Spring 2016 Issue

palaver e

/p ‘læve r/ n. A talk, a discussion, a dialogue; (spec. in early use) a conference between African tribes-people and traders or travellers. v. To praise over-highly, flatter; to cajole. To persuade (a person) to do something; to talk (a person) out of or into something; to win (a person) over with palaver. To hold a colloquy or conference; to parley or converse with.

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Graduate Liberal Studies Program University of North Carolina Wilmington 105 Bear Hall Wilmington, NC 28403 www.uncw.edu/gls Masthead | Spring 2016

Founding Editors Copy Chiefs Contributing Editors Sarah E. Bode John Dailey Dr. Josh Bell Ashley Elizabeth Hudson Mikkel Lysne Michelle Bliss Melissa Slaven-Warren Sarah E. Bode Executive Editor Dr. Theodore Burgh Patricia Turrisi Staff Lauren B. Evans Holli Terrell-Cavalluzi Dr. Carole Fink Editor-in-Chief Jonny Harris Courtney Johnson Ashley Elizabeth Hudson Travis Henry Katja Huru Linda McCormack Rebecca Lee Managing Editor Janay Moore Johannes Lichtman Erin Ball Dr. Marlon Moore Dr. Diana Pasulka Layout Editors Dr. Alex Porco Ashley Elizabeth Hudson Nick Rymer Erin Ball Dr. Michelle Scatton-Tessier Dr. Anthony Snider Layout Assistant Erin Sroka Gabe Reich Dr. Patricia Turrisi

Cover Art: “The Indistinct Notion of an Object Trajectory” by Ryota Matsumoto Back Cover Art: “Surviving in the Multidimensional Space of Cognitive Dissonance” by Ryota Matsumoto

Thank you to the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at UNCW for letting us call you home. Palaver staff, thank you for the many discussions, hours of careful attention to edits, and the tireless push for resources and pub- licity. Palaver could not thrive without your dedication and enthusiasm. Erin Ball, your supportiveness and vi- sionary approach to your job is incredibly humbling. Thank you especially to our submitters, contributors, and readership for your loyalty and for trusting us with your extraordinary work. Without you, we’d be an idea, an abstraction, a what-if, but because of you we are Palaver. Note From the Editor | Ashley Elizabeth Hudson Dear Reader, You might need to shield your eyes because this issue of Palaver is searing-bright. Spring has sprung, and Palaver is feeling its vibes. This issue seems to burst with fructification. There’s a cacoph- ony of neon in the works of Ryota Matsumoto and Ronald C. Walker, featured throughout the issue. Equally scintillating is the writing of poets B. B. P. Hosmillo and Sean Mulroy, whose afterimages linger long after turning the page. So goes for the wildly mirrored collages of Bill Wolak and the star- tlingly appropriate-yet-absurd juxtapositions of Ellen Mueller’s collages featuring historical imagery and contemporary newspaper clippings.

Rita Mookerjee introduces readers to the spoken word poetry of the performance duo Darkmatter in a timely academic piece that also explores certain intricacies of queer and racial issues. Ames Haw- kins’ personal essay explores parental relations in the face of a health crisis, while Michael Levan’s poems haunt with their bridge of spousal love, clinical diction, and fear of loss. And Eugene Sun Park confronts prescriptive reactions in the face of emergencies with his film Resolve To Be Ready, a haunt- ing piece of performance art.

I love how the pieces that make up this Spring 2016 issue of Palaver refuse to be restrained, even right down to Derick Smith’s spilled paint. There’s a theme of perseverance running through these pages, which feels just right for a springtime read. We hope you bloom over the works here, too. Table of Contents | Spring 2016

In the Boy’s Room 7 Discipline & Pleasure Between Ann Stewart McBee the Sheets: Queering Academic Discourse 40 Dehydration 11 Flint Discharge 12 Home Health 13 oneiromancy 46 Notes (TPN) 14 I hit my head so hard, Prayer 15 the words fell out 47 Michael Levan kursk 48 Sean Patrick Mulroy Plaza San Miguel, Madrid 17 Ye Olde Whatever Shoppe 18 We are Here to Resist Your Orientalist Rugbeaters 19 Gaze: Examining the Corrective Queer Cutting Table 20 Poetics of Darkmatter’s Spoken Word Holly Iglesias Poetry 49 Rita Mookerjee Resolve To Be Ready 21 Eugene Sun Park Optical Counterpoints Attributed to Surface Topography in Of Ourselves We are Estranged 23 Clustered Forests 62 Dices of Sadness Rolling Ryota Matsumoto All the Time 32 A Certain Sense of Kindness 34 Calling Skies 63 Suicide is Next to You 36 Olivia Lu But Do Not Fear Your Hands 38 B.B.P. Hosmillo Table of Contents | Spring 2016

different frequencies 64 Lett(er)ing Love 90 Tyler Atwood Ames Hawkins

Roommates 66 Shame Parts 99 Jessica Barksdale Haechang Sun

Rituals 76 Lover and the Pale Fire of Time 102 Tracy Harris Emily J. Cousins

It matters less what I said than how you read it 89 Emily O’Neill “Runners 1” by Ellen Mueller

“Runners 5” by Ellen Mueller In the Boy’s Room | Ann Stewart McBee

ever mind how she got into the house. It’s none of your business. She’s in the boy’s basement room, far enough away that water running upstairs sounds like the band practicing outside Nschool. It’s darker than a manatee’s twat in the boy’s room. She smells masturbation and mud. She almost dies tripping over piles of manga books with big titties all over the covers. Undone homework covered with scary doodles of Cthulu or Pumpkinhead or other geek fests. Cheese-filled scripts for TV movies no one wants to watch except bored housewives and old ladies who wear too many rings. She takes out a half-full can of Coke and a box of tissues before she can get to the lamp. The room alights and suddenly she’s surrounded by balls. Baseballs on the sheets. Soccer balls on the walls. The lamp is shaped like a damned football. In every boy’s room is every kind of ball in the world.

In their upstairs room was an ultra-thick aubergine bedspread. She never had such a bedspread. Say what you will about The Cow, but his mother’s taste is bull’s eye. The boy would spend half the morning making sure that bedspread hung even on both sides. There were candles that smelled like black cherry and sea grass and lavender and fig. No balls. No stolen street signs piled like in a junk yard. The empty room was next door. You just walked through the closet. Now both rooms are empty. The closet is sealed off. The upstairs smells like drywall and paint. The candles never got burned.

One wall of the boy’s room is just shelves of garbage. There’s a warped, lidless Batman lunchbox full of marbles. An old popcorn drum full of dusty baseball cards. A stuffed bear that won’t sit up and a Snoopy doll without a nose. A mess of video games and CDs with their jewel cases cracked and broken. His cross-country trophy is turned on its side so the little golden man at the top just looks like he’s tripping out. Maybe thinks he’s Jacob wrestling with the angel.

