nonfiction

Interview with Christine Hume – Author of A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story

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[PANK] Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with [PANK] Author Christine Hume about her new essay collection, A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. Buy it HERE

We could not be more pleased to announce the April release of Christine Hume’s little book A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story, a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic’s subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it. 

PANK: Thank you for talking to us about A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story. PANK is so fortunate to publish such a wonder. 

CH: I’m the fortunate one!

PANK: A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story does read like a bit of a mystery, like what learning to read as an avid reader and writer with dyslexia might experience? And it feels ever-growing, still alive. Does it feel like more of a poem to you? Are you able to say where it began? With which piece? With which vignette, fragment, guess? 

CH: The process of writing this chapbook was extended, evolving and shifting over seven years. I certainly didn’t set out to write it; I resisted it even as I felt compelled toward it. I had been writing a long essay about my girlhood refigured by the color red when my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. I read a bunch of books about dyslexia and a bunch of other books about color or color theory. Both groups of books were missing a crucial sense of subjectivity and interiority. The books about color were often shallow lists of dazzling facts and stories; somehow most art historians, for instance, manage to kill the use of color in visual art by a thousand dull knives. They miss color as an experience,  bodily and aesthetic, which is, to me, the point. Most of the books I read about dyslexia were like self help books, or information-driven, which I often appreciated, but never felt connected to emotionally. Eventually, the red girlhood essay split in two, with a lot of fall out. Much of this had to do with my enlarged capacity to face my own dyslexia indirectly through my daughter’s–and reviewing my life through its lens. New memories returned involuntarily, and so did some of the research I did 20 some years ago in grad school–on John Keats and Charlotte Bronte. I also liked the homophonic relation of red to read (past tense) because reading for me has always been auditory and mistake riddled. Red itself was my lead. I didn’t know what I was writing, red was leading me somewhere. Red coalesced the shame and embarrassment as well as the libidinal thrill and material pleasures of reading. You are right, it definitely could keep growing, but I pared it back instead. Once I realized what I was doing, it was more the work of assembly and arrangement. I left shades and stories out; I made it elliptical and suggestive; I made it look like a series of prose poems, relying on white space and gestalt. If it feels like poetry, it’s because dyslexics often think in poetic modes–in images, gaps and materialities–and read best in short discrete chunks that activate our imaginations, that require readerly involvement. I was trying to make a dyslexic-friendly text, more than I was trying to write an essay or a serial poem.

PANK: This leads me into my next question about your use of chromopoetics here. Can you tell us more about it?

CH: I teach a creative writing class I call Chromopoetics. In class, we write with, about, through, and into color, a visual phenomenon that seems to elude linguistic expression. Have you ever tried to describe a color or represent it in language? It’s difficult, and that difficulty is a good place to sharpen writerly skills. It’s a class that studies the poetics of color, but it is also by necessity an exploration of queerness, excess, narcosis, superficiality, memory, alienation, and meaning itself.  We get together with the Art Theory class and trade ideas, language, and projects; we mix and complement and contrast. We follow chromatic whims, but we also look at a lot of art, fashion, photography as well as listen to music/sound art and go on color walks. I came across the term, “chromopoetics,” maybe hyphenated as “chromo-poetics,” in an interview with Brazillian artist, Cido Meireles, whose work I also teach in class. As far as I know he coined the term. In context, he uses the word to insist that we don’t reduce his work to didactic political or symbolic meanings, but that we leave ourselves open to the work’s chromopoetics, its allegiance to perception, sensitization, mystery, phantom textures, affective intimacies–complex experience!–that does not cancel out the political but augments it. Partly, he’s correcting the dogged perception that Meireles and other Latin American Conceptual artists face because of their relative political awareness and acuity (compared to most western European and North American Conceptual work). I find the term useful for thinking about a canon of literature that employs color to do both symbolic and poetic work, each extending the reach of the other. Some work I include in this canon: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, Han Kang’s The White Book, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red; Marie Ndiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green; Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, Gerturde Stein’s Tender Buttons, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Pink Trance,  William Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and shorter works such as Kevin Killian’s “Color in Darkness,” Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour” Samantha Hunt’s “The Yellow,” N. Scott Momaday “The Colors of Night,” David Foster Wallace’s “Church Not Made of Hands,” “Everything is Green,” and “Brief Interview #42” — and a lot of poetry.  I include non-contemporary works as well–like Moby Dick’s whiteness as well as Jane Eyre’s scarlet curtains–but since this is a creative writing class, we focus on more recent work. In class, we explore the ways that language colors our perceptions, the ways that color situates language, the ways that we see through language and color, the ways that color and language are similarly contexted dependent as well as context-creating–manifesting moods, structures of feeling, politics, and poetics.

PANK: And so was it difficult at all to settle on the color choices for each piece? 

CH: I did a lot of interesting and unnecessary research that helped ground my choices, often in ways that aren’t readily available. I mixed the names of reds from a variety of disciplines with my own inventions, trying to let the subjectivity of the shades guide me. I was thinking about the philosophical counterexample that David Hume poses to his own empirical theories, one that resonates with the magic trick of reading for me. He says, presented with a spectrum of blues with one shade missing, we can form an idea of this missing shade even if we have never had a prior impression of it. In other words, we can generate an idea without first being exposed to the relevant sensory experience. In this case, the system of colors forms a space in which gaps can be recognized and, if not too small, can be filled in. Color systems always leave something out as they attempt to totalize; it’s a lovely kind of desperation, like memory itself. 

PANK: Early on, in the fifth piece, you write, “Does reading take place in one person’s consciousness or out there, in a system that separates you from me?” You also refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic. Was this as liberating to write as I assume vulnerable? You refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic, was this book the first time you have revealed your struggles with dyslexia publicly? 

CH: Finding out in late college allowed me to grieve a little and shrug it off. I had already absorbed a toxic amount of shame and figured out ways of getting by and working around my disability. I never allowed myself to be curious about my condition. I never identified as dyslexic.  It took my daughter’s diagnosis her then tutor asking me to give a presentation to the local chapter of the Dyslexia Association to really start thinking about how my life and writing have been shaped by dyslexia. I had only told a handful of people in my life at that point. I had habitualized avoidance. Not of reading, but of exploring my relation to reading. No way was I going to reflect on a bottomless pit of pain, but then the thought of talking to reading tutors, for whom dyslexia was common and surmountable, gave me a chance to push beyond my fear. That presentation set me up to re-imagine my entire life through this new lens. I’m grateful to my daughter’s tutor, Madelon Possely, who invited me. The women in her group were incredibly supportive and curious, asked wonderful questions and offered thrilling insights. I couldn’t stop thinking about their questions and about how my own writing was (unwittingly! unbeknownst to me!) had been cryptically addressing dyslexia all along. Discovering the subtext or the true subject of some of those poems was liberating. For instance, the first poem in my second book uses a list of “comprehension questions” to imply a narrative. I wrote this remembering my habit of skipping the reading passage on standardized tests and jumping right to the questions. Often, the answers seemed loaded in the questions; they were leading questions or they pointed to their answers somehow. This was a compensation strategy; it was also a way of reading the questions as a kind of poem, where a lot of the narrative is suggested indirectly. I’m not answering your question, though, not even indirectly! A Different Shade… was definitely my first public outing. After writing it, I remember the first time I mentioned being dsylexic to students. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I dropped the word and owned it in a small graduate class. At the end of the semester, a really inspiring and dear student surprised me with a handmade card in which she thanked me for talking casually about a learning disability in class, making it seem normal and easy. I was floored. It was a kind of first for both of us, releasing us at least momentarily from the grips of useless but deeply felt impostor syndrome. 

