Features

Anatomy of a Rabbit Hole

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BY LORI GREEN

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1.

I have lost myself in Penny Slinger’s archives. It’s an easy way to spend a Saturday afternoon during underemployed COVID times.

2.

Back in 2019 I read a throwaway footnote in a David Graeber book: at some point, the USSR hoped to feed their people with Spirulina, the protein packed algae and modern-day superfood. I failed to locate any evidence supporting this claim.

3.

I did find another Cold War/spirulina connection though, in the LA Times, 1985: Manufacturers of Algae Derivative Claim they could “Feed the World”. In the article, Microalgae International Sales Corp. hosts a cocktail party at which Christopher Hills, the ‘father of spirulina,’ touts the powers of his sustainable green slime. Goodbye starvation. The company operates as an early MLM and donates product to charitable causes–including 1,900 pounds of spirulina tablets for, “Mujahideen Afghan freedom fighters”. Spokespeople claim the Mujahideen are scaling mountains to victory, subsisting on algae and snow. Doctors question health claims and decry the arrogance of shipping pond scum to the poor.

4.

To me, it sounded like the perfect longform article just waiting to be made into a podcast. It sounded like money, bingeable content. You have an MLM, spurious medical promises, a charismatic “Western guru scientist”, and US involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War. Wild stuff. I took some notes and put them away.

5.

Now that I’ve lost my health-food job to the pandemic and have a month without ghostwriting work, I return to the story. I finally have time to “follow the money,” and, “track down sources.” Unfortunately I don’t know how to do any of that. I left school with no research skills and find nothing meaningful on Microalgae International Sales Corp., or on this period in Hills’s life. Every link on his foundation’s website–I try Archives; I try Afghan Refugees–returns me to the homepage.

6.

It’s especially frustrating because Hills is in my reach. He’s all over the internet, photographed with scientists, prime ministers. He received a glowing obituary and in the photo he glows, too. The man was prolific. He wrote books I won’t read because I imagine they approximate the kind of eye contact that washes brains. I assume hypocrisy, the implicit sins of a spiritual conman. I am wary of entertaining that kind of mind after my year with the health food company where I too sold spirulina, under the rule of another aspiring guru. She also wanted to save the world with capitalism and positive thinking. There is no art there.

7.

In all my fruitless research one name keeps coming up: Penny Slinger. Hills’s wife and protector of his legacy, she ran their Goddess Temple after his death. I avoid reading about her because I am skeptical of spiritually driven, age-gap romances, the muse and the bearded man. In the one picture I see of them she’s beautiful and gazing into Hills’ eyes. It scares me.

8.

At my final dead end, I consent and search her name. There must be two Penny Slingers. All these sharp black-and-white photos and collages? This British beauty, domineering, naked, in leather or decked out in a full mane of feathers? Where is the repressed earth mother? Who is this subversive surrealist?

9.

I go to her website and find that yes, there are several Penny Slingers but they are all the one: Penny Slinger. Her lines are solid in portraits, ragged in collage. Rotting and youth is everywhere. Here she is, modern and sleek in the 60’s; here, writing volumes on tantra; in recent interviews she’s a sphynx, composed, grinning and older. 

10.

In one color photograph from a magazine profile she’s standing indoors, indomitable in front of perched falcons. There is surely bird shit on the floor. The scene is a dream I’ve already had, and I dream about the dream.

11.

I look through stills from a film she acted in–The Other Side of Underneath–,the only British movie directed by a woman in the 1970s. It depicted female psychosis. That shoot ended relationships. A man died in its aftermath. I find it for free and skip to the middle. I can tell this movie would destroy me though, so I close the window.

12.

For several years it’s been the fashion to rediscover neglected female artists, the Babitzes and Carringtons. By rediscover, I don’t mean to say that life forgot Penny Slinger, or she it, just that the internet has never pushed her on me. She hasn’t turned up on my Instagram.

13.

She’s the subject of a recent documentary called Out of the Shadows andI watch the trailer. Nowhere do I find the hazy smile of a woman usurped by an old man. I’ve stopped looking for it. I entered my search prejudiced, playing into this fantasy that she stopped making art. To indulge in that fantasy would be a sin and the most monstrous arrogance of all. Of course she never stopped. We were always going to find her again.

14.

Forget Hills. I don’t see green algae in Slinger’s photos so I won’t care about green algae, or my lost job, or capitalism gurus. My vendettas are mine. I should probably work on them. Anyway, now I’m less interested in podcast worthy stories than in falling into a Penny Slinger rabbit hole. And I do, all afternoon. I find everything. There’s plenty and not enough. Her books would cost a fortune to a laid-off woman in pandemic. They’ll come back into print soon though; I’m sure of it, because she’s left the Goddess Temple compound for Los Angeles. She recently designed a set for Dior Haute Couture and gives interviews.

15.

I trace this artist’s face over years and hear her calling me out for storing my womanly powers in the spare room. I am afraid because she is wilder than the life I chose and matches a life I might have chosen. She is brave enough to inhabit a haunted house, formidable enough to gain access to one and does, a place called Lilford Hall. It’s in ruins. Picture Manderlay. Her partner lived there as a boy and grew up to be a moviemaker named Peter Whitehead. The two plan a film together, start shooting in the estate. When they split up he drops the project and she spends years making her own book out of that time and space: An Exorcism.

16.

A quick search tells me that Peter Whitehead’s work has been called unspeakable. At some point he became a professional falconer. Hence the falcons in the magazine piece, I assume. I didn’t know that was a viable career path, but I guess for an English male who spent his childhood in Lilford Hall, anything is possible.

17.

Because anything is possible, I watch myself read about Penny Slinger for the rest of the afternoon. I sign into JStor because it makes me feel academic and membership is free during pandemic. I enter: Penny Slinger Lilford Hall. All I find is a letter from Peter Whitehead to someone named Niki de Saint Phalle. I read the letter to its end, saving some lines but not their contexts. He mentions dropping the film with Slinger. Being from the future, I know she’s going off to make An Exorcism. Peter Whitehead seems mean, but what do I know? I think of a life of meanness, of breaking your word to people but not to your art.

18.

I open a tab for Niki de Saint Phalle and find her huge, joyful statues of huge, joyful women called Nanas. She and Slinger are both stupidly beautiful. Beauty doesn’t seem to matter to them. They use it how they can, like they’d cast it off and laugh and grow old then young then old again. So much scares me but the Nanas don’t.

19.

Have I always been this afraid? The story of a part-time ghostwriter in pandemic falling into the world of someone else’s art won’t buy me anyone’s attention. Considering that Dior set and Out of the Shadows, I’m behind the times already. “This woman,” I hear an imaginary voice scoff, “thinks she has discovered Penny Slinger? She’d never heard the name, Penny Slinger, before Pandemic?”

20.