If she could just empty the frame that has his pimply big-eyed face. His belly, tongue, fingers, teeth. Rubbing on the fly of his jeans. Rubbing his foot with hers. Friction. Doesn’t he remember steaming up the windows of The Cow’s car? Doesn’t he remember in the playhouse? When the bee crawled into the sleeping bag? Maybe he’s too much of a pussy. Maybe his mom is a whore. Or his dad is a queer. Or maybe crazy minds don’t remember. Although, your mom remembers to be a whore. Yes, that’s what she’ll say.

“Herd Everything” by Ronald C. Walker McBee | 7 In the closet she should find his secret roll. But it’s not in the garment bag where it’s supposed to be–the one where he keeps the tux he wore to his first movie premiere. She opens the candy bar box where he keeps his dope-phernalia. There’s a bottle of e-pills, but no roll. She finds a big shoe box full of porn. No cash there either. A garbage bag sits in the corner like a puddle. Inside is a tiny soccer jersey and shiny shorts. A tiny pair of blue Adidas that look just like the boy’s soccer cleats. A tiny football made of foam. A baby blanket covered in balls. She digs out the green bottle from the boot where she knew it would be. Takes a shot, feels the piney burn, squeezes out one tear. Opens the candy bar box “Dreamy” by Ronald C. Walker and the pill bottle. She pockets the pink crescents and bugs bunnies, backs out of that dark closet.

That’s when she notices the scrapbook on the floor. The Cow bought it for them to keep memen- tos in for a future that only lasted five months. And what’s inside? Not the marriage license The Cow finally gave permission for. Not the ultrasound photo. The concert and movie tickets are not ones they went to together. More geeked- out devil and horror shit. The photos are all of him and his fat dyke “Should she burn friend who moved away. Hair like hay and a head like a pumpkin, so it? Flush it? Both.” they called her The Scarecrow. A note in kid-handwriting says: Let’s promise to always be best friends, to never let a girl get between us, and never stop talking to each other no matter what. It’s signed with the boy’s and The Scarecrow’s names. This cannot exist. Should she rip it up? Should she burn it? Flush it? Both.

In the bathroom–just a scummy sink and a toilet full of cigarette ash–the mirror has been painted over with Red 40879, the color he used to tag the Hunt Hill bridge. In the middle of the zit cream and cotton swabs and nail clippers and toothpaste is a gooey black ink stain in the shape of a hip bone, or a pollywog, or a fetus. Black finger prints all around. Goddamn she has missed his fingers.

Something isn’t right. The water upstairs has stopped running. The bedspread isn’t even on both sides. And why did he empty those frames? And where is the cash? And how long does she have to stand here, waiting to be caught?

Back to Table of Contents McBee | 8 “Herd Mentality” by Ronald C. Walker “Martha Who” by Ronald C. Walker

“Found and Lost” by Ronald C. Walker

Walker | 9 Back to Table of Contents “The Frozen Air Evoked the Analogical Still of Ephermeral Swarms” by Ryota Matsumoto

“Hollow Ghosts for Those Restless Spirits” by Ryota Matsumoto Back to Table of Contents Matsumoto | 10 Dehydration| Michael Levan

Nausea, vomiting, and now one more / box to tick. One more symptom to be verified before they know / what will have to be done. / She offers her arm to the nurse, who pats up her forearm / to bring her veins to life. When they do / not, the woman apologizes, tries his wife’s right arm instead, / tapping it like she’s at a fruit stand looking for the thud / a ripe watermelon makes. She finds one / and pushes the needle in. His wife tenses / as blood crawls down the line, into the collection tube, / only to stop halfway full. The nurse wriggles the needle, searching for more, / but the blood has gone / sludgy, thickened, viscous, hypercoagulated. You’re dehydrated, all right, she says, / but we’ll still need you / to pee in this cup too. / He leads her to the bathroom and waits / for more to drain from her. He grabs the cup, / warm and golden, with one hand, / her arm, cold and pale, with the other, and puts her in bed. / The nurse takes the sample and wets the dipstick, mark matching the bottle’s maroon chart. / Your wife is severely dehydrated, she says. / Your baby too. /

He thinks of all the times he’s not thought / about this child, abstraction without name or face, / who has brought so much terrible / beauty so deeply, so quickly, so—/

until the nurse says, We’ll hang your wife / a bag soon, and go from there.

Levan | 11 Back to Table of Contents Discharge| Michael Levan

Three times this morning, she’s said she’s ready / to go home. She imagines their bed’s cool comfort, / listening to last-gasp leaves shuffle through the backyard. /

Later, when the nurse comes to give them her discharge orders, / she works herself into tears, each drop / a question of how or where or when she might survive. / The nurse listens and answers with the party line: / More meds and monitoring. At home. Thirteen days. / But it’s not until she says, There is nothing more / we can do for you here that we haven’t. Go home / that his wife stops, arms and tubes / falling to rest at her sides, sign of resignation, sign of shock, / sign of how-the-hell-can-I-last.

“Now Summer Endures Only in Your Perfume” by Bill Wolak Back to Table of Contents Levan | 12 Home Health| Michael Levan

At home in bed, she whispers in the dark / for a cold washcloth, an ice cube, anything to keep the fire in her / temples at bay, but he doesn’t hear her, / not at first. Only the TPN pump’s timer concerns him. / It reads 1:17, and still no nurse. / No syringes to inject vitamins and liquid Pepcid, no alcohol prep wipes, / no saline or heparin flushes, no tubing, / no batteries, no new bag of TPN, no instructions / to make all these pieces fit the puzzle of her well-being. / He listens for an incoming call, a car door slam, four knuckles’ rattle / against the screen door’s wrought iron. / He’s caught waiting for a sign he can use / to help her while he imagines this first domino / of absence knocking down each worst-case scenario tile after /

until she grabs his arm to pull him back / from inside his head. I need a cold washcloth, she says, / voice peaking at cocktail party levels. He sees her, / he hears her and goes about living / his vows to her.