PANK: Your profound “Maroon” vignette is hard to summarize. You tell us how your mother might call a neighbor a maroon, meaning moron. “The word “moron,” itself coined by a psychologist in the early 1900s, performs its own meaning when misread or mispronounced . . . To equate “moron” with “maroon” though implies a sonic relationship between abandonment and idiocy. To be illiterate is to feel marooned, isolated, left. It took humans two thousand years to develop literacy, and now we give a new human about two thousand days until we expect her to start reading . . . if you consider the other meaning of Maroon—an escaped slave living in the Caribbean—you see how abandonment is just what you chose to ignore, an oxymoron.” I’m botching this, but wow.  This piece seems to encapsulate what your entire book is about, the experience of reading and the experience of being misunderstood as a different type of reader? 

CH: Language is always on the move. Parents make themselves the object of scorn to their children with their outdated language, which is always linked to outdated ideas. After 1880s with the invention of factory dyes, red goes from a rare royal luxury, a symbol of wealth and power, to cheap in every sense of the word: vulgar, suspect, crass, risky. Only in the 19th century did red acquire racial connotations in the Western world via (1) the “red Indian,” (2) “Carmen,” the novella and opera from carmine the color cochineal insects produce, and (3) “maroon,” a runaway slave from the late 17th century (a word produced from marron meaning “feral” in French and/or cimarron meaning “wild place” in Spanish). Because red is one of our longest named colors in English, its history comes loaded with ideology and metaphor. It drags its dinosaur tail of meaning into the present, which creates the conditions for misunderstanding. Or understanding something unintended, other kinds of knowledge. 

PANK: And “Estrus Red” too movingly meditates on so many things. How did you settle on this title and or each title? 

CH: I meant to evoke the idea of being in “heat,” a biological cycle when the female is suddenly very visible. The blood is menstrual blood here, and I want to link reading with receptivity, fertility as well as erotic pursuit. That feeling of visceral absorption and chasing language wherever it leads; texts that get freaky with you and get you sprung but slowly–all the chemistry that marinates your body while you read. Reading is fully biological. We must change our brains, rewire our minds, in order to see marks on a page as readable text. And reading allows us to be penetrated by another mind, another biology, another rhythmic pulse. 

PANK: You tell us here, “Anyone who has ever felt bereft upon finishing a book understands this transformation, which is both temporary and, in some measure, permanent: you can’t go back, you have changed.” You seem to be summarizing your own book here. Any reader of this can never go back to thinking of dyslexia, of reading, or of the color red, in the same way again. You have changed our experience of all of these things. Was this your authorial intent or did you have intentions you were aware of when writing? 

CH: Thanks, that’s great to hear! I didn’t have that [transformation] specifically in mind, but of course what “finishing a book” there means–writing one or reading one?–is ambiguous. Maybe because reading was such an arduous activity for me early on that the effort of reading a book felt akin to writing it, or so I imagined.

PANK: Readers can experience your experience and see things in a new way with each fresh read, the way you might have learned to see words on the page. With the index of shades of red, each shade catches your eye in the periphery from another angle. To you, is there an ideal way for the way this book should be read or do you have an ideal reader in mind? That may seem counter-intuitive, is there a way you would like this book to be taught to writing students? Or, what I am trying to say here, perhaps, is in thinking of this as a rethinking of the cruel optimism of reading, is there an optimistic way you would teach this book to writing students, or a different way to teach this book to students with disabilities? 

CH: I love this question, thank you! I included the opening “Instructions” after feedback from readers at DSQ [Disabilities Studies Quarterly], who because I think it’s a mostly scholarly venue, needed some framing for the piece. (An excerpt was published there last year.) I thought their request was an opportunity to say why I didn’t want to introduce or conclude the piece. I wanted readers to have to figure out what was going on as a kind of simulation of the dyslexic experience, not an exact replication of it, but an experience that involves piecemeal figuring and patience. The “Instructions” make clear that there is no ideal way to read the work, and encourages reading as a heterogeneous activity, and not an entirely standardardized act. As much as our education system has been co-opted by capitalism and has become a kind of factory for manufacturing readers (K-3rd grade), human difference prevails. Our brains are not all wired the same way. Many of the dyslexics I know started reading well after 3rd grade! None of them ended up in prison as is the rumor about people who don’t read by 3rd grade, though I also know that prisons hold a statistically high number of people with learning disabilities. Reading itself is not a measure of intelligence, but we treat it that way. In an ideal world, I would have used the dyslexie font (weighted font that’s easier for people with dyslexia to read), perforated all the (unpaginated) pages, and included a link to the free audio book version.  

PANK: That’s next on PANK’s list. Thank you for your time, Christine. PANK loves you! 

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.

Jogging Through the French Quarter

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By Christopher Louis Romaguera

Track this jog through
the French Quarter 
with an incredible 
playlist:  

CLICK HERE
FOR THE MUSIC

It is March, and we are in a pandemic, and I have been writing dark things all morning: about my family’s exile from Cuba, about dead friends in Miami, about ghosts in Patagonia, and some poorly written things about COVID-19. I turn my phone on to see my parents make another plea for me to come back to Miami, to my first home. I am in New Orleans and am not able to fully isolate, and my parents are at-risk, and it is an argument that goes round and round.

I have lived in New Orleans for about a decade. This is my second home. Even my sister lives here now. But so many of my peoples and family still live in Miami. With the COVID-19 pandemic in the early stages in the states, it is hard to know where to hole up. Would either feel like home without my peoples in it? Or just a cemetery of one?

I run to break up my days. Most mornings I lock myself away in my room, sipping on cafecitos or cortaditos, working on various projects. I run to break up the writing, to return to the page fresh, I run to get out of my head, to return to my body, or I run to return to the outside world, to no longer be in the deep darkness in my head, ready for hugs and daps with all our peoples as I cross the street, ready for a shot and a drink with my peoples in the corner of our bar.

Before the pandemic, I worked on the busiest music street in New Orleans. For the past seven years, I’ve worked at the Spotted Cat Music Club. On days I worked long hours after writing long hours, I wouldn’t get my run in, but I would listen to the band, bobbing my head and making it through the night. Sometimes I’d send Pops a video of a song he liked. The music was my reentrance into the world those days. The music was how I’d avoid getting too deep into my head with darker thoughts. So, at The Spotted Cat, we’d throw one of the biggest music parties on the street, in the city, with my friends providing the music, me providing the one-liners and a drink within 30 seconds.

