when your skull hits it. I am in your walls at the witching hour. I hope for your sake you learn not to wince when your own consequences turn it all to sour.
Women bond through pain. I will make you understand.
I am the crazy bitch who grins after I’ve set my jaw for the punch. Yes, it’s true I almost broke my best friend's living room window; because he recorded girls, because they asked nicely and I didn’t—and I do not mind broken glass. The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
Because if old white guys can call it an art performance, I will give you the last one of your life.
I will make you understand. And I will repeat it as I know you have trouble getting the point.
Because I have every right to be angry, and I would like to break your arm, but women can hold their impulses unlike you.
I will make you understand. How your gods turn obsolete. Because fathers fight for chimaeras. And mothers fight for human lives.
Your gods are turning obsolete. GRAB ‘EM BY THE DICK. Go fetch.
I am giving you a head start. I will make you understand.
B.O.W. (bitch, obviously wait)
Sophie Roy
I’m kind of in the middle of something right now?
Oh?
Okay?
Yeah...I just... Never mind. Sure, I’ll help you.
Bruises
Precise Bruises You can see each finger Wonder if they can See Where You made contact
How do you feel safe when defined by how hard you fight?
Misinterpret me, be harsh. Just so I can be sure.
Bow Satin ribbon
Rip it up
Tear It down
Cut it off
Tie it tight
Tighter
White
Then No longer as it stains
Then stained
Then pink
But splotchy brownish pink
Bow down Satin ribbons
Who do you bow to? Who should you bow to?
Burn the ends
Tie it up
What stains pristine ribbon? How tight should you really—tie a bow?
Neat little bows. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Cue nervous laughter.
I’M NOT DONE.
Where Pain Drops Dead
Susan Richardson
I remove the cork delicately, terrified of crumbling, anticipate the dip and spin of an early onset buzz. A single taste and I begin to feel the weight of loathing unburden itself from my tongue.
Weakening to the charms of intoxication, I slip behind the safety of a cordovan veil, where pain drops dead and the mouth of the moon opens to swallow the contempt on my skin.
Pleasure glides into my mouth, a serpentine flicker of danger awakening in my throat. I am ready to play.
I slash my lips red, prowl with undulating hips, hunting for a rough touch. Desire ignites in my eyes, singes the tip of my tongue.
I am a slur of sex that warps the mirror, enticing drunken strangers from behind a porcelain mask, until I splinter and break.
Painted glass slices into the fist of a weekend binge.
Ugly Girls
Susan Richardson
I.
The first time I felt desire roll in thick over my tongue, I was fifteen and in love with a boy who taught me the taste of regret. He lured me in with cunning eyes that sparked elation in my pulse, and a French accent that made the cigarette between my fingers tremble.
I spent hours outside in the snow, chain smoking, craving the scent of his words. When it was just the two of us, he took off his gloves and rolled fat joints for us to share. He touched the backs of my hands with cold fingers, told stories about doing hard drugs, drifting through Paris and finding the weight of his life buried like the roots of an incubus in his veins.
When his friends showed up to share a smoke, he cast me off into the fringes of silence, buried where his shame and his secrets lived. He slithered into conversations meant for boys, overheard by girls tucked inside cages of stillness, ugly girls who broke their bodies into pieces they gave away for free.
As curfew approached and smokers made their way back to the warmth of dorm rooms, he lingered to pull a slow final drag from his cigarette, whispered an invitation into furtive spaces, tempting me to search for him while the sky slept. He promised to be gentle.
Lying awake, nerves carving a hole in my stomach, I waited for the dorm to fall silent, then escaped through the darkness
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
and out the back door. I stole quietly over patches of ice, an imposter searching to uncover the cure for loneliness, heart beating so fast it threatened to expose me. He left a light on so I could find him.
I crept through the window into a room filled with drug paraphernalia and the desperate longing of teenagers. We smoked pot to loosen our heads, crawled into his bed, leaving the layers of our youth in a tangle on the floor.
With softly deliberate fingers, he stroked the inhibition from my body, his voice melting against my thighs, pulling me into the warmth of his mouth. Innocence disappeared into my breath as it faltered in my throat.
II.
On a school trip meant to broaden our characters, we spent a week buried in the canyon lands, ochre rising around us like an omen. In the daylight I was invisible, passed over like grains of sand falling unnoticed from the splendor of the rocks. At night, he led me across the backs of desert ruins, into the embrace of caves that kept us hidden. We got high and wrapped ourselves in recklessness, exploring the contours of each other’s skin.