“Aroused by a Promise” by Bill Wolak Levan | 13 Back to Table of Contents Notes (TPN)| Michael Levan

At 0:41 left, a knock. /

He takes notes as she mumbles through / the process: (1) Remove TPN from refrigerator four to six hours / before old bag is up, or else she’ll feel / she’s jumped in a Great Lake in February. Otherwise, hold bag against body, / warming like it’s a child. (2) Wash hands / with antibacterial hand sanitizer, careful to cringe as it hits / cold-chapped skin. (3) Get: / infusion tubing (coiled stuff), pump, medications from fridge to add (multivitamins–two vials; blue and white caps), / alcohol wipes, saline syringes, four AA batteries, Sharps container. / (4) Remove caps from additive vials, cleanse / with alcohol wipe for 15 sec. (5) Open syringe with needle, remove cap, / DON’T LET IT TOUCH ANYTHING! (6) Pull back syringe plunger, / fill with 5 ml air, inject into vial, turn vial upside down, / withdraw medication, place cap on needle, repeat with other vial, marvel at how neon-yellow the multivitamin is. / (7) Remove foil from TPN bag, clean port with alcohol, inject into bag without puncturing. / (8) Place used syringe in Sharps container. / (9) Gently knead TPN bag to mix; watch it turn / from milk-white to ivory. (10) Remove pull cap from IV bag and DON’T LET IT TOUCH ANYTHING! or else / it won’t be sterile, insert spike into TPN bag, twisting to secure. / (11) Turn off pump, disconnect from the lumen hanging / out of her arm, wrap this inside alcohol wipe packet to keep sterile, change batteries, turn back on, / hold down PRIME button, liquid looping through tubing like a rollercoaster car / until some seeps out the end. (12) Look for air bubbles in line; / if there, push PRIME until gone, or machine will beep DISTAL OCCLUSION alarm / again and again into the night. (13) Flush her PICC line with saline. (14) Connect new bag to lumen / and KEEP STERILE; DON’T LET IT TOUCH ANYTHING! (15) Reset program. (16) Throw away waste. / (17) Repeat all this daily. (18) Do not forget one step, / not a single one. (19) Pretend to be a confident medical professional, not a man studying words. / (20) Keep wife safe, keep her healthy and strong, live / up to vows made just a few months before. (21) Do not let her / see how overwhelming this process is; it will become routine soon enough. / (22) Trust previous point because there is no other choice.

Back to Table of Contents Levan | 14 Prayer| Michael Levan

He says, /

Dear night, dear sleep, dear God who’s answered / none of my asks, give her strength enough to carry / this backpack filled with what will keep them both alive, / this purse of Zofran pumping into her right leg that will turn / into golf ball-sized welt when I move it to her left tomorrow. / I am alone. I am tired. I am left more unconvinced / every morning, faith never my strong suit. / Nothing is crueler than knowing / I will grumble at midnight, at two, at seven when she calls for me to take her / bags from the bed, follow her shuffling to the bathroom, / lay them down on the tile so / the tubes don’t kink, aren’t cut off, / their alarms sounding and sounding / through the house. All this weight meant to lift her / only a burden, an anchor falling with no place to settle. / Give her strength, I ask and ask and ask.

Levan | 15 Back to Table of Contents “The Enigma’s Exploding Lipstick” by Bill Wolak

Back to Table of Contents Wolak | 16 Plaza San Miguel, Madrid| Holly Iglesias

My past sits across the table sipping coffee, her cup, like mine, steaming. She wears what you’d expect, her idea of the girl in Dylan’s song who has everything she needs—an artist, she don’t look back. I on the other hand am dressed in a camel’s hair coat that my mother would have approved of and a persimmon pashmina. We settle in, silent, Spanish filling the air as she jots vocabulary lists in a notebook, cocking her ear toward the muted conversation of lovers, glaring at the guardia civil. I wish she would look up and see me, but there is no comforting her now—far from home, convinced that exile is an act of will, praying it will sharpen the dull contour of her youth.

Iglesias | 17 Back to Table of Contents Ye Olde Whatever Shoppe| Holly Iglesias

Heading west from Black Mountain to Asheville, strip mall strip mall strip mall, and at the light in Swannanoa what remains of the junk store where we shopped for wine glasses for a party for your new friends the year we lived apart, the owner slumped behind piles of receipts and empty bags of Fritos, the radio emitting nothing but static as we worked our way between the shelves, dumb with grief, wary of breaking things in this world of glass—ash trays, teacups, jelly jars, pickle crocks, platters, tureens, ramekins, tumblers, brandy snifters, wine glass wine glass wine glass—the shroud of dust lifting like a living thing each time the door opened, settling each time it closed.

Back to Table of Contents Iglesias | 18 Rugbeaters| Holly Iglesias

A winter’s worth of dust and crumbs and all that fell to the floor in the hush of father’s version of grace, heads bowed over soup that lost its warmth while he implored the Lord to make of each earthly thing an object lesson, admonishing them to regard even the soup as instructive, which of course it was, the herb-scented steam teaching them all they needed to know of patience and the powers of appetite. By afternoon, the boy at his desk, sipping cocoa from a Dresden cup, reading the leather-bound books that signaled his entitlement, his sisters in the yard beating the last of ten carpets, giddy with exhaustion.

Iglesias | 19 Back to Table of Contents Cutting Table| Holly Iglesias

Bolts of cotton and worsted wool stand upright until a woman of indeterminate age rocks one free from the weight of the others and lugs it to the table, her hands flipping it over and over to reveal the full pattern, penciling calculations on brown paper, allowing for error and generous seams. Surely you see the sunlight, the segmented windows through which it enters, suffusing the dust, the buttons, the scraps on the floor with a hue as pale as the future.

Back to Table of Contents Iglesias | 20 Resolve To Be Ready| Eugene Sun Park

esolve To Be Ready is a short film collaboration between filmmaker Eugene Sun Park and performance artists Ginger Krebs and Sara Zalek. The piece is an unusual blend of event docu- Rmentation and experimental video. Inspired by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “Resolve to Be Ready” campaign, the film features coordinated team action that exemplifies possibilities for cooperation in public spaces, while highlighting the ways in which public anxiety is increasingly “managed” as a public relations exercise. The film also explores themes of vulnerability, dependence, community, trauma, and healing.

Resolve To Be Ready has acquired unexpected attention and relevance in the wake of tragedies in Ferguson, MO, and other parts of the country. The film raises questions about racial profiling and the intentional stoking of fears about men of color in public spaces. The film also confronts viewers with their own prejudices and fears as they listen to police dispatches about a suspect with “dark complexion” who fits the description of a man walking through a bustling urban center.

Resolve To Be Ready Credits

Sara Zalek | is a movement artist, choreographer, and curator. Zalek’s work is rooted in Butoh train- ing, teaching, and investigation into personal identity. She is obsessed with time travel, experimental science, hybrid animals, permaculture, and the intentional act of transformation. Her performative works are designed to ignite public dialog; she creates unexpected encounters often mixed with humor and the sublime, with an intentional focus on the moment when the self is limitless potential. She has collaborated in over seventy unique performance works using Butoh techniques for train- ing and teaching. Her work has been featured at Chicago Cultural Center, Hamlin Park, Links Hall, Defibrillator Gallery, Co-Prosperity Sphere, High Concept Labs, Dance Theatre Workshop (NY), and Headwaters Theater (PDX). She is currently a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, and working with NEFA on Regional Dance Development Initiative in Chicago. In 2015 she was featured in The Chicago Tribune for curating SSII: Post Butoh Festival. You can visit her website here: www.saratonin. com.