With the pandemic, I am out of work, and while I can still write, I still need my escape. I think of Andy J Forest, who opened the Spotted Cat with me for years, and I hear his song “Bartender Friend”, which goes: “When I get to work, I feel at home, always someone there, someone I know, and everybody, says hello.” And I miss that vibe so much. So I make a playlist and tie my Cuban flag bandana over my face and head to Frenchmen, to run through the streets I’ve worked on for a decade, to run through the streets where I’ve seen all my peoples and made so many memories.

As a kid in Miami, I watched my father run after work. He would come home refreshed, like he had sweated out the venom put inside him by the outside world. When I got older, I’d run with him too. Sometimes we’d have headphones on, listening to our own songs or mixes we made for each other. Sometimes we’d run and talk. Sometimes we’d run and hear nothing but the sounds of our steps, whether we were at the beach, in our hood, or somewhere between. Didn’t matter if I explicitly told him about every basketball failure, every fight I did or didn’t get into that I should or shouldn’t have, every broken heart, every botched drug deal, every everything. And it didn’t matter if he told me of every pain that cropped up from memories of Cuba, or his mom, or his dad, or every struggle he faced working in Miami to support our family. We were in sync, in rhythm. Running helped us both just be in the moment, in this world, helped us return back home.

I think of the “suicides” we used to run to end basketball practices with. Suicides being sprints up and down the court, first stopping on a dime at the foul line, tapping the line with our hand, before sprinting back to the baseline, tapping that line, then sprinting back to the three point line, making our way farther and farther out each time. You felt this drill in your knees, you felt this drill in your fingertips, the asphalt courts you practiced on imprinted your hands. For practices to end, you’d have to finish the suicides, then go to the free throw line and drain a couple of shots. If you missed yours, the team ran. If one of them missed, we ran. It wasn’t just the completing of the sprint, it was keeping your wits, it was being sound of body, being solid, still in breath, to get the work done, to shoot your shot and go home, knowing at even your most tired, back against the wall, you can do the damn thing.

I know I run partly cause I don’t know how to talk about COVID-19, about the fear I have of going to Miami to help my family and being one of the asymptomatic ones that has it. Of the fear I have of this virus taking more and more of the people we need now more than ever. How we lost a culture bearer and a neighbor and a friend in Mr. Ronald Lewis, and how we can’t secondline or celebrate him for a while longer. How mournful celebrations put us all at-risk.

No other cars on the road, I stand on Frenchmen Street, staring at Washington Square Park. I listen to “Out on the Rise”, recorded by The Deslondes, composed by Sam Doores, who is fam to me. The song talks about last calls and closing bars, but I have heard him play it when we lived in the house by the river often, and I have heard him play it a lot of late, as it just seems to make sense for a world that has an indefinite last call. I think of how it is my father’s favorite song of Sam’s. Pops always getting the line “but I’ve never been so good at that” stuck in his head. I start to wonder if I’ve never been good at this. I start to wonder if I’m not being good enough for my family? Should I be heading down, in case something bad happens virally or societally? Or will these thoughts make me go back home, and spread something lethal to my family and loved ones?

I stretch my leg using the gate of the park. My head turns side-to-side, looking to see if someone comes too close, or more hopefully, for a friend. I think of a phrase an old roommate used to always tell me anytime I’d call or pop up, that I was “gonna live a long time, I was just thinking about you.” I want to see my friends turn the corner, because I’m lonely and miss them. I want to see my friends turn the corner; cause I want them to know I’m thinking of them. Cause I want them to live a long time. Cause I want to be a part of that longevity. But I’m happy not to see them, cause that actually means a better chance of us all living a long time. Right now, the absence is a promise of presence in the future. Right now, loneliness is love. But the loneliness still deepens a sense of loss.

Sam croons, “And how come all my closest friends, are so far away.” And I think of how he is isolated in the west coast. How some of my closest friends, are so far away. How the ones in the city that I can’t see, feel even farther away. And how this is my situation. Stuck in a broken and incomplete home. Separated from another broken and incomplete home.

Across the street is the Christopher Inn Apartments, which houses seniors and the disabled. I think of some of them coming into the bar to hit their tambourine with the band, some coming with plastic bags for ice to keep their beers cool outside, avoiding the chaos of the bar, but still within earshot of the band. I think of them always bringing us food whenever they barbeque. I think of all the sidewalk parties they had, with their easily folded chairs, of how when I turned the corner for work, I’d see them all lined up, I’d give them all hugs and kisses and fives and handshakes, like I was being introduced as a starter with the baddest bench in the city lined up for me. I think of how many times we saw an ambulance block traffic on the street, in front of the apartments, and we all would check in with our peoples who lived there. Now, I see people at the help desk with flimsy masks and gloves. I read reports that residents and employees there tested positive for COVID-19. I talked to bartender friends who mentioned seeing some of our peoples on the street the night before the shelter in place order, drinking and dancing, saying “Don’t worry baby, we gonna be alright.” I wonder how many ambulances have been there with no traffic to block, and how broken I will be if the street isn’t lined up and down the sidewalk the first day we all get back.

I sprint down the street, and hear Panorama Jazz Band’s version of “Norma de la Guadalajara” come on. I think of how many late Saturday night shifts I’ve entered the Spotted Cat, hearing this song, almost like my musical introduction to the bar, me tipping my hat at the band, Ben Schenck going crazy on the clarinet, doing his dance, making his way through the crowd, a tip bucket in hand, following me like I was a fullback. I think of Aurora Nealand killing it on her saxophone, and how I’d follow her and this band up and down the streets of Mardi Gras, making it from the Marigny through the Seventh Ward to the French Quarter and back to Frenchmen.

I think of all the times I’d hear my name, and give someone a squeeze or a kiss. I look at all the boarded up buildings that are closed. I wonder how many will come back with different owners or staffs or bands, and then just feel different, be different. I wonder how many won’t come back, remembering how Café Rose Nicaud had been emptied out before the pandemic hit. Wondering how many of my memories in there, writing and coffee-ing before work, will be boarded up. I wonder how much my memory will create boards for all the people I’m missing. I wonder how many of those memory boards will stay up, stay blank, from people who won’t make it back. I wonder if my memory boards will bleed into the scenery, if I will even stop seeing the boards themselves. I wonder how many of us knew the residency was over, but still expected to see Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor again. Hear him miss New Orleans one more time before we missed him.

I think of how I don’t know when the street will return, or when I will return to the street. I think of how I don’t know how I’ll be able to pay for my life again. I think of how I was so paranoid my last bartending shift that I kept washing my hands over and over again, so much so that my hands started to dry up, crack, and bleed.

I want to sprint down the street for one final time before going into the French Quarter proper, changing the scenery and hopefully avoiding the dark curve of my mind, when I see Miss Sophie Lee on the balcony of 3 Muses. She is the owner of the music club, an amazing musician and singer, a former neighbor and a dear friend. She also has been working from the club this week, chilling on the balcony, and taking photos of shirtless dudes running up and down (and she has now included me in that number.) We laugh and joke from balcony to street, no cars to dodge, on the same corner where I once put on a dress and danced in a music video for her song, “Lovely In That Dress.” When she goes back to work, I warm back up, listening to that song, and remembering laughing so hard that not even my bandana could have fully covered my smile. This was a home.

