The Opiate Winter 2019, Vol. 16 “The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form The Opiate itself becomes a preoccupation, Your literary dose. because it exists as a problem separate from the material it ac- commodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

© The Opiate 2019 Cover art: taken at Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea of José Pedro Cortes’ photograph, also available in the book, A Necessary Realism -Samuel Beckett This magazine, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. ISSN 2381-859X 3. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

Poetry:

Editor-in-Chief Erica Schreiner, “Johnny” 69 Genna Rivieccio Susan Richardson, “Road Trip,” “The Sun Creeps Up and Swallows Joy” & Editor-at-Large “Counterfeit” 70-72 Malik Crumpler Cameron Gorman, “Treehouse” 73 Editorial Advisor 74 Armando Jaramillo Garcia Harley Claes, “The Happiest Man on Earth” Contributing Writers: Francisco Orozco, “For the Central American Refugee Caravan” 75-76 Fiction: Jonathan Dowdle, “Play the Illusion” 77 78-80 Ewa Mazierska, “Family Man” 11 Steve Denehan, “Lungs” & “November” 81-82 Salvatore Difalco, “Enter Night” 16 Dan Raphael, “People Get Ready” & “A Cornucopia at Zero” Jonathan Kravetz, “Diva” 21 Lou Graves, “Why Write a Letter When You Could Write a Song or a Poem?” 83 Zeke Greenwald, Moons, Part II 28 Mitchell Grabois, “Ovals” & “Normalcy” 84-85 Leanne Grabel, Brontosaurus, Chapters 17-22 42-65 Heidi Seaborn, “A Clean Kitchen” 86 Mike Lee, “The Sword of Gnosis” 66 Jessica Fischoff, “Medusozoa” & “Savage” 87-88 John Gosslee, “Privilege” 89

Criticism: Genna Rivieccio, “Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead: An Exemplification of the Ways in Which Men Can Never Understand the Burdens of Freedom As a Result of Themselves Never Having Been Oppressed” 91 4. 5. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

in the hours before an official peace treaty has been implemented. Alas, when he happens upon a glade where he might at last be able to experience that rare phenomenon called Gnosis, he realizes Editor’s Note that it is on the side of the border still deemed in the jurisdiction of “the enemy”--who will remain For those who still believe in the superiority of the printed word over the digital one, let it be known so for another couple of hours according to the parameters of the treaty. In many respects, it is that The Opiate does not believe that just because something is published online, it is somehow “lesser that proverbial sword of Gnosis lying just within our reach, but not quite close enough to ever truly than.” One has to be far wealthier for that sort of faux pretension. That said, back in November of “grasp” the wisdom we seek. 2018, we put out an incredible short story from Ewa Mazierska entitled “Carlos and Us” (which can be found here: https://theopiatemagazine.com/2018/11/06/carlos-and-us-by-ewa-mazierska/, In the spirit of The Opiate and its predilection for looking to the symbolists as inspiration, we have another should you feel obliged to read it). Along with this detailed and whimsical piece, Mazierska also repeat writer from our storied past to commence the poetry section: Erica Schreiner. With her romantic submitted “Family Man,” the work of fiction that kicks off this winter edition ofVol. 16. In it, Mazierska (and somewhat timely for the looming of Valentine’s Day that comes with every winter issue) piece, explores the yin and yang personalities of two musicians, Michael and Andy, the former being the “Johnny,” Schreiner sheds a glaring light on the reasons why, despite the many disappointments that more studio-oriented family man, the latter being the more tour-driven carouser. come with it, we still keep coming back for more when it comes to love.

To that end, a yin and yang personality exists in a single character in Salvatore Difalco’s highly The following trio of poems comes from Susan Richardson, who appeared to me as though a gift cinematic “Enter Night,” a tale that plays with notions of memory and reality in a way that modern from God or, I guess, Steve Denehan (who shows up later [though that sort of makes him sound like a fiction so rarely does anymore. At times reminiscent of Mickey Rourke as Marv in Sin City (and, for small man who might pop out of the spine of these pages via his Irish magic] in the issue with “Lungs” vertigo reasons, Scottie in Vertigo), the protagonist, Charlie “Squid” Squillaci, is a retired hitman and “November”), a person I must forgive for being a Leo. Richardson’s delicate style brings to life trying to stay away from the old life until an old associate, Ricky Carbone, makes him a proverbial every nuance of seeming quotidian mundanity, serving to remind what poetry ought to do--incite one offer he can’t refuse (because, as many of us are aware, “choice” is but an illusion that keeps us to appreciate that, prosaic an aphorism though it may be, there is beauty in everything, including the going through life as though we are not its little puppets). breakdown.

Submitted to me around the time of my own Sacramento sojourn for Christmas, “Diva” by Jonathan Harley Claes’ “The Happiest Man on Earth” also speaks somewhat to this notion of finding joy in Kravetz, is, to be honest, a rougher around the edges portrait of the Lady Bird narrative (you’ll the frequently Job-like circumstances of life, even when one finds himself in a town like Roseville, soon remember I’m fond of making film comparisons with regard to works of fiction and poetry). Michigan, a place that often makes the worst towns in America list. Regardless, our subject sees “the As Veronica comes to grips with the fact that she cannot, much to her dismay, simply abandon her beauty in the blues.” mother (and associated siblings) for Christmas, she emotionally prepares to make the journey to California’s capital, where Veronica’s mother moved to be closer to her sister, Marie, in the wake of This wry optimism continues in Francisco Orozco’s “For the Central American Refugee Caravan,” their father’s death. a prose poem that speaks to the political quandary (to use understatement) of having an American president that seems not to comprehend that without Central America there is no “America.” That to Continuing from Moons, Part I, which appeared in the Winter 2018, Vol. 13 issue, the final installment treat the likes of Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans as, for all intents and purposes, cucarachas in Zeke Greenwald’s novella, Moons, Part II, focuses the lens squarely on Dinostrophe, the Brooklyn- that need to be exterminated with a border wall, will come of no good to the U.S. and its false based rapper with the secret shame of being an erudite lover of poetry, apprehending slowly but surely emperor. that rap and poetry are intrinsically linked. Perhaps something our own Editor-at-Large can relate to, what with the recent release of his book of raps entitled Beneath The Underground: Collected Raps The ethereal nature of the fittingly titled “Play the Illusion” from Jonathan Dowdle, asks us the always 2000 - 2018. poignant but especially pertinent to the new year question, “Who would you be if you gave up/Your (dis)guises, unveiled”? Lord knows I certainly don’t want to answer that, I don’t know about you. And from Dinostrophe’s woeful saga, we return, once more to Leanne Grabel’s Brontosaurus. In this segment, chapters seventeen through twenty-two, our heroine has left the cruel clutches of her But, in his own way, Dan Raphael seems to respond to the question with “People Get Ready” and “A thankless magazine job in favor a little travel jag that sees her navigating the rivers of London and Cornucopia at Zero.” The former speaks to the spider-esque existence so many of us are subjected to Paris until she finally ends up back in oh so beautiful (not!) Stockton. Again, somehow, your Editor-in- in the studio apartment setup, crawling from the bed to the kitchen with minimal movement required, Chief can’t seem to escape the cosmic connection of NorCal. But the story doesn’t favor Stockton as not always quite aware of what time of day, exactly, it is. When phrased like this, there’s something our girl’s ultimate last stop, as dreams of moving to Portland beckon--whether her current boo, Donny, in it that, of course, reminds me of The Metamorphosis. In the latter, Raphael reveals once more his wants to come or not. One would prefer he didn’t, considering she’s a “beehive” to his “stone.” poetic use of the word “leaf” while making an all too resonant metaphorical allusion to the disconnect Striking her down with the dead weight that most men can’t help unloading. that occurs between our vision and how it ends up being communicated to others, so regularly never precisely coming out as intended (some people like to call this the “director’s plight,” despite the fact Rounding out the fiction section is Mike Lee’s “The Sword of Gnosis,” set in the time of war (ergo that it is typically the director bastardizing a screenwriter’s artistic intent). 6. making it something of an evergreen tale) as a soldier enjoys wandering his foreign environment 7. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

“Why Write a Letter When You Could Write a Poem or a Song?” by Lou Graves got to the jugular of that be” of the literary world (which still exist somehow today). And yet, even before it was released my emotions in that I so want to believe, in true narcissistic fashion, that somewhere out there, a guy in its uncensored glory, to get any semblance of Jude the Obscure to see the light of day (e.g. in I met in a train station is still thinking about me. Then again, it’s not like I’m in my twenties, so why be the magazine incarnation), Hardy had to make major concessions in order to appeal to “polite” naïve? Victorian society. Chiefly, Arabella does not pursue Jude, named Jack in these pages, like some sort of avant-garde tart, nor does Jude end up engaging in any “untoward” relations with Sue—which is, Unless it’s a jaded sort of naïveté, like the one present in Cameron Gorman’s “Treehouse,” featuring you know, one of the key fucking points of the novel. the suggestion of an ax almost more sinister than Lizzie Borden’s as our narrator prays, in so many ways, she’s being preyed upon. In any case, aren’t you so glad The Opiate would never make you edit yourself in such a way? Because, believe it or not, there are still so many prudish publications out there—what’s left of them Exhibiting the tragedian sense of timing that flows most freely when talking about one’s parents, anyway. Mitchell Grabois’ “Ovals” discusses the ultimate desire to “reject rectangles forever,” a symbol of all that wanting to stay in the carefully defined shapes ordained by Mom and Dad for so much of your wasted youth. Building on this theme is “Normalcy,” which explores that other great tragedy of life apart from being born, having a thankless job. Genna Rivieccio New York Fuckin’ City “A Clean Kitchen” by Heidi Seaborn expresses the tender concern that the world’s heart might very January 18, 2019 well ice over like food left too long in a freezer at the rate things are going. Even so, a girl can’t help but want it all: “a clean kitchen & a clean poem & a frost-free heart.” P.S. Please submit fiction, poetry, illustrations and fistfuls of cash to [email protected].

Highlighting a particular knack for the anthropomorphic, Jessica Fischoff’s evocative “Medusozoa” and “Savage” will linger in your mind long after you’ve read them. In addition to the last poem to end the section, written by John Gosslee, no stranger to pain and suffering. That said, the ironic “Privilege” goes back to the previously discussed motif of appreciating that majesty, not necessarily the devil, is in the details.

In a somewhat deliberately cheeky transition from “Privilege,” I bring you “Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead: An Exemplification of the Ways in Which Men Can Never Understand the Burdens of Freedom As a Result of Themselves Never Having Been Oppressed.” That’s right, I’m plainly trying to one-up Lana Del Rey with a title reminiscent of “Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For a Woman Like Me to Have--But I Have It.” Since I’ve been feeling a bit as though I’ve been all too “modern” with my criticisms (the last one being on 2005’s The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, though before that, in my defense, was a dissection of The Red and the Black’s Julien Sorel), I decided to go classic again with Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, read, naturally through the feminist lens of seeing Sue Bridehead as a trailblazer and a timeless martyr for the notion of women being hot and smart (the scandal!) without necessarily feeling obliged to use that hotness and smartness for the sake of attracting a man. Even though, let’s be honest, most men—both of then and now—would much prefer looks with a side of muteness (see: that weird scene in The Shape of Water where Michael Shannon covers up his wife’s mouth as a means to pretend she’s mute like Sally Hawkins) over too much intellectual stimulation. In any case, there was also something weirdly symbolic about speaking on a work that itself was originally serialized (like much of the current work in this issue) in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine under the title The Simpletons (a title in some regards “way harsh Tai”), soon after to be renamed to Hearts Insurgent.

Considering the censorship Hardy had to endure in order to get it to a mass audience (because, yes, if you’ll try to imagine, literary magazines once serviced a mass audience), it bears noting that, like Jude himself, Hardy’s prose was met with nothing but a bakclash from the “tastemaking” “powers 8. 9. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Family Man Ewa Mazierska FICTION

beautiful because Anna was essentially a homemaker, hey had been in the band for over twenty although when asked what his wife was doing, Michael years now.T Their best years, creatively and financially replied that she was an artist. It was true in the sense (when a new record would sell over a million copies), that she studied art in college and in her spare time de- were behind them. But they were still going strong and voted herself to various creative projects, such as design- enjoyed the privileges of those who had “made it”; be- ing Christmas cards, sewing patchwork quilts, making ing described by journalists as “pioneers” and “legends.” jewellery and helping their children in their art subjects These privileges included not only a comfortable life, at school. But she never tried to make money out of but also the interest of women. There were always girls her talents, and Michael never begrudged Anna for who wanted to talk to them after a gig; female journal- not making a financial contribution. He believed that ists who tried to flirt with them, not mentioning sisters thanks to staying at home, his wife was more intelligent and cousins of friends who wanted to be introduced to than most women he ever met, because she didn’t need them. They both met their wives thanks to their careers: to squander it on trivial pursuits. She had a special tal- Michael met Anna in a club, where they were playing ent for detecting absurdity and conveying it in a gentle, one of their first concerts and married her within a year; understated way. The perfect foil to the hubris of a mu- Andy married around the same time, the sister of their sician. She also had a perfect ear for capturing Michael’s light technician. But there was a difference in their love contribution to the music he was making with Andy. lives. Michael stayed faithful to his wife and they lived Nothing gave Michael more pleasure than ar- with their two children in a beautiful house. It was so riving home after a tour and finding everybody awaiting 10. 11. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Family Man - Ewa Mazierska

him like the conquering hero. After hair much faster than he was. It mother with a full-time job. This his car, but she replied that it would freedom? I’m sure she is not, and she Drummers understood only beats; every return, he spent several days was also thanks to Andy that they Michael learned in a café, as Laura be faster to walk. and Laura will get on well with each what was in between those had little without leaving the house; moving were touring so much, making new suggested that the three of them go “Maybe another time,” she other.” value. Andy and Laura sat in the row from the bedroom to the kitchen, contacts and earning handsomely. there. Andy was about to say that added. Even if Andy was right, behind. As it was meant to be their then to the study, the patio and Michael preferred working in the Michael was in a hurry to go home, Later that day he was trying Michael did not want Laura to meet unofficial honeymoon, Andy had the back the same route, as if his world studio, and even there he behaved but, to his surprise, Michael agreed to remember the film where he had his wife. For Laura, he wanted to aura of a besotted man about him had shrunk to three hundred square like a factory worker, looking at his to join them and was more animated heard these words and realised it was be something more than a boring which, in someone younger, may have metres of pure perfection. Anna watch so as not to miss supper cooked than usual. Laura appreciated it and in one by Woody Allen. They were family man, not least of all because been endearing but not so at Andy’s jokingly told him to hurry up with his by his missus. Michael’s music also, to behaved as if she was more interested uttered by Mia Farrow to a man who his bourgeois life was just a veneer. age. As always, Michael found Andy’s midlife crisis before he lost strength Andy’s mind—and ear—increasingly in Michael than Andy, asking him was sexually interested in her. Allen’s Behind it was imagination, which attitude to women embarrassing to leave the house for even a day. In sounded as if coming from a conveyor questions about his interests and his character, who was in love with took him, or rather them (as he was and he expected Laura to be fact, the prospect of spending the rest belt, with the same small number of life and hardly paying attention to Farrow’s, took it as a sign that she taking Andy with him), to another uncomfortable about the situation, of his days at home was very pleasant sounds popping up in the predictable Andy, who was reduced to ordering would choose him too, rather than a reality; it was thanks to Michael that but obviously she had to play along. and Michael often wondered what, intervals. drinks. But he didn’t mind, he really more successful bastard (though she their music had a surreal feel, as At best, she might try to cool down in his case, would be the acceptable One day, before they left appreciated Laura for being friendly ultimately chooses the other man). critics described it. In his thoughts, her boyfriend. Michael thought this parameters of retirement: age, the studio, they had a visitor. It was to his grumpy partner. The lesson is that “maybe another Michael often compared himself was indeed happening in the back income, etc. But it still looked like Andy’s new girlfriend. Normally he “What do you think about time,” means what it says—there to René Magritte: bourgeois on the row. He wished to see it, but for that they were not easy to reach. met these girls elsewhere and later Laura?” asked Andy the next day might be another time. In this case outside, revolutionary inside. he had to go to the toilet. But when Unlike Michael, Andy in the evening, but she had less time when they met in the studio. there might be another opportunity In the end, Michael did not he did go, he only saw Laura sleeping divorced his first wife with whom than his previous lovers and Andy had This was unusual for Andy, to tell Laura to be on guard, when even mention to Anna the possibility in Andy’s arms. It was not the most he had two children, had several to see her when it suited her, rather as he had stopped seeking Michael’s dealing with Andy. of her going to Thailand and she felt comfortable position for his friend, affairs, married again, fathered than him. It turned out that her opinion about women a long time The next time he arrived at sorry for him because she knew how but he was enduring it and almost two more children, divorced their name was Laura—the “ultimate noir before. the studio, Andy told Michael that stressful it was for her husband to triumphantly smiling to Michael, as mother and then practically gave heroine,” as she presented herself. “She is very attractive,” Laura would go with them on their spend long hours on planes, in soulless if he wanted to tell him, “See how up on long-term relationships. He She probably described herself this replied Michael. “And charming,” next tour and it would be a good idea hotels and serving his music to people much I am able to sacrifice for love. tried to bed young women, whom way every time she met somebody he added after a while, as he got the if Anna joined them too. For Andy from whom he felt disconnected. But You never expected that from me.” he could impress with what Michael new, but for Michael it was a sign sense that his first answer did not and Laura it would be a honeymoon of course it was not possible for him to Andy did not sleep much saw as the faded charms of an aging of intelligence uncommon in one of satisfy Andy. of sorts and, for Michael and Anna, limit himself to playing in cathedrals during their journey and when playboy. However, Michael refrained Andy’s flames. She was undoubtedly “And smart,” continued a chance to reignite the romance in or monasteries. They had to carry on they reached the hotel, his chivalry from criticising Andy because he attractive, but not in a way typical of Andy. “I think she is the best woman their long relationship. It had been with gigs at clubs and music festivals, capitulated under the weight of respected other people’s behaviour Andy’s previous girlfriends, who were I ever met.” a long time since Anna was involved and even more in such venues when tiredness and he went straight to as long as it did not impinge on his always at pains to be fashionable and “You’ve said that many times in their music and now would be record sales dipped. But Michael did bed. Laura, in contrast, after the long life and they were never really friends, obsessively tried to improve their before,” said Michael. a perfect opportunity as they were not feel resentful on this occasion, sleep, felt rejuvenated. Michael was only collaborators who went their looks, but rather in an understated “Yes, but then I did not know going to Thailand, taking advantage looking forward to leaving behind the also full of energy so they left Andy own ways as soon as it was possible. and timeless way which brought what I was saying.” of the end of the political crisis early, rainy spring which enveloped in his bed and went to see the city, Still, Michael not infrequently to mind an old French star, such as Michael did not reply, but and martial law, and the supposed his town, and enter the heat wave. which was predictably hot, crowded was embarrassed overhearing him Anna Karina or Françoise Hardy. was thinking that such a woman hunger of the local population for He didn’t even mind having a bit of and mildly oppressive, as Asian cities talking to young women, using the Her dark hair was simply cut and would be wasted on Andy. However, Western entertainment. Michael stress, as he would like to lose weight usually are. The food was also hot, same clichéd language, and looking she seemed to wear no makeup. She it wasn’t his business. Yet when he found the idea of travelling with and stress was better for that than the bringing to Michael the memory of at them with barely concealed lust. wore a dark dress with a small white saw her the following week, walking Anna preposterous. She was not one strictest of diets. their first trip there which was almost Andy, on his part, respected Michael’s collar, like a schoolgirl from the old down the street not far from his for touring; she had neither the right Eventually they were flying twenty years prior. At the time, it preference for domesticity and he days. Michael also noticed that Laura house, he realised that, in fact, he wardrobe nor the right attitude and to Bangkok. Michael was sitting next felt like they were at the top of their never dragged him to the nightclubs broke the rule according to which, wanted to save Laura for something, would find Andy’s antics annoying. to Harry, their light technician, who game and they undeniably were. and spared him the details of his the older Andy got, the younger his or someone, better. She seemed to Moreover, who would take care of slept most of the journey, and his Although their greatest successes affairs. But he could not fail to observe partners became. Laura was younger be happy to meet him, but was in a their children? Andy must have read other neighbour was their drummer, came two years later, they had a that being a family man with its than Andy, but not half his age, hurry. She had to collect her son from Michael’s thoughts as he said, “You Willie, a man of great talent for music, wonderful sense of doing everything bourgeoisie indulgences had resulted being probably in her mid-thirties. It school and take him to the dentist. think Anna is happy to be locked but not for conversation, which could effortlessly, enjoying themselves and in Michael gaining weight and losing also turned out that she was a single Michael offered to give them a lift in in the house, while you enjoy your be said about all drummers he met. having so much in common. By