When he and two other boys got caught with drugs, the canyon swallowed our voices, filling the air with regret as we hiked back to civilization and consequences. On the last afternoon, we had sex on the rocks by a small creek.
I thought it might make him feel better. Neither of us spoke. A week later, I turned sixteen and he was on a plane to France.
I wrote him letters and spent the summer growing pale, hidden beneath a mantle of shame, waiting for sound to return, wondering if I had made the right choice.
Months after the abortion, the belated hum of an overseas connection broke open the silence, his voice filling the emptiness in my belly. He told me he needed to know if I was okay. He said he was sorry. It was the first time I believed he actually liked me.
Isolation Tank
Susan Richardson
We are strangers carrying death notes in our teeth, warding off the evils of a rampant virus.
Two meters and a galaxy apart, be sure not to speak, not to breathe, not to cry.
behind his mask he is an open hand sunlight filling a cold room laughter first thing in the morning
behind my mask i am an isolation tank a storm inside an enforced shelter chaos in the eye of a bomb
We are strangers, choking on a new strain of fear, a cracked marble lodged in the throat. I have forgotten how to speak, how to breathe, how to cry. The Opiate,
Away
Velibor Baco
I sail alone, since childhood on, a sea so vast, leave ghosts of the past.
Alone I roam, lost many times, what once called home, to soul crimes.
I take to the deep, and all I saw, will forever keep, my memories call.
With first thought, a longing grew, I never sought, which was not true.
So I start each day, hope and pain anew, will forever stray, until I find you.
The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
Of Toulouse-Lautrec
Frank Freeman
only five feet tall, about the height of my mother, with those short legs, Van Dyke beard, thick lips, pince-nez, his hat and brushes and palette. (I wonder if the short guy who always walks down Storer Street has the same condition, pycnodysostosis, say that three times fast?) how he loved the whores, the night life, their acceptance, everyone having a good time until it killed them. but mostly of how he painted a portrait of Van Gogh and challenged de Groux, who had put the Dutchman down, to a duel backed up by Signac. de Groux backed down. takes one to know one. outsiders, I mean. and courage.
After the Phone Call
Frank Freeman
wherein Dad told me he had a terminal illness I had to go outside for a walk. it was cold on Greaton Hill Road in West Roxbury, Mass. and I stared at the gray branch against a white sky wondering why I wasn’t crying and thought this is how it always is this is how it always is this is how it always is.
New Wine
Frank Freeman
(based on Horace Gregory’s translation of Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, Book III)
Pentheus, the solid oak tree of justice of what is good and right, tried to ban the god of wine. For his effort an ivy wand lacerated his flesh, his mother Agave cursed him as a pig, he tasted only the wine of his bleeding tongue, as the altar smoke rose in stench, too late to apologize for his narrow eyes. He could only see the songs they sang, wild Bacchanalian songs there on Cithaeron, wondering about Acoetes walking free. Part of the problem here was the good and right Pentheus felt raged with self, blind to Bacchus’ killing of both the unrighteous and righteous, sailors who would have sold him for his beauty and rulers such as Pentheus who loved good more. But this was new wine from old grapes: the encrusted goblet of abandon spews a fountain— Pentheus must drink a river of it.
Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus, you know. The oak leaves shrieked when Agave, dear mother, ripped off his head.
Psycho
Frank Freeman
they had told me I had to go to bed, that it was late and the movie too scary. but I snuck out of bed and hid behind the couch as they watched it. I’ve wondered if they knew I was back there but let me think I was getting away with something, also whether my stepfather was feeling up my mother. whatever the case, I saw the shower scene, the guy getting stabbed as he went backwards down the stairway scene, and the skeleton old lady spinning around in the rocking chair scene. I was seven or eight, and had nightmares for a while about an old woman with silver hair and wearing a black dress chasing me through a Gothic house while brandishing a gleaming butcher knife. the movie Psycho is as old as I am, born in 1960, but I don’t know if that means anything. all I know is that it probably wasn’t good for an eight-year-old boy to see such things, but it’s too late now. time has dulled the black and white terror a bit, but I can still remember the shock. the “blood” in the shower scene was Hershey’s chocolate syrup, by the way.
The Cutting Room Floor
Ron Kolm
When you said You wanted to follow me
Everywhere I went
Videotaping
Every movement I made It should have set off An alarm somewhere
But I said, “Cool.”