I hear Sarah McCoy’s “New Orleans” as I do my version of “Dancing Down Decatur Street”. The haunting keys play as I go up the never-empty street that is now emptied out. I run down the empty French Market, past all the ghosts of vendors and tourists that would usually be a flowing vein from the French Quarter to Frenchmen.

I think of how sometimes Frenchmen Street wore on me, how sometimes, I’d only clock in and out for my shifts, but not make it to my friends’ shows, needing the break from the people, the noise. I remember McCoy’s last show at the Spotted Cat, how I showed up on the way to class and stood by a column, almost hiding, having a beer, as friends asked if the bartender was sick or something, if I was going to fill in or something. I remember how good that set was, her singing with no mic, amplified out of a bucket, voice booming between whatever little space was left between all of us who filled in the bar to say goodbye. How we were all happy to see her go get gigs in France, even if we missed her already, even if I missed never getting the chance to grab drinks with her before she left, for we loved having her here, but we also loved our friends sometimes escaping the city that forgot to care for its people. And even if her leaving just for a little bit has become years and years now, we’re still happy for her. But I fear that if I live just for a little bit, all the home I’ve built here could be gone for years and years too.

I sprint past the window at Molly’s at the Market, where I used to write with Richard Louth and the New Orleans Writer’s Marathon. That window being the spot where we all looked up and out in wonder and wrote. Using those moments to write about what we saw, and letting it lead into what we felt. The last time we were there, it was right before a hurricane was supposed to hit, the storm wasn’t big, but it was early in the summer, and the river was high. There was fear that it could topple the levee, and therefore topple the city and leave little of us left. We talked about how pretty the day was, which we all knew meant it was coming tomorrow, the occasional breeze whipping bev naps and papers and thoughts around, as we all sipped watered down whiskey or rum, wondering if we should go the way of the rocks.

I think of how so many friends back home watched the news on the storm, and told me to get out of town. How on one group chat where my Miami peoples were telling me to leave town, leave my second home, my oldest friend on the chat interjected with: “Come on now, you know if everyone is telling Chris to leave he’s staying.” And I can’t tell if I was smart, or stubborn and stupid lucky. I can’t tell if I’m being smart by staying now, or being stubborn and hoping to be stupid lucky again.

I worked at the Spotted Cat that night, the storm supposed to hit in the morning. Joking about being the designated no-power/yes-hurricane bartender. I remember how the friend I worked with sang, “Es viernes y el cuerpo lo sabe” as we had a full bar on an otherwise empty street, in an otherwise quiet city. People dancing and drinking their fears away, as me and my friend got sandbags and boards ready during lulls between drink orders.

After work that night, I got a Banh Minh from the bodega across the street, the reliable one I assumed would never close for a disaster, the one that is closed with the rest of us now, and how I walked a mile and a half home after I couldn’t fetch a cab. How I sat on my levee, on the side they call “The End Of The World,” and smoked a cigarillo, drank some rum, as the river crashed against the walls and licked the bottom of my feet like a fire gasping for breath. I left the levee that night knowing we would not get burned, this was not the one.

I run a little loop down the Riverwalk, one dude threatens another dude with a stick, saying “that’s why I keep this around, to protect me.” And think of how that is part of the fear in this moment, there is no physical thing. A stick won’t do shit to a hurricane, sure, but you can see the storm coming, you can barricade the windows and sandbag the doors. But this virus could be all over the stick, all over the spittle from his dehydrated mouth. If it’s licking my feet as I run down the Riverwalk, I wouldn’t feel it, I wouldn’t know it, till I got burned.

I hear The Catahoulas’s “Shrimp and Gumbo”, a band I hear once a month on Saturdays, and I think of what a privilege it is to hear Mr. Gerald French play with so many of my friends. I run down to an empty Jackson Square, the kind of place I typically don’t go to, but when I am here, I enjoy the brass bands playing, I enjoy serpentining around tourists and the clueless in order to give my peoples a squeeze, for impromptu dances with henna artists. How I love ducking into old dusty secondhand bookstores on Orleans, and how I love coming out of cigar shops with a fresh ember on a fresh cut cigar.

But running here empty, I think of how Jackson Square was the place of protest. How the Take ‘Em Down NOLA movement wanted Jackson removed for the 300th anniversary of New Orleans. I think of the friend who got death threats before that protest, David Duke stoking the fires of outsiders who were going to come in to defend the monuments. I think of walking next to my friend that day, wondering what would happen. I walked with him; cause I would want someone to walk with me if I got that threat. I walked with him, cause I had the privilege to even make that choice, so I had to make it forcefully. I think of our mutual friend who got arrested during the protest, at the steps of Jackson, us having more friends arrested than the people who threatened to kill some of us.

I need to get out of my head, so I sprint faster. I think back on the suicides, how we knew they were coming from the beginning of practice, how the hardest part was always waiting for you, and how no matter how hard, you had to use that as an advantage. You’re so tired, you can’t do anything but what you’ve always done, clear minded, take your shot. I sprint, I tap the tile. I flick off Jackson on his high horse every time I run by him. I run too fast to worry about if one of the cowards who gave death threats will see me. I run too fast to worry about COVID-19 for just a moment.

I think of how Pops used to run cross country in Miami for high school, after being a child exile from Cuba. How he taught me how to always end a run on a sprint. To psychologically beat whoever or whatever I was running with. To psychologically beat myself, and any fatigue I felt. Pops was so bad at stretching before he ran, like he was always ready to run out of a situation, but how he was so good at walking off the end of the run, to calm down and find his equilibrium, before returning to the rest of the world, to us. Preparing before returning to a rootless home. I think of how I have inherited that practice, in my new home of New Orleans, where there were no roots before me.

I slow down to Arsène DeLay’s “Coming Home”, which she wrote about coming back to New Orleans. It is the song that my sister listened to as an anthem of sorts when she got accepted into Tulane and joined me in town a couple of years ago. I think of how I lived with DeLay for years, and heard that song play over and over again. How it always makes me happy. I think of how New Orleans has become a home for me, and my sister, but yet Miami still has so many of our peoples. How severed that feeling can be in times of trouble, having two homes, no roots.

I catch myself thinking about my sister’s case with swine flu a decade ago. I was still in Miami, but I don’t even remember it happening, being too high, or too depressed, or too self-centered instead. How I didn’t even make it to the hospital, how I barely even remember the episode. Am I just doing that all over again by staying here? The run gets repetitive sometimes, and the questions repeat too. Am I not being enough for my family? Should I be halfway down already, in case something bad happens? Will these thoughts make me go back home, and spread something lethal to my family and loved ones? Am I being rightfully strong or willfully stupid?

I run down Bienville, hearing Andy J Forest’s “My Excuse for Now.” I hear the line, “Today I forgot to eat, last night I didn’t get much sleep.” And I remember the friend of mine that inspired that line. And I think of how many times I adopted that line while working on deadlines and going straight to the early shift to work Andy’s set. Taking “cigarette” breaks in the alley to edit pieces when on deadline. Forgetting to eat before a friend or a brother or a love yelled at me to. Home.