12. 13. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Family Man - Ewa Mazierska

now, all of these feelings had gone. who, by this point, was awake and drink and chat. to sell, but what about the new guys?” company did not allow them to he was packing his belongings, did he Producing new music took ages and grumpy. He did not want them But Andy was not in the This was also what Michael communicate properly. Sometimes start to feel miserable. It wasn’t just the they never sounded completely new, to enjoy themselves while he was mood to go out; he wanted Michael to was thinking, but he did not like when he felt like Laura would like to have fact that he had sex with a prostitute, but imbued with nostalgia; gigs were recovering. In Michael’s view, Andy leave him and Laura in peace, in the other people pointed this out to him, some privacy with him, but on other but that he lost his high moral a matter of putting on a mask rather should have been grateful to Michael hotel, where, as he put it, they could especially fellow musicians. They had occasions he suspected that she teased ground. Now he was even worse than than behaving naturally, and they for keeping his lady company, “enjoy a bit of privacy after the hard a meal and then went to a bar and him or even that she conspired with Andy and Willie, because they were were staying with each other out resisting the temptation of bad- work.” Michael thought that Laura had some cocktails. Soon they were Andy to make him suffer by making ordinary macho scoundrels, while he of pragmatic concerns rather than mouthing him and seducing Laura: yearned for something opposite— approached by two prostitutes. The him feel excluded from their life. was a bourgeois hypocrite. His mood for the pleasure. But now it did not for being a gentleman, although on fun. She even communicated it to one who came to Michael was younger “Maybe another time”—the words was compounded by the realisation and prettier, but he dismissed her and from Allen’s film, which before gave that he forgot to buy presents for returned to the hotel, while Willie him hope—now felt like an insult to his family. He would have to buy went with the other one. Michael felt his intelligence. something tasteless and generic at “In his thoughts, Michael of- tired, but still could not sleep, most The last night of the tour, the airport, as there was no chance likely on the account of alcohol, as Michael went for a walk into town, to get anything else beforehand. drinking made him sleepless. He was where he saw many soldiers or Michael was returning earlier than thinking about Laura, coerced to policemen from a special unit. They Andy and Laura, who included also ten compared himself to René endure the fluctuating moods of an seemed to be everywhere and their Vietnam in their itinerary. His return aged gigolo who’d decided to settle presence was intimidating, especially travel was protracted on account down. He felt sorry for her, but also as they were hostile towards tourists. of a strike at the airport and there himself, stranded in an anonymous He went to a bar, to avoid their was a problem with the connecting hotel, surrounded by people with inquisitive eyes. He knew there would flight. Tired and distressed, he lost his Magritte: bourgeois on the whom he had little in common. be prostitutes, and of course there mobile somewhere on the way. When Two days later, they left were. This time, however, he followed Michael eventually arrived home, he Bangkok and visited places where one of them. He was thinking about was more tired than ever. There was there were smaller venues and fewer all the possible problems which a familiar smell of home cooking, people. The heat and humidity might result from such an encounter, and the kitchen table was decorated outside, revolutionary on the started to affect Michael. He slept beginning with the inability to rise with flowers from the market, but his poorly and his earlier enthusiasm over to the occasion and finishing with senses were dulled from travelling and being away wore off; playing started being killed by a sinister pimp. all he went through in the previous to be hard work again, almost torture. Luckily nothing like that happened. two weeks. inside.” There must be a reason why so many The room to which the woman took “Our family man is back in musicians die in their twenties, he him was fairly civilised and she was his manor,” said Anna with her usual thought. Andy no longer locked very skilful, making him feel virile, slightly mocking lilt. Michael wished matter. Ticket sales for their concerts this occasion, it would have given him Michael through her shy smile when Laura in the hotel, but he wanted to and she didn’t even have a pimp, she’d spared him this tone just once. had gone well, the next day they were much pleasure not to be one. Andy, with deep shadows under his explore the environs without anybody but worked in a kind of cooperative, And then she added, “BTW, Andy meant to meet some journalists; the Their first gig went well. eyes, was explaining their apparent else. When Willie mentioned that run by prostitutes themselves. They phoned this morning informing that city was welcoming and he had great There were enough people to fill the need for solitude. However, she did they should socialise more as a group, had a small discussion about their he broke up with his girlfriend and will company. It was Laura’s first trip to large venue and everything sounded not dare to contradict her fiancé. he replied, “No offence, Willie, but organisation, proving to Michael return home earlier than planned. He Asia and her longest trip without her right. Their lighting man did a Michael, therefore, had to go out with honeymoons should be without that the DIY methods he and Andy wants you to meet him in the studio son. She appeared younger than her great job and they managed to add Willie, who, flushed with adrenaline chaperons.” pioneered in the music business over on Thursday afternoon.” real age, almost like a teenager. something new to their routine, which from the gig, was being a bit more Michael was forced to spend twenty years before were eventually They even went to a is the ultimate sign of a memorable articulate than usual. He confirmed most of his free time with Willie, who adopted in all sectors, including nightclub, danced and got drunk. performance. Michael was feeling Michael’s impression that their first liked finishing the night with alcohol sex work in Southeast Asia. The Michael was thinking that after a so good about himself that he even show went well. and prostitutes. Harry usually stayed experience confirmed what Willie night like that a man is expected to gave a kiss to a young Thai beauty. “It would be nice to do more in the hotel, feeling weak and sick. kept saying, namely that as far as take a woman back to his place and Though he was normally shattered in Asia. The problem is, we’re behind. Michael’s only chance to talk to sexual pleasure was concerned, make love to her but, of course, it after the first night in a foreign place, The whole West is behind and we’ll Laura was when they were travelling nothing equals Thailand. Michael would ruin everything. Thus, instead, this time he felt energised and eager never catch up. We can only sell our to a new place, but then the timing returned to the hotel in an excellent he escorted Laura to Andy’s room, to explore the city, eat the spicy food, old selves. At least we have something was not good, as the noise and the mood. Only in the morning, when 14. 15. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Enter Night - Salvatore Difalco

drinking alone. Charlie had been “No clout here?” They drank. The place got guilty of this in the past. Not this “Not like the old days, busy and louder than usual. Someone Enter Night time. Though he wasn’t waiting for a paisan.” celebrated a birthday at a big central friend, per se. To call Ricky Carbone “I hear you, Squid. Need a table, surrounded by back-slapping Salvatore Difalco a friend was to denigrate his actual beverage pronto. Got stuck in traffic. well-wishers, a few sporting paper friends. This city’s gone to the dogs. Can’t party hats, all imbibing to excess. A A couple argued at a booth make a move without some dickhead cake with hissing sparklers arrived to across from his table, a blonde woman up your ass. I was telling Julie—you broken applause and slurred cheers. and a man with silver sideburns. know Julie from Darrigo’s—I was People sang “Happy Birthday” in Charlie tried to ignore them, but telling him he better not get too widely varying registers, at different sometimes people insist that you comfortable this summer. Gonna tempos, swaying left and right. should acknowledge their drama, be a hot one. Gonna be a scorcher Charlie’s head spun and he had a validate it. The woman scored like you never seen before. You’ll be hard time hearing Ricky, who was points. The man had cheated on frying eggs on your Cadillac hood, I telling him how an uncle of his had her repeatedly. He’d made promises. told him.” two families, one here and one in the He’d been verbally abusive. Three “We talking global old country. strikes, by Charlie’s count. The man warming?” “How the fuck did he manage defended himself, referencing his “Global warming.” Ricky it?” insecurities, money troubles, work rolled his eyes. He shouldered off his “What’s that?” Ricky said, problems, an ex-wife and kids. coat and draped it on the chair back. cupping his ear. “You never see them!” “Global warming, my ass. Global “How’d he manage it?!” “I pay for their damn private warming.” He snapped his fingers for “Uncle Frank could lie to schools, don’t I?” service. anyone without batting an eye.” “I don’t want to talk about Charlie noticed Ricky’s “You think?” this anymore.” freshly manicured fingernails, shining “Three kids here, younger, “Then don’t talk about it like polished shells. The lengths and four older ones back in Sicily. anymore.” people went to satisfy their vanity. He’d fly back and forth every The woman burst into tears. “Ordered you a martini.” few months. For work, he’d say. Charlie was hoping she wouldn’t, that “You know me too well,” Importing cheeses from Italy. And he she’d stay strong and tell this idiot to Ricky said. was running numbers in Buffalo, so go fuck himself; then again, weeping The waitress arrived. Ricky he had bucks.”

can’t be avoided at times. downed his martini in one swig. “Wives ever catch on? What

His cell phone buzzed; he “Bring another,” he barked, about his kids?” long black hair floated in Charlie Squil- She grabbed the defiled drink and moved on checked the message. Ricky was chewing the olives. “Please.” “Yeah, he got charged with laci’s bourbon.A He stared at it for a minute, honing his with small but quick steps, as though her ankles were here. Where was he? Charlie swung “Nice to see your friend bigamy, sentenced to a nickel in disgust. It was powerful. Tender music whining over bound together. A person’s walk says so much about his head around too quickly, setting arrived safely,” she said. upstate New York. Kids eventually all the speakers—a Roy Orbison song—angered him. He them. What did hers say? Charlie didn’t like this cock- off a momentary swirl of vertigo “We’re touched by your met up and still connect at reunions summoned the waitress, dressed in red velveteen to the tail bar, not really. The Tiffany lamps grated, as did the that made him grab the edges of the concern,” Ricky said. and such. Uncle Frank, God rest his upper thighs. Well into May, he tried to puzzle out the old wood and threadbare bordello broadloom. The hair table. This happened now and then He roughly wiped his lips soul, died in the joint. Some skinhead reasons for the fashion choice—other staff wore differ- in his drink punctuated the dated, dirty vibe. But conve- when he moved his head too quickly with his hand and wiped his hand on shanked him a few months before his ent costumes, none red, none velveteen—but nothing nient and quiet, the place drew little attention. or when he rose abruptly. Maybe his trouser leg. He looked angry even release. He’d been put up to it. Which came to mind. When he reported a hair in his drink, she By the time Charlie finished his second bour- a blood pressure issue. He shut his when he was happy. Just one of those brings me to the now, Squid.” smiled. bon, his shoulders relaxed. Sinatra buzzed over the eyes to regain his equilibrium. When faces. “The now?” “A hair?” speakers with “The Best Is Yet To Come,” and it was he opened them, Ricky stood by his “So, what’s up?” Charlie The couple in the booth, “That’s right. May I get another drink?” fine. The liquor bottles lined up behind the bar glint- table in a full-length black leather asked. quiet for a time, reignited. Recovered “Ew. Sure thing. Your friend’s late.” ed and whispered in their secret tongues. A throbbing coat. “Easy, Squid. Let me have from her crying jag, the woman “Observant of you. When he comes, please green magnum held his eye until the waitress brought “Could’ve found a better another drink and relax a little. You addressed the man. bring him a vodka martini with two olives.” another drink. Maybe she suspected he was one of those table,” he said. in a fucking hurry? Haven’t seen you “Know what you can do with “I can do that.” people who say they’re waiting for a friend, when ac- “Booths were occupied.” since Martino’s stag. Don’t insult your apology?!” “And please, take this away.” tually they’re simply too embarrassed to admit they’re Ricky snapped his fingers. me.” “Simmer down.” 16. 17. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Enter Night - Salvatore Difalco

“Simmer down? Fucking slaughtered,” Ricky continued. “Be Bach fugues, soothing in the evenings. Ricky texted. It was simply a name: When he opened them, the homeless intent. prick!” cruel and you’ll taste the stress in the He’d first discovered Bach in Kingston Iggy Macaluso. Iggy, or Ignazio, used to man was gone. His temples throbbed. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe.” The man muttered under his meat. Be humane, and you’re eating Penitentiary, of all places. A lifer had be a regular at the games staged at the He’d never passed out in his car like “You’re bleeding.” breath. tender, know what I’m saying?” turned him on to the Brandenburg Benvenuti Social Club, a real donkey that without being shit-faced. He’d “I’m what?” “What did you say? Repeat The waitress stood by, smiling Concertos. Same guy later tried to shank and blabbermouth. For a guy from heard of inner ear infections fucking “From the ear.” She touched that! I dare you to repeat it!” with small white teeth. Smiling so him in the showers. Palermo, Sicily, where reticence was with a person’s equilibrium. Maybe her own ear and handed him a A crashing of glasses and relentlessly—something happens to His cell phone buzzed. Tina. the ultimate mark of character and that was it. Or he was getting too old serviette. scuffling ensued, fleshy slapping the face muscles after a time; they set He’d been avoiding her. Not that they manly virtue, this Iggy babbled like a for this life. Maybe that was it. He touched his earlobe, sticky sounds, grunting. Then the woman like a mask. were a thing. A few drunken wrangles. village gossip. Names, places, scores... Continuing east for a time, with blood. He looked at his fingers in bolted from the booth, handbag under “Buddy boy,” Ricky said, But she’d been calling him every few nothing was sacred with him. He was he soon realized he’d forgotten his horror. What the hell was this? Blood arm, a camel shawl flailing from her “another?” hours for two days. Maybe it was someone with limited mortality. At destination. He never brought his cell spattered his shoulder. He was really hand. “I’m good, but you go ahead.” important. Most likely it was nothing, least in Charlie’s circles. phone on jobs, so he couldn’t check the leaking, but didn’t feel any pain. He After a good pause, the man “What I want is a porterhouse so he ignored it. She left a few garbled message. And he never wrote anything took the serviette and pressed it to his with the silver sideburns followed her steak Chicago-style with a side of messages. Something about numbers, *** down. It was all in his head. ear. He drove on, struggling to “So, you remember me?” the Another text arrived from fill this sudden memory lapse. It felt waitress said. “Maybe she suspected he was Rick: Seven and Seven Lounge. like that part of his brain storing the He gaped at the bloody East end joint, near the city location had been surgically removed. serviette. “I meet lots of people in my limits, but Charlie had never been Concerned, he pulled into a gas line of work.” there before. No problem. station. He sat there and replayed the “And I don’t?” she said, rolling At dusk he set off in his day in his mind. Iggy Macaluso—yes, her eyes. one of those people who say nondescript grey Buick. He drove he remembered his name from the One of the counter men east and within minutes darkness message. But the location—a blank. laughed to himself, his shoulders enveloped the city. The glare of He exited the car, hoping shaking. Why was he laughing? What oncoming headlights blinded him. He the cool air would clear his head. He did Charlie not know or understand turned his head too quickly and felt a walked without direction, passing about this joint? His head swirled: they’re waiting for a friend, when tickle of vertigo. He pulled over to the darkened storefronts and shuttered he needed nourishment. He couldn’t side of the road, put the car in park row houses. He didn’t see a soul. He remember the last thing he ate. and tried to regulate his breathing. kept walking, thoughts narrowed in “A piece of pie, please.” scope, focusing on the pavement in “Apple or blueberry?” they’re actually too embarrassed *** front of him. “Blueberry, à la mode. Finally, he passed a diner, The waitress walked off, Charlie must have dozed off. dully illuminated, the windows thick clutching the small of her back. For When he opened his eyes, someone with grime, the sign—Three Square a moment, Charlie thought he saw was peering into his passenger window. Eats—aslant. He opened the door to something jabbing out of her spine, to admit they’re drinking alone.” He started. Then when he saw the a jingle of bells and entered. A few a metal rod perhaps. She turned and fingerless gloves and filthy face, he drab men sat at the counter, hunched caught him gawking. He averted his out, head bowed. rapini.” numbers this, numbers that. No idea understood it was a homeless man. over coffees. The waitress, in whites, eyes, pretending to gaze out the filthy “These people...” Ricky said. “We only serve finger foods,” what she was going on about. She “Get the fuck away from my grimaced when she saw him. He sat at windows into the desolate street. “These people don’t know how good the waitress said. could be histrionic, even at the best of car,” he said. a booth across from the counter. She He was in crisis. It wasn’t they got it. Takes nothing for it all to “If I wanted fingers,” Ricky times. The bum gestured and made hurried over with a glass pot of coffee just a state of nerves. He considered go south, know what I’m saying? Take snapped, “I know where to get the In his bedroom, he opened the a sad clown face. and filled the cup on his table without calling Ricky on a payphone, but to your eye off the ball for a second and real things, know what I’m saying, closet door and searched for a locked Charlie reached to his console asking if he wanted it. She was maybe admit he’d forgotten the location— poof, up in smoke. You gotta maintain, sweetie?” wooden case among his shoeboxes. for his piece. twenty-something, thin, hair like repercussions would follow. know what I’m saying? You gotta stay Maintaining the smile, but He kept the tools of his trade in the The guy backed away from charred straw. The waitress brought the pie sharp, watch your back and so on. taken aback, the waitress hustled off. case. They’d gone untouched for the car, hands at his chest. “We’ve met before,” she said. with a scoop of beige ice cream. Never know when the boogie man’s several months. He’d been semi- A moment of absolute silence “We have?” “Enjoy,” she said. coming for you haha.” *** retired, refusing gigs. Didn’t need the and stillness followed. Charlie felt like “At the Exhibition, back a few One of the counter men Half-listening, Charlie let him money. He had no debts, no wife, no he was plummeting. Then a bright years.” looked over, eyes so deeply set Charlie ramble on. Charlie relaxed on the sofa kids—as far as he knew. flash lit up the car windows. He looked into her eyes: a couldn’t see them. The pie tasted of “Like when an animal gets with a bourbon on ice. He listened to His cell phone buzzed again. He shut his eyes for a moment. lifelessness there disqualified any ill 18. 19. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