Alright, but then where are the Babitz/Carrington documentaries? Where is Penny Slinger’s biography? I am afraid if we don’t get them down in print our attention will have only been a trend. I need more information. I need a paperback before she walks away again, off of the internet and out of earshot. I wish I’d learned to write biography.

21.

There are other leads I could follow this afternoon. Why did Peter Whitehead live at Lilford Hall–32,406 square-feet, over 500 years old with 100 rooms–when he was young? Was it already in shambles? I’m curious about his access, but am more curious about Penny Slinger taking it from him. I’m curious about the hall’s disrepair. How long did its ruin take? Lilford Hall had a great fall. All neglected structures crumble. How did they put it together again, and why? More information, please.

22.

I won’t find those answers. But I tell myself a story: some very old family was gifted Penny Slinger’s hardcover on a Christmas morning in the late 70’s. Flipping through the pages, they were returned, after a lifetime away, to their treasured estate. They wandered through it. They found their rooms filled with nudes and floating nuns, scorpions, a mouth in flight.

23.

What these bloated landed gentry said was, “The wallpaper is in strips; the floor is littered with the ceiling; find the old help and rescue those mirrors.” 

24.

What they meant was, “Our ancestral entrance is blocked by a pair of spread legs. We are going to have to exorcise this exorcism.”

25.

And they almost did. How long before dust is the permanent state of affairs? The Lilford Hall website does not link to Penny Slinger’s archives. It doesn’t mention her at all.

—

Lori Green studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[REVIEW] The Purple Lotus by Veena Rao

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(She Writes Press, 2020)


REVIEW BY KIRAN BHAT

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We begin the pages of Purple Lotus in transit, or in travel. The main character, Tara Raj, is a young girl on a train heading to Mangalore. Though “peanut shells and crumpled newspaper [strain] over the floor,” and “stink of urine [emanates] from the toilets three compartments down the corridor,” Tara is a little girl filled with wonder, and hope. She sees her mother with “her hair coiled into a neat bun – like Belle in Beauty and the Beast,” she notices the presence of the child in her mother’s belly like “a birthday balloon,” she describes the passing landscape dotted with, “dark clouds too, smudges of dense black ink that threatened to let their wrath loose again.” Do not be fooled. We spend actually very little time in Tara’s childhood, as the chapter immediately after morphs Tara into an adult, having landed into Atlanta, after having been arranged to marry an Indian-American she barely knows. Yet, in the same way that Rao has taken extra care to decorate her language with the right amount of detail, but never too much so as to render her language garish, Rao has started off our imaginary of Tara as a child for a reason. The journey to loving oneself is long, the journey to understanding yourself is just as hard. A superficial read of Purple Lotus would make it appear like the biography of a woman who dealt with constant gaslighting, spousal abuse, and denigration, during her marriage, and found recognition in herself later on in her divorce. At the same time, I think Rao is attempting something much bigger here. Rao is trying to tell the story of the innate smallness each and every one of us have in a society, culture, or family, and yet to remember that, despite that smallness, we offer a vastness of our own to the world.

One of Rao’s great talents at play in Purple Lotus is her ability to reveal the full depths and feelings of a character in an extremely small space. A few days after Tara is brought to Atlanta, she lays in bed, jetlagged, thinking about whether to call her parents or not. Her husband Sanjay has called her, but she does not understand what he said. Later at night, he confronts her. Tara quite earnestly explains that she could not understand his accent, which causes Sanjay to scold her. After insult upon insult, he roars, “‘Aren’t you supposed to have a master’s in English literature?’” and Tara’s instinct is to escape to the bathroom. “She couldn’t let him see the tears. She felt so stupid. She had already rubbed him the wrong way. The tears flowed, hot and earnest.” These handful of lines do pages of work for Rao’s characters. They reveal the lack of compatability in Tara and Sanjay’s worldview, they foreshadow the further toils and turmoils that Tara’s marriage will result in, and they are just simply relatable. Anyone who has been a migrant to the US will know where Tara is coming from, and instantly feel a connection with her inability to fit in.

Another talent of Rao’s is to imbibe the immediacy of an image or sensation into the reader using language. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri, Rao writes about food in a way that not only makes the reader salivate, but also educates them about the importance of food to culture and the building of relationships. For example, in an effort to make their marriage more amenable, Tara tries to learn how to cook Italian and Mexican food. “Her first attempt at making veggie lasagna was a disaster, but her refried bean enchiladas turned out better—the cheese had melted sufficiently, the sauce was still bubbling when she pulled the dish out of the oven, and the chopped black olives and cilantro added aesthetic appeal to their plates.” Ignoring the fact that Rao’s sentences make me wish I had some Mexican food right in front of me, what is important to the narrative is that Sanjay responds to Tara’s hard work by saying, “It’s good,” and still going out to eat most nights elsewhere. Tara savors what little positivity Sanjay gives her, but to the reader, it’s very clear their relationship is going south, or has been south since it has started.

As per the affair, and what happens after, this is where Rao starts to stumble. It was so obvious that Sanjay was cheating on Tara that I would have almost liked to have seen the story go in another direction for subversion’s sake, and while Sanjay appeared like a well-drawn Indian-American initially, his abuse later on reveals him as a character of very little subtly or three-dimensionality. One wonders, is there anything Sanjay likes to do other than rag on Tara and cheat on the side? A similar problem seems to exist for a lot of the other characters Rao introduces. Tara’s Russian neighbour Alyona often comes off as a generic Eastern European immigrant, with very little detail that reads true to anyone who knows Russian culture well, and Rao’s second love interest Cyrus seems to only exist for Tara to dote on. In fact, it’s such a shame to see Rao’s flimsily realized side characters, because Tara is so strongly developed, and realized, and even real.

Still, all writers are learning their craft, and Rao is no exception. No matter what misgivings I have about certain aspects of the novel, Rao’s prose is so well-paced and structurally formed that hundreds of pages can be read in a few hours, and there’s a lot in her writing that is not only likeable, but courageous, and commendable. Purple Lotus proves Rao to be an apt writer of character study and an effortless storyteller. I’d recommend it first and foremost to people who are fans of the expansive storytelling of Tayari Jones, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, and then to anyone who wants to add to their bookshelf of growing Atlanta literature.

—

Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.

Craft – Veterans Day – The Heart of War

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By Michael Ramos

I am an Iraq War vet. And I write a lot about the military, my war, and more importantly—at least to me—what I call the after.

My first publication was in the Sun’s Readers Write and while I was stoked, I started to worry that people would gravitate toward my work when I started telling my stories because it was new, and they wanted to know about war. I didn’t want a free pass. I wanted people to respond to my work because of its artistic merit. But then I realized being a war vet wasn’t special and neither were war stories.