I see a man curled up in the door frame of a closed business like it was his own personal nook, and I think of how I don’t know how to write about the musicians and gig workers who are struggling with unemployment, struggling to make ends meet, despite being the reason people come here. I don’t know how to write about the one in four people who don’t have internet here to follow orders or find information, just like I don’t know how to write about the one in five that don’t have a car for drive-thru testing or groceries. I don’t know how to write about what shelter-in-place means to the thousands of homeless who sleep in the nooks and door frames of businesses that don’t open. I don’t know how to write about the doctors and nurses and medical workers who are doing their best to keep us from reaching our end with minimal medical resources, buying and rigging their own PPE.

I see a sanitation worker on the street and raise my hand to say hi. He nods back at me. I think of how so many New Orleans cats laugh at me and my bandana that covers my mouth, then wave and pound their chest, me doing the same, making up for the lack of contact with each other by smacking our own bodies more, harder, like our heartbeat had to break out of the cage. I think of how so many tourists or people I’ve never seen before cross the street, as they’ve always done, how they did before social distancing, and how it saves me the hassle of serpentining around them and their possible contagions they chose to bring here. I think of a friend from back home joking about how I should wear darker color bandanas to buy groceries so that people would “socially distance” from me. I think of how sad I got having to explain to my mom why I preferred pink bandanas instead of black ones. About being at-risk outside of a virus.

I run down Bourbon Street, it is quiet, and I see the Preservation Hall closed, rusted gates locking up all the memories. I look inside and see a plastic cover over a podium that briefly looked like the silhouette of a musician or bartender sitting down, waiting for the day they can unlock the gates back to a heaven. I listen to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric” and think of how gun sales are going up, how I read domestic violence calls are going up, how I worry about the whole world being crazy, and those who can isolate from a virus but not from their killers. I think of how I once saw Hurray for the Riff Raff do a “secret” show with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, being with my sister and my homies, and seeing worlds collide and create something better than what was before. I wonder if the world we were all on top of a year ago is crumbling beneath our feet now.

I run past the Hard Rock Casino that caved in, killing people, including some undocumented late last year. I stop the music and I jog in place, looking for the body that used to be visible from the street. I can’t find it, but I know he’s there. Am I subconsciously blind to him? Selectively forgetting? I think of how every intimate experience with death for me has always been accompanied by silence, like I didn’t want to attach or associate a song to a death. I think of how the presence of a white sheet never makes death absent. I think of the blue tarp that they covered the undocumented man with, as if that made it less obscene, as if they could further erase him. I wonder if they thought putting a blue tarp on the dead would make him “disappeared.” As if changing the color to blue would erase the violence to the naked eye. As if his color hadn’t already made him invisible to so many. 

I run down Rampart Street and pass through Louis Armstrong Park as John Boutté’s cover of Southern Man comes on. I think of how my family and I saw Boutté play at a fall festival at the park, a place that was “gifted” to the community after they constructed I-10 through it. Boutté talked about how the park “wasn’t always ours,” and right as he said it, sirens blared, coming from somewhere by the I-10, the echo of the underpass making it hard to know exactly where. Boutté raised up a finger, as if he just got validation from the gods, before saying how the community took the park back, how it’s theirs again, before he sang Southern Man.

The wind howled and sirens blared and Boutté sung above it all, everything but his voice calmed down. I sprint hoping to hear a car pull up and honk, to see a friendly face. For I wouldn’t stop, but I’d turn around, running backwards, like a basketball drill and point at them through a cracking border, knowing they’ll be alive for a long time, and so will I. But I don’t hear it, I don’t see it, I don’t feel what I want to feel. So I sprint and see more National Guard congregating in front of a hotel and laughing, I catch another wind and sprint, stopping at the neutral ground and jumping up and down, like I did pre-regulation-games, nothing stopping my momentum. The cars pass and I sprint across the road, back to Frenchmen, back to home, wanting to finish my run on a sprint, like how Pops taught me, syncing up to the times that me and Pops would run, to the time where he runs alone now, on a treadmill for his knees, slowly, but syncing up all the same. I run because I need to, to get out of my head and to just trust my instincts, my shot. This pandemic is a big one, but it ain’t the one, and we going to make it, with or without help beyond ourselves, beyond our peoples, so I run, to clear my head, to listen to my peoples doing their thing, to shoot my shot, until the next time we can all take a shot together in the corner of a dive, when we won’t have to look forward or back to see our peoples, when we can fill the streets again, and I can return to my river, and take off the bandana and scars be damned, reveal my smile in whatever unveiled home I find myself in.

__________

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Romaguera has been published in The Daily Beast, Curbed National, Peauxdunque Review, New Orleans Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog. He has an MFA in Fiction at the University of New Orleans. You can find him on Facebook at Christopher Louis Romaguera. Or on Instagram and Twitter @cromaguerawrite

Animal Years, an excerpt

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Lion by Jean Bernard (1775-1883). Original from The Rijksmuseum

BY LORI GREEN

—

Before Hal was the beginning. And the lions, still fresh. There were seven of them, each as big as a bedroom and the color of the sun. I was six-years-old and too happy to try being a novelist. Our family had a backyard with shade and acreage and its own stone bench. The maple by the door was devoted to me, and once a year the lilacs bloomed.

Then for Christmas, my parents decided to teach me about responsibility and placed the job of feeding the Pride squarely on my shoulders. I don’t know how they thought it would work long-term when I wasn’t allowed to handle raw meat. Once my maned and tawny darlings had weakened from hunger, they were checked into one of those chimpanzee retirement communities where fur becomes glossy and grabbable again. They thrived and plumped up and made new friends. I sent them postcards and they wrote back but, as my handwriting improved, theirs plateaued.

I mourned. My parents bought me five Goldfish and an indestructible tank. Thinking they deserved better food than brown clumps from a bottle, I fed them the best our pantry had to offer until they died of salted pretzels and sour candy. I mourned again, but less. The fish had been pretty boring. I missed spending summer afternoons with my lions, falling asleep inside the fuzz of their choral purr.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for a notebook instead of another animal. My parents warned This is your last chance! and bought me a spiral-bound soft-cover. That year I completed my first short-story, The Missing Bird, a highly effective series of cliff-hangers resolved sentence by sentence. I knew I’d never top it so I moved on to novels and churned them out, a prolific kid. It was 1998 and by 2000 I’d begun twelve and finished none.

Now it’s 2020 and I spent over a year filling my last Moleskine. Clearly, it’s time for humility don’t forget, a child can write a novel as well as any adult and is probably better at diagramming sentences so I get down on my knees and beg my kid self for direction. She’s lounging under her maple tree flipping through old correspondences, four feet tall and intimidating as hell. I was never that intimidating girl. She tells me, We’ve been starting novels as hiding places. We think we can store faces behind paragraphs, sneak fictions into immortality. We call it stone-soup, believing stone-soup is about the stone.

This seven-year-old is too clever for me by half. I get humble. Patting my shoulder, she says, Just find a store and buy a copy of The Address Book. Better yet, call Hal. She leaves me with a copy of our original story for guidance.