nothing and as he forked it up he look right to me. Your eyes, I could see bang startled him and he tweaked his noticed his hand’s pale shade of blue. it in your eyes. Unsteady.” neck. The dizziness came on strong Diva He put down the fork and studied “How do I make this right?” this time. The entire street wobbled his hands: blue. He looked around “Like I said, Squid, it’s too and tilted. He had to hold a parking Jonathan Kravetz to see if a coloured light was shining late.” meter to gather himself. somewhere. Except for the slabs of dark He hung up. Finally, he staggered to the red defining the upholstered booths As Charlie returned to his Buick, opened the door and got in. and stools (and the bloodied serviette), table, the counter man who’d been Exhausted, he could barely lift his black and white predominated, with laughing grabbed his wrist. arms. He leaned his head against infinite shades of grey. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t the headrest. He heard music. Roy Charlie finished the pie. The belong here.” Orbison. Roy Orbison? Where was it waitress poured him more coffee. Her “Who the fuck are you?” coming from? arms were like bleached sticks. “Tell ‘em I want out of “Finding yourself in the ranks here. Tell ‘em I don’t wanna do this *** of the insane,” she said, leaning close, anymore.” “do you stay put and make the best of Charlie wrenched his arm Charlie must have dozed off. the company given, or do you escape?” away and gestured for the check. When he opened his eyes, someone “Escape,” Charlie said. “That’s just Pernel,” said the was peering into his passenger window. “People rarely change.” waitress. “Harmless. But he knows the He started. Then when he saw the “Do you think you can score.” fingerless gloves and filthy face, he change?” “He does?” understood it was a homeless man. “I have changed.” The waitress flared her nostrils “Get the fuck away from my “I agree. You have changed. and took a deep breath. car,” he said. You are changed.” “You should stay here,” she The bum gestured and made But all of this made Charlie’s said. “This is a safe space.” a sad clown face. head heavy. He resisted the impulse to “Safe? Safe from what?” Charlie reached to his console rest it on the table. He needed to get “Isn’t it obvious?” for his piece. back on the road. Nothing was obvious. The guy backed away from “There a payphone? Forgot Charlie’s head ached. He felt queasy. the car, hands at his chest. my cell.” He rubbed his temples. A moment of absolute silence “Nah. But you can use ours. “Do I have to spell it out?” and stillness followed. Charlie felt like No long distance.” “Stop it,” he said, anger he was plummeting. Then a bright welling in his chest. flash lit up the car windows. eronica threw her plate against the wall. It Her mother was right about Tommy–her father *** “You forgot the numbers, He shut his eyes for a moment. was one Vfrom the set her mother had given her when the beat him—but it didn’t mean his actions shouldn’t have Squid.” When he opened them, the homeless old lady moved to Sacramento to live with Marie, Ve- consequences. When they were kids and Tommy got Ricky yelled at Charlie. He “The numbers? What is it man was gone. His temples throbbed. ronica’s sister. The plate bounced and landed, undam- angry, he would yell at, or even punch Veronica. He’d had never yelled at him. It was too late, with these numbers? And why you He’d never passed out in his car like aged, on the kitchen floor. Veronica, wearing her baggy once, when she was fifteen, gathered up a group of his he said. Iggy was gone. calling me Squid?” that without being shit-faced. He’d sweatpants and sweatshirt—her winter attire—pounced friends and followed her home from school, saying noth- “What do you mean ‘gone’?” He quickly paid and exited. heard of inner ear infections fucking on the plate and delivered it again to the ground. It ing, but occasionally making obscene kissing noises. She “He left town.” She called after him, but he didn’t turn with a person’s equilibrium. Maybe made a satisfying sound when it shattered this time and thought they were going to rape her. “When did he leave town?” around. that was it. Or he was getting too old she sat back down to contemplate the email. Her moth- The old lady ended the email with an or else: “Couple hours ago.” He stood in the street trying to for this life. Maybe that was it. er once again wanted to know why she wasn’t able to show up or she’d stop speaking to her. Veronica knew “I would’ve missed him situate himself. Blood still leaked from forgive her brother. He acted like a “jerk” (her mother’s her mother was incapable of carrying out that threat, anyway.” his ear. He walked pressing the bloody word) sometimes, but that was the way men were. Don’t but still resented her for writing it. “Wrong,” Ricky said. serviette to it. Everything looked you remember the time your father walked around the neighborhood She picked up her phone and looked at the “Everything was planned. It was unfamiliar, the storefronts, the street for an hour because he couldn’t stand the suspense of the game, and black, cold square for an anxious minute before calling. perfect. Now—now it’s too late. signs. He felt detached from his body, when the Giants lost, screamed at Tommy? A boy who was treated “Mom, it’s me.” Something wrong with your head, from the experience of being there. that way by his father deserved forgiveness. The state thought “You’re coming, right?” No small talk and she man? Tell the truth, Squid. You didn’t Just as he approached his car, a sudden so when they paroled him. sounded braced for a battle; Veronica didn’t have the

20. 21. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Diva - Jonathan Kravetz

stomach for one. The flight to San Francisco them up watching too much British herself free. Can’t you respect that?” together. She really felt cold, but didn’t “I haven’t gotten my ticket was a little bumpy and landed fifteen comedy on television. She sighed into “It’s good to see you,” he said. She wanted to ask him what dare mention the heater again. yet.” minutes late, but there was no sign of the phone. “Sure,” she said. “You too.” he knew about respect, but was aware He persisted. “If you don’t, I “What are you waiting for?” Tommy when Veronica got to the curb. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was “Well, then, okay.” He rubbed he was tempting her. He enjoyed their think Marie and I will play something “Nothing, I guess.” She She plopped down on her suitcase and just a joke.” his hand over the shiny red sports fights. She didn’t, at least not anymore. and mom will wonder why you’re listened for her mother’s breathing on called Patrick. He was her new lover “It’s okay. My life is a joke.” car. It was an impractical rental, but Still, the tension grew. not.” the other end of the phone. Maybe —they’d been together almost three She was pouring it on, but Patrick he couldn’t help himself from being “I gotta ask you a favor,” he “I’ll think about it.” smartphones didn’t pick up those months—and this was the first time seemed to enjoy soothing her. ostentatious. Dark shadows hollowed said. “What’s to think about?” human sounds the way the old phones they’d been separated by the breadth “Your life is far from a joke. out his eyes and his teeth looked She gripped her seatbelt. She forced a smile and they did. More likely she was holding her of the United States. He worked as a You’re a semester away from a Master’s breath. “I’ll get it.” project manager for an IT company in speech pathology.” “Christmas is a time for in Manhattan, which she found to “Is that really a life for a family,” her mother said. “And your be, at its best, uninteresting, but she’d singer?” “But family really was im- brother is really looking forward to deliberately sought out a man with a “It’s your life. Embrace it.” seeing you.” steady income and stable emotions. She knew she was whining Her mother wanted Veronica No more musicians or writers. and, feeling a little guilty about taking to say something like “I am too,” but She pictured him sitting at advantage, asked him about his new portant to Veronica: she that would be total capitulation. She’d his desk, a fifty-year-old man in jeans project. He was building a model of lost this battle, but there was still a war and a t-shirt, the glow of a computer the Starship Enterprise, the spaceship to fight. “I want to talk to you about screen making the wrinkles on his from Star Trek. He’d been working Tommy.” forehead look deeper, more profound. on it for over a year and was nearing “This again?” He’d been against the trip and couldn’t completion. had come from these peo- “I just want you to listen.” understand, he said, why a forty- “I’ve added a few more details “When I was growing up, something woman (she hadn’t divulged to the exterior,” he said. “I’m a terrible listening wasn’t a thing. If you need her true age to him yet) had to appease painter so it takes me forever.” to be heard, go out to the park or her mother. She defended her position, “I can’t wait to see it.” whatever that patch of grass is near muttering something about obligation “It’s very realistic.” ple and couldn’t deny it. The your apartment and start yelling. Lots to family, her mother’s troubled life And then she was crying. “I’m of people will hear you.” and other clichés. But family really sorry,” she said. “Like I said, I haven’t gotten was important to Veronica: she had “It’s okay.” my ticket,” Veronica said to make sure come from these people and couldn’t “I really do miss you.” obligation felt real.” the old lady understood who really deny it. The obligation felt real. “Me too.” He listened had the power in these exchanges. He was in a good mood and uncomfortably to her sob for a few “Don’t threaten me,” her asked about her flight. minutes until she got control of herself. mother said. But her voice betrayed “It was fine.” “I should have come out there yellow. “Isn’t she’s a beauty?” “What’s that?” drove in silence for an hour until they her. Before Veronica had time to speak “I miss you,” he said. She with you.” He sounded less certain “It’s a great car,” she said. “I think it would be awesome got to Marie’s house on the outskirts of again, her mother added, “Since your hadn’t expected the sound of his voice than usual. They drove to the house to put on a little concert for mom. You Sacramento, a split-level painted green father died”—her favorite way to to affect her this much. She nodded, “I appreciate that. Thanks.” listening to a CD of a musical he can sing one of your standards, I’ll and white, a nice little McMansion begin a sentence—“it’s been up to me forgetting for a moment that he They stayed on the phone another was supposed to learn for a job in accompany on the piano and Marie paid for by her ex-husband, Mark. to hold the family together. Please help couldn’t see her. ten minutes and avoided talking Wisconsin. She felt as if he was using can play guitar. Before you respond, He’d owned and operated a candy me do that.” “I miss you too.” Then she told about family until Tommy arrived, the tinny music to attack her and the I’m only asking for mom’s sake.” store near the university campus before She sounded sincere, which him she was still waiting for Tommy. looking puffier than she remembered. car filled with tension. When she tried Tommy never did anything the divorce. She envied him now: he’d was all the more upsetting for Veronica “Well, I guess you had to She wondered if he was taking his to turn on the heat, he glared. that wasn’t for himself, and this was escaped. Marie came outside when because it meant the woman believed expect something like this. Maybe he medication. She said goodbye to “I’m cold,” she said. one way he could make her his little they pulled into the driveway and her own bullshit. won’t pick you up at all and you’ll hop Patrick—the distance felt like more “It’s California.” marionette and pretend as if nothing hugged Veronica when she got out of “I’ll be there, okay?” right back on a plane to New York and than three thousand miles—and hello Veronica took a deep breath, had happened between them. As if the the car. “Good,” she said and hung up we’ll be drinking egg nog and shagging to her brother. He put her suitcase in but her hands were shaking. “Northern past was nothing. Twenty years in New “I’m so glad to see you,” she without asking about graduate school. by one a.m.” the trunk without responding to her California,” she said. “It gets cold York trying to make it as a singer had said with her smoke-damaged voice. She liked that he used unusual greeting, but then, after hesitating, here, you know.” taught her that music couldn’t fix her. “The family should get together like *** words like “shagging.” He picked threw his arms around her. She pulled “I just like it cool when I drive. Or her family. She rubbed her hands this more.” 22. 23. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Diva - Jonathan Kravetz “Sure,” she said, already it and a short-sleeve shirt that showed while her mother had wanted more “It’s okay.” man obsessed with order—his job was, the way it seemed to her now looking feeling tired. Marie had gained a lot her sagging arms. Veronica felt a than the simple things, but hadn’t “When I come back, let’s take in fact, creating order out of chaos back. She wondered how her niece had of weight and looked fat as she twisted jolt of anxiety and hugged her from been quite sophisticated enough to a trip together,” she said. “Someplace —and she and her family were the managed to avoid Veronica’s kind of her face into a strange variation of a behind without announcing herself. realize this. So she stayed married and cold so we’ll have no choice but to epitome of its opposite. She shouldn’t desperation. How had she settled on a smile. Veronica wondered if her sister Her mother put her soft hand against unhappy and took her frustrations out spend every day cuddling on the bed.” have told him about them—it was too career so easily? Her father’s influence allowed herself to feel anything close Veronica’s forearm, but managed to on her husband, nitpicking his faults. “A cuddle-heavy place is what soon—and kept everything upbeat. certainly helped. Mark lived in Dallas to a real emotion anymore. With her keep stirring the pasta sauce. If she He passed those frustrations along you’re saying?” The beginning of relationships were now with his second wife and a young white and red Christmas sweater, with had a reason to cook like this every day to Tommy who took them out on his “Yes, please.” supposed to lift you up like a helium boy; he seemed like a good father. her hair sticking out and her fake grin, she’d be happy. baby sister. “That could be arranged.” balloon and she’d already tossed “How’s your dad doing?” with her eyes blinking at odd intervals, “I’m glad to see you,” “What room am I in?” There was an awkward pause. several anchors on his lap. She wanted “His wife is pregnant again.” she looked like she belonged in a Veronica said. It was true. The sight of Veronica asked. They weren’t at the place in their to call him back and be a different Angela patted her stomach and smiled. mental institution. her aging mother—her obvious frailty Her mother stared at her relationship where she felt comfortable person, asking him more about his Veronica clapped. “Really. Wow!” Tommy put his arm around —made her realize the old lady didn’t for thirty seconds and it felt like they with long silences and her brain projects, letting him talk about himself. “I like Clifford, but I’m hoping Marie’s shoulder. “Hey little sister.” have many years remaining. Maybe it were having their screaming match scrambled for something to say. Finally But he would think she was as crazy as for a girl this time.” “Hey big brother,” Marie was best to give her what she wanted. telepathically. Finally, she said, “You’re she said, “I might make a pie later on.” everyone else in her family. Maybe she “You want a little sister?” said. They were only a year apart “We’re happy you could come in Angela’s room.” Angela was Marie’s “Pie is good,” he said. She was. “I guess. Yeah. They’re and had always conspired against as well,” she said. daughter. “We put a cot in there.” hoped she wasn’t coming across as Angela popped into the room. coming to visit me at UMass over Veronica, who was five years younger “Do you need any help?” “Thanks, Mom.” too needy: she had just called him at She was a skinny, wary nineteen-year- spring break.” than Marie. “Any trouble with traffic?” Veronica asked. “I could bake.” She The walls of Angela’s room the airport and he’d been generous old, but had always seemed mature for “That’s great!” “It was smooth sailing,” he made the best apple pie in the family. were covered with posters of 80s enough to talk then. And even if her age. She probably had to be with Veronica hugged her niece again, said. “It’s too late for that now. rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and he liked comforting her, he didn’t Marie as a mother. surprising herself. “It always is with you.” Besides, Marie is on a diet.” As if Madonna. Her niece had always been naturally talk about emotions. He “Hey Aunt Veronica,” she “Are you going to sing?” Veronica rolled her eyes and avoiding a sugary dessert was going to interested in the past and had started preferred to talk about practical affairs, said. Angela asked as they pulled apart. started to walk past them into the help her sister lose weight after stuffing out studying history at the University like the BB gun he’d purchased to “Hi Angela. You look great!” “I don’t know,” Veronica said. house. But Marie took her arm. her face at Christmas dinner. of Massachusetts before switching to shoot the woodpecker that had started They exchanged a quick hug before “Do you think I should?” “You’re going to sing.” It Her mother put down the a math major of some kind. It wasn’t hammering away at his house. He’d the girl threw herself onto her mattress “My mother is fucking full of sounded like a threat and Veronica wooden spoon and turned around. surprising the girl had put as much talked about that for hours, how he and propped her head up with a couple shit.” The curse startled Veronica. She thought of a hundred smart retorts. “I just want you to be good to distance as possible between herself would shoot the bird, how much the of pillows. still thought of Angela as a child—a What, are you, Tony Soprano? You gonna Tommy,” she said. “Can you do that and Marie. pecking annoyed him, how expensive Angela whispered, “Are you quiet kid who escaped into her own whack me if I don’t? People from where for me?” Veronica opened her suitcase the repairs to his siding were. Her ready for the madness?” imagination—but she had obviously they’d grown up in New Jersey Veronica wanted to scream I’ll and took out her own version of father had worked part-time for the fish Veronica laughed. “Can you grown into a perceptive adult. And sometimes talked like this. be good to him if he’s good to me or some Christmas attire, a white sweater that and game department and would have ever really be ready?” Angela shrugged Veronica agreed with her, though Veronica shrugged. “I don’t variation. They were a family that she’d knitted for herself a few years hated this solution to the woodpecker with her whole body, exaggerating the she didn’t think it was her place to know yet.” had always communicated through back. It was plain and unostentatious. problem. She’d told Patrick there were drama. Veronica loved this girl. encourage her niece to talk that way “Why do you have to be so screaming and she’d been trying to She sat on her cot and called Patrick other ways to get rid of the bird, but “How’s college?” about her mother. difficult?” Marie said. control her impulses better. Therapy again. he’d already made up his mind. She “It’s good. I mostly get Bs, but “We’ll see what happens,” “Just make mom happy for helped with that. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” didn’t want to bring it up again. that’s fine with me.” Veronica said. once,” Tommy added. Her mother added, “He’s He sounded surprised to hear from After another silence she said, “You’re studying something Angela shrugged and Veronica managed at least to been out almost a year now, did you her. Or was he annoyed? “I miss you.” with math.” Her niece had thoughtful retreated farther back on the bed, her prevent herself from crying in front of know that?” Tommy had gone to Veronica was about to let loose “Me too,” he said. And they eyes: you could see the ocean raging face blank. Veronica worried she had them and went inside where it smelled prison for assault after getting into a a stream of complaints, but didn’t said their goodbyes. She wondered behind them. disappointed the girl and scrambled like it often did when her mother was fight in the stands at a minor league want Patrick to think that was the only if since their last phone call he’d had “Accounting.” That’s right, for something to say to let her know cooking; you wanted to take a giant baseball game. He wouldn’t have spent reason she called him. “I made it,” she time to realize what kind of mess he Veronica knew this and kicked herself they were on the same side. Before bite out of the spicy air. This comforted time if it hadn’t been his umpteenth said. “Mom looks frail, but she’s happy was getting himself into by dating her. for forgetting. When Veronica was she could come up with something, her a little. She put down her suitcase offense. “Your father was so mean to to see me.” At fifty, he wanted his life simple, and the her age, she’d gone on the road, however, Angela asked, “Did you bake and went into the kitchen, which was that boy.” What her mother never “That’s the stuff,” he said, dating someone with a crazy family singing in several cover bands; it was a pie?” cramped, but well kept—her mother wanted to face was her own part in again sounding like a television show. would only add complication. She four years of that before finally going “Your mother is dieting.” had probably cleaned it from ceiling creating a monster out of Tommy. Her He was talking in short sentences: this imagined him huddled over his pristine to music school. She’d had a fissure in Veronica added, “I should have, to floor when she moved in. She was father liked hunting and singing—he meant he felt impatient. desk painstakingly adding details to his her soul and somehow being a famous though,” hoping Angela would come wearing an apron with reindeers on was a farmer who despised the city— “I’m sorry for calling again.” Starship Enterprise model. He was a musician would fill it up. Or that’s around. “I’m the best pie maker in the 24. 25. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Diva - Jonathan Kravetz