So I was totally shocked When, later that evening, You threatened my life For an imaginary wrong. You said you wanted To edit me in the flesh.
The Cat Business
Ella Middleton
I walked across a large field, flanked by trees, the breeze shifting green matter, the sunlight, the bees. And finally, the frenzy of this led me to the edge of a vegetable patch. I thought of my grandparents—farmers and teachers. My grandmother leaning over in her garden, my mother laboring over tomatoes in August.
I produced an apple and sat down, thinking of fall and apples and the now-waning summer. And finally, my thoughts fell to Cuddles, my cat. She had left my life just Saturday, brown and red and gentle. Now Tuesday, her imprint was only widening. My face burned in the heat, in the tears, and pulling the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, I dried my lashes. I tried to adjust my eyes to the midday light. In the path of my gaze had appeared a cat.
He stood at the base of a short spruce, the patron tree of my grandparents, flicking his tail. And obviously mulling over some important decision, I clicked my tongue in the hope that he would notice me. In the past, I’d had little luck with this. Cemetery cats attended to the graves of the dead and had little interest in the living. Or I might call in the direction of a window cat, but only to catch his glance. These efforts were futile and always fruitless.
But this cat...this cat. I clicked again and his decision was made. Crouching in the appropriate greeting, I held out my hand. He sniffed gingerly then rubbed his little ears against my calf. The small talk over now, we had gained a mutual trust. He sat down next to me and I stroked his head, his chin, the small of his back. And again, my eyes began to burn; what a gracious gift in this week of sadness.
I grinned and he lay on my lap, purring loudly. His fur was incredibly soft, marked on his head and back by stripes of brown, red and black, his underside a snowy white. A woman approached, explaining that it was the cat of the École du Breuil. She stayed, watching him, but the cat did not rise in her direction. She headed off, and once again we were left alone amongst the sunlight and vegetables.
Then suddenly, he bit me. Thinking he wanted to play, I plucked a dandelion stem from the grass and dangled it in front of his face. He looked at it, a slight annoyance playing around his
whiskers, then bit me again. I drew my hand back from his paws and watched him, hoping to pet his head one last time. But the moment had passed, and without bitterness or sentiment, he rose from my thigh and trotted off in the direction from which he had come. The Opiate, Summer Vol. 38
Poem For the State of the World
Ella Middleton
Here is the world in its faulty treaties, crossed borders, olive groves and rose bushes. Ocean-sea currents of the turtles, and wind.
Here are people living on through wars, sides, think pieces.
We like to think—like to argue—that the sides are different, that the powers that be are trustworthy, but really everyone is in bed with everyone else.
Here is this metal taken from that land that was never yours to begin with. There go the deadly lies by past presidents, their graves still lie in dirt, their skin still disappears in time.
At the end of the day, is coffee the price of broken backs? Is a text due the cost of mines through Earth and fingers through dirt?
So here is this throne and crown of bones, of skin, of fingers you have to step over to climb up.
Careful not to look down or you might glance at what it’s made of.
CRITICISM
The Only Thing That’s
Timeless
Is Totalitarianism Justified Through War: Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song
Genna Rivieccio
Edwin
Starr might have once declared, “War/What is it good for?/Absolutely nothing,” but it seems that the message has yet to be received by the “big men in charge.” Worse still, it’s been received but ignored. The profit margins and “causes” too important to pay heed to such a song (a sort of “prophet song,” if you will). Written in 1969 and released in 1970, at the height of anti-Vietnam War sentiment, Starr’s anthem of protest is moving and impactful in theory, but fails to take into account the automaton nature of the proverbial big black boot of the oppressor that seeks only to crush anything and anyone in the way of its agenda. In Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the author wields his native land of Ireland as the fictionalized milieu where totalitarianism has infiltrated at every corner. Although Western countries would like to believe in their immunity to such things, Ireland is no stranger to being a war zone, what with its history of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) showing militant resistance to British rule.
In Lynch’s imagining of a dystopian Ireland, it stems from a far-right entity, the National Alliance Party (NAP), gaining control
of government and therefore establishing “emergency powers” that swiftly strip away any of the basic liberties and human rights that the country’s residents were formerly accustomed to. This includes the right to protest without being arrested, as well as not being given the right to bail or legal representation when arbitrary arrest occurs. This is the fate that befalls Larry Stack, the leader of a teachers’ union who has the “gall” to think he can stand his ground against the Garda Síochána and the newly founded Garda National Services Bureau (GNSB), a Gestapo meets SS (Schutzstaffel) type of organization that has free rein
“‘There is no biblical end-of-days. We destroy the world again and again and again and you watch it on the news.’