January 27, 1999 / The Missing Bird

Once upon a time, I had a bird; it could talk. The bird was a big help to the family. He was the only pet we had. One day when everybody was out of the house a thief came. The thief stole my talking bird. When I got home I said, “I’m back from school Mad.” Then my mom and dad told me he was gone.

When Mad was about to be choked because the thief was holding his neck, he kept getting closer and closer to a strange mansion. When he got inside he thought to himself, “I got to get out and find a phone to call Lori.” Mad got out by smashing the door down. He had trouble finding a phone. He finally found a phone he called 536-[xxxx]. I answered the phone. “Mad where are you?” “I don’t know, let’s meet at the park.” The next morning I went to the train station. When I got there I saw Mad. We went home and had a great feast!

—

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.

To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

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Order To Limn / Lying In HERE

As we isolate, let us reflect. Consider the light through this deeply meditative, intense lyrical collection of essays. To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman is our 2019 Nonfiction Book Contest Winner as chosen by Maya Sonenberg.

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. 

“In J’Lyn Chapman’s To Limn/Lying In language becomes a breathing body we live inside even as the book’s heightened finely-tuned intelligence revels in each of its recurrent images (light, pregnancy, babies, mother, mothering, family). Each section, each spin, spirals and expands, connects terms unexpectedly, “emergence” and “emergency” for example idea, bringing them full term, until we are born into a world in which every word, every state of being a woman, is new. ” – Maya Sonenberg

Order To Limn / Lying In HERE

[NEW NONFICTION] Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

—

Fleabag was, without question, a 2019 hit. Hollywood affirmed the societal value of Fleabag this fall, offering writer, director, and main actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge widespread recognition for her work, winning three Emmy awards in 2019, and two Golden Globe awards.

Set in London, Fleabag reckons with the everyday struggles of a white, English, cis-gendered British woman. People of color don’t really figure into her storyline (except for one sexual encounter, in the second season). The show, though aware of whiteness, doesn’t seem interested in contextualizing Fleabag’s life within the grand scheme that produces her material conditions. Despite this, I still loved the show.

The highlight of Fleabag is not Fleabag herself (I know too many like her– troubled white feminists who daily confront the contradictions of their privilege and oppression), but the show’s narration. Waller-Bridge’s direction cultivates an intimate relationship between the viewer and Fleabag, created by moments when she looks directly into the camera. Through the screen, the viewer has access to the character’s self-reported motivations and thoughts. It’s those moments where she is the most tender, cruel, and honest. What’s interesting is that these connections are established by the visual—they begin when Fleabag makes eye contact with us.

Perhaps more enchanting than these moments was the split second when someone else – the (Hot) Priest – noticed the eye contact was happening. (Hot) Priest’s intrusion into Waller-Bridger’s narration is like watching someone enter the mind of the maker. (Hot) Priest, played by Andrew Scott, is tumbling into the understanding produced by the poet and a clear-eared listener. It is this thing which makes art powerful: the negotiated space between two people trying to understand the thing between them, and by extension, one another. This is what makes (Hot) Priest hot: he wants to build this space with Fleabag. He already sees her. He wants to know her.

These past six months, I’ve been so happy on my own, and yet, even at the heights of my solitude, I wonder: what does it mean to be seen? How does it feel to be known? And perhaps most terrifyingly: are such requests impossible?

//

Seeing and knowing are irrevocably linked for me. This idea I’m engrossed with–being understood—recognizes that our methods of communication are not always useful in sharing the totality of our sentiments. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing, “Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Language, and the intangible and inaccessible images produced by language, allow me a way into recognition. But it is not plain language.

Language is not built for the lives we lead. Though I call my good friends often from the other side of the earth, there’s a part of my life they’re missing by not physically seeing me. Kelsey doesn’t see the way the angles of my face soften when I talk about a new crush. Mia doesn’t see how the new Maggie Rogers song makes my eyes well as I think about that last person I loved. Irene isn’t here to touch my forehead when I think I have a fever. Our texts don’t suffice. They do not make me recognizable.

Earlier this summer, I was traveling around Europe with a childhood friend. The last city we went to was Rome. I was at Palazzo Barberini, which houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica or Italy’s National Gallery of Ancient Art.

It plays host to many famous paintings, but perhaps the most singular is La Fornarina (the Baker), a portrait by Raphael.  The figure is believed to have been Raphael’s lover, Margarita Luti. She appears in other paintings by Raphael, but it is this painting that draws out the rapture in me. I am particularly interested in the way Raphael uses translucent cloth to suggest Margarita’s agency in exposing herself. A classic subject of the period is the naked body. Raphael shows this form in La Fornarina, but covers her in cloth. Thus, she is clothed and naked, visible and opaque, at the same time.

The fabric is a delicate muslin, made popular during the Mughal Dynasty in South Asia. This particular weave is the product of weavers in Dhaka, in Bengal. It’s where my grandmother was from. So hands like hers, brown hands, delicate hands, made the medium necessary for this moment of intimacy. These hands remain invisible, translucent, just like the fabric they created. They are unseen in La Fornarina, and so they can’t be known, either.

In the painting, the subject is seemingly trying (and failing) to shield her body, not unlike Fleabag. She, too, makes eye contact with us. But she is unlike so many of the female nudes of the era, drawing the anonymous viewer in. Implicit in her language is her lover. Raphael’s relationship with his subject is not unlike (Hot) Priest’s. His painting suggests that he is peering in on this subject, a woman who attempts to remain hidden, yet still desires to be perceived.

But the perspective of narration is different. In Waller-Bridge’s show, Fleabag unfurls her own story. Raphael, instead, shows us his mistress. His painting then is less about the viewer seeing him as it is about the viewer seeing what he sees. Implied in the image of his lover is his act of looking at and perceiving her. Or, as Berger says, his painting is interested in the act of recognizing her. He wants to share this moment of visual intimacy with us. He wants to create a moment of shared seeing.

Sight, then, also reveals our connections to one another. And in the case of this painting, with the missing brown and Black hands that created its moment, it also reveals the ways we erase one another.

//

Consider the Netflix series Sense8. The show follows the lives of 8 people who have a gene that allows them to experience one another’s senses and emotions in real-time. In the show, Kala, a darker-skinned, curly-haired, desi woman falls in love with the German Wolfgang. They fall for each other because they see each other—literally, but also emotionally.

In order to communicate their shared feelings, the directing Wachowski sisters decide to show us that they can see what one another sees. When Kala is in Mumbai, Wolfgang is with her. They are not just sharing their emotions, then. They are sharing their connection with the world.

But we might wonder—what would happen if this connection were not forged in their biology? Would Wolfgang’s seeing of Kala’s body and life lead to him knowing and understanding her? The Wachowskis picked actors of different races, languages, and religions for their show. Could Kala and Wolfgang’s true connection have existed in Waller-Bridge’s world or in our world? Or is it only in a work of fantasy that someone like Kala could be understood by someone like Wolfgang, someone white?

//

As a child, when people asked what I wanted to be when I was older, I used to say: I want to be free. Buried inside that statement was something deeper: I wanted to be understood.

