us, pottery fragments once  
dusted in warm sand—jagged,  

mismatched—today, preserved  
in glass. it began to rain while we  

walked from the bar, so we came  
here, listening to artifacts speak about  

their hieroglyphs, even after we learned
the paintings we wanted to see were  

switched out before morning arrived. yet
we wander through modernism and  

antiquity, stopping to see a vase or shield, the
faces of those bending down on the other  

side of the case. one of them reminds me
of him, you say, which is the complete  

antithesis of today’s adventure—it’s to forget,
you emphasized during our second round of  

drinks. come here, taking your hand, dull
blade of a jackknife. and we pause by a 

sculpture of a green balloon dog.  
there are no security guards lurking or  

barricades surrounding the mantle.  
push it. you’re crazy. imagine  

it’s from him, make it appear like an  
accident. you roll your eyes, but lift your  

hand, pausing by the nose, arm  
trembling, ready to spread  

god’s fingerprints with  
one small shove.

Desaparecidos (or, Memorializing Absence, Remembering the Disappeared)

installation: sculptures

see who’s next to be concealed in harsh  
twilight. stand behind statues, peephole  
through gaping exit wounds. yesterday’s  
papers flutter with mosquitos. go: crumple 

headlines together. deprived of liberty via  
a breeze and years of futile searching for the  
deafening muffle of a rooster crowing. let them 
call for those kissing palm leaves over  

mouths, the forcibly taken and disappeared, 
watch as the flecks of embers in a field of  
sampaguitas ablaze subsist through 
crush-glass rain. name, picture, remembrance. 

the disappeared are not dead, but immaterial with 
stiff heads, necks, limbs, ab- away, esse- to be 
in rigor mortis—the bodies’ event horizon—for 
absence remains: open wound, festering in 

hectares, eyes scalloped out, sockets blackened  
inkblots. watch them hold gifts, hands gripping 
golden frames which contain no archipelagoes or  
portraits, but recesses. think: deserted mirrors,  

barren caesarean, flesh turned nuclear winter. 
child wearing overalls, student in cap and  
gown, nun’s mouth calcified shut, old  
man, old woman, snuffed out by candlelight.

The post Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum appeared first on Electric Literature.

Does anything really 
begin. The house, clinking
window frame in the last 
of canyon wind. Does 
anything begin. 

*

The day a room becomes a field. 
The day a field fills with water. 
The day you fall through yourself— 

this is how you say it— and how to respond to responses— 

I’m sorry you capsized inside your body.
That must’ve been terrible— 

*

Your left hand starts 
swelling nightly. The body 
now filled with unfamiliar and inflammatory substance.

You scratch until 
skin scabs at three 
lined-up points. 

Orion’s belt. Pinpoint self. 
You’re comforted by the symmetry 
of your smallest wounds, how 

you can keep scratching them open 
and have a little composition 
to keep you company. 

This is only the surface of 
the skin. Under moon, 

the season’s first monsoon 
sequences the sky. Flash of rose. 
Then begin the drenchings:

	pain salvage sink caveat absence–
they open and plunge into the depths of your body, 
that system of caves. 

*

It was so fast for you. How 
did you catch your breath— 

one after another you lost the people you loved as if they occupied 
a single vessel and entered 
the destructive radius of a storm. 

Now nothing holds its water. 
Nor its salt. Nor such heart. 
Nothing has weight but everything 
is an aspect of an unmovable weight. 

*

There are parts of the ocean no natural 
sunlight penetrates. In the basin 

of grief you receive a dream where you try to distract the dead with inane conversation, holding them but not long enough for them to realize they aren’t meant to be anymore.

In the basin of grief these dreams 
are the hanging light of an anglerfish. 

Behind the contained, luminous target: 
		A waking trap, and teeth. 

*

You gather the memory-shatterings, the regret 
you caught wandering your interior, the flakes 
of scab that fill your selfsame 

shipwrecked body. There are days you are the only 
person who remembers there was ever ocean 

in this desert, where the dampening
of fossils under rain becomes the only reminder 
that everything lost was once alive.

Gray crests over a hill. Clouds in 
thinning sheets, mountains black. 

You become a field. Then
the air above the field. 
Integration of wound and dark. 

And one stone dislodges from 
its burial sands.

Sonnet to Sleep Paralysis

            after John Keats 
 
It began for us, hushed, that year. You and I insisted 
on seeing each other then sat slack with the unsayable. 
Retreat to separate apartments, mirror our way across 
rooms, night birds singing as the world folded itself 
and stained us like two halves of a Rorschach. When 
we woke we were not butterflies, not people. Only  
the center of a cleaving. Mine was an old woman in 
the corner: Bisabuela, I was sure. Would she leave me 
alone, please, out of love? Knitting dread, yours against 
your chest, a saddled demon barreling black. This is the 
language our minds create when we hold everything 
back. Identical vaults. You need each other, the 
phantom says. Que no se les olvide, says Bisabuela 
through the transparency of her head.