Ginger Krebs | has been performing and directing performance projects since 2005. Her work has been presented recently in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Auditorium Theater, the Cultural Center and, site-specifically, on a traffic island in Wicker Park. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital’s MAP Fund, the Illinois Art Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Af- fairs, and the Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Krebs teaches performance and cross-disciplinary studio courses at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can visit her website here: www.gingerkrebs. com.

Park | 21 Out of Site | is a performance art series that curates unexpected encounters in public spaces. Out of Site supports contemporary performance artists to create new work that engages directly with the public. Based in the Wicker Park-Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, Out of Site’s mission is to bring cultural experiences to everyone, facilitating work that brings joy and transports people out of their daily routines to create a moment of reflection and wonder in their lives. Out of Site is the brainchild of Carron Little (Faculty in Performance Art at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago) and Whit- ney Tassie (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts). You can find their website here: www.outofsitechicago.org.

Please click the image below to view Resolve To Be Ready.

Film Directed by Eugene Sun Park Concept and Performance by Sara Zalek and Ginger Krebs

Back to Table of Contents Park | 22 Of Ourselves We are Estranged| B.B.P. Hosmillo

In a city named after Christmas, a box of whatever shape can supply enough to life although a large one is preferred, something that may contain a complete guide to separation or astronaut uniform for men who have no exact location: they who show up only to be absented, they who are here. This is not about a city. This is not about Christmas although we want to see Santa Claus naked, exposing our wishes with vulgarity. After all, this is about a box that will make us public. Open mine and watch how our city falls down, trumpeting shreds of enigma, taking revulsion down to our senses. This is the kind of gift we have—tissues of delirium, damaged organs, in troupes, all capable of complaining, detrimental no matter how unobvious, dis-paraging, destructive—that’s why so much in us begs us closed. This is not necessarily wrong, but this is impossible, love ad- vices then shows our faces in the mirror painted in brown, already broken. Even if we can’t exclaim that love is a gospel, it is our better mouth that talks to people, our temporary eyes that capture the best in us, in every house. And if a beautiful moment also feels how we are demolished, such beautiful moment must know that every house has a room in which tragic men are forbidden to say anything treasured. We are in that room. We are re-thinking that room is not just a room.

You know what could happen and I know what we don’t want to see. This is gospel telling us fire. This is gospel still figuring out where to exit. This is gospel touching us: it is an alcohol

Hosmillo | 23 rub, and then a pinch, and then a lash. The uninvited body ends like this: on a precipice that says below you are welcome. Because it is not only that we can sense, but also that we are sensed, our better mouth the skin of a flat tire, our temporary eyes four zones of the same fire. There is a question here but you are afraid it is the irreversible opening of your box. There is a likely answer here but I’m afraid to take it would mean to take away your box. What else then would supply enough to life when we are busted, already believing what we are to keep forever, somewhat a contribution, iconic and so digressive, we involuntarily made ourselves, is a long, spinal rumor that tells we are unreal?

/////

Dau my American-born Vietnamese neighbor had his first kiss at 14, his first suicide attempt at 15, and his box in between. I was there when he got it, smiling away at the condom I flushed in the toilet, something he trusted, something I vanished—this might change the question entirely.

At 17, Dau my American-born Vietnamese brother is what I say to define family—this is the revised question, another question, integral part of the original question, the question that demands some identification because there is always that compounding void whenever we look at each other even in our most honest form, a bodiless body. We touch: we discern: we doubt. What kind of eyes do we have? This has an obvious answer: you will chance us holding hands in a dark alley, you will think to yourself as long as the alley is dark that it can never be always too dark.

///// Hosmillo | 24 This is a rumor about sensing: once, there was a very little box the size of a nose or a month- old hamster. One would say that this very little box can’t be anywhere between valuable and precious. Martha has seen this very little box and Mi Shen has seen this very little box and they’ve never been changed. In different places, they threw this very little box away. In different places, this very little box is meant to be claimed.

This is a rumor about sensing: once, there was a very little box the size of a nose or a month- old hamster. One would say that this very little box can’t be anywhere between valuable and precious—this is not always the case. A lover has seen this very little box and another lover has seen this very little box and both have been changed ever since. He said something nice and a man heard something nice. They slept and dreamed saying nice things and hearing nice things in a city named after Christmas where they’ve been killed.

Now, there is a boy and his evangelist parents in a bright corner of their house. This is after dinner. The boy asks his good father how he finally expressed love to his good mother. The father takes a yellow paper and a pen. The boy blushes. The father draws something on the yellow paper, folds it immediately, and tells his son open this when you’re at the right age to love and then give this to that lucky girl. The boy still blushing, takes the folded yellow paper and goes up to his room. Through a little window and with his little mouth, stretched, a red line like a perfect incision, he checks if the street is dark and empty, enough for Joseph his friend to stand in front of the boy’s house unnoticed. The boy then puts the folded yellow paper inside his underwear, thinking Joseph will have to get Hosmillo | 25 this himself. Meanwhile, the boy’s mother is praying. She begins praying when the boy is locked up inside his room and ceases it when the boy is in a bright corner of their house.

/////

We are put in a different world, Dau says, a wrong world, which means it is daybreak and I am alone, I can see Dau looking at me, crushing what any future wishes standing, cropping out his heart just by looking at me.

Dau is a question. Yes, he is, the bed or someone says, if you try to answer him, while I’m minutes away from sleep or when masturbating. It is embarrassing to think that he is the focus question, the best way to identify. Because when wound forms an immobile horse that makes up Dau, totally banishing him—spent and so unpredictable—I don’t know why I see the immobile horse as a beautiful, so beautiful body. The more I see this useless animal the more I feel empowered as if I could create what I would live to see unchanging all day, all night.

Lover, what kind of wound do you have that forms a beautiful body out of me?

Dau is a question from some box discrimination left in America. Discrimination belonged to America, but the box is not American. Everybody should know that this little flat in which I live took shape too after someone left, the shape of sky, russet, a dark sky. I don’t know why I’m certain, and everybody should know this, too, that a human other than me holds a moon somewhere in this dark sky, a moon so lambent I can’t wish for another sky, its moon-ness Hosmillo | 26 questionable for being too near, too tangible like a thick strip of flesh my mouth could spark into. To address him, that human, to tell him to keep the moon-ness of this “moon” is to seek first which part in where I live is the question and which is America. Like senses, I accept what may be given: I take nothing for an answer. This is seeking what I already have. Don’t think a wound is easy to see.