The problem with being a war vet writer is that warriors have been telling war stories for actual millennia. I didn’t want to tell the same old stories the same old way because then no one ever changes the way they think or feel about anything. So, when I think about what stories I choose to tell, I think about whether I am bringing anything new to the conversation. If not, the answer for me is to not tell a particular story.

You might think that is stifling, but I think the opposite is true. I am free to pursue things that haven’t been talked about or seen. What I mean is that most people by now have some idea of what a patrol is or looks like, what a gunshot or gunfight looks or sounds like, or an explosion, most people know the military members, those who have served together see themselves as brothers or sisters. Most people assume that as a veteran of Iraq I am morally injured or callous to suffering. Indeed, in the early days people felt the need to tell me why I was wrong for being in Iraq or how awful I must feel for all that I had done. Of course, I don’t remember seeing those folks shitting in a hole next to me or bored out of their minds with me, but whatever. Needless to say, people have seen or read enough to think they know everything about war, and I want to challenge that.

I don’t focus on the conventional war stuff that everyone has already seen or read that’s too easy. I want my reader to understand the heart of war.

The heart of war is different than the machinery of war. The machinery of war is what you see on screen and read in the hero books.  The heart of war is the bone deep tired of being awake for days looking for enemy contact and the sorrow of aging and enjoying the highs and lows of life in the after while your friends are the same age they were the day they died in some dirty shitty piece of earth or in the car after making it home from the battlefield.

I want my reader to be tired, so tired that their body aches from lack of sleep and wearing 75 pounds of gear everywhere,  an ache that you feel in your bone marrow and the near constant headache and buzzing in your head from not resting and never being able to escape the background noise of war, not the gunfire or explosions or screams or whatever you imagine, but the static hum and beep of the radio that’s always receiving word from higher and the fast-paced, high pitched squealy creak of Amtrack treads crushing sand into powder,  and the soft splash a booted foot makes into that powder and the swish of dirty-stiff Cammie pants rubbing together as someone walk towards you and the creak of a rifle sling and the pop of a twenty year old kid’s knees as he sits next to you as you both lean against a Humvee tire and the smell of tire rubber and  diesel and the whiff of salty sweaty BO and dirty feet and dust and realizing it isn’t him—well, it may be him—but that smell is you and missing showers and clean clothes or at least clean socks and peace and quiet but you have a nice, chalk-moist poundcake that you can’t wait to enjoy and in that blissful moment after tearing open the package and halving it with him you hold that half a MRE pound cake in your dusty grimy hands and take a bite. Only you don’t taste the exhilaration of chocolate but sand, or maybe gritty sand with a hint of chocolate, but it’s a poundcake—how lucky are you to get the chocolate pound cake and not peanut butter crackers or some lame shit like that—and you revel in the joy of that millisecond near escape.

I hardly ever see people write about that or see that kind of experience in the movies. I hardly ever see anyone talk about two or three junior personnel and a supervising NCO standing around oil drums and the sweet and sour smell of diesel burning human shit or the weightless relief of being able to take a piss without fear of being blown up.  

But even then, those things might be familiar to an outsider. I remember a comment a friend and mentor made about a piece I wrote called “Sleep.” In the particular image—I focus on image like an Impressionist painter or poet rather than a traditional scene—I talk about how my Marines and I are fine during the day, but the dreams—not always nightmares—the replay of every moment happens at night. He said to me that as different as our lives and worldview might be, as foreign as these experiences are to him, he could relate to the things coming back at night. He went on to talk about an accident that he had had and how his replays of the events happened at night.

Who would have thought that a civilian and a war vet could find commonality in an experience? I think that the way I handled the experience, translating it into a still image where you can almost see and feel the terrifying closeness of the dark, humanity’s primordial fear, helped bridge a perceived gap.

I say perceived gap because a common trope of the veteran writer’s experiences is their unknowableness. But I reject that unknowableness. On close scrutiny, we see that humanity is humanity and our experiences at the emotional level are similar if not the same. Besides, as a writer like all other writers, my job is to translate my experiences and have another human being understand me at an emotional level.

I am not the trauma hero, I am not the redeemed hero, I am not even a hero hero. I am a human trying to make his way in the universe.  Sure, the experiences of war, and of being a vet, can be overwhelming and suffocating and fun and exhilarating, so I use the page to reflect that reality. Long sentences, short sentences. Sound and cadence, visceral detail, point of view and time shifts—no real magic or arcane knowledge there—all work to immerse and overwhelm my reader so they can get a glimpse of what it’s like. But what I care most about is when the reader is finished with my work they can say, I don’t know the particulars, but I know that emotion.

______

Michael Ramos is an Iraq War veteran writer and the Assistant Director of UNC Wilmington’s Publishing Laboratory. He focuses on dispelling the myths about war, warriors, and veterans and bringing military and civilian communities together through the power of writing.  His work has been published in the Sun, Fourth Genre, Slice, OAFNation.com, and In Love…and War: The Anthology of Poet Warriors. 

[REVIEW] The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

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Saga/Simon & Schuster, 2020

—

REVIEW BY THEODORE C. VAN ALST, JR.

Gabe’s dad looks out the kitchen window, at the wall of the house right beside his, maybe.

Who knows what old men look at?

—Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

When it comes to reading, anyway, what do we, old men or not, look at? The words we read, the images they evoke? Cover art, name, title?

Or ourselves, like the best art asks us to?

Stephen Graham Jones always asks, subtly demands, and ultimately forces us to engage with all of the above along with the not-so-casual why of why we read at all.

For scholars of Native lit (whatever that category may be, or ever have been), a new offering from Jones presents two possibilities, both usually inhabiting the horror category (and increasingly the genre). The first; what terrors await us as readers and teachers of his work that always pushes and stretches our intellectual abilities and classroom boundaries, the second; as Native scholars of lit, well, it’s only having to examine the boundaries of what we do and who we are.

Jones’s notoriously difficult and elastic experimental work in texts such as The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto present their own academic challenges in the field, but his own essays and thoughts on being a writer (“Why I Write,” 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” “The H Word: What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror Endings”), and being a Native writer (e.g. the oft-cited multiply-published “Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer, and Maybe to Myself,” first heard at the Native American Literary Symposium in 2015) make us do the real work.

On one level, Jones’s latest, The Only Good Indians, makes a similar in structure but different in move via tone that I found in my first reading of Silko’s Ceremony. In the 1986 Penguin paperback version, the “Note on Bear People and Witches” appears on page 131, exactly halfway through the book. While I may have noted it as a postmodern turn at the moment, it was nonetheless the moment in which the text rolled from a self-conscious exercise in projected classroom teaching to the vibrant, layered storytelling masterpiece I hoped it would be. Though not quite at halftime, the moment in which The Only Good Indians moves from a story I found myself describing in a note as a work that “reads a thousand years old and not-born for even more, while it lives today with each next word. The first segment was a hundred grocery store paperbacks comfortable, that best voice to hear, so I should have known it wouldn’t, couldn’t last,” to an expectedly unexpected slow inferno in a Jones work is demarcated in post-postmodern (I’ll go with “neocosmic” [new world] for lack of a better term as to what debatable literary/theoretical moment we find ourselves currently inhabiting) fashion by the author himself: “It’s a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.”