Birdsongs

	Entonces, desde la torre más alta de la ausencia 
	su canto resonó en la opacidad de lo ocultado 
	en la extensión silenciosa
	llena de oquedades movedizas como las palabras que escribo. 

	— Alejandra Pizarnik, “Poema para el padre” 


You were born with song in your mouth, a mastery of birds. Inevitable migratory life. Arrive at the day you told me stories of your migration and the terrible thing is I already forget, the fabric stretched and broken. A luxury high rise across from the Habana Libre. Contracts with Lufthansa airlines. Your father at the national bank with Che, your father’s miniature Minolta camera, your father, you.

We found letters between the two of you, written when you were brackets on either side of water. Elaborate puns woven into language. The father organizes the escape, cannot tell his son the details. The son, when he becomes a father, can only relay half-details while sitting in an art gallery with his daughter. 

Your father. You. My father. 

The gallery sells a spherical ceramic jar and a bird-shaped pipe holder and cans of beer. I forget the details. I remember I remember and I don’t. Only the jar because we took it home, only the bird because we chose to leave it behind. I remember thinking the gallery was a beginning, that in the parting between branches you would start to speak until everything spilled out, a whole history unbraided. We would be whole. 

If I rip open the bird, what happens. We recognize it’s a pipe holder. We do nothing, elegantly. I hold the day when I cannot hold the detail. I am past and present tense when they resist clear delineation, there and here, sells and sold. I’m walking you back to the car you parked illegally. I rip the ticket off the windshield before you notice. The need for something to stay so perfect a twelve-dollar intrusion isn’t allowed. Beginnings we don’t know are denouement.

*

We make imaginary plans for Havana. Dream of meeting Leonardo Padura on a terrace somewhere. At home you point out the architecture of Havana schools in a Padura TV adaptation and show me walkthrough videos of the city on Youtube. Mauve balconies, juts of houses into the street, then someone turns a corner you remember. You pause, the image blurs. You say, this is where I walked with my dad.

*

Pipe tobacco, one of your smells. In my dreams I kiss your aftershave cheek and am I still the child who worried about your smoking after anti-smoking day at school or am I the adult who cradled the plastic bin of your pipe collection after you died and ran a thumb over the concavity of ash that still held something of you? 

I know that you are you and sometimes you aren’t. Sometimes you are the father, the son, the migrant, the archetype. I am walking a thin line of smoke. Parts of you so within me that I feel them radiating in my chest. Parts of you so far from me that I can only conceptualize them as a half-understood, half-literary history.

* 

Daily isolations. You didn’t always understand our need to be not-alone. Family would go out for dinner, you’d head back early to be with the dog. How I had to drag you to that gallery. How talk of Cuba felt far because it was hard enough to get you to walk past the school grounds across the street. To remove you from your sphere of context. Retreat, retreat to where there is quiet and books and the story of a house.

*

My friend from Havana says all Cubans have this quality, como un sass, un humor, tu sabes. I ask if I have it. He laughs. He, at least, thinks I’m enough. 

My understanding of an entire country came from a single person: you were Cuba to me. Watching the show, you’d say, that’s it exactly, that’s how everyone talks in Havana. That rhythm constituted a new language, like puns on typewritten paper. 

I am you, sometimes you are you. This is all I know of collective identity.

*

First daughter, blue cap, impatient to exist. You were astonished by her smallness, held her in two hands the way you would hold and funnel birdseed. Curved detail of your head in hers. 

Second daughter, I was almost born in the car. You could not have kept calm for that. When anything rose in you, terror, anger, panic, you would arrive at the same pitch, yelling at nurses, at the front desk, your tight command of language unraveling, those branches parting. 

These are the partings that lead to spillage. An ink-dark fountain breaks, its water non-potable, something can’t remain in the brain, can’t remain in the mouth. Claws its way up the throat. The baby bird eats what emerges. 

Third daughter shared your bird obsession. The two of you would stand outside in sunlight dappled by lilacs, pushing suet blocks behind little green rejas.

*

You would yell, we would leave. Distortion of tears. You would yell, we’d yell back, escalation until the space between us became electrical fire. You yelled. We were quiet.

*

But always we returned to each other, our collie between us in the backyard or laying his head on our feet in the kitchen. Arguments as unintended journeys: you’d travel into yourself, into your hurts, and in a vein of quiet you traveled back out. When you did, we were there to accept whatever book you placed in our hands.

*

You and I once translated a poem together. You were proud of an invention: yawning pits for extensión silenciosa. It referred to grief carved out, an emptiness left behind by a father who died too soon. You said the poem reminded you of your dad. One day it would remind me of you.

The father in the poem could never sing the song he was meant to, a song too symphonic for the containment of a life. Your father. You. 