These days, many of my closest friendships are with other writers. None of us have perfect vision. Every person I have ever felt romantic affection for, though, has had perfect vision. But even when I showed them my body, they couldn’t see me enough to create that special space of sight, of seeing and being seen. I have wanted to make that space with them, that space shared by Fleabag and (Hot) Priest, by Kala and Wolfgang, by Margarita and Raphael.

They read my work with dedication. My writing is Fleabag’s voiceover, Raphael’s painting. I’m looking for the reader who can see me through the page, who is fighting to make this space with me. Because they do have to fight. There’s much crowding the space where the reader might be able to recognize me.

As a writer, I am in the business of sharing my business. I use my work – poetry, prose, fiction – to communicate essential qualities I see in people and the world. I’m trying to show the reader what I find beautiful about living. These are moments of recognition, and thus, intense intimacy. My writing is about fleshing out the seconds where I am tender with the world. So they reveal me, too.

I’m not trying to make myself hard to understand. When I write a story with complex allusions, I want people to get it. I want them to understand the delicate environment I’ve created with language in order to communicate a more nuanced and delicate thought. My work is a part of a larger project of being understood. It’s about giving the reader enough information so that they can walk through the haze and find me, understand me. One of my biggest fears, then, exists on the opposite end of knowledge and made its way into music a long time ago. As Nina Simone ached on my father’s old record player, Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Perhaps the irony here is that life seems to insist time and time again that we are most understood by those who “see” us. But in my experience, seeing my body alone has not rendered me known. My last partner saw me but she did not understand me. I thought she did until I realized, she couldn’t. I wasn’t like her – she who has gay grandmothers – I was always going to have to fight to be seen. Some days, she doesn’t have to fight. Seeing, then, is not directly knowing for people like me. There is work that the see-er has to put in to reach that thing we call comprehension.

Fleabag doesn’t share herself, ultimately, with Hot Priest. She shares with the viewer to avoid being seen by real people. She knows the cost of being misunderstood, as exemplified by those jarring interactions with her family members. But for me, for my friends, it’s different. When I look at Raphael’s painting, I see a subject. I choose to engage in the painting’s constructed moment of intimacy.

There’s a privilege there, in Fleabag’s ability to shift back to the language of recognition with (Hot) Priest when she is ready. I don’t have that space in my life. I can’t help but think of the white person who met me a few months ago, trying to embody all that I was in a few words. Their choices? Indian, Woman, Immigrant. But they would never be reduced down to words. No one would attempt to make a whole person into a series of adjectives.

When I refuse to be seen, it is not an act of defiance. I am giving in. There’s an inertia at work in the way that I am seen and perceived. The inertia tends towards disinterest, erasure, or stereotypes. I have spent my life desperately trying to explain myself through the web of misunderstanding that exists where Fleabag finds love. It’s exhausting.

Unlike Fleabag, I don’t fear being seen. I demand it. I demand you find it in yourself, dear reader, to fight for this moment with me. I need you to see me for who I am. I need you to assist me in undoing the objecthood that I am otherwise left to drown in.

These days, I feel most seen and understood by my friends. Not because they look at me and see a familiar story, but because they have perceived the words of my stories. They take time to tread through the haze created by a world that insists on my objecthood. They had to walk through the haze of “unseeing” made by ignorance, the very haze I was able to escape through books and movies as a child. It wasn’t literally “seeing” other people that helped me forge bonds with them, just as so many saw Fleabag, so many saw Margarita, and so many see me. I was made into an object by the enforcement of a different kind of seeing, making me into a thing to be seen, instead of a person to be recognized.

It is using art as a way of seeing that allows us to understand one another. In his book, John Berger says that “to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself…Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”  I remember painting my own body in a painting class last year. How much I loved my legs. But I could only paint when I was alone. When it was just me and the force of my mind’s eye. My writing removes the pedestal, the slick glory of linseed oil and mohair. I wish to be before you, without disguise. I wish my writing, if not myself, to achieve the velocity of escape from the soul’s nudity, from display. Seeing through my writing is my way of rewriting, of revealing myself. It is the way of seeing me that takes precedence over all else. This is the seeing I cherish. And there is a beauty to it that exceeds all description, and thus, all language.

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ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE is an undergraduate at Yale where she majors in Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Indiana Review Online, Paper Darts, and Broad Recognition, among other places. Ananya’s work is mostly concerned with love, liberation, and certainty. You can find her early in the mornings watering her plants or listening to love songs.

[NEW NONFICTION] Crying and Paintings

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BY ALICIA BYRNE KEANE

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I.

I remember once going to an Edvard Munch exhibition and seeing an entire room filled with studies of the Weeping Woman. I don’t really know art things so the painting didn’t really seem all that remarkable to me compared to his weirder ones. It’s a nude, standing up in a bedroom, her head bowed. But the longer I looked at it the more I started finding it sinister. The way the same picture has been obsessively repeated. I started to notice how in certain versions the room is claustrophobically distorted to make it look as if her head is almost pushing against the ceiling like she’s standing up in a tent. How in some the palette is unpleasantly oversaturated, her cheeks too red, the shadows in the corners of the room too dark. Something invasive about the angle like the artist is sitting too close to the subject. I never found out the context of the painting, whether it was meant to seem that way. (Weird if not, and weird if so.) There’s something panic-inducing about it.

 

II.

Crying four years ago, surrounded by large abstract paintings. I’m in a top-floor office in a leafy suburb, the very kind of ornate redbrick neighborhood that causes people to employ the cliché leafy suburb, in the office of an academic I have just met. She conducts studies on things like hats in literature.

There is lots of art on the walls, floor to ceiling. It’s not very good art, but it’s large and copious. Particularly vivid, in this memory, is a view of the painting opposite me. It’s sort of pinky beige. It looks the way baby wipes look when I’ve used them to take off my makeup.

‘Beckett was a real guy,’ she is saying. ‘He had sex, he played tennis.’

He played sex, he had tennis.

I manage to say ‘I hate it here’, in a voice that sounds like it’s being squeezed out through a straw.

 

III.

I don’t know my housemates very well, but around the Repeal referendum, one of them bought a little framed painting that sits on our mantelpiece. I can’t see who the artist is because their signature is done down the bottom in pencil and I can’t read it hardly, but it looks like the first name is Anna or Ann. It is titled #togetherforyes and it shows a crowd of people from afar, stick figures with outstretched arms, holding different banners that all give the names of different collectives and organizations. It’s incredibly detailed when you look at it closely and reminds me almost of Quentin Blake drawings, it seems gentle. I need to ask them who made it.

I Google #togetherforyes painting, #togetherforyes ann painting.

Everyone’s away and the house has an uncanny quality. I have been cleaning for hours. It reminds me of grey Sunday dread when I was a kid.

I have put a chair out in our garden and I can see it from the window. The garden is a blaze of sun and if you saw just this scene in isolation you would think you were somewhere nice. I duck into the corner of the kitchen closest to the door, for some reason, because this feels like the least windowy area of the house, and somehow safer than anywhere else for displays of emotion. I don’t know who I think would be watching me. I begin to cry.

I am not sure why I am crying, here in the part of the kitchen that no one can see, where the dustpan and brush hang, trailing bits of grey fluff.