It’s been a minute since Jones published anything with an identifiable “Indianness” in its title (of course in the week or so since I started writing this he’s published Attack of the 50 Foot Indian in typical Jones prodigious fashion), and though I am not making the argument that doing so now marks a departure from his commitments to “Indianness” everywhere and nowhere, The Only Good Indians marks a broad Big 5 (soon to be Big 4, I assume) release, and through no fault of the author picks up the requisite looking-for-an-Indian-in-this-cupboard mainstream boosts along the way. According to Saga Publishing, Jones is “The Jordan Peele of Horror Literature,” and in his latest, “The creeping horror of Joe Hill meets Tommy Orange’s There There in this dark novel of revenge told in Stephen’s unique voice.”

Puns and jokes sing throughout the work, from protagonist Lewis Clark to “The Last Finals Girl.” Jones gives Native folks some much-appreciated inside Crow jokes to go along with almost every Native kid’s school experience: “Is this really Indian, D? Shouldn’t you do something to honor your heritage?” (129). Challenges like that can unwittingly escalate to unmooredness, to the cultural vertigo Jones deals with in showing the shame and awkwardness of disconnectedness, telling us “Lewis never built the sweat he wanted, but if he stands in the upstairs shower long enough that it’s all steam, he can pretend, can’t he?” (105).The fear of ill-defined identity is as nerve-wracking as the inexorable approach of hulking monsters. The Only Good Indians examines the trauma of place, of leaving the reservation, and also how those who stayed behind are really never that far away.

The physical sense of immersion is equal to the mental depth provided by Jones. The deep cold of the northern plains and mountains is palpable, leaving us wanting a blanket against the chill as much as we want it to fight the terrors that waltz under the bluewhite iciness of black Montana nights. And when we think we couldn’t possible feel more alone under those clear hard stars, he switches to 2nd person narration for Elk Head Woman, leaving us utterly lost in the snow. This masterful melding of cultural specificity that translates to universal horror is the neocosmic approach of The Only Good Indians, a much-awaited offering which thoroughly delivers on Entertainment Weekly’s declaration that it’s “One of 2020’s Buzziest Horror Novels.”  It marks, intended or not, the departure of Jones into the broader mainstream, with, for the field of Native literature, a guideline over Jones’s always-generous shoulder, bringing so many of us along with him while reassuring the good doctor, as if he needed it, that we’re with him, still connected, looking forward to the worlds he’s heading into.

—

THEODORE C. VAN ALST JR. is Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. He is a former Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and has been an Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent work includes “Lapin Noir: To Del Rio It Went” in A Critical Companion to the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, ed. Billy J. Stratton from the University of New Mexico Press as well as the chapters “Navajo Joe,” and “The Savage Innocents,” in Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013), available from Michigan State University Press. His current book-length project is Spaghetti and Sauerkraut with a Side of Frybread, and his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones was released in April 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press, who are also publishing a collection of his short stories in 2018. His fiction and photography have been published in Entropy, The Rumpus, Indian Country Today, The Raven Chronicles, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. He has worked as a consultant on multiple projects for the Disney Channel as well as on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has recently appeared in multiple segments of the History Channel series Mankind the Story of All of Us. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Native America Calling, Smithsonian Magazine, and Al-Jazeera America Television on a variety of subjects, from Native representation and Tonto to Spaghetti Westerns, headdresses, and Twilight.

[New Flash Fiction] GRAY

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BY BERGITA BUGARIJA

I reserved my last day in town for the museum of contemporary art, the famous one. A must-see, Madge said when I told her about the trip. The fourth floor would change everything, she gushed, her voice breathy. Hardly, I thought, but didn’t have the heart to crush her zeal.

I entered the concrete and glass box. I don’t mind minimalism. Although, the vast, sprawling lobby was scary. A block of white granite in the middle, the reception desk, seemed like a life raft in a sea of spooky echoes. Murmuring multitudes studied colorful floor plans that, if followed as recommended by their own Madges, would change their lives.  

First floor, Lichtenstein. Okay. Second, Mondrian. Fine. Third, Warhol. I get it. Kind of. And then the fourth, the inevitable: a square of gray. A mockery posing as art and all of us, certainly the Madges of the world, in on the prank.

Well, not me.

No one can tell me that a piece of gray painted canvas stretched on a frame is art. And the worst kind of gray, at that: nihilism gray. Not charcoal, not pebble, not mouse, not elephant, not concrete, not rainy day. Not smoke gray. Not ash gray. Not stone gray. Not gray hair gray.

Just gray. The synthetic kind, artificial like its callous attempt to make us second-guess our sanity, forgo our common sense, our instincts, our sensory grounded reality.

It’s not even that, like so much of contemporary “art,” the gray square made me feel I could have done it. Of course I could have. In five seconds. Madge’s hologram appeared before me emitting the art community’s worn-out comeback: You could have. But you didn’t. You know what? I wouldn’t have made this even if I could, or, for that matter, because I could! This shameless practical joke that went too far. Seriously, is this what I traveled miles for and paid money to see? This pretentious nonsense posing as a provocation, I suppose. Of what?

Oh, Madge…

Gray square like a gray cat; neither bad luck nor good fortune, just whatever. Not a majestic humpback whale gray, not a dewdrop translucent playful gray, none of the mystery of the fog gray. Even smog gray is more enigmatic than this dull one venerated at the world’s esteemed museum. Not moon, not London, none of the fifty shades from that bestselling erotic saga I never read but a friend told me all about. Even gray aluminum wall installations at any of the countless nondescript corporate headquarters have more depth and texture, more soul.

I don’t think this gray was even painted on the canvas, the charlatan artist didn’t even bother that much. What most likely happened is this poser bought a gray tarp from a knockoff Gucci handbag trafficker who used the cloth to bundle and transport the illicit cargo. So fascinating. Right, Madge?

My skin started to itch at the edge of my sweater sleeves.

The color of elegance, they say, of fine Italian suits. I say a warzone tent has more charm, more layers, more emotion. But no, let’s attribute to this gray square some deeper message, elevate it to a pedestal of a cliché metaphor like “the gray zone” symbolizing the absence of clarity and straightforwardness, the visual representation of the relativity zeitgeist. Or maybe it’s a social commentary on the gray economy, or a racial paradigm shift—the whirlpool of humanity in which all mingle victoriously color blind.