family.” terrible—and then sat. “You really of accusations, to defend her sensitive Marie said, panicked. “A time for up. “Before all hell breaks loose.” Her niece joined in and the two of “Oh,” Angela said. should get this thing tuned,” he said. father, to accuse them of being bullies, family to be together.” “Stop,” Marie said. “You them competed to see who could sing “Whatever.” The girl blinked, but “Like I have money for that,” to tell them once and for all that they “I know,” Veronica said and can’t!” louder and higher. remained still. Veronica regretted Marie answered and then pulled her could go to hell. took her niece’s hand. “We won’t be “No one is going anywhere,” “Tiiiiiiiiime,” they dragged this last remark about the pie: Angela guitar from the closet. All the siblings As she rose, her eyes landed gone all night.” Tommy said. the word out together, imitating Mick didn’t care who made dessert, she just were excellent musicians, something on her niece. The girl was playing with Tommy played a diminished “Not on Christmas Eve!” her Jagger, “is on my side.” wanted to eat something with sugar. they inherited from their father, who the food on her plate, looking bored chord, the kind made famous in old mother said. Veronica was supposed to be the cool sang and played the mandolin every and restless. horror movies. “You’re so fucking Veronica tugged Angela past aunt. She tried to change the subject Christmas, his voice rough from Veronica took a long purging selfish,” he said. them and through the door. Outside, to boys—that’s something they could cigarettes, but warm. Maybe she could breath. Veronica could see who these it was all crisp air and moonlight. always talk about—but Angela didn’t sing and imagine she’s entertaining Angela was different because people were. Marie was blinking She was still holding her niece’s offer much. Veronica couldn’t blame him. He’d been a natural artist, but she’d chosen to be. She was like a her for wanting to keep secrets from without training and other artists to girl who’d grown up in a war zone the family and wondered how happy share ideas with he’d never learned to and learned how to avoid stepping “‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘It’s California.’ the girl was. gain perspective on the choices he’d on mines. Why did Veronica need to made in his life. Those choices ate away explode? *** at him without him really knowing. She put her hand on her He worked as a machinist until niece’s shoulder. Christmas Eve dinner— retiring at sixty-five and lasted about “How about we go get some Veronica took a deep breath, but her the Feast of the Seven Fishes—was ten years after that before succumbing dessert?” Veronica said. Her heart was typical. Which is to say, spectacular: to esophageal cancer. Her father had pounding, but she continued to take smelts, shrimp, baked fillet, steamed been an angry, inarticulate man, but deep breaths. clams, fried eel, green salad with olives his rages had never been directed at Angela looked up. “What?” hands were shaking. ‘Northern Cal- and roasted red peppers. Veronica her and she’d loved him. She was the She looked confused as her eyes shot put both hands on her abdomen and only one who had, perhaps. around the room, waiting for the remembered when she could eat one Wasn’t it her job to defend reactions that would come. of her mother’s holiday meals and him? “We’re about to play for still look like a model. Now she looked Her mother’s eyes began to mom,” Tommy said, like Tony ifornia,’ she said. ‘It gets cold here, like the third base coach of her grad moisten and she clutched her hands Soprano, apparently a popular school co-ed softball team, a curly in front of her chest as if she was benchmark for her siblings on how to haired guy named Brad or something, praying. Veronica felt frozen to her communicate. who spent his evenings and weekends chair: should she give in to her siblings A tear rolled down her you know.’” drinking beer. Her mother leaned and prove to herself that she had no mother’s cheek. “You can’t just leave.” back, still excited by the meal: she liked will of her own? Or should she resist “You don’t want to get fat,” to watch others eat her food. Tommy and cause a fight that would? The time Marie said directly to Angela. “Look was ripping apart a raisin zeppole like Veronica refused to sing for her own mother. what happened to me.” over and over, terrified of the family hand as they stood on the steps. She a chimpanzee and Marie and Angela Before she could move, The rocket that had been set to breaking up—of any change—and remembered then that she didn’t have were talking about school. Someone Tommy said, “Hey diva. You gonna blast off inside Veronica dissolved into Veronica felt sorry for her. Tommy a car. from the outside might actually think sing or what?” her bloodstream and filled her with looked like a past-his-prime bouncer “I think you’ll have to drive,” they were a normal family. The word “diva” set off a energy instead. She was looking down at a nightclub: drunk and resentful of Veronica said. Then Tommy stood up, bomb inside her. There were real from space, studying the life forms on the mess he’d made of his life. Their Her niece giggled. “I left my zeppole still in hand. reasons for why she’d become this a far away planet, formulating a plan: mother, arms and face sagging, sat keys inside.” They looked at each “Mom,” he said. “We have nervous, angry person. She hated how can we communicate with these wringing her hands, denying with all other. Then Veronica laughed too as a surprise for you.” Veronica tried to Tommy for what he’d done to her alien creatures? her remaining strength that her image the sounds of arguing shook the living relax her hands under the table, but and resented her mother for letting “You go ahead and sing of a perfect family, like a Christmas room window from the inside. The ice couldn’t stop them from shaking. it happen. And she’d had enough of without us,” Veronica answered. card from the fifties, was a false and cream shop wasn’t more than a half Without saying another word, their bullshit. If they wanted a fight “We’re going for a drive.” sickening fantasy. Her jaw slacked hour on foot, anyway. Tommy stumbled to the piano and —and they did—she would give it to Angela looked anxious and open and her eyes glassed over. They began walking, and after opened the lid. He played a couple them. She stood up intending to let unsure. Here were the real divas. a moment Veronica launched into one Read more from Jonathan Kravetz at http:// of chords—the instrument sounded all her pent up anger out in a barrage “This is Christmas Eve!” “Come on,” Veronica of her old cover tunes. This is what jonathankravetz.com. whispered to her niece who hopped music is for, she thought: to celebrate. 26. 27. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II - Zeke Greenwald in her next apartment. anything. The bouldery piles out the thought about the dead one, and then Even when they went out to window went just as speedily, “I think remembered, oh yes, I guess I do still Moons, Part II dinner, she was still talking about these I found something; it really just says have a son. He was two, he had a piano things. They always ate Chinese the one thing.” Arthur inspected Miranda teacher and an Australian nanny, and Zeke Greenwald day before Thanksgiving. She had with his forehead bunched between apparently the young Farid was quite talked about it on the bus there, then the black haired lozenges on his brow. adept at studying. But his father would in her room, and now in the Chinese “What does it say? That hardly see him. dining room. A lot of nuances about he’ll be mine forever?” She smiled The other would have been the fervent scheming were lost on her expectantly. That was how she really six or seven, and so many professions parents, in her excitement about it, thought about him, too. and things when the mind wandered. like that it was just all of her dreaming. Indeed, it said one thing; His wife, that is, his former wife, So when her father asked her, Dinostrophe had said about her just unfortunately, miscarried just after “What new apartment?” she had to one thing: “Yes, the leading lady, Farid was sentenced to sixty days in jail clarify that it was a hypothetical one while good in the play, can be a little for speeding. The injustice of the thing! that she wanted. rambunctious.” At the time, the building where Farid “How could you even afford Miranda was dismayed, but spent his sentenced time was a jail; it?” Her father asked again. to dissemble the dismay, kept talking but his reminiscences, where learned- “I make money now, Dad!” about the apartment she’d have of, outside circumstances coalesced, Arthur was slouching, someday. recast the place as a decent hell where spooning soup into his mouth. Her Arthur eventually settled rapid motorists and murderers were mother panicked and cried out, “What down into the interview; these kept at a distance from silent babes. apartment are you talking about?” The Dinostrophe interviews were his main Does medical science allow waiter put a steaming dish of brown source of wisdom since his youth (he for grief ? Does mental duress count onto the table’s lazy Susan, gave to had skipped the man’s book of verse). as a scientific cause? Duress not only each their own empty plate placed on But now it seemed more like Dino was for her husband’s incarceration, but the pink tablecloth, and turned around avoiding the questions than saying who was that with him in the car? to get the other dishes. anything new. Can Dinostrophe be said to be an But, oh, the lights and the bed infanticide, now that she knew he had in the Midtown apartment in her head CHAPTER 2 been pulled over, hussy in the car? The Miranda was quite enthusiastic about her parents’ house from the bus, he was in a fragile state. But had been a fun conversation at one For instance, the interviewer man had said he had gone upstate to childhood room. But now the switch was turned down, Miranda was enthusiastic in that cloying chipper way. point, when most of the bus ride still asked Farid what advice he’d give to cut a record. Some mountain shack which controlled the light fixture, half orbed, fluted “Oh my bed is off the ground!” she excitedly lay ahead of them, and Arthur was his child. Farid responded by saying, was defiled, some mountain jail where round, on the ceiling. The few heads of lamps scattered said. fresher from his insufficient night in “I don’t know what I’d tell a child. they kept him for a while. The deceit around were extinguished too. Her parents had been “Most beds are that way,” Arthur inveighed. bed. Maybe I’d say that people will always compounded with the lock up, and the keeping their distance all evening since returning from “It is just so adult that way,” she explained. Arthur was laughing when he say things about you that aren’t true.” thought of all his time away from her Chinese food; but now that she was going to bed, the “This is your childhood bed,” he said. said, “What an apartment you would “And that’s the advice you’d at the very moment of the birth of hallway light singled that they were all the more awake, “And look at the light that works by a switch in have if you would be Dinostrophe’s give?” asked the interviewer. their first child extruded from her with and their footfalls just about glowed in the light around the wall! I feel successful all the sudden; I feel like a star.” showy wife. The wives of rappers live “No, it’s not advice, but too quick a gestation time, a half-born the door and fell and fell upon Arthur asleep, in a heap She pointed, and pointed at the suspended light again; luxuriously.” people assume, for instance, that I’m a babe. Medical science, please! Don’t inside the sleeping bag, on the floor next to the bed. A then brought both hands to her breast. “You think I should start murderer, a drug dealer. Those things allow that grief is a cause! Describe crumpled magazine was in a pile by Arthur’s head, the “It is too round; the light is too blue,” and Ar- seducing him, don’t you?” she laughed. aren’t true, not strictly true. But have only the thoughtless chemicals that cover promising an interview with Dinostrophe inside; thur dismissed this latest moon, shielding his sensitive “Maybe I should try.” I sold drugs? Yes. So then maybe it is cause phenomena in our bodies! the topic was his play. eyes. It made the aged, spit-stained pillowcases almost “Here, let’s see,” Arthur true. Maybe those people who say that Say there is no god! But don’t allow Beside him on a mattress, on a box spring, on a green, and her fervor for all these things disgusted him. pulled out a magazine he had just are right! But it doesn’t take much for that Dinostrophe had murdered his bed frame, off the floor, is Miranda comfortably alone in All of her marveling was so fatiguing to Arthur, bought containing an interview with them to be right, knowing all the little son! Their other one is alive. Oh bed. who just needed gentle light, who just needed chill. He Dinostrophe. “He talks about the play crimes that men and children do.” yes, I guess we do still have a son. A Arthur had been tired and fell asleep right away, was becoming nauseated by rambunctiousness (a port- inside, let’s see if he mentions you.” Coming back to the issue of glittering child (you’ve heard about the just as his pale skin with the lights turning off into dark- manteau, of sorts, for “all around obnoxiousness”), and He flipped through pages; he scanned his child, the interviewer asked, “What Australian nanny and the piano) and ness fell away. He slept with a weight. What with a seven her ardor for these things, which were repulsing him. with his finger line by line, looking for is it like for you to have a son?” sometimes he sparked over the sooted hour bus ride, what with a few days in the city, staying up And the poor girl, she was just excited by all the Miranda’s name, the word actress, At first, however, Farid circumstances that made his father late, what with the semester’s labor, when they got to her things that she saw right here, which she planned to have 28. 29. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II - Zeke Greenwald

never want to see him. One dead That his strength fizzled out, which Dinostrophe sings: wiping the lingering ring of wetness off coward.” There’s pity enough in the pursues bravado. Hear our young calf, mortally disfigured, the other he braced himself against that loss, his cheek? Or was this unaccustomed world to forgive an overtaxed woman’s dinosaur act out; the massive books disfigured too. Two mooncalves, one and flopped out in bed, to try to gain I used to have a dream reaction to his mother’s kiss a sure sign cruelty, but let us look for some truth in the drab, light-polluted classrooms deformed by death at birth, the other more might from reading again. But that my mom put me in a foster home, of perversity that he perhaps thought in the devastation, let’s look to the lose their intelligible gravity that deformed by the death of the first. the noise getting into his private space where an elevated train was my metronome, to think that no kiss, no affection consequences that give Dinostrophe’s keeps a mind there weighted and An evening glare from over starts to get to him: the traffic sounds, I pressed muted scales on the dinner table, could exist that wasn’t so exuberant, life such creaking arthritis! There’s engaged; he becomes a child of the Hudson River made the red the young people laughing in the street, but my mental keyboard failed ‘till it wasn’t and no mother was precluded from a kind of boldness of speech that is peculiar incitements; often he shows bricks pink. Looking back from the that music playing from who knows able. incest? Perhaps just a short thought. not so good for a child to hear, and off his waxing behind, a bluish thing; window, Farid answered a few more where, which music he almost hated, I didn’t have tunes; I didn’t have headphones; Then he would hear his father yelling for Farid unfortunately, the bluntness he gets suspended for a fight; he does questions about race and the music his own. The very thought pains him, I hated my new folks; my new home got real at his mom. Soon enough, of his own doesn’t end here, for he told his mother the drugs of a much older kid. In the industry before he left. Outside the of just how long it takes him to read the old. volition, the brutal man was gone who how his chest tensed and heaved; and meanwhile, while planning to abscond restaurant, the grey clouds looked like small portions this book in a day. And Farid always remembered as he saw how the subway car shook and wailed from his home, he would think that his the continuous stones dimpling the Dinostrophe feels distressed, almost CHAPTER 3 him once in the middle of the night with him; and how even the subway father had gotten it right in leaving. pavement in the road. Between the wanting to cry, wanting to have made As a child, he was quite mild- horizon and the weather, the setting her cry with empathy screaming, so he mannered to begin with. While other sun lit the street in tatters, or perhaps could have got the pretty girl of the boys would make rough contact the way it made him squint rendered bus to exit her enormous headphones conveying a ball between two goal posts “And his manner was mild it so. Just as then his face scrunched that she’d hear him convey the death at recess, there he was like the musical up into cobblestones, so, too, did and mournful beauty, a kind of poem David in flock tending; the first grader he sense the load of aging brought that books have yet to contain, of how Farid would be psalmodizing, plucking upon by studiousness. Dinostrophe she was trying to drown herself out of at the chain link fence surrounding while singing internally of had become quite a scholar, don’t reality with music. These pretty girls the playground as if it was a series you know? Turning toward Houston with music; a weepy child and a pillow; of harp strings. Those youthful lyrics Street, he took his thoughtful-looking a father eating his child’s breakfast he daydreamed, we now know were countenance home. cereal in front of the television; all fancied from his nightmares. And the He reached the apartment of the things which nothing appeases landscape around him was asphalt; abandonment.” on Avenue A that the divorce made caught in one moment of reprieve; it’s to the south the street, the cars, the him rent. Then, breathing hard, he like seeing flies die upside down on his sounds of vehicles that come when you exhausted the stairwell. blue chandelier, but not fall down. call 911, to the west the swing sets. But on the way to the john: darkling and brakes screeched in disbelief at what Then he decides to be a rapper, but What with the play, he began Damn tardiness, damn speed do not imagine an empty schoolyard blue, eating his son’s sugary breakfast his aunt had said to him. No outside he doesn’t inform his mother of that to grieve that he had done too much and whoever reads books fast, there’s around him while this is happening. cereal in front of the TV, after he had sound displayed to Farid its grief for plan. There is still some tenderness the last few days. Over the past few still escape, there’s still comfort as long And his manner was mild while singing quit smoking. him when more shockingly his mother for her, lending him compunction years, Dinostrophe had been living as he has memory of what he’s read. internally of abandonment. But it couldn’t last: chubby agreed. She said his aunt had been that keeps him from rending her heart at the chair-creaking speed of book If it weren’t for that, everything in life In the grey and green Farid’s chummy browsing, like correct. With sudden anger at her son, into two crescent moons with the two reading. Now, his day to day had a would seem a tattered episode and schoolroom, there’s a teacher ordering childhood’s calf, had to wind up she raised her voice to shout, you are a dark sides facing in like the two Farid jogging pace, and people winded him, unto itself fragmentary. The crushed young minds with arithmetic and masticated on Brooklyn’s lack of coward. demonstrates in the playground some got him tired and confused. Now, foam grew in his ears, and drowned English where Farid seems to be grass; there sometimes grows a sickly So then, standing in the four- afternoons. Although forfended from when he can, he piles his still life here, the present sounds away. So Farid excelling at childish academics. fecundity of things, at the knowledge room apartment that was all to them, such a dreadful thing, as of yet, he between the kitchenette and mattress, reached out his dusk-covered hand Could that be him in a small of which children wither all the faster, the son heard it from his repulsed hates her, and her beatings, and her in this studio apartment; and studio toward the book and into the navy bed, near an open window through yet keep looking their age. Farid’s mother all the ways he was just like threats of foster care. means everything is in one small blue past of things, and both he and which now the JMZ train could be young aunt, young but who had several him; you have the temperament of a failed His nightmares were spoken room. Since the last time he could the book inwardly beamed. heard sounding like a roller coaster, kids, was supervising a play date over artist, she said, just like your father who aloud, and the children were listening. ply the quiet trade, he had left the Perhaps it should not surprise and now what seem to be screaming him and her own, during which she thinks he can become a star rapper, but he Rivalries were formed, friends night table a nature morte. Two foam us that our rapper searches the riders, and still scarier sounds? Could had one of her frequent breaks. It was can’t; and all this above meant that turned against him. Their singing earplugs that were used before stood classics of poetry. Some fans have that be his amber night light, who is the year 1985. Farid, seven years old, Farid was sulky and dark and would competitions became violent, and if on The Metamorphosiss, which he hadn’t always speculated from some of his a rapper now, who joys over a woman still in the first grade, was being treated be a brutal slouch just like his old man. they had been bucolic in a way, soon cracked for days, looking just like the lyrics that Dinostrophe was at one piecemeal, who sang once, “Get out of unfairly by a cousin of his. There in Farid runs to his pillow; he sobs into enough, outnumbered Farid’s face was flies that die standing upside-down point, however brief, trained in music here with masturbation; pornography the orange and red subway car back his sheets. dashing into the urban pavement. on his blue chandelier, but don’t fall classically. Maybe it is from his song, is a form of castration…”? Could to Brooklyn, Farid started crying, and So if erstwhile Farid exhibited There had ceased to be rap down. “Dinostrophe’s Oldest Dream,” in that be him more chaste than chastely his aunt told him, “Don’t be a fucking cowardice, now, as if by career, he without rapping in a battle. He was 30. 31. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II - Zeke Greenwald