Yet what if we’ve finally come to a point in human existence when there is suddenly no world left at all to destroy? This very question can be applied to the fact that, as Israel drops its bombs and sends in its tanks and troops, it has had an all too grave effect on the already fledgling environment.”
to do, well, whatever the fuck it likes. Especially to citizens it deems “dissenting.” A word that, in their minds, constitutes just about any behavior that displays a modicum of sentience (what George Orwell would bill as “thoughtcrimes”). This is precisely why, at the beginning of the novel (which is structured without paragraph breaks or quotes around the sentences spoken by different characters), Larry asks his daughter, Molly, “Tell me, he says, do you believe in reality? Dad, what is that supposed to mean? It is a simple question, you took the degree, you know what it means. When you put it like that, yes, I know what you mean, but spare me the lecture.” He then tries speaking about it to his wife, reasoning, “We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition
The Only Thing That’s Timeless Is Totalitarianism Justified Through War... - Genna Rivieccio
but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on—the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change the ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true—this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.”
Repeat enough of one “truth” and it becomes more real than reality itself—something Trump supporters know all about. Or, more accurately, don’t seem to realize at all, so effective is the trance. But in the case of the characters in Prophet Song, it’s less about being caught up in the “glamor” of non-reality and more about staying in a state of denial regarding said non-reality until it’s too late. Until non-reality actually becomes reality. Even so, as Larry warns Eilish, “Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself...you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales...”
The eerie applicability of Lynch’s book—which went on to win the Booker Prize in 2023—is part of why it is a retroactively prescient read in the wake of what Israel is doing in Palestine. But it didn’t take this particular cataclysm to “inspire” Lynch. As he stated in an interview with the Booker Prize (while still merely a nominee), “I was trying to see into the modern chaos. The unrest in Western democracies. The problem of Syria—the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference. The invasion of Ukraine had not even begun. I couldn’t write directly about Syria so I brought the problem to Ireland as a simulation. The book began with a problem that Larry Stack is faced with: how do you prove that a democratic act is not an act against the state?” Especially if the state is an unreasonable, illogical totalitarian regime.
Although Lynch never explicitly states the catalyst for the farright takeover of government (something that certain critics of the book took issue with), it doesn’t really need to be “spelled out.” The reasons are always the usual ones: position the “other” in a country as the enemy so as to scapegoat them for all the problems that are, in truth, the fault of a corrupt system perpetually exploited by politicians. And so, without the detailed “why” for what caused the regime to form, Lynch further added that once he asked the aforementioned question of Larry Stack’s problem, “The novel grew in complexity and
developed its own implacable logic.”
Or rather, developed out of the world’s own implacable lack of logic. To this point, Orwell’s other Newspeak word, “unperson,” comes to mind. The definition should be fairly obvious (“a person who has been stripped of rights, identity or humanity”) and the political motive behind it even more so. By depicting a “certain” group as being “subhuman” (an “unperson”), it is much easier to justify acts of obscene cruelty against them. In the Israeli government’s case, having an ironclad excuse to go about exterminating Palestinians was the boon they’d been waiting for. After Hamas launched its attack on Israel beginning on October 7, 2023, the Israeli government response went well beyond the objective of “expelling Hamas,” but instead, became entirely about escalating the conflict into an all-out war/bloodbath. In essence, they capitalized on an opportunity to be seen as “defending themselves”—even though that ignores the larger picture of why Palestinian outrage might have reached a “terrorist level” in the first place. And for a quick minute there, sympathy did seem to be on the side of Israel (as it usually is when it comes to Western perspectives). Until the (blood-red) tide rapidly turned and non-politicians could blatantly see the senseless carnage being carried out in the name of vindictive “rectitude.” Complete with the language typically invoked to “rationalize” such horrific atrocities. Case in point, Benjamin Netanyahu calling Gaza “the city of evil.”
In every war, true to form, one side tries to paint the other as just that. In 2002, when George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address, he was sure to emphasize what parts of the world were “evil” after Osama bin Laden became the poster child for that branding. In his now infamous “axis of evil” speech, Bush proclaimed, “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.” In 2024, Bush’s rhetoric would be largely unmoving to the current legion of protesters (many of them students) who refuse to buy into the idea that all Palestinians must be obliterated in order to “stop terrorism.” Call it a shift in sympathy or an inability to be as naïve as teens and college students of the 2000s were. Indeed, a jadedness not seen since the Nixon administration has taken hold of the United States. A total lack of faith in government and its associated institutions.