But wait. Maybe gray is a trickster. Officially achromatic, inoffensive, unassuming. Hm… Who are you kidding? What are you hiding, gray? Are you afraid that the nuance would overwhelm our fragile brains so we’d better not take a closer look?

I crossed the masking tape on the floor delineating the art’s personal space bubble.

Now up close, I inspected the travesty and guess what? It’s pixelated. And the pixels are not even gray but purple, peach, black, brown, indigo. Each pixel aware of its pigment, each more colorful than the next, playing their part, each anything but boring and meaningless, anything but meek, anything but safe. But all decidedly laying low, partaking in a camouflage orgy to create a deceivingly idle, harmless gray puddle, shun the attention, perpetuate an illusion of sameness, equality. All under the pretense of offering a generous respite for our overstimulated irises prancing along, uninterested in truth, preoccupied with distraction, counting on all to pass by unaroused, mindless, lifeless.

Neutral? Nice try, gray. All those pixels. What for? To glorify opacity and indecision? How brazen. How weak.

Just as the sweaty half ovals radiating from my pits reached my bottom ribs, the guard hushed that the museum was closing in a few minutes. I walked out the exit and breathed the fresh darkness, the streetlight polka-dotted night, the ease, order, the calm black and white.

Still, I was angry as anyone denied closure would be, fuming at Madge and the stupid gray square for wasting my life, for weaseling its way to that prestigious piece of wall real estate, blasé and arrogant, while so many worthy of the spotlight whimpered in bleak anonymity. How did the “artist” con the curator? How could the curator suspend all reason and allow that garbage to pass for art? What did they see? What could the “piece” possibly mean, what could it evoke, stir up? That drab, mute piece of nothing.

—

BERGITA BUGARIJA was born and raised in Zagreb, Croatia. After the War of Independence in the nineties she moved to Pittsburgh. Her fiction is forthcoming in Pleiades. She is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.

[REVIEW] Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich

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Red Hen Press, 2020

—

REVIEW BY SHANNON PERRI

The cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection, Animal Wife, might make you scream. On it, a quintessential 1950’s housewife, dressed in a frilly apron and with a bow in her meticulously curled hair, offers a look of shock on one side of her face, while the other half has transformed into a snarling wolf. The effect is jarring. The cover suggests that, inside of this domesticated woman, lives a wild and dangerous beast clawing for release.

The characters in Ehrlich’s collection battle a sense of entrapment, too. These dark, fairy tale-esque stories reckon with how a civilized world holds girls and women captive. Like wild animals locked in cages, the characters rage against their plight. They bare their teeth, only to have their captors saw them off. For instance, in “Night Terrors,” a girl wakes up with an ominous feeling that something terrible might happen to her or her family. She is taught to quell her fear, only to learn that her instincts were right. In “Kite,” a mother “feels alive like a soaring kite and ignores the pull from far below, as if someone were tugging the string.” But the pull is there, limiting and restricting her.

Though these fifteen stories vary in length and only some contain elements of magical realism, they all share an absurdist, allegorical, and feminist tone, similar to the works of Carmen Maria Machado and Kate Bernheimer. Many of the stories are told in the present tense, heightening the brooding suspense. One is not even confident that the characters will survive to the end of each page.

The first several stories in Animal Wife center on girls, many of whom struggle with the anxiety of not knowing what it is they don’t know. They wade into murky waters, unsure of what danger lurks beneath the surface, but certain that danger is there. The protagonists age as the book moves forward. In fact, the collection is bookended by two linked stories, “Animal Wife” and “Animal Wife: Revisited.” The title story is told from the perspective of a girl whose mother suddenly vanishes. Many gendered rules constrict this girl. Her father instructs her not to fidget, develop calluses, or make others feel uncomfortable. Yet her mother, a sad and restless homemaker, has taught her differently. The girl reflects:

“My mother said girls have to take care of themselves. That’s how we avoid turning into sea foam and falling down wells. That’s how we escape hunters and kings who chop and carve and snip and steal. That’s why I practice punching every afternoon.”

The girl is devastated her mother has disappeared, and though there are hints as to what happened, it is not until we read the final story, told from the point-of-view of the mother, that we fully grasp the choices made and the transformation that has occurred. Ehrlich reveals why the mother had to leave, as well as the painful consequences of her decision. We feel for both the daughter and mother. We sense their ache. It is this sort of complexity that makes these beautiful stories so haunting and evocative.

Throughout the collection, many of the characters rebel, though rarely without a hefty cost. Often, their freedom from the captivity they’ve known only leads them to another prison. In “Vanishing Point,” one of the strangest, yet most stunning stories in the collection, a newly single academic “needs a change she can’t come back from,” so she tries to transform herself into a deer. She eats grass, wears a deer suit, even tricks a buck into mounting her. Yet as the story goes on, she finds herself enslaved to a new master and committing acts of betrayal.

Another compelling and especially timely theme explored in Animal Wife is the weight of motherhood. With the pressures of a deadly, uncontrolled virus on the loose, mass financial stress, evaporating childcare, and escalating racial tensions, many women are bursting with what The New York Times deems “mom rage.” Though perhaps intensified by the current moment, Ehrlich reveals how this anger is nothing new. It is not that the mothers populating Animal Wife don’t love their children, it’s just that they love themselves, and the worlds they inhabit make it nearly impossible for both to be true. One story states:

“In the fairy tales, a stag eludes a prince, drawing him deeper and deeper into the forest. There, the prince finds a maiden: a swan princess, a sleeping beauty, a girl dressed as a beast with three dresses folded into nutshells. He finds her in a lake, or a hollow tree. Although he doesn’t threaten her outright, he rides a stallion and carries a bow or a gun. Often, there are dogs. He bears her back to his palace, assuming she yearns for domestication. She grieves her wildness, even as she bears the prince’s children, maybe even comes to love them.”

Despite the devastating entrapment so many of these characters endure, a sense of hope prowls these pages, too. These girls and women are mighty. They do not give up or accept their fates. They swim across monster-filled bodies of water. They attend emerging writers workshops after years of putting their families first. They construct cage-fighting alter egos who can crush skulls between their thighs.

It is no surprise that Animal Wife is the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award. Through gorgeous, searing prose, Ehrlich has created a cast of unforgettable heroines who rail against the unfair societal expectations that confine them. By telling their stories with beauty, nuance, truth, and magic, she has finally set them free.   

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SHANNON PERRI holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her words have appeared in a variety of newspapers and literary magazines, such as Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Observer, Joyland Magazine, Fiddleblack, Literary Orphans, and fields magazine. Her short story, “Liquid Gold,” was a finalist for the 2019 Texas Observer Short Fiction contest; her story, “The Resurrection Act,” was awarded a 2016 Joyland Magazine Publisher’s Pick; and her story, “Orientation,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets. Follow her on Twitter @Shannonperriii.