suspended from school so his rap of scales where it had been wounded; there more studiously shed; bedtime wished she got a fuckin’ abortion.” Dinostrophe’s last hits, but just you many colorfully bound books, reading career was ended by fighting. And in violence had slitted his pupils with a stories that hadn’t been read in an age, And, elsewhere, “If I wasn’t in the rap wait! A 2012 demo rhymes as follows: paperbacks he brought from home. that time, he helped his mom while look of ancientness; and this creaked jokes and drama from their school game/I’d probably have a key knee- Farid laughed when he read Ralph they moved to a smaller apartment. along with his jaw’s movement. If lives were recounted to one another as deep in the crack game/Because the Let’s gramaticize that scratch of curvy sky! Ellison grieve; why, why did women, It was important for them in the “dinosaurness” exhausted him, he was friends. They were schoolmates. The streets is a short stop/Either you’re There’s a color difference between all the “why did they insist upon confusing the coming years to live a little more ready for his mom just to read to him crueler times were never reminisced. slinging crack rock or you got a wicked white lines. class struggle with the ass struggle?!” “economically” while his mother in bed. The horror escaped their lives like jump shot.” And, to conclude, “Back That cloud appears to have a dative ending, It reminded him vaguely in a way of continued her education in business She started college in the steam from the tea, which he’d make in the days our parents used to care for I agree, something he had once said. And he management. In a way, the time of his spring semester of 1986. Her degree for her having completed his little us/Look at ‘em now, they even fuckin’ Since the greyish part swirls indirectly. read his paperbacks until suddenly one suspension let them get to know each was very time-consuming, yet she homework, first. She would have to sit scared of us/Calling the city because day… other as they packed bowls and plates, still worked a little bit for a catering there a few more hours with her bigger they can’t maintain/Damn, shit done Roughly one year later, there That day, he had been on as they threw all of his father’s things company. If she would get home assignments. changed…” B.I.G. goes on to discuss are no more clouds, “you” is no longer the D train going to Bryant Park; he away. His mother renewed some rather late, how could she get upset A hanging bulb in a blue the reputation that brutality on the the woman of his affection, it is a was thinking that having betrayed her tenderness for her son, and learned with Farid? Without supervision, he fixture, the orange stove light and streets can buy. sentence, and we can hear this man so viciously, it probably wasn’t worth again the frailty of his age as she would stay up as late as she did, but a black desk lamp constellated the There had been hunger in simply stalling out in a Greek textbook: staying; and the brakes shrieked the helped him to recuperate: every wince at least he’d have an interest to hear brightness they shared doing school these rappers’ flaky lives. Our scabbed volumes of disdain his wife had meant of his when she took small stones out the befuddled irritation that bloated work side by side at the kitchen table. and flecked Farid became a scaling I’m not too much of a gramaticker, him in the comportment of her ways. of his lacerated cheek; every time, so her evening of work; it was always Vapor from the tea slipped up and up rapper. His debut album came out in But you’re either a past counter to fact He had seen her at the breakfast table, as to change it, she pulled back the hard for her to be specific at three in into the air’s gaseous vacancy. Their 2008. He was thirty years old, and Or a future less vivid conditional! first thing, eating bread toasted brown, bandage, which clung to the scabs so the morning; that or one client would problems had moved on. successful in many aspects of the rap and she wore a brown bathrobe, and he’d start to bleed; she saw the toil in not ignore her serving him, but would game, and now the author of several This is what Dinostrophe her own brown skin looked drab. him from which she, too, needed relief. acknowledge her vagueness in the CHAPTER 4 hits. But by 2012, there’s been a wrote when he realized he had to give She had stopped straightening her She went into her own school all the table’s atmosphere, and that customer With creaks of the bones or problem; Dinostrophe can’t seem to up rap. hair, which was slowly crinkling into more committed. Perhaps by taking would be the object of her elaborating creaks of the chair, we age, my friends, put out a second album. Shortly, here, Now it is the winter of 2012 little twists that made her reticent to on some other kind of challenge, life anger and founder of her generally we age. Our Dino-child is no different. we’ll see why. and our hero is but newly out of say anything, especially to him; the wouldn’t need to be so slavish as it had won harassment. We’d like to say that Farid escaped Dinostrophe has mentioned jail. He was arrested in October of tension he sensed from her had echoed been. Overall, Farid’s mother no the next two decades unscathed, but his album as recently as 2016, in last year. Even with time served, he into the concave of her stooped When finally Farid returned to longer despised men, but like a woman real things call out to us in our study casting his less than enticing theatrical didn’t get out until end of November. shoulders and slouched breast. And as school, the stifled and tense populace in the work of Ovid, she despised her places. And just like why people in art production. But it was as much of a December was spent soothing his wife, he thought about her shoulders on the of suffering students begged to hear form that attracted them: she started museums are always seen looking out lie then as it was when he told his wife after interring the bio-waste of his ill- train, they shrieked, now, they finally the color of rancor, which they saw in to wear clothes that emphasized the windows, we refresh ourselves in that he was going upstate to record formed child. January, February, he shrieked. He had asked her, how are the discolored shades of the scraped her durability; she let her hair grow reality, which right then looks more it, October 2011. Interestingly, just starts creeping back to the library. At you? She had twisted away. Didn’t that away skin on his face. In a public naturally, and began covering it beautiful. Farid’s mom married again, one year before that, only a few weeks night, when he would leave, the moon somehow say a lot? address, he offers all well wishes, and modestly with pastel scarves shaped and Farid was homeless by 1993. before the record was due initially, was hidden behind the tall buildings, That one day, he had got on a beatitudinous list of ceramic dishes like triangles; but her teeth were Many of Brooklyn’s kids Farid got his first pair of prescription their lights hid the stars. Walking the D train at Grand Street, and he packed away, the lightly used clothes extraordinarily even; and some men took to Brooklyn piracy. Their glasses. Our worn out man was across Bryant Park, tugging his scarf went to Bryant Park, to the library, that were donated, and motherly still found her pretty. Men were kept at recklessness was intertwined with studying again. up to his chin, he tries to think about and it hurt him that he had been a affection by a flower stand on the a distance; as a matter of course, some the other epidemics of the time. Was Over the duration of his why he married his wife in the first successful rapper, but a failure of corner of a bodega, and the collage she had sex with; but she had stopped the poverty so bad? Was the anger library hours, he seemed to forget place, in his dread of returning home an artist. Hadn’t his wife, like Lady of green and gold that was there, and cursing these heavy-shouldered so widespread, that such a terrible what rap sounded like. Over the next to the vulgar thing. He thinks about Macbeth, deployed her own ambitions ovals of reds and pinks in succession, creatures who so often took such an common attitude even caught student few years, his compositions became divorce; he used to think about being on his career? If only he had the yellows in crumpled folds, and the active stance against prophylactics, as Farid, got him forced from his home hopelessly literate. In his first of the self-killed. Maybe later we can think courage to divorce her, he could at small cluster of blues: they wrapped if it was her delight to see sex sloughed for his criminality? As a reference so-called study raps, we hear: of the Sentimental Education of all things. least be the failure of a rapper at his his mother’s hug in their perfume. His off as an ephemeral pleasure into her point and commentator of this chaos, He groaned at her meanness; above own convenience, that he was already well-being lost their attention, and he garbage can. For if the latex snakeskin let us consult the reflective voice of Wearing glasses while reading isn’t like all he groaned his mistreatment of so vexed by her to be. didn’t vie for it again. He wasn’t willing had always been put on, who would be the Notorious B.I.G.: “All of my Studying your pussy through prophylactic everything. He was offended at her, He had never wanted to be to commit himself to only handling the her comfort then? life I been considered as the worst/ tights, but she hurt that much more because a star rap man, until she told him to roughness of things and the rough-and- Somehow in having technically Lyin’ to my mother, even stealin’ out It’s better. of him. be. In late December, after the funeral, tumbleness that it took to display it to less time to care for Farid, their accord her purse/Crime after crime, from Usually Dinostrophe sat (small casket, sparse attendance, small them. His skin had turned to a burden cemented, and better attention was drugs to extortion/I know my mother Admittedly, this was one of inside there all day, surrounded by affair) his wife had shrieked, in fact; 32. 33. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II - Zeke Greenwald

she had said, Farid had done to his This had repulsed him. She drank instead of ending the marriage, he solving purpose served Barbara “For all the money these remarked on the dumb expression career as he had done to the son he cola to quench her thirst; the scent of just leaves it hollow, and considers the Eisengitter. She was the daughter of people have,” she said to him, “they on his face, ignorant as she was of killed. That was just before the New her sticky perfume smelled like candy; nuptial dullness (no rancor, no bliss) a Claudius and Diana Eisengitter. He sure do act like slaves.” After this she his unscrolling inner monologue. She Year, and about a year and a half she ate candy. Yet he told himself to marriage saved. owned a corporation, which owned said oops, but coldly, having made no made a Wordsworthian paraphrase: ago their marriage had been in straits love his wife for some reason. Hadn’t It was very clever the way several private correctional facilities mistake, intentionally having let her similarly. Then she had fulminated: she encouraged him, pushed him in a infidelity brought their turbulence around the nation. insensitivity slip. “I guess I shouldn’t You look round on your Mother Earth, your career is like an abortion, or a mattress on creative direction? to an end. For you see, each hour he Would you believe it, but have said that.” She smirked at the As if you were her first born birth, the floor.Which is to say, he had stopped Actively, actively, for some spent away with this other, which he Farid met her at a party on a rooftop? black man; but she blew her cigarette And none had lived before you. working on his album, and yet, back reason back then, three times six loved too, were hours she spent under One of the record people was telling smoke at nothing. then, Farid’s people somewhat cared. months ago, 2010, he tried to save the comforting impression that he was Farid to record his album upstate at his Earlier in the evening, all And what she meant was that This marital unrest first took, his marriage, with heroics, with hard at work perfecting, finally, the own place. These were the days of the he had done was talk to a boisterous rappers were foolish poets who never if not a solid shape, then a focused might and with sexual courage. album that was overdue. prophylactic tights, when unknowing chubby girl with black hair. This was even looked to their own tradition, tangibility for Farid, after he returned With the fear of failed marriage Unlike Odysseus, cleverness rap pined vainly after him, but another type of alluring. Something as folksy as the singing shepherds of lingering rap made him feel flushed in her flippancy about money and antiquity. Then she railed on about and full of complaints. Uneasily, he monetary success, and the elitist the ass struggle and the class struggle, “Over the duration of his library walked past the drooping wires that way with which she hated it with an making points with the backward logic hung with lights like closely gleaming added shade of unsavory racism just the points themselves were meant to stars. It was summer; it was late night; for her shaded interlocutor, it was a disprove. And she was pretty, and he there were clusters of hanging fires. contradiction our involuntary rapper loved her, and she was twenty-two. Beneath them was the industry still somehow, in his own bitterness, It was to be her last year at hours, he seemed to forget somewhat eager for his work, and admired. He became enamored with university, and learned girl, she told there with them was his promissory her. He slacked his hands from his gut him about so many things! She tells wife, promising them his output. as his brain bubbled with things he was him what Homer is, what Virgil is, What doubts of his did she almost going to say to the thin-armed why Barnard girls are lesbians and not lack? What doubts of those were girl blown about with smoke of blue. why lesbians are called lesbian. And what rap sounded like. Over also not of rap? He hated his fame; he He wanted to say to her, when she had a very good handle on the walked past the ropes of light into the they were younger and his rap career subject as she went to Barnard, the obscurely less lamped rooftop’s edge, was too, its spoils adorned his wife so Aeolian Uni, Columbia’s lesbianic where the luster of lights and extent of well, and they bespoke a final ease to annex. What is more, she knew about the next few years, his compo- the building ended at once. her and him whose youths had been feminism, and the patriarchal society He pinched at the sides of poor and full of abuse. Now somewhat in which we all live. She read Nabokov, his abdomen. Without the soft rounds frumpy even in these adornments, and Vonnegut and Salinger, willingly. of his glasses, his face looked starker now that they were usually unhappy, Let us imagine what a fool in its length, longer too now that his and now that this life, also, was no rest, Barbara must have thought Farid sitions became hopelessly liter- mouth was but agape, darker in the and still had misery, these niceties and was on their first rendezvous. Let us shadows down its length. He wanted what had bought them, it occurred imagine her lecturing him on who all to purge his inward dissatisfaction to him, might have been in some these famous personages are. What a with the paltry rhyming work he had way poor. What peace of mind could fool he, and all the more a fool she, his done. Pinching his sides all the more, money alone bring? Let alone money wife, nursing her vain hopes for her ate.” he wonders where this overflow would won with pop music! Or maybe it was husband’s career, very motherly, in home one day after his latest visit spurring him on, he tried to love his for our sexual adventurer was not even go, if it were to come. That just his constipation, the size of one their beige home, or closing their red to the ophthalmologist. His glasses wife in different orientations. He enough. And in the art museum, was when he saw her, involved in his album, something he should put out, curtains to watch TV. Let us imagine would be shipped to him about a week cycled through the escalated layers don’t we see how painted tears on a burgeoning monologue. Barbara was but couldn’t, soured his view of her the Hungarian pastry shop where later, so maybe it was just because he of perversity until simply cheating cheek are two bright spots that make faintly lit by the orange tip of her and things. But before he could make a Barbara has just finished her lecturing, wanted to see better, but he noticed his was the final trespass yet to fill, and a darkness beneath? And in this way burning cigarette. He could make out speech and moralize on his unfulfilling the only café in New York City not wife was looking impatiently at him, they had filled many holes already. can we not anticipate to what end this her shoulders in guipure lace and the living, Barbara took the conversation to play music. She expresses her wish every time she looked at him. This Yet now the home is quiet; there’s cuckqueaning felicity might lead? For jut of her clavicles. There was a falling away with a quote, and his unwell that more café owners would take on had puzzled him. When he got his indifferent peace between them! Had there’s a problem in trying to solve taper of her auburn hair over her face, filling might as well have stayed in his this kind of quiet. Let us imagine them glasses, he became more familiar with not this cowardly maintenance done problems of sex with other fucking. but no hairdo, a sense of red lipsticked pinching belly. outside the café, him in a navy baseball this rapper’s showy wife’s crude ways. its fill? And cowardly, we say, because Yet, just to this problem- lips, a general aura of blue. For with this quote, she cap and her in a pashmina scarf, and 34. 35. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II -Zeke Greenwald

the awning the bill of the hat made, know just how despicably he had with age. The sun made bright spots; What a lovely composition, human qualities with its warmth. eventually it was towed away to some and the chatoyancy the scarf displayed done the intellects of himself and of there were tarnishes where the very where the images of light and “I noticed,” said the officer, distant impound lot with all of Farid’s as they had a chaste first kiss in semi- children and whoever listened to him. surface seemed to fall away; there shade perhaps have a relation to the “about a mile or two back up the luggage and clothes. privacy and in radiance. And then So after hearing that, he felt expiated, were reflected mountainsides. The character of the beloved woman, road, you didn’t have your seat belt The wife found all this out she pushed him away, and as if to relieved to be justified doubting all he leaves colored the tops of the trees. In but are never a cheap racial allegory. buckled.” The officer sucked in his over a telephone call. The illusion of comment on the standard meekness did, less guilt toward his wife whom between the volumes of red, orange Farid was always more inclined to the cheeks, perhaps remarking now that his reviving career vanished, her hope of it, she quoted Shakespeare’s Juliet he had disappointed with his slowing and yellow, either the sky refreshed aesthetic, anyway. On that note, I’d the seat belt was fastened. withered and hung upside down; he saying, “You kiss by the book.” She career, but also he felt with her saying their vividness with snips of living like to take a moment to explain how it Out of insolence more than had finally destroyed it. The baby had pushed him away, but he swore all of this, as if he had killed a child, blue or the upside down cocoons of came to be that Dinostrophe garnered umbrage, Barbara, the wicked copilot, died. the remaining powdered sugar on their or whatever it should feel like to waste brown leaves reclined in their fatality; a reputation as a controversial rapper, cried out, “But it is buckled now!” lips had glued them together. Across many young intellects. So by affirming and the easy sun came out just to dry for he was, among his compeers, never Dinostrophe looked mortified, *** the street was a metallic sculpture of all his negative thoughts, she kept him the dead leaves. Their love heightened the biggest user of profanities, and, and a sense of pain scaled his face. a biblical prophet, and the world, and in a kind of jail, with his spirits low, but by their altitude on the mountain and unlike many of his rougher forbearers, “It is really for your own safety So Farid is puzzling over these the world was roamed by giraffes, for his affections kindled. the increasingly gorgeous views, they he was never in a real life gun battle. that the seat belt should be fastened at things; he thinks on divorce; as he walks they were meant to represent world Yet, he was not to be the great themselves were taller a few inches It was always his descriptive elements, all times, while the motor vehicle—” into the library with his paperback, of peace because, as a plaque said, poet yet that he is to be some years later. in their brown fabric and red-laced and his, if somewhat latent, originality, Barbara interrupted him with, course. But he makes no resolution, giraffes are by far the most peaceful And hearing so much from the guest hiking shoes. They would kiss before that accompanied the vulgarity, which “He did have his seatbelt on, except the coward; and there is a fear of of animals. That was the fall. Let lecturer of his affections, he substitutes what in their distance became a pastel rendered him all the more shocking. that he wanted to take his jacket off.” failed marriage; there are regrets that us imagine the winter and senseless all the reading he had yet to do with blur, blown about by a chilly perfume, Then Farid got arrested. On The horror-plated Dino he might ease; there is forgiveness to fucking, and also the spring; and each the glasses he had hardly used with added thereto was the intensifying the morning they were heading back was frozen, and frozen again by the pursue. On the other hand there is time they felt pathetic and wanted to informative dates and sexual outrages. odor of her hair, which strengthened to the city, she teases him that maybe gelid weather, but wished with all his protracted marriage. But, oh! how that clutch at their passion, they used her But still all of this half-literate living, it everyday it was absent from shampoo. they’d recognize him in the town hibernating telepathy to shut her up. distant secret part of him is abused by room in student housing on 110th wasn’t—it couldn’t just be—reality, it The smell of natural hair oil where they stopped to eat potatoes “So, I’m going to write you a her! What about her treatment of that Street. It was a bland room, her desk was all a poem enhancing reality. It was took on the associations of the foliage and ketchup and scrambled eggs ticket today…” said the officer, flipping distant poetic quarter of his that feels had books stacked on it and a box of the way that all of Barbara’s simple perfume, moss and mud, and stood for in a wood-paneled diner where the and unflipping his citation pad. the wrongs of both sides, and calls iron supplements. It was also a beige blue tattoos (a dandelion, a cartoon camping with his tortuous love. And waitresses kept pouring cups of coffee “You know what this is?” that task of imagination all the reward room. Let us imagine again the wife daisy), which she got in some college if we want to get a sense perhaps of in all the spare seconds of their day. said that thundering, knowing imp, necessary? There, even there, he knows in her lonelier beige surroundings, boy’s living room, crafted with a single just how much this trip inspired Farid She looked like the very daughter of theatrically projecting her voice at his wrongs are worse. Then he thinks starting to get nauseated, starting needle, one poke at a time, blended with a real sense of both love and fall with hair somewhere in between nobody, evil actress, at the wrong about a hard divorce because there are to have strange cravings for food, with all the intertwining of her own foreboding, maybe we can look to a red and brown, between the red goop somebody. “This is one of those harder apologies that he would have to her belly being tender, doubting her veins of navy blue. So then, in a way, poetic work of his from early 2015. It on the potatoes, and the brown coffee instances of driving while black. And make. capacity to be a mother, and yet what all his time with her in fact was just like is from his first collection: poured in her cup as fast as she drank you are just racist!” When he sat down at the vain hope! What hope for the child writing songs! And he remembered it. And when she had expressed her Shut up, you bitch! thought the library table, and set out to finish King and Farid’s career together! Quickly, suddenly that recording studio upstate. To B.E. hope that he would be recognized, fossilized man. Lear, he became aware of how all of turn your minds back to Barbara, and They packed their bags, and I cannot see her face, the room is dark, he looked like the more despondent “I can’t believe you are still this had aged him. He was destitute her arched and pleased and pinnacled in an October week, they made a So her skin might as well be clear; father of despair. The cheeks under writing,” she intoned, like a gremlin and bare (what splendor was there body, and her raised knees, and her definite record of their combined Glowing blue just about where the whites are his close-set eyes had started to age. in a fighter pilot’s cockpit pushing its left in all he had?), and everything had steep nipples. Let us imagine all this, tenderness and obnoxious requests Her nostrils of vision appear. Then they were driving home; own envelope. Don’t you know who aged him. “O heavens, if you do love for when Farid spoke in the summer in one another’s memory. Know, at and when the heat had finally come this man is? He’s famous!” old men, if your sweet sway allows of his wife and his gestating boy, it was this point, Barbara was no longer in In the light, she has skin where dark veins on in their rental car, when after they That was it, and the officer obedience, if you yourselves are old, precisely this juxtaposition that gave school. Let us not forget, too, the baby twine had taken off their coats and scarves; had Farid step out of the car. There make it your cause, send down and Barbara great joy. meant to be coming along anytime With swirly stick-and-poke tattoos. a siren, and red and blue lights, and a were more misunderstandings and take my part.” Then upon the closing Now for over a year, Farid soon. Through her see-through skin, the veins cop car pulled them over. embarrassments; his lawyer couldn’t of the ultimate page, Farid listened to had been expressing his doubts to his Now we are in a mountain squirm with lines And when the green-coated come; and the judge was sick of the echoing of library machinery; to childish lover, his doubts about rap; range. Now there is a lake, and from a A darkness round the inky blue. officer with heavy heels clicked up Hollywood types getting away with the soft-soled shoes which clicked like for maybe she was right, and it was vantage a little hike up the mountain, to their fender, Farid lowered the their crimes. It all spelled a jail sentence wood and leather ones, and the mixed just folksy; and had been expressing we can see another adjacent lake. Oh, how I loved them, while I loved you, window, and all the heat went out; his for Farid. vibrations were the whir of diachronic his regrets, over not having been a They were like two ancient mirrors The blue glyphs, not the darkness they skin went rigid, and he wished he had Barbara took the car back crowds heard now at a distance, and learned great poet. And his sexy imp made of some silvery metal that was belonged to. put his scarf on. Oh, how it would to New York. She parked it on 110th the sepia light of all past time had played it all back on him. She let him beginning to corrugate and fleck away have warmed him, and animated his Street, where it received tickets until really tumbled from the lamps to 36. 37. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II -Zeke Greenwald