The song arrived to us braided from figures of speech. In the leftover story-pits, song. The song doesn’t fit inside of a life but fits in the skull of a sparrow, sitting on a shelf in the gallery on our perfect day. A breakable thing, lacking its body, is still capable of sound. The slightness of air, threading through the gaps. 

The post Your Body Is a System of Caves appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I was a girl I had a plethora of aunts – too many even to keep track of. I thought of them as one person, moving en masse toward the dreaded cheek pinch or a stern yet loving scolding, a cloud of cherry-scented cough drops following them. But my Aunt Mabel was the exception; she alone could stir an excitement akin to Santa’s arrival.

Aunt Mabel had been a great beauty years ago. She married a wealthy banker, and all the other aunts were jealous. One day Aunt Mabel’s husband locked the two of them in the bedroom and lit their house on fire. She escaped by jumping out the window after he passed out, but she was never the same again. Her left knee was shattered, and even after many surgeries she walked with a limp. She was covered in scars, little whorls of raw skin that crept like a vine from her fingers up her arms and neck. Her face was textured like the bark of a tree, her cheeks and scalp flushed red with the ghost of flames.

After the fire, Aunt Mabel got insurance money, plus the inheritance from her late husband. She sold the plot of burned land where her house once stood and bought a van that she fixed up herself. Aunt Mabel toured the whole country in that van, and even drove around Canada and Central America. We never knew when she’d come to visit; she herself didn’t seem to know until she appeared suddenly in our driveway, her gas tank nearly empty. My parents scuttled about the house picking up, but I threw open the door and ran barefoot to greet her.

Sometimes Aunt Mabel brought gifts from her travels: a keychain of the Empire State Building, a T-shirt that said, “I survived spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns.” Even more precious were the stories she told as she pulled me onto her lap and braided my hair. She told me of the ghost of a prospector she’d glimpsed in an abandoned mining town in California, of the northern lights that stretched across the sky in British Columbia, so bright and expansive that she thought, in her solitude, she’d imagined them. She told me of a man who tried to rob her on a Texas highway but instead cried to her about his failed musical career, and she told me how she rescued a fox from a trap in Washington, and in return, the fox brought her pups to nuzzle into Aunt Mabel’s palms. She was full of a hunger and awe for the world I’d never seen in adults. This awe protected her in ways I couldn’t fully understand – she could ask a stranger a personal question, and instead of taking offense, they’d divulge their whole life story, happy to finally be unburdened. The worst possible thing had already happened to her, and so she was completely unguarded. The world, seeing this, wanted to hold her in its embrace.

Of all Aunt Mabel’s stories, the one I requested the most was that of the island of escaped parrots. She was staying on Prince Edward Island one summer when she met an old man who was blind and could no longer use his boat, so he offered it to her while she was in town. She took it out for the first time on the solstice, when there were only a few hours of darkness. She ran aground on an island too small to be populated by people or homes. The island was thick with greenery that seemed to rise directly out of the gulf, but the vegetation wasn’t like the trees speckling the coast. Here, the vines and drooping trees looked more like those she’d seen in the Caribbean. She stepped into the sand and felt herself engulfed in a pocket of warm fog. She could see the wind currents stirring the water all around the edge of the island. But when the air reached the sand, it became stagnant and syrupy. 

Aunt Mabel took off her shoes and walked barefoot through the sand and loam, feeling spongy moss beneath her toes. By now it was nearly midnight, and the rays of sunlight were stretched across the sky like pulled taffy. She heard a noise like a child crying, and when she looked up, she saw them: hundreds of parrots tucked into their leafy nooks, peering down at her with bright eyes. Each feathered body shone with a unique pattern. When the setting sun illuminated their plumage, the ruby hues seemed to dance like flames shuddering in the breeze. 

Later, Aunt Mabel would ask the man with the boat about the parrots, and he would tell her the story of the bird salesman who, many years ago, traveled from South America up north, transporting the cargo he planned to sell. His colleagues warned him the birds wouldn’t survive the climate, but he wasn’t concerned with their fate after the sales. He died when his ship capsized in a storm, and no one thought twice about the cargo they assumed had also perished. It wasn’t for several years that someone discovered that the parrots had survived to roost in the branches of an island untouched by humans. Occasionally, a sailor would see a blur of emerald or tangerine streaking across the horizon. But the birds were notoriously aggressive, and few attempted to go too near them.

On the night of the solstice, Aunt Mabel didn’t yet know this story. She assumed the long hours of daylight and little sleep had pickled her brain, and the parrots were merely a trick of the strangely angular dusk. 

When she learned it wasn’t a hallucination, she searched for the island again. But she could never find it after that night. 

The first time Aunt Mabel told me this story, she presented me with one perfect feather. Its root was marigold, but its hue became more mango at the center and tip. I stroked each soft blade very gently with my index finger, then tucked it into a shoe box full of my most precious treasures to keep safe beneath my bed. 