/////

Where a populous city remakes itself as a locked up office, a man named Joseph has a way to enter: through the ceiling, through a high tendency of falling down. This man hasn’t eaten for several years and he doesn’t want to spend his remaining coins for food, not for anything my sadness, my face in a fogged up mirror wouldn’t be replaced by, he says. Before he came in, the secretary swallowed all the wrong people and wrong senses that abound in the office to make it ideal for business operation. Joseph scans the office with eyes of someone who died of asphyxia. You shouldn’t have come here, you who this place cannot invite! Now knowing exactly which black cabinet contains the voice that negates him, he seizes it, opens it with a strong kick. There is nobody inside yet the voice continues to strike. You shouldn’t have come here, you who this place cannot invite! He takes off his dirty pants and ties the empty black cabinet onto a chair. You who this place cannot invite! He takes off his sweated, soiled white shirt and forces the black empty cabinet into it like a dead pigeon that is too big for a cadaver’s bag.

Now naked, inimically bare, here, your boss left what is mine all along, Joseph jeers at the disappeared secretary the way a Hosmillo | 27 wound—out of cruelty, of form—remembers, scoffs, and inevitably incubates revenge that is chiefly experienced by the bearer, always an attack against the self, of the wound.

What is it that Joseph was deprived of and still lingers to? A document? An archive? A datum of his own contact to emptiness, which, if found, might have been meaningful? Let’s imagine what exists that can’t in any way exist. Imagine a hand that easily gets inside him, a path to a feeling, a value.

/////

There is a rumor about a box everybody knows of:

Yaw the son of an immigrant goes to class always ahead of time, ahead of everybody. He hates coming to class only to find out a cream gum is patched on his chair. Rest assured that everyone hates him, which is not the entire story of his life. Of course, this is not about hate; only that hate creates the box this rumor is about. Ninety minutes after lunch- hour, he buys his food, already cold, pork and something slimy. He chooses the table at the far end of the cafeteria, puts his food tray on it, sits properly, and takes from his backpack a cardboard box, its top with a hole only formed when a knife failed to make a perfect circle however gently done many times. While eating, he looks at the cardboard box, specifically at its bad hole and then talks, I discovered a quieter place near. Soon I’ll bring you there. He is the only boy at school who talks to a hole: he believes life could exist inside a cardboard box. Is that really life?

There is a rumor about a box I could see our bodies lying in: Hosmillo | 28 A summer sun shows up and it is not even summer. There is no vacation to speak about but a stray dog sniffing what looks like a makeshift house—scrap woods and broken umbrella and plastic bottles assembled together. Flies come around and out from it. Ridiculous but this is a homeless man’s resource and a dog is sniffing it, its scantily pieced walls, the back of a tarp that makes its door. Flies come around and out from it. Perhaps the train, working like a mil- itary lieutenant, or the artificial garden or the new internet sensation has already desen-sitized people: they pass by this house, the dog sniffing it without noticing this house, the dog sniffing it. But flies come around and out from it. Loyal mourners. How hungry.

There is a wound that is our core, a cavity less known than sex, and it is not a rumor:

From Newark, Dau arrived in Hanoi on time and alone. The trip was relatively smooth, but he was so worn out, he walked slowly toward the crowded luggage pick-up with his hands tightly clenched, his face an appearance of surrender, you know something bad happened earlier, he can’t tell the details. At home, he lay on the floor next to his red suitcase. Then, he took it, placed it above his body, and closed his eyes. Perhaps for some time he was asleep. Or only that kindly, he was murmuring. Then he opened his suitcase and realized he took someone else’s, a wrong box of personal smog, yet he knew, without a doubt, to whom it be-longed. This is not a joke. This is a joke, he says while his mind says my name, a tally of droll mistakes, adlibs. Rapt, he tries to laugh and he laughs. Then shortly, he cries.

///// Hosmillo | 29 There is a city that has stripped of its name several times. In this city, memory forms those to never be remembered or my hands if those to never be remembered are with me and burning. No seclusion can be any more spirited and crowded than here.

There is a fire and there is one home obtainable. There is still a fire and I’m trying to understand what embodies you. Is it Frozen Dust? Is it Queer Moon? Remembering Wound? Unidentified American? Or this water I can’t hold?

There is this absence and from dreams my body digs a man, the foremost penman of my emotions. There is this partition. There is this wall that is not a wall. There is division and I’m the worst effect of that, a problem with one hand and one knife. To get some sign of earth and kind fabrications, I call my foster family and they say to call them back after they finish praying. What kind of sign is that?

There is a healer and there is discussion of faith, endless, otiose; and along this long procrastination there is neglect, the details to castigate the harm of fire, the broadest blow of intolerance to haze. Whose world is this act of temerity?

I sent my last breath to my last beloved and you know it is a heart of revolt. However little, this heart has a stomach for fire. Underwater where most of his life is to be done, he clears his eyes of sand and thinks, what is this for?

You know most fears of a stranger. You know what crowded means when I’m alone. You know how to be identified, the hopeless fright when you can’t be identified, the public shame of being unidentifiable. You clutch your Hosmillo | 30 ventral skin like some fluffy animal that has learned to live in you, and you want to keep it living, firm, distinguishable as yours, able to feel—yes, your hand makes sense, you are able, but why do you need a proof of what you are?

You lock yourself up in my room. A desk remains and it will never be the back of a man. A telephone is above the desk, but it only is a collected ash. You shout your name and you open the door into the thinking that someone is just shy to call you. You say the fire is gone, but the fire swallowed me. You go out for a minute, your head turns to the right, to the left, and then you get backinside. Easily a routine: you open the door as if my room is a box of invisible bodies you keep opening since you haven’t seen the invisible yet. You try a random name and still nobody appears. You go out from the room for a minute, for a day, beyond a day’s day right outside the door, your back against the door, then against the burned wall, then you imagine there is no wall, but you, with many questions all founded in houses of longing, can’t fall down. How can you be this so much strong?

Meanwhile, many shadows approaching the room we thought was not just a room, they’re a number significant to restore the view where we said and heard nice things, but it’s a day everyone is running late. There are a lot of reasons to look, some even more vigilant than a technique of finding a virus, but there’s just nothing to see.