laminate the words of foregone time Chrissy Shepperpussy. The first and into mistress Shepperpussy’s anus. Farid Smith was in love with such an education; but by that point a second with their own voices. main conflict here is that Chrissy will, In that scene, as well, Chrissy is unsavory girl. Though this land be split, that was once for girl had been fired for Miranda’s sake. Then there was a whiff of by no means, marry Cumfroth until he humiliated, but by their being caught In time, thinking that she your use It was only after the holiday unshampooed hair, and of a former agrees to have a hyphenated last name by that same rascal. For comedy, they would be great for the play was ’twas never yours, but yours in servitude; that he had his chance with her. Their lover, and Farid thought, “The for her parents are without a son, and make this wag eat each and every shat changing into wondering about her You rage as though something from you’s been first kiss, know you all, was not chaste library, what an extraordinary sort but poor now; before they were drawn out grape. in more personal ways; for he had her stripped: or simple; it was all jazzed up, all sloppy, of extramarital affair!” And more into slavery, they had been royalty in Let us marvel at with what now in the play. Her leotarded ass was Always thus you’ve had nothing of your eroticized, and outpouring; for she had penitent. the Cyclades. So if they must die in toil and mental strain he wrote these in his face half of most days, but could own, made him raucous with anticipation. It The hair smell was clear, slavery, at least let their name live on! scenes! But Farid only got truly the leotard be stripped aside for his So away from you, nothing of yours is kept. had been incredibly challenging to get but its scent had a many-petaled hue Cumfroth, on the other hand, being haggard in the real life production sake? Yet his more sober, tired thoughts her on her own those last two weeks; that permeated the high-ceilinged a traditional man-of-his-own-virtue, of the thing. As the play progressed begged of him, what need your flesh Farid shook off his fatigue and it was as if she was holding back; first, room. On the shelves there was, lo, does not like the idea of splitting up through every procedural strata of its for such nourishment? Seeing as that filled out the foolhardy eponymous she had a friend in town, and then a an iridescence of book spines; he what is rightfully his. The second staging (and growing practical tasks soul of yours was falling into neglect. shepherd of his play: trip to her parents out of town; all of looked up and saw a gold, brown and major theme handled in the play is absorbed his cowering time) oh Farid You only take up Ovid anymore but his deficient alone time was all tense green Italian dictionary; two turquoise how Cumfroth’s master divides his toiled, and strained his very well-being with an ever slowing pace. Cumfroth: Does not its custom to me at the thought of her. There was no volumes in a line of greying blue; adobe grazing pasture lands into two, to lease to keep a foot in the book struggle Yet, in his fatigue, how quickly make it mine? distraction, nor personal fulfillment dusting a brick red tome; a scraped to another, now opposing shepherd, he considered had been keeping him prevailed that love sickness; he would big enough to flush forth his lustful knee pink next to the cobblestones Antinoos. And here, once again, we alive. turn over as he fell asleep, and he knew Tim: In slavery no, not in the bonds swollenness. Our monkish rapper had that it tripped on. An entire wall of see Cumfroth struggling in the division Then the play was cast, and it were in vain to reach out his arm to of thine. abstained from sex since his wife left red jackets caught his eye; next to it he views of what’s his own. He sees there was practice all the time; the embrace the absent lover; in its turn him; now two years of urges were he espied another wall in green, these in this counterpoised way, all of his earplugs’ dirty carapace, the closed how harmless it seemed to him to want Cumfroth: Next to the feudal, there’s playing back on him. Now Miranda’s were the library’s proudly displayed manliness dwindle away. book on the night table, were more to, so painful to leave the space empty: a natural line, in which parallel world, gurgling throat was in his palm; now Loeb series. Thence, he took a red It is all the more clear if we stagnant all the time. Thus life won could the lacuna in his text on happy use makes them mine. there was a wet clicking sound at her Virgil. Then, not knowing any better, consider two scenes, side by side, as out; and if we look at play practice, living not be filled in by him by humble pelvis. She had been abstaining too. he took the Italian dictionary. The they are, in the play. The first one has we’ll see them leaving together; if we inference and make his enjoyment of Tim: Know thy sadness; yet make the Over the next few weeks he solemnity of having so many books the elder shepherd, Timoklitus, explain look at his apartment, we’ll see them treasured text and life with textual new way work: treat with grace this had got her to gag and choke, swallow open at once and consulting both, he to Cumfroth how to best endure his both in bed. Look! He’s at it again with cleverness all the richer? Was there no fissure; honor each side: with accidents and spit many things on the arena of knew then would mark his behavior slavery, which includes the heartache Miranda, and Miranda is at it again modest compromise? it’s coping that’s divine. his full mattress, which is to say the only and he would piously approach again of having one’s lot divided, but to still with Farid. Timothy Neil, the reverend large enough space in his apartment. his marriage. be expected to live on it; this scene At first, Miranda wasn’t even actor in the role of aged Timoklitus, Then, too, Dinostrophe Over the next few weeks Miranda But as we know, she really just ends in some sage and tutorly sodomy. supposed to be in the play. A brawny was just not understanding his role considered a balance of his body and stopped wearing her flesh-colored wanted him to be a rapper, so after The second scene has Cumfroth and girl named Alex had been cast. Then in the scene today. Farid went to his mind where now there was just an leotard in rehearsals. Only Farid’s face they had their first kid, she divorced Chrissy ruminating over the foreseen she was fired for Miranda’s sake. For great lengths to explain his authorly inflammation of begrudging sides. He ever got close. In all this time, there him. woes of impending monogamy, which you see, in the interim practices, Farid intentions for the actorly dialogue, picked a woman who could appease was just one thing she wouldn’t do… will have to include the division of had never quite let Miranda slip his which they were practicing. Then, his lust, but inspire it in him but mildly. he called her his withholding lover. CHAPTER 5 their last names. This scene ends in mind, to the extent that her memory by the time they began their metered Her name was Demetria, “It’s just the one thing, which Most of 2014 was spent in a less philosophical kind of sodomy. strengthened, and all of Alex’s back and forth, creaky Dinostrophe not an actress, but employed in the I won’t do,” she argued. the divorce. Then, with the modest The here and there of balance creates perfectly adequate stage presence was was tired. production; she was from Greece She asked him if it bothered accumulation of his reading, he wrote a nightmarish reality that Cumfroth is dwarfed by Miranda’s marvelously It was before Thanksgiving, originally; in bed with her, already, he him that they were always together? a play: The Impossible Bride of Cumfroth. losing something on all sides; it makes captivating eidolon, which was more yet early in the practices, and they wore found out she had gone to Barnard He said he didn’t care; but what did Just like his best verses, he shows a one understand his slavery and its present to him. not their rustic tunics, and girdles; they under his bluish chandelier light. With he know? The man was still busy knitted skill for structure and symmetry anguishes, and the crush of his loss How engrossing was she wore sneakers, not cothurnus; the boy a few soft angles and tricks, optical thrusting aside all his cacodaemons. of his details. It is quite brilliant, really, and limitations. when remembered, when she was so playing flute on a distant hill on the illusions and profuse apologetic Despite the one missing variation of the narrative weave of this play. If There can also be parallels far away, all the more she would be grass below some blooming branches falsities, he played impotent and sex, Farid was beginning to come back we consider the play’s two biggest drawn between the scene where one when she was there before them on was but a stage direction still: the sets dismissed her out the door rather to himself again. The disappointment themes, there’s an incredible harmony of Antinoos’ rascal underlings starts the stage. So in this way, from the first had not been wrought yet. There quickly. That sex could have only ended of his lack of private time and reading, between them. For the most part, the snatching grapes from Cumfroth’s time he saw her, she was in a manner were just black curtains and exposed poorly. Suddenly Dinostrophe sensed he made up for by pushing the sexual play deals with the lusty shepherd, bower, and sodomy here is used for there with him, always there. So his lumber. the misuse of him by his decisive issue with Miranda, every night. But Cumfroth, and his romance with the rape and humiliation; and the scene lust made a pretense of his play, and As Timoklitus, Timothy read lust, and this girl should not have his aggravation at her rejection just queenly and virtuous shepherdess, where Cumfroth tenderly lips grapes introduced to him by degrees that out: been maligned just because of her got worse, so he stopped pressing the 38. 39. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Moons, Part II -Zeke Greenwald

matter. In fact, there came a day, rather Miranda was there, just like everyday to his prowess in the first place, show’s particularly moved producers he expect the slip up afterwards; she quickly, when he swore his appetite for anymore, sitting at the small square because he had surprised her. After and the cast members relaxing in the almost fainted at the sensation; he her was abating. table opposite the bed; and he tried her Thanksgiving trip with Arthur, she orchestra, she walked offstage. almost fainted at the gore. Farid had given cast and not to care. Farid cracked his book; he couldn’t imagine his courtship aimed at As Miranda had now just “Are we supposed to go to the crew a Monday holiday to recuperate started laboring at reading. Miranda her. Little did she know that he meant completed her final scene of the day, hospital?” Asked Farid. In the end, after many strenuous rehearsals, (the scooched in her chair; she giggled at no romance, and lust’s spotlight shines she was circling back to the dressing they just tried to go to bed. Call time previews were coming soon). In the something she was reading. He looked around awkward, curling corners. room to change. There was a lot of for the performance was in less than early afternoon, he had a meeting with up at her, and then continued ardently Surprising, additionally, because she concourse in the coulisse, and a few twelve hours, but they couldn’t fall a composer, who had read his book of in the newness of his laboring. thought that he already had pursued divine shepherds rushing to their asleep. If only memories could fade poems and was interested to set a verse “I just read something something with Demetria, the girl scene. She smiled and stood aside away so easily. to music. It is the one about shock and hilarious,” she said, rousing him. from the Lesbian Island, the show’s as the legion passed, looking upon All the same, the night of reeling after his wife left him. It is Dinostrophe considered sex choreographer. May from Cincinnati, who thought the performance, our two insomniacs called, “A Migraine for Divorce,”and telling her about his new rules and Yet what empowerment she vegetarians were gay, upon Robert went onstage. The audience was all goes like this: boundaries for himself. He thought had in putting a boundary in their who wouldn’t say exactly from where journalists, intellects and fame. Farid about telling her not to disrupt him conjunction. But no sooner had she he came, upon ever-stomping Maggie, had but one hope for the performance: I’m dizzy, but, oh, more than the swirling anymore, for his sanity! But his courage placed that boundary than she sensed upon Mike who had worked in every that Miranda wear her leotard again. Down I’m drawn by a clear plaited furling failed him. And every noise she made her lover colden, and she couldn’t but café in the city, all in their scrunched- Oh please, that it would not happen string; I kneel with the force of things unseen; distracted him from his book. By the blame herself for his apathy. Now, she up sheets. But over the bobbing white onstage! But her sleeplessness allowed My wounded sight, scratched by neon, more time he could get to the library, it began to fear he would start sleeping water rapids of Greek-draped actors her habit to guide her; she made no light bleeds: would soon be closed; and in his one in his bed paired otherly. and actresses, Miranda watched a new decisions today. She performed Just as a lamp in a mirror is as bright room there was nowhere else to go. Where would she go, if she dark-skinned one running back into with bare bottom as she would any To stare at in replication as in life, “I’m getting hungry, do you couldn’t stay with Dinostrophe? She an obscure grey hallway, running or other day. As the scenes were executed, Or snow: so my eyes were like those mirrors want to order in?” she asked. still had her room in Bushwick, no chasing somebody. Miranda lurched a Dinostrophe got sick at the thought Reflecting what’s behind them all the clearer: He looked to her, her hair doubt, but it was so dingy; at least step forward, but was blocked in her that he’d have to mimic sodomizing her These are the spangled crumbles of well- uncombed, her eyebrows bushy, her Dino’s place was okay and bright way by the onslaught. She kept trying soon. Soon became sooner and sooner. being, pubic hairs reaching around her enough with his ugly blue orbed to turn her gaze around that corner. Timoklitus encouraged Cumfroth after all my wife, my stalemate’s leaving. panties and curling back in. She wore hanging light; what was more, he had A flushed and mussed Demetria to accept his fate. Chrissy’s parents her pink bathrobe open and, below a real kind of bed. She saw Lester came from the selfsame hallway. But mourned their kingdom. Chrissy They had met a few streets that, a white t-shirt that ended mid- and Deb every now and again, but Miranda couldn’t stick around to see drowned her child and mourned, too. above Lincoln Center; then after belly. Suddenly again, he was without even more briefly than before. She if it was Farid who would emerge Now Farid and Miranda stepped out walking toward the subway along hope. He looked to his navy blue book: mentioned to her stranger-roommates from the empty passage, for Miranda’s to perform the infamous grape scene. Columbus Avenue, a sudden it was his palm holding his page inside, that the first performance that counts placement made it too narrow to see, The play didn’t continue to the confidence grabbed a hold of him, and his fingers curling out.Could he get to his will be in two days; then she grabbed and grumpy men carrying equipment end. Amid the scandal, the production enlivened his prospect ever drearier, book while she was there? the disappointed other underwear; then she was leaving, rushed her on and out of their way. never progressed. Farid became an these days, with obsequious sex with scholar asked himself. And she was a band of private garments hanging In a swirl of doubt, in a whirl of the obstinate recluse while the reviews in a servile girl, who disgusted him more always there; she was always there. from her leather jacket’s pocket. The shadow punches of bumping into the so many outlets were calling for his and more. Farid had hoped that his personal exposed and protruding in crowd, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t arrest. Oh, what the intelligentsia had rhyming words could make music yet! CHAPTER 6 common view. him! Yet when he was waiting for her been exposed to! Miranda went back What’s more, he became positively Her mind still worked! The It was the day before the in her dressing room, when they were to her darkened room, with the two happy in the thought that starting memory had not abandoned her to her first show, and they were running, drawing concentric circles with their broken lamps. She blamed herself for today, he would ignore her sometimes; mistakes; it did not let the continuity once again, through some of the tongues in one another’s mouths, she the miscarried enterprise. You might he would ignore her and focus on his of her shame give way to further trickier parts of the play. Miranda didn’t stop doubting him: he could be able to see her around town, in a studies; he would get to the library shaming. Even every one of Farid’s was performing in a partially opaque have circled back around, and twirled baseball cap, on her way to her job. when he could; if he couldn’t get there overtures to sex were accompanied chiton, and her dramatic buskins. She conveniently into place. Oh Miranda, She serves coffee now. he would block her out and read in by sharp nerves which he tuned like played the short soliloquy about a baby this should have been enough Close these pages in sad bed; and only when he couldn’t stand a tone deaf shepherd and plucked his she drowned rather than see it work embarrassment! But wait! contemplation of her wreck. his horniness any longer, only then lyre while over tuning, so greatly did a fettered day; then she praised her That night, Dinostrophe did would he cleave the splittable girl. she fear her vagina rubbed the wrong parents’ honorable name. It brought not expect what sexual favor Miranda In an ecstasy of balanced way could disrupt her posterior’s hair out a special fervor in her today. To was offering him, the intended cordial living, he got home and sat in bed. trigger. Perhaps, she only succumbed the uncontained applause of the of their fainting romance; nor did 40. 41. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel Chapter 23: Chaotic British Teeth Leanne Grabel

I landed at London’s Heathrow Airport at 9:23 p.m. on a late October night in 1974. I was so overloaded with stuff. I looked like a walking jungle gym. I was wearing long under- Grisha promised himself that wear, tights, wool pants, a cardigan sweater, my pea coat, my thirty-pound backpack and one day he would be silent too a long polka dot scarf. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hot in my life. And that he would learn to understand words before they were born Six steps into the airport terminal and one of the straps on my backpack broke. Every- and after they had disappointed. thing spilled onto the floor. I was sweating torpedoes. The English were scurrying about Elie Wiesel me with their chaotic teeth and their sensible shoes. Nobody helped. 42. 43. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

I tore off the scarf first. Then the coat and sweater. I gathered up all my things and tied them brick walls. I sat on the bed in the middle of the room and I shook off all my clothes. I sat on the together with the scarf. I slunk into the British night. It was raining. I had no hotel reservation edge of the bed naked. Full splay. And I stared at London. It looked bleak. And its gray build- and no umbrella. ings were sweating about as much as I was.

A bus driver pointed out a block of small bed and breakfasts in the theater district. I’d never Alone on a planet of strangers, I didn’t feel good. I tossed and turned all night. Around 5:00 heard of a bed and breakfast before. I loved the sound of it. It seemed like it would be cozy and a.m., I got up and got dressed. I sewed and repacked my backpack. Breakfast started at 6:30. I relaxed. And food was involved. was the first one in. The dining room was filled with what seemed to be members of a support group for The Unlucky. All with wet coughs. I found a room in a small brick bed and breakfast. The room was on the third floor and had

one window that looked out on the London skyline. The other windows looked out on other On the round buffet table were sausages, corn flakes, orange juice and buns bejeweled with 44. 45. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

jellied cherries, curled lime rinds and golden raisins. You could also get porridge but only if you asked. Chapter 24: Paris Leanne Grabel It struck me as odd that the choice was between corn flakes, sausages and orange juice. I just couldn’t imagine how those three things ended up in the same category. Orange juice, corn flakes and sausages have nothing in common—like Andy Warhol, moths and buckwheat pan- cakes. Like wasabi, Big Hunks and your mother.