Every day, I passed a pet store on my walk home from school. Usually the store only had a selection of fish and hamsters. But occasionally the store displayed a bird in its window, inviting passersby to enter. Once, I slid my fingers near the clasp of the lovebirds’ cage, itching to fling it open. I could picture them soaring through the open window, filling the cityscape with their lime-colored plumage, circling one another as they floated higher. At night they would fly to other pet stores, unclasping the metal hooks of cages with their sharp beaks, releasing animal after animal until the sky was iridescent with a false dawn. People would wake, stretch, ready to greet the day, only to see the sunrise shift and flurry – not clouds, but feathers quilting the heavens. Soon other pets would hear their caws; not just those waiting in shops, but those who had been living for decades in apartments, plucking their feathers out as they watched the seasons pass from the window. Macaws who had been bred to be pets would stir, remembering their wild ancestry. Their clipped wings would regrow, and they’d rise, fearless, tearing the window screens with their claws. The parrots would make a flock – mismatched like a carpet of wildflowers in a meadow. As it traveled across deserts and mountains, the flock would momentarily eclipse the sun with aquamarine tails. Migrating gaggles of geese and swans would hover, mid-stroke, to admire the uprising. Finally, the parrots would arrive at their island, exhausted and ready to nest. 

Aunt Mabel always left too soon, gone only a few days after arriving. I think it made her nervous to linger in one place too long. In between visits, I waited for her on the porch, watching the horizon for her limping van. Occasionally, just as the sun burrowed beneath the earth, the pearly swoop of a cockatoo careened past me to perch on the eaves of our house. I stood very still, willing the bird to flutter closer so I could lean into its sun-bright body and whisper secrets into its plumage. In the growing darkness, the pattern of its feathers swirled like Aunt Mabel’s scars. I closed my eyes when it took off, feeling the wind stir beneath its wings, imagining Aunt Mabel’s face as she received my message.

The post Take Me to the Island of Escaped Parrots appeared first on Electric Literature.

of your covid test then take two subways
to work. You turn your time card, take 
your mask off to drink tea. You take 
attendance and teach The Poet X. 
You teach The Joy Luck Club. You cross 
your fingers for each student dancing in the hall.
You learn new names. You memorize new pronouns. 
You wonder if your cancer will return.
You taught some of these kids on Zoom.
You saw their faces then. They sat 
in folding chairs in front of bunk beds. 
Now they’re wearing masks. 
Your eyes look at their eyes. 
Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable.
You grade four papers, then another four,
press two for Cantonese translation, 
update your Google slides. You stand outside 
in chilly columns as they sweep your school
for bombs, holding only folders to your chest. 
All clear. You walk the six flights 
back to class. You give your students extra points 
if they don’t check their cell phones
when they finish workshopping their drafts. 
You walk between the groups and say “Good job
just spacing out!” and mean it. They laugh. 
Nobody knows which lockdown drills are real. 
You take two subways home and pick 
your own kids up from after school -
your living, vibrant kids. Your son sits on the floor
to play with beads. Your daughter hates being alone. 
Your wife is on the F train now and has a cough. 
Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable. 
You do not know if it will ever be
better or worse than this.

Nina is Wonderful!

I prop my phone against the ketchup 
so we can all see Nana’s face, her short hair
white in Key West sun, my two kids at the table, 
the baby buckled in, the big kid reaching 
jammy hands out towards my screen.
Between their shrieking, Nana tells me
her friend Janet used to say “Nina is wonderful!” 
each time her toddler daughter Nina spilled juice,
sassed back, or sat her dressed-up self down in the bath,
new party shoes and all. I think of this sometimes
when Mia grits her teeth and mumbles “Never”
when I ask her to put on her socks. Mia, 
four years old in a track suit jumping couch to couch 
while Leo licks crayons beside her. 
Nina is wonderful, now thirty-plus in Denver 
doing something with philanthropy,
and Mia is wonderful, and Leo, too,
though he won’t wear his coat. And surely my wife 
and I are wonderful as we haul two full car seats
and a stroller through the airport 
several times a year, caravanning up the terminal
towards the loving arms of grandparents,
and what could be more wonderful than that?
Oh Mother Goddess, oh Nana and Abuela,
oh lifelong friends like Janet, oh women 
who’ve schlepped any children anywhere,
please help me to survive these years 
of ear drops and sippy cups,
this age of so much wonder.

The post This Is Not a Drill or Maybe It Is appeared first on Electric Literature.

DEAR ________ : I WANT TO BE A BETTER FRIEND, I’M SORRY

You put your hand on my neck and
whisper that if you were here you would

sew me a telephone. But you
are here, I say, and then you walk

to the door. I follow your shadow past
my mother’s gun-filled aquarium and

meet you on the porch where we watch a
slow wreck occur on the highway. The colliding

metal makes a severity of noises and we stand
admitting our own heroic transgressions

without ever discussing who let the neighbor’s
kid unbury the body. When it’s finally

dark enough to move in poor focus, you
saddle my shoulders with soldered toy

soldiers and ride me to the crash site so one of us
can flirt with the medical examiner about unsanitary

stock market projections. Nobody has enough
loose rope or batteries but the signs we’ve

made hold firm under the weight of your aging
chest. Lost in the panic we are ravenous

trumpets, mouths swelling like boxcars
to blow hard scissors and oil.