Contest Judge Spotlight – J’Lyn Chapman – Nonfiction/Hybrid

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” I am eager to read works that take risks and innovate narrative approaches within the capacious “creative nonfiction” genre.  “

As we near our contest deadline, we are thrilled to introduce you to last year’s winners — and this year’s judges! J’Lyn Chapman’s incredible collection of essays To Limn / Lying In won our Nonfiction/Hybrid Contest, as selected by Maya Sonenberg.

You can buy J’lyn’s book HERE

Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together. 

Read the most recent review of To Limn / Lying In in The Colorado Review.

Why Superheroes Wear Capes

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BY SHAMECCA HARRIS

I twirled to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” at the center of a doll town I’d created in my mother’s living room. Teacher Barbie stood at the foot of a plastic-covered couch that I’d routinely spill juice, or milk, or germs on. Her forced smile greeted a toy classroom of Tuttis and Todds, Barbie’s lesser-known tween twin siblings. Nearby, just beneath the glass wall unit where my mother hid the good china, a Barbie Bride admired an abstract mannequin in a tiny white dress. Her groom, a hand-me-down Donnie Walberg from Mattel’s New Kids on the Block collection, sat waiting a few feet away in a flamingo pink convertible. I wanted the townsfolk to have a prime view of ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons, so I placed Skipper behind the cash register at the bodega replica in front of the TV stand. In retrospect, I realize that I was no genius architect; I was merely a seven-year-old hoarder of toys.

Fashion occupied the center of my makeshift Barbie world. Each extended holiday away from school, I’d wake up with the sun, splash the entire contents of my toy box onto the floor, and dress and undress dozens of plastic torsos for hours. Barbie’s elaborate costumes reminded me of trips to Buster Brown’s, a local children’s store where my mother and I shopped for the perfect Easter dress, ruffle socks, and patent leather shoes every year. While most children squirm at being poked and prodded by a seamstress, I indulged in my real-world opportunity to play dress up. I was a Barbie girl, after all. I’d dress and undress my own flat torso in fluffy church dresses while blowing kisses at my reflection in the water-stained mirror.

Years after I dumped my doll collection down the trash incinerator, I am still a Barbie girl. As an adult, I no longer need a holiday as an excuse to play dress up and embrace every day as an opportunity for spectacle. My mood is the preeminent muse for each outfit of the day. On mornings when I am feeling fierce, I channel Beyonce with a yellow maxi. On nights when I am feeling fiercer, I channel Rick James with my platform boots.

And then, there are days where there are no words to describe the wildfire blazing in my gut, days where I’m convinced that, if there is a God, He has forgotten I, too, am His child, days where I don’t believe in anything, least of all myself.

July 7, 2016

“Stay with me!” Diamond Reynolds pleads from the passenger seat,  as her fiancé, Philando Castile, bleeds out behind the steering wheel.

Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, has just been shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Blood spills out from his torso, soaking clear through his crisp white T-shirt. As Reynolds live streams his final breaths from her smartphone, the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, looks on from the back seat.

“He’s licensed to carry,” Reynolds explains to the camera as Castile moans in distress. “He let the officer know he had a firearm and he was reaching for his ID and his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”

“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up!” the officer retorts angrily, still pointing his gun at Castile who appears to drift in and out of consciousness.

Castile’s eyes rotate to the back of his skull as he rocks his head slowly back and forth in a hypnotic wave. When he finally stops moving, his eyes settle into a cryptic gaze.

“Oh my god, please don’t tell me he’s dead,” Reynolds wails. “Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went out like that.”

Each time I lay down to sleep, I see flashes of Castile’s eyes in a hostile roll. There is no use trying to sleep; I may as well stay woke. Desperate and dumbfounded, I resort to making a political statement with my wardrobe. I am well are a good outfit can’t eradicate systemic racism but, if I was going to save the world, I needed to look the part. In tribute to the loss of black life, I reach for a black cape with wide sleeves that gave the illusion of wings each time I lift my skinny arms. I complete my costume with a black bandana tied around my face like an LA gangster.  I take a final peek in the mirror and I look like a black-American super-shero, an awkward mashup of Solange and Tupac. I call her Queen Goddess and endow her with the power to kick white supremacy’s ass.

Bodies quickly shuffle into the subway car to avoid being trapped by the temperamental doors. I am among the growing mass of travelers and yet feel as if I’m in a world removed, an invisible bystander of Queen Goddess’ swag. She is I and I am and she.

“Excuse me,” Queen commands. Her voice is robust and powerful. She is not apologizing for taking up space so much as she is demanding that space be provided to her. She speaks to everyone and no one in particular, all at the same time. The crowd parts and Queen confidently strolls down the narrow aisle, her cape catching the breeze of her graceful stride. Shortly after she snags a rare empty seat, a preppy meets hipster man in his early ’30’s, plops down in the seat next to hers. 

 “Is everything alright?” he whispers in her ear.

Normally, I might be moved by this thoughtful gesture. I might thank the subway creeper for his concern and, despite yearning for peace of mind, I might lie and tell him I was just fine. Queen, on the other hand, isn’t so impressed, nor is she so polite. Queen quickly shifts her gaze and covers her eyes with a pair of dark sunglasses. She is blind to the bullshit today. The part of her that wants to be liked is dormant, and what survives is a bad-ass alter ego who just wants to be free.

“No!” she responds, positioning her dark frames on the brim of her nose to flash the fury in her eyes. “I am not okay!”

The man quickly transforms from a pale white to a crimson red as he gets up and walks solemnly to the other end of the car. He keeps his head bowed for the rest of the ride with the exception of an occasional nod. Queen assumes that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but either way, she has no interest in catcalls or small talk. So long as the world could neglect black lives, she could neglect white tears.

When she arrives at her stop, she exits with the same stunning confidence with which she entered. She floats past the idle booth attendant, flies up the sullied stairway, and welcomes the burning intensity of the early morning sun. She has been contained underground long enough. She is ready to unleash her powers in the real world, but she is not welcome there.

As soon as she enters the office, her revolutionary spirit is deflated by the deafening silence of our peers. Their backs are bent, their heads are bowed, and their gaze is fixed on their desktop screens. Her air of defiance is met with cynical stares. No one cares how angry she is. The only talent of value here is a knack for silence.

This is where I step in. I am an obedient worker. I shut my mouth, I put my head down, and I get shit done. Still, despite my best efforts to keep Queen in check, I can’t seem to contain my alter ego’s rebellion, and she eventually storms up to our supervisor’s desk.

“I’m not feeling well,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have to go.”

Queen darts down the steps and out of the building before her boss can respond. Once outside, she pulls a powder blue pouch of Turkish tobacco from her mini-backpack and rolls a skinny cigarette. She presses her lips to the narrow opening and takes a long pull, inhaling the comfort of the warm thick smoke and exhaling the tension from her listless bones.