Hosmillo | 31 Back to Table of Contents Dices of Sadness Rolling All the Time| B.B.P. Hosmillo

Or, clash brother, the mewling dog, the burst of what I am and I am amplifying since your arm is a long ax and my neck is a breaking glass and this world wants a breaking glass and more of you. Waves like strong impulses make it blue, the scary Pacific ocean, and its temperature—that’s what I make. A fever through which I stick out my own tongue, a symptom of being useful that can only go as far as inside me. The man you left alone and miserable is now many parts of ambiguity as though to say my seed is more fertile than yours that it can either be juice of pain or disbelief in imprisonment or pleasure in being unacceptable or the secret happiness of having a secret wound you once tasted or other otherness you are still looking for. I needed a personal fantasy to do this. I told you, O my only friend love ought to have an agenda of recollection, if not history, beautiful wishes that happen all the time by not happening. I told my obedience, chief wrath and other hostile braveries to be a stranger, pee on a scratch paper and never say it’s my face. And now it’s become a common fantasy, look, it’s a dream boy whose existence is the very capability of our sadness, of our tiredness, of us when told love is a beauty to die for. Pain-normative, now easy to be sick when waiting for the world to finish a litany. Now embodied conflict. Now my ancestors demanding comfort. Now a wedding you have not attended. I’m a marriage that can’t be official. Can’t be an effect of agreement. Didn’t you master the hole you use to see your own body? Didn’t you know why it’s getting bigger? I’ve been living inside you and you hate what’s inside you. Been walking through my own submission, this sympathy for erosion, the way a hungry bird prays, sees eyes of a dead bird as cherries. There is food here and it can’t be eaten. There’s someone eating here and it’s not me and if it’s you, why are you poured out. I ask how possible is it, how real is its truth to have something approved, something delicious where your bowl that is my indefectible skull is but where health pretends your dead appetite is good for another day? The mewling, the burst, the blue, all complicit to separation, a split between You can always reject me and I can’t get rejected. It isn’t enough to split unfortunately. Hosmillo | 32 It isn’t enough to have a wound, an archive coughing out chords and strings, sweet memories, your old good hands trying to be a feeling, trying to die. What hurts can’t make you a better torso, not even a guitar, but I sing and my shadow only seen by a telescope starts dancing. Who would’ve thought in my isolation, a gnarled centerpiece left by a boat, fire in the middle of this outstretched night, there could be dancing? The dancing goes fast, a probe into my own energy, a surviving victim four decades after some conflict. And then what? Still the conflict, a colonizer lunging at me with spears. Because the promise of conflict is to stay if the heart is changed by it. And I sing again because I still can. My voice a medium of liberation and thwack bouncing back. Dear clash brother, this dog I’ve become, in spite of its mewling, is a beast, a beatitude even. You are hurt and I am hurt and this dark world in which my existence is lost is the remaining colony where you have to breathe.

“Shame-Anxiety” by Haechang Sun Hosmillo | 33 Back to Table of Contents A Certain Sense of Kindness| B.B.P. Hosmillo

Without you, I age quickly. I age in front of a mirror, even in photographs. At times when I need a better form, only the wrong chisel there is to find, this equipment of remembering: how carving you has become a talent of sadness, how human hands fag for this nobility of creating chaos, persisting only beyond actuality and so the farthest conundrum but one that slowly tears down a quiet house in my mind. The last time I consulted a psychiatrist I was told naturally the mind won’t hold a quiet house for long especially if you were not born there.

•

Between my thumb and another finger is a white pill. I think of this as a star, white star and I swallow it. Between my thumb and another finger is another star. I think a miracle is going to happen and I can already see it. Between what’s not happening and what I see is a star that looks unhappy and scared and so I take my mouth back from the future’s cold ass only to swallow it. Isn’t that right? You were unhappy and scared that’s why I had to swallow you and didn’t you say I got warmer, inside my body little lights that didn’t shine. That’s love, isn’tit? The presence of stars within. You heard this at sleep and I placed your hand above my scorching belly, how inside me things were dead.

•

I’ve put myself in danger finds a place without you, finds what isleft still devoted that it remains lying down, which already seems a fascinating story but no professional writer is yet awake to author it— if implausible to be written, perhaps all this could not be erased: the body of an animal being the scope of tortured defiance, slowly beating, insects crawling above it aware that silently it’s screaming life but only to take it back like a myth, or the other half of a myth— How unproblematic to describe this animal as both “nearly alive”and “almost dead,” which is why this kind of being is problematic. From its own blood, a statement, perhaps final, emerges. How out of stench, there is more to know: something in this body is not of animal and something in this animal is not of body. It is not standing, but it is standing. It is not running, but it is running. It is not doing anything, but you’re changing even if you have no idea.

• Hosmillo | 34 Not too long and however separated we come to the last paragraph of our fall in which we excuse, almost deliberately absent ourselves. For we must remember not only the collapse. For being human has ended a long time ago. You can’t say anything anymore and I believe it’d be too much to talk about that, how often you’re misquoted and how often I’m the quote and how often we’re a grammatical error, summarily removed from good speech. There used to be a word that invited us for a twin elegy, there was a letter in this word repeated in the complete name of desire, and there was which this word could not say that pulled my hair from behind to the point that I felt my scalp was bleeding, it was very uncontrollable like the want to be with you. How evil was that day! Not only that: how it was a house: I and filth inside, that filth you used to kiss me with, that filth always a bird on my head, forcing a chirp on a dayyou were most necessary, vomiting all inside its afflictive stomach in a way I could see and never deny that everything of you came back but without you. That put me to place, didn’t it? A preposition, without you, a sadistic parameter, it meant to occupy nothing of earth, more compelling than memory of the wrong, perhaps what gives the wrong its own linguistic atlas.

•

A dialect asks why love is a mute word and here where my eyes are open for some sixty days you build a door to where you don’t need to observe silence and this place used to be at the back of my head and now beside you as a trained fire. The great problem with love, and so too its beauty, is its discipline gives destruction no limitation at all, not even a premise as to why your blood is kerosene, and so inescapably, death succeeds to being unquestionable. This is quite simply a logical operation, but who needs this now? Not too far a mound of soil, bring the shadow of looting, how it’s unconvinced we lost everything, how it belongs to everyone, those we could suffer again and again if given even little worth. See and see and see, the dead don’t lie: hundred statues of the same people, the same hurt, all haloed with ancient fireflies, all illuminating but heatless into our hearts. We could only be honest and we could say all of you are safe inside us but that we could only be the jail in a story that extinguishes the human it tells. Yet how true: all are safe inside us.