The post Darling, Please Flatten Me With the Volvo appeared first on Electric Literature.

When you first appeared in my backyard, riding the big red mower you bought in ‘99, I was thrilled. You had been dead almost twenty years, and I missed you like crazy.

It was the smell. Your sweat mixed with exhaust and grass clippings. It clung to your stained white T-shirt. It smelled like home, like Holmdel, three thousand miles away.

“What are you doing here?” I shouted over the noise.

“Fine,” you said, stopping the engine. “Hop on.”

I did as I was told. We made sharp right turns over and over, my square patch of lawn too small for your machine. I let you shred my son’s hollow T-ball bat. I didn’t want to stop.

When there was nowhere left to go, you hopped off and kicked at the dusty ground. “I can’t get this sod to take.”

I said nothing. I never liked contradicting you.

“You have to water it during the week,” you said. Your stare was accusatory. “While I’m at work.”

I nodded, but that week, I did nothing. LA was in a drought, and it was hopeless.

The next Sunday, you reappeared, again while Chris was at gymnastics with the kids. I heard you first—a scraping of metal against concrete. I was supposed to be writing.

You were in the back, raking the path to my driveway.

“Dad,” I said. “Don’t worry about that. We don’t have those kinds of trees here.”
You handed me the rake. “Go on. Use some elbow grease.”

I obliged you, for a while, until the sound started to grate and I began to sweat. October is hot in the Valley. “I think we’re good,” I said. “I rent anyway. This is not our job.”

“Always trying to get out of doing work,” you said.

I rolled my eyes.

The next Sunday, when I heard the water go on, when it splashed against the window of my room, I remained at the desk as long as I could. I had a deadline.

“Dad,” I said, when I finally gave up and met you outside. “Stop. I pay for water.”

You turned your head without moving the hose. You were drenching my lavender bushes, flooding the ground in all directions.

“They don’t need that much,” I added.

“The deer are eating all our tomatoes, Kate Ann,” you said. “We might need to go to Home Depot later. Put some wire up.”

I wanted to say: “We’re not going to Home Depot. And you’re not in New Jersey.”

Instead, I walked to the back of the house and shut off the water supply. From the shadows, I watched you shake the hose, stare into its dark mouth, unravel the kinks with your hands. You looked around the yard, your head on a swivel. Your eyes went blank and a little sad, and I couldn’t tell if you were looking for the spigot or for me.

The following Sunday, I waited—for the sound of a mower, a leaf blower, a shovel slicing through the gravelly soil where my hedges were planted. I wanted to apologize. I wanted you to apologize. I wanted to tell you to stop coming. I wanted you to promise me you’d never stop. There was only silence.

I went to the backyard, and there you were. Crouched along the edge of the fence, where the white rose bushes survived without care.

You heard the sliding door, and you raised a finger to your lips. You motioned for me to come forward, slowly.

“Look,” you said when I was beside you. You had a stick in one hand and you used it gently to nudge something invisible. You were excited—giddy. Like a boy.

“What do you see?” I asked, whispering, staring at your handsome face, your clear blue eyes, wondering when you were ever so young.

“The babies,” you said. “Don’t touch them or the mother won’t return.”

I remembered then, the warrens in the backyard, the bunnies curled up under a layer of cotton. The way you would sweep it aside so gracefully, to allow me a glimpse and nothing more.

The post Lawn Care Tips From My Dad’s Ghost appeared first on Electric Literature.

Born, 1968. Misunderstood everything, ‘72 to ‘86. Started pulling it together after that. Eventually I became the first in my family to lie in a field of clover and speak earnestly to cows. Then I fell in love and got married. When she asks if it’s cold outside, my wife doesn’t want to know the temperature; she’s asking how she’ll feel when she leaves the house. I try to earn her trust by thinking about her bare arms, her face. Now we’re on the couch watching episodes of “Cheers” out of order. Coach dies and then comes back. Then he’s gone again. I told my therapist I’m always bracing myself and she said she has a conflict next Saturday morning. We stare at our calendars. The next holiday is Flag Day. The next birthday is today but not for anyone I know. My next meeting is with the Assistant Director of Tomorrow. He has a message for me from the Director of Tomorrow. Before I can read it they both resign so I leave work a little early. Our daughter asks if the money in my pocket belongs to George Washington. Not anymore, I say. Years later we find the dollar tucked inside a small velvet bag which is inside a red purse which is inside a glittery backpack. Where does it end, I wonder? I mean our ability to shrink some things and enlarge other things. The gods never saw that coming. They thought we’d eat, and have sex, and sleep, then pass the time staring out at large bodies of water. I guess the answer is it never ends. I mean how much we love the ocean, always clapping when whales do something normal like breach the tension and take a breath.