“Whatever I do, I will not be silent,” she says to herself between pulls before flying back down to the underground subway with her cape in the wind.

—

SHAMECCA HARRIS is a creative writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York where she also teaches English Literature and Composition. Her essays, reportage, and experimental writing have appeared in The Rumpus, Global Citizen, and Apogee Journal among others.

doors! a conversation between kevin latimer, author of ZOETROPE, and emilie kneifel

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Grieveland, 2020

Latimer’s debut book of poetry, ZOETROPE, is out August 8th 2020. Emilie Kneifel sat down with him to discuss pink, the embodiment of punctuation, whether doors close, and who lets a poem be political.

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EMILIE KNEIFEL: tell me about pink.

KEVIN LATIMER: it’s my favourite colour. it’s also a betrayal of masculinity, which, as a Black and queer man, i try to subvert a lot. so pink as in queerness, and pink as in a sense of letting go of something. 

you also use it to describe the opposite of letting go, i guess? is that the body? like when “pinkness / hangs.” the strangeness of a body. i’m thinking about all the necks and knees. body parts. disembodied body parts. 

as a unit of exposure, yeah. i try to pick body parts that crack or snap. or this feeling in the real world of being heavy and stuck, in contrast with space where everything is sort of loose and free. 

right. like the space between your bones expanding. next: exclamation points. i feel like they introduce the awareness of an audience at the most basic level, the idea of reactions to what occurs in the poems. 

in a way of feeling, yes. it lets you know that this thing is serious, or this thing is something that you should pay attention to. beyond that, i just like the way it looks. it sort of looks like a body. this is a larger point towards punctation as sort of as a visual effect. it looks more concrete. using ampersand, for example, there’s something about the way it looks. it visualizes to me something actually being there. i guess that goes along with where the eye wanders. punctuation is a place where the eye stops. 

that is so exciting, because i told devin gael kelly recently that the ampersands in “vertigo” make me see people and balloons. wow. i feel like i’ve unlocked the kevin latimer experience. i’m wondering about that idea of stopping, and also velocity. there’s one poem, “swallow me, sky,” where you’re like, “say all the following, slowly.” can you talk more about that? [pulls up the poem] there’s an exclamation point too. how ideal.

i think movement was one of the most important things i focused on in the book. a lot of the poems sort of move in a way where you don’t really know where place is. the exclamation point after “the sky opens suddenly / and the sky goes to hell” is a sort of a break point, the first concrete place where you’re in a scene and you know you need to stay there. there’s a lot of places where the punctuation is wrong on purpose, and it’s a sort of jarring point. sort of a break in the rhythm and the movement. 

hm. like when someone in a play stomps their foot and it jolts you. the other really interesting use of punctuation is how you begin a line with a period. i want to know what you feel like that’s up to.

it’s a way to denote space. or denote that you’re in the specific space. when i use periods at the beginning of a line, i don’t use them at the end of a line, sort of as an opposite to stopping. i always try to give periods in each poem their own rule. i think in “last dispatch at the end of the world,” all the periods are used for scene placement or an action happening. but in other poems, they’re used as a point of starting, or a point where a character begins. 

that’s so smart. i want to know about the “is this weird?” in “moratorium on flight and fame.” you’re doing a lot of world-building in this book, but there’s also a lot of snapping back into “the world,” the world being a place where one is perceivable, and maybe how that differs from the experience of being a child. 

i think the snapping back moments disorient you from this world that is illogical by nature but that you’re starting to see as logical. there’s things that don’t make sense, or are not normal, but at this point in the book you’ve come to accept them. the “is that weird?” is telling you that you shouldn’t accept this. it’s letting you know that, one, i am unreliable and, two, the world you’re living in inside this book is unreliable. 

right. right. so even the reader isn’t safe from the pitfalls of the world. the reader can fall through as well. 

yeah. i want you to know that this is a play or that this is something that’s happening on a stage. 

i’m excited to hear that you’re thinking of it as a play. i was worried that i was just doing that because i know you write plays. but you are thinking of it as a staging of sorts?

it was intentional in that way. the spectacle is sort of there before, in that i want you to see it but you’re not forced to. by the end, in the last section of the book after the credits, i’m telling you you’re in a play. 

right, exactly, you see the light fixtures. okay. kevin. what are the necessary elements for a world?

i think intention is the most important thing. this world has to exist for a reason. before you start thinking about the characters or the situation, it’s “what is the main function of this world?” “what are the triggers that make this world function?” so, for example, i chose plays because there’s this universal “you’re on a stage” sort of thing. but then what you think isn’t possible on a stage is happening on a stage, and that doesn’t make any sense! so i think about a world that is uniquely mundane, and using very concrete things in a way that shouldn’t be possible. 

that use of what we might call absurdity, or the juxtaposition of things, is happening on multiple levels, the first of which is obviously content, deer holding guns, and the second of which is on the level of form. the repetition and the splits, if i may call them that, feel like a similar kind of twist, where you’re doing something– “on purpose” is what i want to say, even though that’s wrong. do you have thoughts anywhere around that?

the intention was to see how far the limbs in this illogical world could stretch. to find that little space where what is improbable now becomes probable, because i’m telling you so. maybe through content, or me changing how the page is moving. i wanted to try to figure out what this idea of spectacle can be stretched to, and how tactile can i make sound. 

you’re almost lifting form to the level of content by giving it this dense texture. like, rather than being the receptacle or whatever, it’s another character in the play. 

yeah. or another stage.

do you think meaning changes when something is repeated over and over again? or is something other than meaning moving through it? or do you think there is something to the incessance of repetition that requires one to stop, and for nothing to move?

i think the latter. the intention of the 137 shots in the space opera poem is to show how long it takes to reload 137 shots. i think there’s something tactile in the way the mouth moves that makes you register how long this is taking. and in terms of the “my boy is dead,” it’s just how much grief repeats itself, and becomes this single-minded thing that sort of engulfs everything else. so repetition is mostly used when i want to, one, sort of beat this into your head and, two, put you into the emotive state in which this is happening.

i feel like the “livingliving” repetition is a different kind of movement. would you agree with that? because it’s not existing in that same block of text, there’s room for something else?

in the original publication, it’s this sort of house, but i thought it would be interesting to contrast the living that’s sort of moving with the judgment that’s coming. it makes you realize that this thing is ending. then, by the time it’s over, you get these tactile things that you can’t do anymore.  

can we talk about scope and zooming in and out? i think we’ve talked about speed in a horizontal or linear sense of the word, but i’m wondering about the z axis, or access, of miniatures and giants in your poems. 

i think it just goes back to the title of zoetrope. the intention is that these are many different stories and many different characters in their own very small worlds that can, at any time, zoom out to something bigger. the way stories affect me on my physical heart level, or on a societal level. and i’m also really curious about this alternate way of telling story, the illogical nature of it. trying to take away the assumption of what is normal in this world. because nothing is, unless i state it is, or let it be that way. 