Hosmillo | 35 Back to Table of Contents Suicide is Next to You| B.B.P. Hosmillo

And what’s the point of ignoring an honest heart? Doubt not St. Augustine asked this once, discussing gene- alogy of the confessing animal. Some indications of suffering came before that, but when I conceded I was a wrong sentence, a kind of severe punishment and I couldn’t take you out of my body, even the body with-in me, that you may have been the subject of my life, didn’t you mean I could go on fine with this when you left but never in dreams? That when I close my eyes the collapse speaks again courageously show the world your dream boy, a stunning subject. Do you think I can always do that? Visit a ghost town and pluck a man there, kiss him and open my eyes and never be afraid. • If I say I’m done, I mean how you’re so dead to serve me. This is followed by these things will not change and the things you did follow, too. Imagined plants to water, unreal trees to uproot, hotel and hotel and hotel and I don’t know how else to pay my misery, which is an eternal fact about my body— O this shit again. When I say I’ve gotten so sick, poisoned, I mean I ate my own flesh. Obviously you follow to see whether I’m completely gnawed, bodiless, depleted like the legacy of sharing another useless dream, which is a voice and has many addictive things to say. Here you listen as I stop saying this and this and this. It’s ungainly endless and you still prying in the bathroom mirror, or there where I wash my hands and let go of them, even here, now, with the moon out, saying and in fact waiting for an answer why can’t you stop listening, which is a comfortless remark of your being within, a rapscallion whose name is my name, whose appetite my need, a self definitively brought muddled to dwell in me, absent within. O animal, how you can’t be something else other than me! •

Hosmillo | 36 I came to every prayer this week a year late. In front of many angels, I showed my hands, both charged by afterlife like they’re the last

two leaves of some preposterous tree. One angel claimed my hands are self-immolation. Others wept. Some others retaliated, pointed

out the lack of evidence—no fire, no body, no witness—saying there’s no basis to quit our job. The rest couldn’t see my hands, they’re the landscape

after burning. All of them agreed my hands and suicide are related, but they couldn’t agree whether what I did was right.

“Runners 2” by Ellen Mueller Hosmillo | 37 Back to Table of Contents But Do Not Fear Your Hands| B.B.P. Hosmillo

A replica of man dented by the crowd of its own craftsmanship, limit of representation obvious only when you say this man has tried so much to stay, it could no longer force himself. A subtle touch would flake off his powdery skin, his version of concreteness. It was once brown, then yellow, and then white as if staying like a man means getting soaked in acidic water. And who knows if white is the final falling apart? No longer a piece of solid wood but thin strips strangely put together. No longer coherent. No longer an inspirational message of other life. To you some meanings are still clear, but this work holds nothing, loses the ghost it’s supposed to keep. What kind of shame does it bear? This is a question of form when form once had promise. And now, how it shows more of incredible eruption—yes, there is still a chance of earnestness: you could say looking at a body away from itself is nonetheless a blessing of our eyes even when such body is a violin with its “f” hole smashed, its chinrest utterly incompatible to human jaw, that even when this instrument whose fingerboard time severed and threw away where nobody knows how to use it you could still say this might give a better music and longer regret, and in spite of that vulnerability, now, as joy’s got a sound of outrage, it is still irrefutably joy you could say, but all this is only a testament as to how being a replica of man is being the susceptibility to fracture and nothing else. This will never be obscured. Will never increase the intelligence of any god. You made it alone, your desire guided by faithful detachment from everything real, your body, your ache— O how you never saw this coming, the face of your replica declines the face you chose and the upright position held for the isolated years you cherished gone. It must have found a better space among every living being that left you behind is a deep long breath to let go as you are here with dices of sadness rolling all the time, here in one part of this wonderful world that still could not exist. Hosmillo | 38 What is determined to happen next will tell you first that it will never happen, taking the love you did not have, could not have as the love you are alive to build.

“Janson Says 2” by Ellen Mueller Hosmillo | 39 Back to Table of Contents Discipline & Pleasure Between the Sheets: Queering Academic Discourse | Flint

his is an academic paper and will be readily identified as such by those who read such papers with the regularity warranted by their professional pursuits and personal predilections. Schol- ars and other academics, for instance, will unproblematically recognize the academicity of this T 1 paper because it meets—one might suggest exceeds—The Standards of Academic Recognizability es- tablished, and then codified, by the Academy to signify that one is in the presence of a work of recog- nizable academic intent; which is not to say that the academic content of the paper is representative of a noteworthy, trustworthy, or valid entry into the discourse of the discipline with whom its author purports to be engaging, let alone a meritorious contribution, no matter that the contents-in-question; which, as has been mentioned afore, may indeed be questionable, provided said contents-in-question are acceptably emboweled within the regulatory anatomy of the page as delimited by its marginal/ ized corsetry, accepting, as one must in matters subjected to an oversight the nature of which is not only synergistically but also conterminously codified and institutional, that the mere suggestion of excess is irreducibly hyperbolic and, perhaps, indicative of the questionability of the contents-in-question, regardless of authorial intent. Readers unfamiliar with The Standards of Academic Recognizabil- ity—an unfamiliarity unfamiliar to the familiar reader—will doubtless be adrift in a stormy textual sea, hopefully casting their net of doubt, and doubtfully netting more than the most meager yield, forced to jettison all hope of comprehension, the flotsam of conceptual jetsam bobbing and knocking against their little boat before sinking from sight. The indulgence of the familiar reader is begged, as an overview of the Standards is presented to foreclose the prospect of a titanically unfortunate textual experience for the unfamiliar reader.

I. Uniform Appearance of Impaginated Text

In order for a scholarly work to meet the Standards of Academic Recognizability (henceforth, “The Standards”), the impaginated rendering of the work must, first and foremost, display a well-dis- ciplined visual uniformity. The formal containment and constraint of typed, double-spaced text erect- ed as properly indented paragraphs of considerable density and length within 1” margins (a spatial circumscription that obviates the need to measure, and therefore regulate, paragraphical girth) clearly demonstrates, in regards to the body of the text, an enviable Kristevan cleanliness and propriety, a neat-n-tidy and oh-so-appealingly hygienic text—text that is hygienic to the point of near-sterility, and this orderliness of text suggests a concomitant regimentation and orderliness of thought, exemplified by the myriad qualifiers and multiplicitous qualifying phrases divided and subdivided in strict accordance with the ordering principle of, for example, Russian nesting dolls. In the interest of minimizing readers’ potential collegial embarrassment, I’ve also included:

1 These Standards are applicable to only those authors and texts working at the highest disciplinary and hierarchical rung of the academic ladder. Recognizability, refers, of course, to the awareness that something perceived has been, in fact, perceived before, and is connotatively situated at the intersection of cognition and perception, or, more clearly, and certainly succinctly, recognizability is the repeated encounter of iterance at the site of pre- then post-thunk thoughts.

Flint | 40 A Bullet-Pointed Checklist of Textual Shenanigans & Offenses to Avoid • No funky fonts. (In some circles, sans serif is an error as egregious as Wingdings.) • No doodling in the margins. • No uncrossed t’s or heart-dotted i’s. • No cutesy phrasing. • No gutter talk in the footer. • No breaking into song, even if you are an ethnomusicologist studying the radical transformation of the non-schizoidal glossolalia of the Appalachian Ozark (1908-12) wrought by the the introduction of the syncopathic patterning of the gutteral utternance. • And, shudder though one may to imagine otherwise: black ink; white paper.