Some of what’s going on in America sounds itself like the symptoms of a totalitarian regime, complete with banning “foreign media” (i.e., TikTok). In Prophet Song, Lynch delineates that phenomenon (so well-conveyed in Orwell’s 1984) by writing, “Another decree is announced on the news, the listening to or reading of any foreign media has been prohibited, news channels from abroad will be blocked and an internet blackout starts from today. That’s ridiculous, Bailey says, how can they just turn it off like that? I don’t know, love, they can do what they like, they want to control the flow of information, they don’t want us to know what’s going on.” On that note, the socalled flow of information has obviously ceased altogether in what’s left of Gaza. These victims of the “us versus them” mentality that many Israelis have been indoctrinated with are likely aware that “they are calling it an insurgency on the international news, but if you want to give war its proper name, call it entertainment, we are now TV for the rest of the world.” Tragically, that is exactly what the genocide in Palestine has become: a source for “spectacle.” Even in its casual and callous mention during the worst presidential debate in history, during which Donald Trump spouted the following rhetoric, totally unchecked: “Actually, Israel is the one, and you should let them go and let them finish the job. [Biden] doesn’t want to do it. He has become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.” Not only does “finish the job” sound like a barely-veiled euphemism for “finishing the genocide,” but the word “Palestinian” is wielded by Trump in a blatantly pejorative sense. And no one—not Biden, not one of the moderators—saw fit to interject and call Trump out for his racially-charged remarks. Of course, why would Biden do that when he proudly declared, in the same debate, “[We are] providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them... We are the biggest producer of support for Israel than anyone in the world.”
With no political entity in the West meaningfully on the Palestinians’ side, those who could never fathom being summarily ejected from their home might ask why Palestinians “bother” to stay. To this, Lynch’s answer in Prophet Song puts it rather succinctly when “Eilish tells Molly, ‘And where would we go, we have nowhere else to go, it costs a lot of money to go someplace else.’” This notion of staying in spite of being driven out in the cruelest, most brutal ways possible is addressed many times throughout the novel. Particularly as things get bleaker and bleaker, and there’s even fewer ostensible ways to escape the country. At one point, “Talking to a man named Gerry Brennan, Eilish listens to him tell her, ‘It’s plain as day what they’re
up to,’ he says, ‘they’re trying to chase us out like vermin, that’s what they’re doing, they want to exterminate us like rats, it’s just a matter of time and effort...’” This no holds barred assessment is all too uncanny considering the present circumstances. Brennan then continues, “Why should we leave?...tell me that, they won’t get us out, we will live underground if we have to, I’ll dig a hole in my fucking garden, if you’ve lived in one place all your life the idea of living someplace else is impossible, it’s what do you call it, neurological, it’s wired into the brain, we’ll just dig in, that’s what we’ll do, what else are you supposed to do anyhow, I don’t know where else I’d go, they can drag me out in a coffin.” And, as we’ve seen repeatedly in our genocidal history, that is exactly what they’ll do.
Yet the people subjected to literally dying to stay in the place where they were born would often “prefer” (a stretch on word choice) to remain. Even when none of their other kin are still there. Hence, when Eilish asks another neighbor why she stayed in Ireland if her children have long been gone, her response is described as follows: “The woman is silent a long time. She puts a mottled hand to her chin and goes to speak but sighs instead and looks away. Why do any of us stay?” The answer, it would seem, is baffling to those who don’t understand being inextricably bound to a place. This “boundedness” on both sides of the current conflict playing into how it will never end. At least not in a way where one side doesn’t lose spectacularly. Where one side isn’t perhaps wiped out entirely.