i’m thinking about the line in “a poem turned political” when you say “this poem is political because i let it.” you were just talking about letting a poem be normal, and i’m wondering if there’s almost something nonchaotic about the illogic or the absurdity of your world, that something about them is nonchaotic because we know that they are artificial. can we talk about natural disasters? i’m just thinking about the destruction of that world. 

i got really interested in God’s plagues. how they were so small and tactile. locusts are really interesting to me. and the contrast yet the sameness of natural disasters and disasters inside your own body. in terms of something falling apart but the rest staying the same. or how the body reacts to its own disasters in terms of the setting of the bigger disaster.

that’s what i love about how you use natural disaster, or just the weather– it’s always attached to the body. “i kissed the homies”’s “muddy tongues like fresh rain” or what the twister in “this tuesday in kansas” does to the bodies of the people trying to put out the fire.

the idea of a sort of threat too. what i think is really interesting is not so much fear of the disaster, but fear of what disaster will do to the body. how we use the world as a standard bearer for what’s normal. what happens when disasters are happening inside of yourself, but the world is also in a state of disaster? 

that’s good. that’s really good. and the way they crack differently, or how different things crack them.

yeah. but also they end in the same way, in terms of this thing opening up. 

the wavering door. 

that’s my favourite image in the book. 

am i allowed to ask about it?

yes, feel free.

you can pick one of these, but: where is it, or what is it made of, or is it closed now, or where is it going, or what was before it, or is there a window in it? 

the idea is that the door will always be wavering, but the real question is what’s behind it. and in this poem [“something about the pink sky”] particularly, the whole idea is this obsession, and coming to the understanding that you’re not getting what you want, but you’re getting something else. i think i really wanted to personify how love sweeps someone up like a tornado, and then trying to hold onto what is real. the mail box, for example, is this idea of grounding. and taking that away with the wavering door. it’s holding onto this image you have in your mind, but being open to what the alternate could be.  

how is that related to the wavering door in the last sentence of the postscript?

one, it answers the question of whose hand i’m brushing for. two, it makes the zoetrope come back full circle. the door never closes, because the questions that i’m asking don’t get answered, and these emotions that i’m feeling, in terms of this obsession or this idealized version, don’t go away. it just sort of circles back around, and something or someone else opens the door and walks into the room. whether that’s my mother, or God, or me, or the deer. 

it definitely feels like the door is always open, and there’s always something passing through it. it reminds me of doors in kitchens.

i like that. it’s just this sort of accepting that you don’t have an answer to the question, or that you don’t know what’s going to come through the door, just that something always will. i’ve been thinking a lot about the question of what is this book for, what i was doing when i started writing it three years ago, when i was 23, and writing it now, when i’m 26. all these experiences i think i struggled with a lot. 

the graph at the end of “the last dispatch,” where it’s like “blk boy / how do you deal / with grief? // on my knees?” i really fumbled around with the question mark. originally it didn’t have it there, but it felt like i was answering the question. this is just one way in which i just don’t know, but i’m realizing it’s not working.

what’s not working?

the way of grieving. or in the case of this poem, the way of not accepting grief. 

how do you understand those graphs? 

in terms of a speaker, me talking to God. it’s just a voice in my mind, i think. it takes over the page because it takes over like an anxious thought. me trying to figure out what is wrong and what the solution is, and me realizing in every case there’s no one answer or the answer is what i want it to be.

in the sense of self-determination, or?

less self-determination, more that the answer changes so frequently. or in terms of: this is a passing thought that seems to be correct at this moment in time.

right. right. okay. i see. whatever you put into the bubble that day is correct. 

yes. or in the rules of this world, this is how i see this being correct. like, i think the idea in the “on my knees?” part is penance, but i’m realizing that it’s not working and that denying it doesn’t make it go away.

i feel like that brings us back to our question about letting chaos exist in a constructed world. 

here we are.

we’ve landed. hello houston. i guess maybe that’s where the chaos gets let in, because you have no choice. because even in the most constructed of worlds that’s a question you don’t have an answer to. 

i guess in terms of chaos just being an accepted part of life, or learning to accept these chaoses as a part of life. because i don’t want it to be this despair thing where you can’t change it and it’s inevitably going to happen. more of a thing where how do all of these whirlwinds survive in your body.

right. right. i didn’t mean to imply despair. i’m actually thinking the opposite, which is that you are still the constructor of the world, so you get everything else. you get to decide that Black boys drive comets and that they fly. everything is available to you. but even as the constructor of the world, there are still limits to your own–

yes. exactly. yes. 

can we talk about that line?

which line?

“the poem is political because i let it.” i’m curious about the idea of you or the speaker or the constructor of these worlds’ agency over what does and does not fly — literally — in this world.

first of all, changing the idea of what a political poem can and cannot be, and doing that on a micro level in the way that it affects a Black boy’s body. how do i make you care about this thing? i think the way to do it is by opening it up and letting you know that the tactile thing it’s affecting is my body, and my mother. using that at the end of a line opens it up and sort of focuses it in a way that gives the permission that this is now a political poem. 

how old do you feel you are?

a child, indeterminate age. anywhere between eight in some places and sixteen in some places. an age where discovery is confusing.

in which physical places are you those ages?

with my mother, i am very young and very confused about the nature of her illness. her death, though that occurred when i was 23, feels like i was younger because of the confusion. there are places, like “in poem turned political,” where i am older than that. it becomes an understanding of control, so i see myself as older. there are places, like “last dispatch from my dying mouth,” in which i feel dead, in the way that i have accepted that this is happening, and i feel like all the ages, and i’m asking all the questions all at once.  

is that what being dead feels like? being all the ages all at once?

yes. 

is there milk in space?

i think there’s everything in space.

how does a deer hold a gun?

typically using its mouth.

what is your relationship to reality?

present. often confused, but always accepting. 

would you close the wavering door?

can i tear down the wavering door? i’d like to tear down the wavering door. and i guess not in a way where it doesn’t exist, but in a way where it sort of spreads so everything is wavering.

what would you do with the door after you took it down?

i think i would just leave it there. the door would just sit on the ground in perpetuity.

it just kind of sleeps there.

dust everywhere. zoom out of what’s behind it.

—

KEVIN LATIMER is a poet & playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. he is the founder & co-editor-in-chief of BARNHOUSE & co-organizer of grieveland, a poetry book project. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum & recent poems can be found in jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Hobart, & elsewhere. he really likes Nickelback.

EMILIE KNEIFEL is a poet/critic, editor at The Puritan/Theta Wave, creator of PLAYD8s/CATCH, and also a list. find ’em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiá:ke, hopping and hoping.