Rules for When the Coin Toss Ends in a Tie

All players must immediately call their wives and beg forgiveness. The top scorers have to donate their statistics to the less fortunate. Team captains kiss each other on the cheek and say one thing they admire about the other. It can’t be about their physical strength or muscle tone. Something real. Fathers have to imagine who they’d be if they had better fathers. All the old-time greats are allowed to climb out of their graves. They get to drink a beer and eat a hot dog. Then they have to go back. Every fan gets a time-out to take home. Some use it when the world is too much, others when the world is exactly right. The roar of the crowd is bottled and saved for later, a day when we might really need it.

The Strange Lights in the Sky Are Not For Us

I can’t sleep so I watch the news. First they animate the weather. They play it forward, then reverse it, then play it forward again. Next, they interview an Air Force Brigadier General who waves away evidence of UFOs. We’re all alone here so get used to it, he says. But when pressed he gives a little wink. Then he flies away. I write a poem about what I’ve seen. I put the poem under the bed so it can be alone. The weather outside looks fine one minute and the next it’s made up its mind to darken our day. That’s normal, I say to myself. Tomorrow it will darken the day of those who live to the east of us. I call someone who lives to the east of us and tell them about the UFOs. The weather slips my mind. On the walls of the Air Force recruitment office are posters of jets. In the jets are people who have broken free from gravity so they can be alone. I wonder how the poem is doing. I look under the bed. The poem is gone. Then I find it under something else. I change the title. I call it The Brigadier General’s Big Adventure. I turn off the TV and get into bed. The poem is asleep. I can hear its steady breathing. My wife stirs a little so I tell her everything. The weather will be fine tomorrow, she whispers. Yes, I say, and the strange lights in the sky are not for us.

The post We Deserve Applause for Normal Things appeared first on Electric Literature.

Every year, on the third weekend in October, there’s a vigil for Caroline. Every year, they use the same easel to prop up the same poster-size photograph of her, the one taken for our sorority composite the fall she disappeared. Shiny curls gleam golden atop tan shoulders, blue eyes sparkle, a careful blend of pink cream blush and highlighter paints her cheeks rosy. Her smile is open-mouthed as though she were caught mid-laugh, and it’s weird to think we’ll never hear her full-throated chuckle again. I get kind of choked up just thinking about it.

Every year, they surround Caroline’s photo with fragrant wreaths of white roses and hand out tall, slender white candles. Our faces streaked with mascara-black tears, we cup our hands around the lighted candles to protect the flames and make tortured comparisons to Caroline’s metaphorical light, extinguished far too soon. Honestly, it’s all a little much.

Every year, they pass a microphone around the crowd, encouraging those of us who knew and loved Caroline to share stories about her. Every year, the same people say the same things—Caroline was beautiful, Caroline was smart, she was kind, she loved animals—and every year, we avoid saying the same things—Caroline was petty, she could be cruel, she stole homework and earrings and boyfriends.

Every year, we stand in a clump of Kappa sisters. Every year, there are fewer of us who actually knew Caroline and more who only know of her. Everyone knows of Caroline these days. She would have freaking loved it.

Every year, people trade theories about what happened to her. She’s being held in a basement, someone says. Just like those women in Ohio.

I don’t think so, someone else says. I think she’s buried in the cornfields outside of town.

Oh, I think she’s on the farms all right, someone else says. But you know those pigs? I heard—

Jesus, someone else interrupts. Don’t say that. Don’t even think that. That’s disgusting and not true anyway.

Besides, someone else says, everyone knows what really happened is that Ian Rogers roofied her drink at that party. But Ian’s an idiot and used too much, and she choked on her own vomit and died. Such a shame.

Every year, Amber bristles when Ian is mentioned. Of course she does—he was her boyfriend, might be still if not for Caroline. Back at the first vigil, when Caroline had been missing for a year and the investigation was still active, Amber attacked some know-it-all townie for calling Ian a murderer. I mean, really just went after her—hair-pulling and nails to the face and all that. I think the lady ended up with stitches. I know she called Amber rabid and was set to press charges until she realized who Amber was.

One of the roommates.

That’s what they call us, you know, the three of us who were living with Caroline the semester she vanished. The roommates. Every year, we face the inevitable stares, the whispered accusations. There are the roommates. You know they lost track of her at frat party. Do you think they feel guilty?

Fuck yes, we feel guilty. That’s why, every year, I hide behind dark sunglasses and Amber clutches mala beads and chants a mantra she picked up from some yoga class. It’s why, every year, Sarah fills her water bottle with vodka and ends up wasted. Every year, I hold Sarah’s meticulously curled and sprayed hair back while she retches and cries that next year, next year will be different. Next year, we’ll tell the truth.