This time last year I walked to a part of the city I didn’t usually go to and read Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin and found the way she was in bed with a broken ankle for most of the story sadder maybe then I was meant to. It made the whole book seem transitory and unfinished like just a really odd part of someone’s life. I read it in a park during a drought, when most of Dublin looked grey and yellow.

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ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a Ph.D. student from Dublin, Ireland. She has a first class honors degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. She is currently working on an Irish Research Council-funded Ph.D. study of ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. She has performed poetry at events such as Electric Picnic, Lingo Festival, and Body & Soul, and has assisted on the editing team for the New Welsh Review. She has more recently turned to writing prose pieces.

[NEW NONFICTION] Intro to all my Unwritten Novels

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Image by Catherine Green

BY LORI GREEN

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Recently I’ve been hearing this sentence: A baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I know it’s grammatically off, but replacing ‘among’ with the antiseptic ‘at’ leaves the picture juiceless. So does keeping ‘among’ but turning ‘banquet’ into a word for its people, such as the archaic ‘banqueters,’ of which the baby is one.

I don’t go to banquets, certainly not ones with guests self-possessed enough to bring a baby and set it free to find its own memories. I can’t think of anything more glamorous, except for a story I read in a fashion magazine when I was a teenager: It’s the late 1950s and a couture-clad woman strolls through Venice with a man she just met. They’ve spent hours along the canals tilting their chins toward the moonlight when she realizes she has to pee.

If she asks to interrupt their wandering, she’ll betray herself as a human being with a body rather than the universal antidote. Even if she does admit this fatal flaw and make it to a restroom, her dress is such that she’d need the help of a good friend and a pair of scissors to get the job done. She cannot will the situation away and her wits are failing by the minute. It’s pressing. In the end, she is saved by her nose, which remembers that Venice already smells like sewage. With a fit of sparkling laughter, she hides the sound of urine sliding down her legs under a gown she will never wear again. For me, its cloth has always been a satin in ominous mauve.

Not being fifteen any longer, I understand the scenario’s corrupt. But still, whenever I remember her ingenuity I’m reminded to get off my ass and actually make something of myself. I’ve told this story to friends and family but I can never translate its effect. No one sees the charm, the danger and innocence. I try to emphasize the lines of her dress and the intensity of her gaze, the city’s postcard perfection and its stench, the Woman Victorious.

When they tell me it’s simply disgusting, I know I have failed again. I wonder if it would play out better on film. The baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I will not kill this darling.

 

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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.

[NEW NONFICTION] The Dead Psychologist

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BY AMANDA OLIVER

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I’m using a dead psychologist’s pen in a dead psychologist’s house full of dead psychologist’s books and yes, it smells like an old man.

Or dead air, or cooked food aromas that have hung out in the rafters too long, or just a closed-up house at high elevation. It could be comforting, could be warm and familiar, if I knew him. But he is a stranger. But he is dead. But the house is free and his children are so generous to let me use it for two weeks. The floors are real wood and real rock and lush carpet. The bed has memory foam and the couch has a plaid pattern and there are glass roosters, of all sizes, everywhere (everywhere, everywhere). The bedroom has a bay window. The living room has a fireplace and massive television with surround sound. There are games in a closet, there are plush towels in a hope chest, there are family photos on the fridge, there are menorahs.

The ink of the dead man’s pen isn’t working. I’m carving lines into the pages of books I’m reading with it anyway. Hoping that leaves enough of an imprint that I can find it later when I need it.

His children have left this house like a shrine to him. In his den, among books like TREATMENT OF THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE EGO AND ITS DEFENSES, is his checkbook. The last check he wrote was to the IRS for $1,079 on 3/20, year unmarked. The check before that was to AT&T for $43.65 on 3/17, year unmarked.

Can you invade a dead person’s privacy?

 

I am in the middle of writing a book. One that requires full sentences and a better version of myself that I do possess, but I possess it like a ghost, which is to say it feels like haunting, like lingering around too long in a place I maybe don’t belong, using words I’m not quite sure of.

Most houses are dead people’s houses, I guess.

This house does not feel haunted, but, somehow, my writing does.

My own psychologist’s name is Suzanne and she has worked with me for eight years. Says things like, “You deserve this” and “Do you think you could ever forgive your brother? Do you think you could ever forgive yourself?” and of course I do and of course I could, but will I?

I’m carving lines with the dead psychologist’s dead pen under words like “he craves a family, a neat nest of human bowls” and I wish that I could unwant anyone. I wish I knew how to satisfy a craving for a person who isn’t here anymore. Isn’t dead, but is still, incredibly, a ghost.

There are mugs full of pens, mugs that say things like ZABAR’S, a gourmet emporium in New York City with A Mezzanine that Has Everything For the Kitchen and Home and they remind me that the dead psychologist had a full and well-traveled life in addition to what seemed to be a successful therapy practice.

I don’t want to discover that none of the pens work, that all of the pens are dead, so I don’t try another one from the mugs.

On page 62 of the book I’m reading, the pen miraculously starts working again and I draw a blue arrow at the words: “The houseplants will appear to have chosen sides. Some will thrust stems at you like angry limbs. They will seem to caw like crows. Others will simply sag.” I have killed more houseplants than I can count on both of my hands. When I moved from D.C. to Southern California I tried to mail six plants in a package to myself. When they arrived, they were, inevitably, dead.

I am constantly doing this. Trying to make things live longer than they want to with me.

What would the dead psychologist say?

Which book would he read after meeting with me?

How much would he charge me for the favor of telling me what’s wrong?

Do we think the dead psychologist had a favorite patient?

I am always trying to be someone’s favorite. The dentist, the barista, the classmate, the coworker. I want everyone to like me. Tucked away in this house at 5,678 feet above sea level there is no one to make like me.

Two trucks pulled over outside of the house windows earlier and I heard a man and a woman yelling from their windows.

“Why can’t we just get lunch some time?”

“I have a husband.”

“What about everything I did for you?”

“I have a husband.”

I do not have a husband. I do not have a boyfriend or a suitor or a crush or an affair or a desire to let anyone touch me. I do not have the feelings of a significant other to worry about. I have freedom that some people would kill for and I’m not sure how much I want it.

If these walls could talk would they tell me I should let someone in for once? Can therapy occur through osmosis, like, if I sit in the psychologist’s office chair? Can therapy occur through death? If I touch and eat and sleep and write in one of the last places it was life?

On my fourth and fifth nights here my electric toothbrush turns on in the middle of night and wakes me up. I press the button to turn it off and it stays off for the rest of the night. This is not the thing I wanted to haunt me, or, I am totally unclear on what this message means and who it comes from. Is it the dead psychologist? Is he worried about my teeth?

Nightmares about losing your teeth are supposedly about feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. I have them all the time, but I haven’t had them here.

Have I gained back some power?

Is the dead psychologist trying to tell me to keep going?

I would like some answers, dead psychologist.

Do you have them?

Can I keep them?

 

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AMANDA OLIVER is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Times, Vox, and more. She is currently at work on a book about being a librarian. She is @aelaineo across social media.