I headed for Paris.

You wonder what it all means. You stumble and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while. Amy Thomas

46. 47. Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

I had wanted to go to Paris since I saw Gigi on my seventh birthday. It was my first movie

and a key aspect of my party. I adored the Parisian elegance even then. I loved the style job after he showed her his poetry, for instance. I wanted to sit where Henri Matisse and and the finery. Claude Monet argued over lapis and vermillion and cadmium yellow. I wanted to imagine the melancholy of Ernest and F. Scott as they marinated—two men thirsty in the desert of their Later, in college, Paris was the landscape of my idols—the surly poets and literary ex- angst. I wanted culture—with no American ending. perimentalists. I took a ferry and a train to get to Paris in the middle of the night. It was

cold and foggy and very cinematic. I felt like Ingrid Bergman. I walked through Paris for five days. I saw the long, rich bars with the grand chandeliers. The booths loud with ghosts of conversations. I strolled by Gertrude and Alice’s on Rue de Fleurus. I couldn’t wait to sit where Gertrude Stein sat with Alice and perhaps Pablo Picasso. I I saw the work of Gaugin, Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir. I saw their brush strokes. It made me couldn’t wait to imagine their conversations—when Gertrude told Pablo to keep his day cr y. 48. 49. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel Chapter 25: My Right Earache Leanne Grabel

I loved how the French owned their sexy. How tight they wore their pants. And how the men wore their lips like breasts. And how even the old women wore their bodies like gowns.

it is hardly possible to take up one’s I mimed my way through the purchase of a perfect little navy wool motorcycle jacket from a street residence in the kingdom of the ill vendor along the Seine. It had a creamy satin label. Made in Paris. I also bought suspenders that unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors were the color of pinot noir. with which it has been landscaped Susan Sontag

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I developed a massive ear infection on the plane from London to Montreal. The pain was excruciating. Its bolts were leaping through my head and neck like a sun storm with Chapter 26: Stockton ADHD. The pain had complete control. Leanne Grabel

Thea picked me up and drove me to her parents’ house way out on Long Island. I lay down on her daybed. And I didn’t get up for two weeks. My head was enormous with pain.

On New Year’s Eve 1975, I arose from my sick bed and padded down the spiral stair- case. Dizzy and disoriented, I saw Thea and her parents sitting down to a dinner of prime rib, Waldorf salad, black-eyed peas and apple pie. I stared at the food. For once in my life, I was unable to eat. I tried a spoonful of black-eyed peas for good luck. They tasted like bugs.

A week later, I flew back to California to recuperate at my parents’ house. I needed to you settle upon the stop for a minute and envision. My ears were still burbling and popping. I’d heard of knobs on the someone whose eardrum had burst on a plane. I kept expecting my eardrum to burst. dresser drawer, you Occasionally one of the infection’s long-lost cousins screamed through my head, loud as decide that the an asshole. secret is there Charles Bukowski 52. 53. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

There are crickets everywhere who sing in a chorus every night giving thanks for the sleep Stockton is a Gold Rush town—important in the 1850s. Those were its glory days. Stockton of the hot Stockton sun. was an aggie town, hot and flat. Its dark soil is rich and sweet. Every fruit, every nut, every

field crop grows to be strapping and rife around Stockton. There are fields of tomatoes as Thank God, that sun, she finally went down. Oh yeah, oh yeah, sing the crickets. scarlet as peril. Carrots so bright even the blind need special glasses. There are cherries that

startle with their ruby throbbing. Coming up in the fifties and sixties in Stockton, however, was probably just like it was coming up in hundreds of small towns across America (except hotter). And there were way more melons and tomatoes and bugs. Lots of bugs.

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“Like a little raw chicken. She looks absolutely like a little raw chicken wing.” fingers. She gives me kisses. I don’t see my mother doing this. She must have.

That’s what they said about me when I was born, six weeks earlier than expected. August Stockton was full of young and hopeful American families ready and expecting to live out instead of September. 1951. I was scrawny and pimply with a big rash of curly black hair the American dream in their three-bedroom, two-bathroom homes. With dens and family and a smashed face like a dried apricot. The medical team threw me right into an incuba- rooms and swing sets. The fathers were World War II veterans. They were thankful to be tor to beef up. There were no hugs. The rabbi said I was the darkest Jewish baby he’d seen alive. And they were revved up and ready to get on with it. in years—since Colin Brockman. When I reached five pounds a few weeks later, they sent me home. The dutiful, beautiful, frustrated wives stayed at home. There were also brothers and sisters, some of them mean, some of them kind, some of them fat. There were shedding dogs and I have an image of my family and their friends holding me as if I were a fish. Nanny holds dying guppies and hula hoops and skate keys and jacks and plastic tablecloths. There were me the softest. Her skin is vast and velvety. She smooths my hair with her curly padded lamb chops and pot roasts and egg noodles with cottage cheese and margarine. 56. 57. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

I had a nautical two-piece bathing suit. Navy on white. I hid my legs with towels tied around my waist. I poured on baby oil and roasted in the sun. Everyone did. But I was always the I excelled in school. I swam on a swim team. I took piano lessons. I took ballet lessons. I took darkest—except for Mrs. Giannini. She looked like beef jerky. modern dance lessons. I went to Jewish Sunday school. I tried to win at everything. Including boys. I won boys at Sunday school, but that was about it. We had a cherry wood television console that was about the size of a studio apartment. My father always drove a Cadillac that was a few years old and a little gaudy. My mother drove I made cool backyard forts with Mary and Larry and Billy and Joanne and Alan and Paula a station wagon. It was usually a white Ford or Chevy. One time she had that kind of station and Jean. They were for fun—and protection—from the toxic spray of frustration coming wagon with wood paneling. from some of the houses. Like mine.

58. 59. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel Chapter 27: The First Day of the Rest of My Life Leanne Grabel

I ran into Lonni Britton in the Lucky’s parking lot. Lonni was my best friend in the seventh grade. She was also my idol. My parents forbade our seeing each other midway through eighth You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or grade. They thought she had too much power over me. And they were right. She did. I was even months overanalyzing a situation... gaga over Lonni’s imagination and her warped sense of absurdity. She had the best brains and justifying what could’ve happened, would’ve best ideas. And she had the best art supplies. She had the best jokes. I laughed all the time. Lon- happened... or you can just leave the pieces on ni also had the best legs and the best shoes. I always bought the same shoes Lonni bought. But the floor and move the fuck on. they never looked anything on me like they looked on her. They looked like paddles on me. On Tupac Shakur Lonni they looked like magic slippers.

60. 61. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

One day in seventh grade, Lonni and I went to Macy’s and filled out applications for a teen beauty contest in the names of all the fat girls in the school. It was Lonni’s idea. But I was thrilled to go along with it—to do a little soft-shoe with the Devil. I was laughing so hard. I had wet my pants.

The contest applications were stacked in a clever cardboard display with a cutout head of a beautiful teenage model with a perfect flip, perfect skin and a perfect nose. Lonni, on the other hand, was as smooth as glass. Her eyebrows arched with command.

It was ten years later and Lonni was inviting me to a party at her grandmother’s house the following weekend up in the foothills. The gold country.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” Donny started coming on to me right away. He had a sweet face and clear blue eyes. He had I felt pretty. I felt thin. I had jeans I liked. And a t-shirt with a well-designed neckline with min- natural white-blond hair that was long and pulled back into a natural white-blond ponytail. My imal plunge that revealed minimal cleavage—nothing gaudy—just enough. God. It bolted halfway down his back like lightning. I found it phenomenal. Donny’s hair was the exact opposite of mine. Mine was a large, misshapen cap of black frizzle. I was in. I made a choker the night before the party from a tooled gold peace symbol and a black satin ribbon.

62. 63. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Brontosaurus - Leanne Grabel

Donny and I whispered to each other in a corner for hours. Everyone else went to sleep, then from my parents’ house. I’d never had sex in Stockton before. Donny and I started making out on top of his sleeping bag amidst a lagoon of sleeping people. We kissed and caressed. But I couldn’t relax. I was afraid someone would wake up and see us. It was hard to relax. I was worried Donny was just too slow-paced for me. I mean, if I were That would be way too embarrassing. I kept an earnest slice of eye peeled at all times. The next Hong Kong, Donny was Troutdale. If I were Los Angeles, Donny was stasis. But ignoring my morning, I looked like a dog that had just thrown up under the table. instincts, as usual, I asked Donny if he wanted to move to Portland with me.

I drove back to Stockton with Donny. Donny wanted to pick up some of his things in his parents’ “It has a river running through it. Like Paris. And it has bridges. And stairways. I have a good garage. I didn’t tell my parents I was in town. I’d never been in Stockton without their knowing friend from college living there. My best friend. Thea. And her boyfriend is from there.” before. It felt mean. “I’ll go where you go.” The next night, Donny and I made love in his friend’s parents’ guest room—about twenty blocks 64. If I were a beehive, he’d be...a stone. 65. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 The Sword of Gnosis - Mike Lee

at lunch and imported Irish whisky might lie in this unexplored territory of the forest trail. Have my moment of for dinner. Our dissolute gatherings beyond the line. rest and tranquility. were collective affairs, with certain Before going on the patrols we That never happened, The Sword of Gnosis townsmen and women joining us. were not to follow the brook, only to unfortunately. The sword of Gnosis is Drinking, as the poet René scout from the summit of Lanauoge. only made from wisdom, not steel. Mike Lee Daumal wrote, shows how you really Now, as I stepped down through the That boundary remains. think. With each glass, my thoughts thick knee-high grass, I felt a rush of were tragically formless, unable to excitement. What mysteries would I spark to nascence. I shouted oaths uncover in the borderland? I felt like and sang old songs from automatic a child; when I wandered the woods responses. When I spoke, it was when behind my home, creating imaginary spoken to, or prompted by the habitual countries in my head, scrawling maps sagacity of getting along and following of them on pencil. This short journey the unspoken orders of perceived was like such, and I embraced the leaders. sentimentality with a loving, youthful At morning muster, it was kiss. announced the treaty was signed and I followed the course of the hostilities were officially to cease at creek until I reached the woods. I noon sharp. We cheered louder when walked the tree line until I found the our officer announced over the public trail, which led through the forest. I address system that no patrols would spotted the granite marker set in the be assigned. Effective immediately center of the dirt trail, delineating the we were placed on in-town leave, free border. from moving to the frontline patrol. With that, sadly, I could go no Afterward, it was explained he was in further. I looked at my watch. There communication with his counterpart were two hours before noon. The war on the other side, and they agreed to was still on, and even a minor act such respect the boundary as set for the as stepping beyond the granite marker duration. would be interpreted as a provocation. As my comrades headed to the I am trained to follow orders. café, I decided to hike into the forest However, I did see what I hen it becomes time when all the wars of the conflict were a bit of a vacation, although fraught on the far bank of the lake. I finally came for. have ended,W I will choose to live in the glade I saw at the with fear of becoming the last to die in combat. had the time to be alone, and to rest I pulled the binoculars border at the end of the last conflict. I would take com- We faced our fears at the outdoor cafés on in a meadow to contemplate now that attached to my garrison belt and looked fort in the moments of quiet peace; this is akin to coming cobblestone streets underneath the vine-covered stone the sleep of peace was to come down down the trail. There, at the edge of upon paradise after a long journey through a dark forest. arches in the ancient quarter of the town, San Piet- at noon. my farthest sight was the meadow, That is not to say my sentimental attachment to serenity ro, which lay by a lake near the alpine mountains that I crossed the pontoon bridge framed by the trees surrounding it means that I lack a warrior instinct. War fighting was my marked the boundary with our enemy neighbor. that replaced the stone structure with shafts of light reminiscent of a life nearly from birth, but tending to the killing machine In the latest conflict, the rivalry between nations destroyed by enemy bombing. When Turner painting—a glorious sight that as a well-greased gear required periods of rest. became brutal and cruel. Modernity unveiled mass mur- I reached the far bank I left the road, only belonged in dreams of heaven. Toward the end, however, there was precious lit- der, as the weapons of war evolved to expand upon the hiking the well-trod trail into the forest. Yet, the time was not right. tle of that within me. endless possibilities of mass physical extermination. Af- This was a trail we often used to get to The war had not yet ended. I dreamed of the forest, and of war. The final ter thousands died in mere weeks, it was decided that the summit of Lanauoge Mountain, I turned, traced my steps back battle I had fought was close combat, and nightmares of politics had to override the force of arms. The sword of where we had a clear view of the to the summit of Mount Lanauoge. its indelible horrors will haunt my dreams until my end. fire was quenched, and in a few days the sword of Gno- thickly wooded valley beyond the tree I returned to the town, and met my I found myself stationed in a town near the sis would prevail. line that marked the border. comrades at the Café Siraj, and drank border. My unit occupied the barracks near the central Those last days before the armistice often be- At a crevice several hundred and danced as the church bells rang, square, ordered to stand down until the treaty conclud- came a bacchanal. At the Café Siraj, my comrades and feet below the summit were the heralding the peace. ing the war was signed. I spent our times in bouts of serious drinking. We began headwaters of a brook that flowed into I vowed then that when peace original photo by Mike Lee The days leading up to the official conclusion with coffee spiked with liqueurs in the morning, wine the forest. I wanted to explore it to the was solidified between the two nations border, enchanted by the idea of what I would return to the glade at the end 66. 67. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Johnny Erica Schreiner

what is possible a thousand shapes he knows the sea

underwater, his hands cupped

he rested as though part of the light struck his wings

he knew her mouth he listened to her kisses

veins of movement his fingers clicked the flame

he ordered one moment POETRY thousands were met

68. 69. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Road Trip The Sun Creeps Up and Susan Richardson Swallows Joy Susan Richardson Tire tracks scar history onto the asphalt, Sidewalk dwellers escape the pavement, pulling travelers into the story of a lost highway. searching for blades of coolness in the grass. The heat hits the ground like a truck barreling They sink into mirages that ripple and shimmer into the skin of the pavement. with the promise of relief, It is a road that time spat out, but reverie is severed by the venom of the season. where secrets take cover in trees There is only the dense heat of its gaze, that stand like sentinels, parched tongues and energy siphoned waiting for the rain to lull roots from the dust. through the tops of blistering scalps. Dreams bloom under a veil of branches, Children choke on the fumes of heatwaves. plucking shamrocks as they fall from the sky. No clouds appear in a punishing sky Music winds its melody into the clouds, to quench the skin of homeless families. colors clamoring to saturate the air, They succumb like prisoners without eyes, until the hum of an engine creeps over the hill, breath dictated by thirst, leaving the metallic scent of death on the landscape. voices pulled into the melting throat of an urban backdrop. The sun creeps up and swallows joy, hiding the incandescence of rain beneath its tongue. Hope dissolves into the teeth of summer.

70. 71. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Counterfeit Treehouse Susan Richardson Cameron Gorman were you there in the spring, in the woods You take my hand and lead me into the dark, underneath the rusted tub aware of my blindness and the soft texture of my heart. while i swung an old ax Your whispers of love are counterfeit, at a dead tree’s chest? expertly crafted words that fall from your teeth with flickers of duplicity. sure, you were already gone Hungry for the incendiary quality of your mouth, by then, but i could sense I lean in to catch the embers on my tongue, someone’s eyes on my back. swallowing the warm elixir of your lies. Your thirst for other women already in my third cycle is something you teach me to ignore, of change, of not knowing fingers sliding like flames across my throat. who i was, of youthful lung destruction,

i had gotten good at knowing when someone’s eyes lingered—

(and i know you were already gone by then)

but tell me, when i was alone in the woods, arcing myself and my heart through that dulled metal,

trying to wring something through a handle and blade, trying to convince myself i was angry, angry,

under the rocks of the dry brook, inside the sand of the log-rot, behind the green-choked trees, were you watching?

72. 73. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 The Happiest Man on Earth For the Central American Refugee Harley Claes Caravan He spoke of Roseville like Francisco Orozco It was heaven itself, All its autoshops and kids shot Montreal, Canada, two a.m., November 2018 Even despite this he saw the beauty In the blues As if Tijuana wasn’t alive with all these thousands of bruises. And the pinks in the sky Preached to us that the lord All these sunrises and mariachis have taught us that our houses have shoes on. Would forgive all of his children Even those addicted to the bottle No American dream just enough beans and rice to get by. His bones were as brittle as icicles Lungs collapsed in the cradle of his chest Our father will have paint or dirt stains on his jeans at our graduation ceremony.

He had his fair share of love for the drug Kisses are more real when the San Ysidro Border of Tijuana/San Diego is present… It’s not over until we work A dependency, in all these countries. Couldn’t think he could quit it But in jail Jesus accompanied him Our spines subjugated by those that don’t understand our broken smiles, maybe the affluent La Jolla neighbor- Straight into the arms of heaven hood is rich because of our heartbeat. In the form of a bible between the hold of a cell And the stripping of his self Maybe the thousands of Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans are just a reminder of how far we didn’t go. One more paycheck, in five years, abuelitos will drift away in some unknown town in Santa Ana, El Salvador. We called him the happiest man on Earth We all know that Los Angeles will make room for us. Every morning he said it is his best yet To wake up still breathing Our historical Amnesia will remind us of March 25, 2016 when we took to the streets in masses. Some say one From buried lungs million. Off of an oxygen tank That stung others his age Give us back the city. Give us back our childhoods. Give us the smell of car engines for days and we know what With a promise of the kiss of death to do with ourselves. No self-actualization, just more fucking work. Work that children wake up to hear from their Latino fathers at three a.m., drunk with tiredness.

We know what this means, you keep us here to clean, cook, build.

Latina mothers see what happens in the fields while working alone. The women janitors too. This is for Guate- mala, for El Salvador, for Honduras…

In memory of Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, age twenty, whose life ended for crossing over in Texas. Rest in Peace.

This is for the Central American refugee caravan.

…a burning throat, a baby being told about his place in the world too soon,

a swollen pride, the forgotten family that still makes room for you in their house. A broken spirit, four months in some detention center, your tears hot down your shirt, tortillas, corn.

74. 75. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

We are not asking you to share.

We will sneak in. Play the Illusion

Peligro. Jonathan Dowdle

El pueblo… jamas sera vencido Play the illusion, that most conversations Aren’t marked between gambits Pancho And you will be liable to find You’ve already lost the game; Loose as truth, we build pyramids To our own ignorance, Take the frame as solid, Ignore the faults.

In the art of disconnect I listen to dialtones silenced, like hearts, As the next step becomes Another wor(l)d That we close our eyes to, Possibility is nothing In the face of retaining The familiar.

Who would you be if you gave up Your (dis)guises, unveiled For a moment, Just one honest moment The heart, outside All pomp and circumstance Jockeying for position In the self-conversation Played out through Reality’s field, min(e)d.

No, play the illusion, Old hat/one trick Pony up the truth In fragments, Which are also Fractures, Don’t ask me to understand A thing Until you are open To understanding.