We never do.

We never take that awful microphone and tell the assembled crowd that on that long ago October night the three of us grabbed Caroline. We never tell them that we intercepted her leaving Ian’s room, that we put one of Amber’s floral pillowcases over her head and threw her in the trunk of my car. We never tell them that we cranked up the music to cover the sounds of her screaming, or that we drove past the city limits and then released her, spinning her around to disorient her before speeding away, laughing. We never tell them that it was just a prank. Just something to knock Caroline down a notch, something to remind her that she couldn’t just take what—or who—she wanted all the time. Not without consequences.

So yeah, we feel guilty. But not for the reasons they think, not because we didn’t walk her home or because we let her fall prey to some creep armed with a vial of horse tranquilizer. We feel guilty because we left her alone in the dark, miles from home.

Or that’s why Amber and Sarah feel guilty, at least.

I feel guilty for another reason.

Because I went back. After the three of us had returned to the party, giggling about how furious Caroline must be, and after Amber had assumed her rightful place upon Ian’s lap and Sarah had lost her top in a game of strip poker, I climbed back in the car and drove to where we left her. It’s a cold night, I thought. We should have taken that bitch’s sweater.

But we hadn’t, and so she was still wearing that knee-length black cardigan, wrapping it tightly around herself as she unsteadily made her way along the road. She was still a mile outside of town, still a mile before there were any streetlights or store lights or lights of any kind. Between the near pitch-dark of the country and that goddamn black sweater, she was practically invisible. Totally invisible once you factored in the three cups of trashcan punch I’d consumed.

I drove back to the party with Caroline in the trunk. What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just leave her there. People would wonder how a sorority girl in faux leather pants got hit by a car so far outside of town, would wonder why exactly she was strolling along a desolate country road in the middle of the night. And then they would remember the pledge we had pulled the same prank on last year, the stupid one who had walked for two miles in the wrong direction before flagging down the first car she saw and ratting us all out. They would know it was us, that it was our fault somehow, and Caroline would win one final time. I couldn’t let that happen.

This year at the vigil, a new Kappa, some apple-cheeked nineteen-year-old wearing too much lipstick, leans close to me and says, You know, I’ve always wondered if anyone checked the frat’s dumpster after that party. I mean, there could have been evidence or something like that in there, right?

I lower my sunglasses. Hmm, I say. Yeah. Something like that.

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Sara

teach me how to girl

my fingers pale against your stomach
your boyfriend’s bike     jolts us toward
al-anṣariyyah mountains     in the distance
house lights flicker     like christmas
you find an old roof
you kiss a boy     and i watch
a stolen cousin     a lesson brewing

running beyond the borders
     of cannot

to live through the night i lie
to my father    to your father
we went on a joywalk    just the two of us

and we let loose

on a dry afternoon
marjuuha swings our girlbodies
you   show me how   to touch
forget the boys   the men
your fingers smell of oranges