Yet, despite that risk, they will not yield (even when a miraculous escape hatch does arise). For those who endure genocidal agendas (and manage to be among the few to survive) don’t have a choice. Not just literally, but figuratively. They have to stay. In any case, choice is a luxury, in fact, that fewer and fewer populations seem to possess. And yet, this ousting of choice is a tale as old as government. As Lynch puts it in Prophet Song, “History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”
As the war continues to escalate to the point where it’s right on the Stacks’ doorstep, Lynch conveys how Eilish “does not know why she remains so calm, another door has been opened, she can see this now, it is as though she were looking out upon something she has been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in the blood, thinking, how many people across how many lifetimes have watched upon war bearing
silent negotiation, whispering then pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the specter that cannot be directly looked at.” And, speaking of not directly looking at things, the world that watches the carnage in the Middle East does so only cursorily. Does so, as previously mentioned, in a manner that makes it serve more as “entertainment
Riffing on what T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men’—‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper’— Lynch describes that feeling more elaborately as Prophet Song itself comes to an end, and Eilish and what remains of her family are about to get on a boat like the refugees they’ve unavoidably become. He illuminates, ‘...she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life...’”
value” than anything else. This was grotesquely displayed via a trend on TikTok where, per an October 2023 Wired article written by David Gilbert, “In the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, TikTok creators have been engaging in ‘live matches’ on the platform where one creator plays the role of Israelis and the other that of Palestinians, while encouraging—and often shouting at—their followers to continue to donate expensive gifts [with TikTok taking its own fifty-percent cut from “creators” for the “pleasure” of being able to use the company’s LIVE content feed]. The side with the most gifts after five minutes wins the battle.” So there you have it: the height of how war has not only become a source of entertainment in the twenty-
first century, but even a source of income for the desensitized hoi polloi instead of just the warlords known as government.
Meanwhile, Palestinians were perhaps hoping, when (this version of) the war first began almost a year ago now, “...this is not going to go on much longer, we don’t live in some dark corner of the world, you know, the international community will broker a solution.” This is what Eilish says at first, hopefully adding, “There are talks going on right now in London, this is how it goes, first there are stern warnings and then there are sanctions and when the sanctions don’t bite they bring everyone around the table, they’ll broker a ceasefire any day now.” That tune could also apply to the fallen-by-the-wayside-in-terms-of-newscoverage Russia-Ukraine war, with so many sanctions unleashed on Russia at the outset of Putin’s invasion that everyone falsely assumed he would “have to” give in. Two years later, the dictator shows no signs of de-escalation at all. Just as it seems rather unlikely that Israel or Hamas will de-escalate either. Not until one or both parties are all dead.
In this sense, the way in which the world ends is so often on a micro level before the domino effect that leads to a macro result. Riffing on what T. S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”—“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper”—Lynch describes that occurrence more elaborately as Prophet Song itself comes to an end, and Eilish and what remains of her family are about to get on a boat like the refugees they’ve unavoidably become. He illuminates, “...she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down in to the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be case out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore...”
What’s happening now, though, is far more than a distant warning. It’s a harbinger for the commoner and a dog whistle for the oppressor. Further confirmation that the latter can get away with whatever they want, so long as they bury the lead in the headlines in the midst of burying the bodies.
When questioned in an interview with The Guardian about the escalating tensions (to use understatement) in the world that have occurred during the short time since the novel was released, Lynch stated, “I was hardly surprised when I saw Mariupol being leveled or Gaza pounded to dust. I’ve been told I’ve written a zeitgeist novel, but to me this is a novel about what has been, what continues to be and what will always be. There is a wretchedness built into the human condition. There is no biblical end-of-days. We destroy the world again and again and again and you watch it on the news.” Yet what if we’ve finally come to a point in human existence when there is suddenly no world left at all to destroy? This very question can be applied to the fact that, as Israel drops its bombs and sends in its tanks and troops, it has had an all too detrimental effect on the already fledgling environment.
As Nina Lakhani, a climate justice journalist for The Guardian, reported, “The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.” The cost of “bombing for peace” (which, yes, is like fucking for virginity), therefore, is no longer just the lives of one’s “targets,” but also those of the global population at large, increasingly going down a path of no return when it comes to averting the several-degree heat-up that Earth is projected to have. Probably sooner than we think at the rate that things are going. For the timelessness of totalitarianism is causing everyone’s time to be up.
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Klimenko
Summer bummer has taken on a new meaning in 2024. The Opiate, Vol. 38 shines searing, sunscreen-requiring light on some of that ick factor with fiction, nonfiction and poetry from Jason Escareno, Danila Botha, John Whalen-Bridge, Kevin Brown, Joseph Couchet, William K. Burke, Joel Savishinsky, Frankie Laufer, Stephen Barile, Rich McFarlin, Heidi Joffe, Stephanie Watkins, Dale Champlin, Dina Fiasconaro, Sophie Roy, Susan Richardson, Velibor Baco, Frank Freeman, Ron Kolm and Ella Middleton.