76. 77. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Lungs November Steve Denehan Steve Denehan Once, I could hold my breath for two minutes time enough We met on neutral ground today to be born and to die a coffee shop with two exits to fall in love for all the good they did me to fall apart I sat across from him to gag on curdled hate listening and listening to sing one short song words poured from him or half a long one many of which I had heard before to break every mirror he told me how well he looked to be quiet and to listen how people often mistook him to really listen for a much younger man to forgive them all I listened to forgive myself he explained to me how it feels to be without to be broke, to have nothing these days of falling flesh and rising moons before informing me that his hotel room of second, second guesses last week in London I can hold my breath for one minute and thirteen seconds cost £400 time enough a night to do it all again twice over it was his treat to himself the man who has nothing

I glanced at the exits then at my watch

I looked down at my coffee gently tapped the side of the mug watched ripples roll from side to side he kept talking as the coffee stilled

an hour passed sheepishly by he told me, again, of his achievements of those who wronged him he casually listed off the things he needed me to do for him telling me that he hadn’t the time nor the patience for them I looked back down at my coffee I felt shame burrow into the base of my spine there were two exits

78. 79. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

I spoke then, I mentioned something from my life he paused, wide eyed, perhaps surprised to see me People Get Ready perhaps surprised that I would dare Dan Raphael I held his gaze and, in his eyes, I saw disdain sailing on a lake of apathy he excused himself and went to the toilet Down the road, a network, veins on the back of an 80 year old hand on the way he cracked a joke with a waitress street of compressed mayan alphabets. she smiled politely he roared How the wind views traffic, crowds I winced why it always rains the first saturday of June the coffee was cold on my tongue has nothing to do with the parade held then the key i turn to start my car doesn’t have to be a key I saw November out the window transferring electricity when i snap my robot fingers mild and calm and waiting under my breath I hummed a song My studio with murphy bed, built in chests, I put a smile on my face a table rising from the floor, kitchen sink converts to shower to try and trick myself windowless with glowing walls means i could be underground, it could be night—how would i know, my clock he returned could be anywhere in the world or above it, my lunch could be interrupted by someone the coffee stilled demanding a 2AM dream I took a breath he told me what he had said to the waitress Bed like a xerox machine, bed like a toaster, he explained that people enjoy him a floodplain, a topographical map used as a musical score, he said that he had made her day 2 biceps of lava, footprint filled with beans cheese & peppers that she would tell her friends later on about him The car across the schoolyard looks small enough to fit in my hand about how he made her laugh and laugh i’m not overweight—those are speed bumps, albino asphalt people enjoy him not a speed limit but how much can i carry how far i took a bag of groceries to safeway but they wouldn’t pay me he is a giver i put my Leaf up on blocks & plugged my house into it he is a listener he can’t understand why people don’t return his calls why they cut him off he reminds me of the work he needs me to do he smiles and shakes his head and throws his hands out before him exasperated he has better things to do but I will enjoy it it will be good for me he will visit every week to check on my progress there were two exits

80. 81. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 A Cornucopia at Zero Why Write a Letter When Dan Raphael You Could Write a Song or a

dropping into a circle, a sphere, 60 years of rotating, orbiting Poem? on the sun’s path down a galactic arm blossoming like highest speed trains powered by going through their opposites. Lou Graves the will to will the shadow twin of momentum. Ten years ago I sat in a bus terminal in the south of England, with a suitcase whats the opposite of time, names for objects opened in duration, and a guitar, and a notebook half-filled with bad poetry. In my pocket was as circle is to sphere, simultaneous. a letter I wrote but didn’t send to a girl I knew I’d never see again. Whiskey vortices springing like adamantine hair caught in my throat, threatening a thumb breath, tobacco spit, her smell still on my unwashed skin and clothes, the as time is connected to cash, dried sweat, irresistible memories effluvium of coitus. In a dream I had last year she said, “why write a letter close the door & the house goes away when you could write a song or a poem?” Sometimes it’s easier to love a scar opens to a wound reverts to perfect flesh from a distance, where memory can chisel away the sharp and rough edges from stage to audience to parking attendant and make of her a Pygmalion statue to be stood upon a pedestal, to be admired from car to mountain to gravity blisters harvested in space and worshipped. A haunting memory; and still I hear her voice the way a i went halfway up the mountain & looked level in 360 one-armed man might reach down from time to time to scratch his phantom through the granite, the haze rising from lakes, limb. Her voice, her echo, her smile; the parts of her I trapped in a notebook the ants of pollution trying to sneak past tree mouths like a lightening bug caught in a mason jar, like a photograph of a plant that the higher you get the more the sun reveals its spikes & blemishes not needing a lens to focus or strip one element from another needs neither water nor sunlight, that neither wilts nor blossoms. Somewhere reverse the plot and its axes to get a taste of the cornucopia of zero, behind me a cicada bug is searching for a hole in the window. Somewhere as we keep hoping one word will gain wings we cant see Prometheus is still chained to his rock and Sisyphus still struggles with his boulder. & fly into the universe of anothers brain, not the word most likely to, Had he any sense he would leave it where it lay at the bottom of the hill and he as the seed that sprouts looks nothing like the seed in the packet, the unfurling leaf is a cloud weeks away from raining would lean his back against it and rest. She is out there somewhere and still, somewhere else, somewhere within, her voice still echoes. Why write a letter when you could write a song or a poem?

82. 83. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Ovals Normalcy Mitchell Grabois Mitchell Grabois

I was swimming across oceans I worked in a Nursing Home across continents Now I work in a state mental hospital This is wonderful exercise My next job will be in a school for child molesters my daddy called who are children themselves First the Guinness Book of World Records then the Olympics! Snow 323 has fallen Canada repulses me like an electro-magnet But I disappointed my daddy I take pills I decided records were bad karma to keep me from despair People always want to break them I use Unguentine for my skin conditions I wear a back brace to keep me upright They want to break me I go to church to keep me upright people like my daddy and mommy Big brains lead to big problems Even after their acrimonious divorce Normalcy constantly decays they were united in that

I decided I would not allow anyone to shatter me I would leave the cement confines of pools

reject rectangles forever in favor of circles and ovals

84. 85. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 A Clean Kitchen Medusozoa Heidi Seaborn Jessica Fischoff

Sometimes I worry that the world’s got a cold heart. Will it ice over like food left too long in my freezer, little crusts of frost growing fungus under the Tupperware lids? My freezer And so, in the desperate measure needs to be cleaned & by that I mean the refrigerator must be cleaned, everything pulled Of undoing, the Lord transformed me out, shelves wiped & by that I mean the kitchen too, oven, range, cabinets & by that I Into a jellyfish and skipped me mean the whole fucking house & the raised beds in the garden need to be planted & the Across the continent, into the darkest house & the garden where I write at my desk with the dog’s dirt & fur curled around my Trenches of the sea. bare toes & the hum of the refrigerator reminding me it wants to be cleaned. I just read a poem from a poet that wants a clean heart, but I want a clean kitchen & a clean poem & I cleaned my fluorescent regalia frost-free heart. Of the sandy cover, like Medusa Letting down her hair, I unfurled my tentacles To sting the salty brine, And claimed my kingdom.

86. 87. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 Savage Privilege Jessica Fischoff John Gosslee

Nobody wants me, so what? I’m here, This labyrinth is a serpent untangling realer than the dead, the public-park-bound statues, its belly, and I’m wandering the mess I’m just doing my work. of stomach, a lost and undigested bone that won’t pass to the new life. Sometimes all of the magic is just for me and that’s called being alone, The thread unravels toward the heart, until I open my mouth and invite the gods and I shed my skin in sacrifice, to say what someone besides me needs to hear, cut the memory of stars, of earth, and that’s called love. of humble beginnings, raising glasses, I can walk almost anywhere and be a stranger, waking in my own bed, hands still soft. but what’s in me, what comes out of me is not. I’ve lost my way before, but never in such darkness. There is no difference between dying * and the marks I’ve tallied into the gut. What I’m trying to say is you’re my favorite present, I should have scratched my name, because without you, this is nothing, slept through the struggle. there is no letter, ground, sky. The only thing more brutal than the tip of a horn, is the mouth that swallows whole. And this is another opportunity to present the empty warehouse, the block party, the starving, and fat, and it’s easy to choose who I want to be today besides a smile, when I can pluck cash from a machine, food from the shelf, clothes from the mail as if it’s all a perpetual harvest.

88. 89. CRITICISM Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead: An Ex- emplification of the Ways in Which Men Can Never Understand the Burdens of Freedom As a Result of Themselves Never Having Been Oppressed Genna Rivieccio

sweet-natured and remediless optimism makes him mong the most grossly misunderstood A highly endearing at the outset of the novel, as the story and unfairly maligned characters in classic literature wears on, we see that his false ideals of how people is undoubtedly Sue Bridehead. Perceived as wretched (and, of course, life and the institutions that represent and unfathomable for her “cruelty” (in terms of not it) ought to be is less Christ-like than it is sheer ignis wanting to give in to making everything somehow fatuus. Sue, to be sure, is one of the foremost beacons turn carnal with men), Sue is easily one of Thomas of his delusive expectations. Hardy’s most complex protagonists (naturally inspired To make matters even worse than the fact by his own first wife, Emma Gifford—because woman that Sue is Jude’s cousin, she also possesses the rare is nothing to man if not muse, especially if, like Emma, combination of feminine qualities known as beauty she cannot serve her biological purpose as child- and intellect, sheer kryptonite for men like Jude and bearer). Richard Phillotson, the very person who ends up filling That the amount of the spotlight she dominates Jude with the ultimately tragic notions of scholastic from the person who is supposed to be our intended grandeur by telling him of Christminster (a university hero, Jude, is telling of just what an unusual for the and town modeled after Oxford), the place Phillotson time (Jude the Obscure was published in its complete plans to continue teaching upon leaving Jude and his 90. novel form in 1895) “bird” Sue is. Although Jude’s 91. Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead...- Genna Rivieccio The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16 other students at Marygreen, where preface to the novel, in which he when everything becomes too much to While, to be sure, Sue has own wickedness, I suppose you’d call any logical sense. the first portion of the narrative describes feedback on the apparently bear in terms of her coexistence with nothing but fondness and admiration it—a repugnance on my part, for a In an afterword by literary begins, placing primary emphasis not so peculiar character of Sue from Jude throwing countless Job-inspired for Jude, she does not take this to reason I cannot disclose, and what critic William Deresiewicz, Sue’s on Jude’s collegiate ambitions as a reviewer in Germany as “the first circumstances their way. Jude, too, of mean that their rapport should would not be admitted as one by the progressive stance for the age is opposed to his ensuing replacement delineation in fiction of the woman course, has been compared to both naturally translate into something world in general!...What tortures me billed as being the “New Woman,” preoccupation with Sue. who was coming into notice in her Jesus and Job for all the terrors he sexual, which is what so many women so is the necessity of being responsive expounding, “In 1894, [Sue] Despite her influence thousands every year—the slight, pale must endure in his simple quest and of this era (as well as the present one) to this man whenever he wishes, acquired the name by which that coming later, Hardy’s take on what ‘bachelor’ girl—the intellectualized, yearning to learn, to be a part of that would want to happen. Not Sue, who good as he is morally!—the dreadful decade would define her: ‘the New women “do” to men with their emancipated bundle of nerves that crowd arbitrarily deemed erudite. views marriage as the sort of prison contract to feel in a particular way, Woman.’ The term was applied to tantamount to the one forced upon in a matter whose essence is its real women, but even more, to their the rabbit she and Jude hear being voluntariness!” But that’s just it, there fictional counterparts, for those years ensnared in a gin during the middle is nothing, in truth, least of all during saw an outpouring of novels that of the night after reuniting for the this epoch, “voluntary” about the centered on such figures. The New “While, to be sure, Sue has purpose of their aunt’s funeral (a nature of marriage. It is a societal Woman was intelligent, well-read, very creepy sentence in its incest imposition that one feels eventually independent, strong-willed...and... implications indeed). Sue, only two forced into lest they be judged, or outspoken...” nothing but fondness and ad- months married to Phillotson at this worse, ostracized to the point of... If Sue was to set the point, awakens around the same time obscurity. This, of course, is precisely benchmark for this phenomenon, miration for Jude, she does not as Jude, unable to ignore the suffering what happens to Jude and Sue (in then she did it well. For the dame can sounds and associated image of the the wake of surrendering to their cite J.S. Mill and Edward Gibbon in wounded and trapped rabbit. Often emotional affinity for one another) the same breath. She can speak her take this to mean that their rap- interpreted in this literary context as when they attempt to find lodging for mind without fear of what so doing a symbol of marriage itself, the steel themselves and their three children might incur. She has all the qualities trap the rabbit is caught in applies to (the eldest referred to as “Little Father of a Jane Austen heroine without any port should naturally translate both Sue and Jude’s own marriages, Time” because of his humorless of the meekness. And, unlike one of the former falling prey to the societal temperament), and Sue tells the these heroines, she does not see the into something sexual...” pressures she could no longer ignore honest and strange truth to those that merit in giving up her chastity for and the latter falling for the oldest might rent them a room about not the sake of “fulfilling her end of the trick in the book: being told that legally being married to Jude. bargain” on a nuptial agreement. he had gotten a girl pregnant (who The decision not to wed one By the same token, a man casual indifference to the wants and modern conditions were producing, After leaving Marygreen, knows if the child that eventually another in that “binding” manner is (particularly a man of Jude’s idealistic passsions of their male counterpart mainly in cities as yet; who does not he does his best to make the most came to be really was Jude’s). Thus, more a result of Sue’s own willfulness, nature) does not want a woman to is made clear at the outset with his recognize the necessity for most of her of his hopeless social standing in the concept of needing to put the and her need to preserve the integrity be too carnal in the way of Arabella, deliberate use of the Esdras (later to sex to follow marriage as a profession, life (for it has always been that to rabbit out of its misery is, in part, so of the pure form of love she has described by the narrator from Jude’s be referred to as Ezra) bible quote to and boast themselves as superior seek higher education one must be strong because both parties are aware with Jude (almost as pure as the perspective as follows: “He knew commence Part I of the novel: “Yea, people because they are licensed to be affluent) by working as a stonemason somewhere deep down that they are blood they share). As Sue incisively well, too well, in the secret centre many there be that have run out of loved on the premises.” Hardy, unlike in Christminster, turning full auto- also entangled in the same impossible explains it, “Jude, before I married of his brain, that Arabella was not their wits for women, and become most male writers of his time (or even didact as he studies Latin and Greek trap that only death can truly provide him I had never thought out fully worth a great deal as a specimen servants for their sakes. Many also this one), additionally had the candor at night in the hope of one day, release from (something that their what marriage meant, even though I of womankind.” Well shit. Clearly, have perished, have erred, and and openness of mind to add that somehow, some way, overcoming the son is especially convinced of, as is knew… I am certain one ought to be you’re damned if you do and damned sinned, for women... O ye men, how the critic was furthermore rueful that seemingly insurmountable obstacle revealed toward the final act of the allowed to undo what one has done if you don’t as a woman. Even so, can it be but women should be strong, “the portrait of the newcomer had of being accepted into the university. book). so ignorantly. I daresay it happens Sue chooses “don’t” for the most seeing they do thus?” been left to be drawn by a man, and It is at this point in the novel that To make matters even more to lots of women; only they submit, part, offering female readers to this Yet, somehow, Sue is strong. was not done by one of her own sex, Jude’s affections for Sue are almost abominable, Sue can’t help but, at and I kick… When people of a later day the vague comfort that, even Infuriatingly so, both to her cousin who would never have allowed her to a direct byproduct of his inability moments, turn self-loathing regarding age look back upon the barbarous when it hurts men’s delicate feelings, and technical husband (that is to say, break down at the end.” to make what he really wants to her behavior, consisting of the sort customs and superstitions of the a woman is entitled to change her ultimately, Phillotson). That Hardy This “break down,” as happen, happen, ergo using Sue as of clinical matter-of-factness toward times that we have the unhappiness mind—should not be required or himself must acknowledge living Hardy sees it, is Sue, once so practical a sort of temporary distraction that male-female friendship that, even to live in, what will they say!” beholden to a bloke just because it in a time where the female gender and “free-spirited” (every man’s turns out to be even more infuriating today, is still not entirely palatable or How prophetic an estimation makes her come across as “fickle,” or was the easiest to spurn for their favorite word for “loose”), turning to and frustrating than Christminster’s credible to most. It is thus that she as, the more the years go by, the less what’s better known as owning all of “choices” is addressed in his later religion—as his own wife did in life— similar out-of-reachness. laments to Jude of her marriage that the “institution” of marriage (and the the same freedoms that men have had “...there is nothing wrong except my religious associations tied to it) makes since time immemorial. 92. 93. The Opiate, Winter Vol. 16

As a trailblazer for her rebel in any way she knows how, Of men and of fucks given. But who “kind”—the New Woman—it bears including the negation of her are you kidding? You know you’re emphasizing that what comes across corporeal self—for nothing appeals going to end up like Sue, cursed with as Sue’s neuroticism is actually to a male more than the body, ergo that line, “She’s never found peace the near inability to fathom being she finds various ways to conceal it. since she left his arms, and never will “entrusted” with even a modicum of As Deresiewicz phrases it, “...she does again till she’s as he is now.” Because the same amount of liberation as a everything she can to make her body a girl, in the end, still can’t help man. Granted, even if it is the same disappear. Sue is ‘light and slight,’ succumbing to that Adam’s rib role. level of freedom as a man of low an ‘aerial being’... Again and again, All that “freedom” driving her to the stature, like Jude. It still prompts Sue we see her refusing to eat: skipping madness of going back to love over to shoulder a heavy and unexpected breakfast, pushing her dinner around self-actualization. weight as she navigates a world on her plate. To Jude, halfway in which she might be considered through the novel, she is ‘hardly intellectual equal instead of overall flesh at all.’” And that’s just what she sex object. wants to be—no body, therefore no Phillotson appears vaguely feminine curves, means no judgment willing to concede to this ahead-of-its- or scrutiny for something she is not time approach to “handling” Sue, or, concerned with: her womanhood. more specifically, her request to leave The very thing, ironically, that him for Jude. It is precisely because Arabella is most concerned with of Sue’s simultaneous uncertainty properly wielding to the advantage and self-possession that her enigmatic of her being taken care of by a man. ways prove so fascinating, aggravating Any man, really. Jude just happens to and captivating to her suitors, neither be convenient until another catches of whom could possibly comprehend her eye in Australia. And then doesn’t her confusion at her own state of anymore (oh the whimsy of women being having themselves never as portrayed by male authors!). been subjected to any true form of Regardless of Sue’s best oppression. Apart from poverty, the efforts to do right by herself and both natural state of most people. of the men she has ensnared like that To this point, adding further rabbit in the gin, it looks as though, to his dissection of Sue, Deresiewicz just as is the case with Jude, the more notes, “Sue never develops a particular she tries, the worse things get. While professional ambition; it is Hardy’s some like to interpret Jude the Obscure as purpose to trace the consequences another one for the “tragic love story” of trying to live by emancipated annals, what is truly tragic about it is ideals for ordinary provincial people that Sue might never have bothered devoid of educational and financial to toil in the ersatz comprehension advantages, not a privilegd urban of romantic love when it has always elite.” It is a result of this underlying been the case that, just as Pet Shop comprehension of her unavoidable Boys said, “Love is a bourgeois “fixedness” in the face of any brash construct.” Those perpetually action she might take that Sue stuck down at heel would do well manifests her dissatisfaction in the to remember that when settling for form of being a wavering neurotic. whatever slop of a “partner” presents A term that would never be bestowed himself. Then again, thanks to Sue upon a man for any of his own and her New Woman tack, a girl can indecisiveness. continue down a path more traveled But she must instinctively in opting for the life independent. 94. 95.