zest against the grate
skin the rind
skin the pith
let me eat it

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Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines. Bah. Bakery in Berlin. Basically it’s a crazy year, that’s what Claire said, this is going to be a crazy year. Be a pro, Lemons said. Be a woman. Be an individual, he suggested. Be bald-faced and strange. Be calm. Be cautious with your money. Be clean and attractive. Be comfortable and assured and confident in your work life. Be creative, is what Pavel thinks people are told, and what is expected of a person, now more than ever. Be direct about the things you need that are reasonable requests, and apart from that, just enjoy him and your time together. Be impeccable with your word. Be miserable about the world. Be optimistic, for you know how steady application always gets you somewhere. Be patient and hold on to your vision and integrity. Be peaceful, do little, find the one good thing, the one solace in the moment. Be thoughtful and wise. Be very quiet, very humble, very grateful. Be worse than you were when you were younger, and allow that to be a fact, that people around you will interact with less than common grace and decency, they will interrupt and disappoint one another, and they will not always behave as you would want—in that good way. Because another person is not a tool for your own self-development. Because as Claire was saying the other night, one’s thoughts are always changing. Because beauty is a word reserved for art, and I’m not sure to what degree to consider this new book art. Because by the time I reach the computer to write, I’ve so exhausted my mind that the only thing I have the energy for is answering emails. Because for so long I’ve wondered if I’m not heartless to always be breaking up with men, or thinking about breaking up, but what if it’s something else—what if it’s a neurotic need to repeat the insecure feeling of things coming to an end? Because I am in debt and don’t know how I’m going to live. Because I am not writing. Because I am sad. Because I am with a man. Because I couldn’t leave, I tried to find the dinner party interesting, but I was unable to find anything interesting about Lemons’s new girlfriend. Because I had love until this weekend, I didn’t think money was important. Because I had sex with Lars. Because I have zero dollars. Because I will probably ruin my life. Because I would get bored. Because I would leave. Because it is a pattern, and the pattern is: be with me, desire Laurel; be with Laurel, desire me. Because it would be better to write one really good story, like Frankenstein or something, just once, it doesn’t have to be more than once, just come up with a really good story, probably a tragedy. Because it’s emotion that makes something compelling, and I don’t know to what extent to consider this new book emotional. Because it’s the whole truth. Because Lars seems not neurotic, I feel like the things I do that might wound another man would drop off him. Because one is always falling in high heels, falling forwards. Because that’s the sort of woman he wants, and that’s not me. Because the money isn’t here for nail polish, or lipsticks, so now that you have nail polish, now that you have lipsticks, now that you have this green skirt about which Pavel said, keep it on, then proceeded to fuck you in, stop spending money on such junk. Because the standards here are so low, my standards have also become low. Because there is no God to ask forgiveness from if we trespass religious laws, we must ask for forgiveness from each other for trespassing or failing to honor human laws. Been thinking about authenticity, and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values. Before falling asleep, I was thinking about my fundamental insecurity in the world, and I wondered if it was possible for me to feel safe even for one minute. Before I boarded the plane, they made us sit for a long time in the suffocatingly hot bus. Before speaking to Rosa, I was reading a Leonard Cohen interview, and he said that the longer he lived, the more he understood that he was not in charge. Being a lazy wanderer with no mission is definitely an option. Being back in Toronto brought close the truth of how I felt being onstage with the band those two weeks, which was: very bad. Being high for the first time on tour, I saw how amazing it all was, how remarkable and new, and how interesting all these people I was traveling with were. Being onstage in front of a crowd that is screaming for you and applauding your name—this is not an experience I feel I need. Besides, there is nothing wrong with writing books that come out of an inner security, peace, watching, reflection. Best not to get too rosy-eyed about each other, so that when I return to him, we aren’t disappointed. Best not to live too emotionally in the future—it hardly ever comes to pass. Better to be on the outside, where you have always been, all your life, even in school, nothing changes. Better to look outward than inward. Blow jobs and tenderness. Books that fall in between the cracks of all aspects of the human endeavor. Books that would express this new philosophy, this somehow post-capitalist philosophy, or whatever it would be that could say, in the worldly sense, be a loser, and not with the religious faith that you will be rewarded for it later. Both of them were in important relationships, then they had a passionate affair, and now they’re suddenly together. Both those meetings, though good for my books and my work, did not feel good for my soul or for my moral progress in the world. Bought a good spray for getting out stains because my overcoat had gotten stained with wine the night before, then I hung around on Adam Phillips’s tidy London street and bought some hair elastics and arrived at his house a bit early. Bought a lot of clothes, make-up, spent a lot of money. Bought tea. Bought white shoes. Brunch with friends this weekend? Brunch with Lemons and Ida. Build a life together, step by step. Building a fireplace and being cozy. But after getting out of the car tonight, I realized that actually, with writing, I have something far more valuable than money. But also, there is no Platonic world. But any change is really hard and a real risk because it means not controlling the outcome; it means you don’t know where you’re going to end up, so if you’re at all determined to get somewhere—to some fixed spot in the future—it’s hard to let yourself change. But as I was saying this, I was realizing that my feeling about it was changing, and I saw that there was something fascinating about living only one life, and in some ways there is a great privilege in getting to live only one life and not having to live any others. But I had some good pierogis anyway. But I just wanted to mark down that I am happy. But I mostly don’t feel like I can spend much time with Pavel anymore, for he irritates me on a very deep level. But love can endure. But love is not enough. But love without compatibility is a constant pain. But my task is not to love him, but simply to love—to be a person who loves—so to love him as part of an overall loving, not at the exclusion of everyone else, with blinders on, focused only on him, but rather focused on the entire universe, for the universe is my first relationship, the fundamental one; then beyond that, to love all of creation, which includes the man I am with. But of course it was a joke. But the essential thing is to remain persevering in order not to deviate from the right path. But then I left and bought myself a round of cheese from the grocery store, and a Minute Maid and a bottle of water and some bread from the bakery—it was delicious—and I was so hungry that I drank the juice as soon as I got outside and I immediately felt better; but before, sitting in the restaurant when the woman wouldn’t take my order and kept laying out knives, I had never been so irritable. But then I started to cry because I didn’t want to start things up with him again. But this morning I am not worried about it, I do not care. Buy food with Mom. Buying skin cream. By staying here, my world closes in. By the end, people around you will be dying off, and they will be thinking about their own deaths and the deaths of their partners so entirely that they won’t have time to notice what you have accomplished, or how you managed to live such a faultless life, they’re just going to be thinking about how their wife is dying, or how their husband has died, or about how there’s nobody in the world who will love them as much or understand them so well, while you will be sitting here all alone with your great pride over the life you have crafted, and the work you have made, and everything you did to make yourself so perfect and good. By which I mean, not having children, being with the wrong man, having no love in the end, and being sort of penniless and maybe ignored.

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