II. Standardized Punctuation

O! Beware the excitable exclamation mark, for only the foolhardy or the foolish are seduced by her charms, period.

III. Authorial Objectivity

As per The Standards, the scholarly voice is an “There is nothing personal about objective voice. A rational voice with a well-reasoned academia; there is no person, no rationale for presenting the cogent analytic proposition at hand. A voice that studiously avoids the imper- ‘I,’ no ‘you,’ nobody in the text, tinence, if not outright violence, of subjectifying either no body in the text...” author or reader to the personal violation of direct address. There is nothing personal about academia; there is no person, no “I,” no “you,” nobody in the text, no body in the text, unless it is, as Solnit reminds us, the “passive object [of the postmodern body]…laid out upon the examining table.2” This displacement, this distancing of and from the physical materiality and corporeity of the body, is abso- lutely imperative—categorically imperative even (even as I implore you, Dear Reader, to leave Kant and his categorical imperatives beyond the margins of our efforts)—for embodiment is an almost un- bearably risky proposition. Literally. Think of the various bodies conjured into purgatorial beingness by critical theories of subjectivity, bodies hovering between the literal and literality. There is: the body of the text. There is: the body of theory (borne of the disciplinary body). There is: the body-in-theory. There is: the body, in theory. There is: the body of the author. There is: the authorial body of work. The imbrication and implication of author with theory with body is absolute, impossible to escape, a matter of life, of breath, a matter of desire, and of death.

Which is some seriously heavy shit to haul around from one end of a text to the other.

Hence, the imposition of The Standard of Authorial Objectivity.

2 Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print. Flint | 41 Authorial objectivity is a safety valve, the escape hatch through which one may wriggle and plunge one’s way, Alice-like, from one theoretical wonderland through another, recognizing, dis-recognizing, and unrecognizing oneself in the trick mirror world of subjective textuality. One simply need look at the trouble the French intellectual elite brought upon themselves with their oo la la gendered language, their il and their elle frolicking about the page unsupervised and having the unpro- tected sort of discourse that led to the birth of écriture feminine. (Yes, the Americans have their “outré” transitive and intransitive verbs, but the quickest flip of their petticoats evealsr that—the question of the direct or indirectness of an object notwithstanding—these verbs are actively, directly, objectifiably, really fucking boring.) Suddenly, the phallologocentric governance of French intellectual discourse, and its reliance on the legislative authorial presumptions of patriarchal language with its laws of linear connectivity and cause-n-effect, and its enchantments with temporality, is interrupted, ha!, by Cix- ous’ The Laugh of the Medusa. Suddenly Irigaray, Wittig, Kristeva, Lispector and oh-so-many others are writing the female body into the text, writing the female body as the text, writing themselves, female, embodied, bodily female, and textually bodied. Suddenly these French feminists are merrily leaping from Point A to Point Q(ueer) to Point Zed to goddess-knows-where-else in a contradictory, contrari- an, (dis)connect-the-dots zeal to manifest novel, albeit non-narrative, theoretical spatial constellations, with nary a whistle-stop betwixt or between.

How is one to interpret and process the perkiness of the intellectual content/context of the scholarly work when the text itself has suddenly sprouted breasts, and the breasts written therein may or may not be those inscribed by the author herself? How are you to know, Dear Reader, if the author has pressed the text, like a letter to a lover, with her scent, or if this is a whiff of chicanery perfuming the page? How will you puzzle out whether the author is flexing her tightly-honed intellect, or just flirting with you? Is she glossing her lips or glozing her argument with a swipe of glitter polish and the shimmer of her sparkling wit? Obviously, the question of miniskirts can no longer be avoided, nor the scotomatous blindering to the (f)utility of her cogent analytic propositioning effected as it is by the batting of her long-lashed lids, and you are wise, Dear Reader, to wonder if this is mere authorial coquetry employed as distraction or a means of persuasion.

This simply will not do.

This sort of rank subjectivism is in clear violation of The Standards, and has no place in scholarly writing. Better to remove the subjective body from the text altogether, and thereby ensure that the author is not preoccupied with worry that this theory makes her ass look fat. Better to clinically hoist the sociocultural conceptual body onto a steely, sterile gurney and clinically slice it open from throat to groin with the keen clinical edge of a keenly critical intellect. Better that the work of theorizing be as bloodless as an autopsy, for if the author brings her body into the text, she is no longer simply the keenly critical intellect operating with surgical precision, but is also the body on the gurney await- ing dissection and possible flaying. Better to bypass the pesky ethical demand that anesthesia be administered to a living organism before drawing the blade across even the most hidebound authorial abstractions by maintaining the strict authorial objectivity of The Standards (if only to avoid the inevitable, and altogether unfortunate, squirming and shrieking—honestly, who can concentrate with all that clamor?)

Flint | 42 IV. Subject Matter of Disciplinary Significance

In accordance with The Standards, unless one is interrogating the imagined/imaginary histo- riography of visual appearance (or dis-, as the case may be) and the lingering effects of invisiblifica- tion upon the intersubjectivity of subpopulations self-identifying as faeries within a mythic tale, one would do well to avoid the topic of unicorns.

V. Cogent Analytic Proposition

You cannot keep your Dear Reader in the dark about your academic intentions and go winsomely faffing about for six full pages before laying a firm theoretical foundation, explaining the methodolo- gies you intend to employ or ignore, providing a statement of scope and outlining what your cogent analytic proposition will and will not attempt to accomplish, and still expect your authorial efforts to fall under the aegis of The Standards. So let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

Upon second reading of Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, I totally crushed out. Upon first reading, my comprehen- “...one would do well to sion was somewhat dimmed. I understood, of course, all of the words in that exquisitely unwieldy tome, on a word-by avoid the topic of unicorns.” word basis—it was the meaning of those words, strung together into sentences and from there to paragraphs to pages in that particularly Foucaldian way that Foucault likes to write, that I didn’t get the gist of right off the bat. But when my instructor shared the fact that he’d had the pleasure of anally fisting our dear Michel in the now-defunct debauch-a-torium of San Francisco’s infamous Catacombs—info that was shared, I can assure you, in a context-specific moment and manner that advanced our understanding of power/knowledge and Foucault’s theoretical stance positing “the examination” as disciplinary power exercised as a combination of hierarchical observation and the peer-to-peer effects of normaliz- ing judgment, and presented in clear alignment with the course objectives outlined in our syllabus—I knew I needed to lubricate my curiosity and bend myself over the cracked spine of Discipline & Pun- ish until I’d burrowed into Foucault as deep as I could.

If I had to synthesize and compress all the incredible shit I discovered in my time spent elbow deep in Foucault’s inner sanctum—and time constraints dictate that I do just that—I’d say that, at its heart, Discipline & Punish teaches us what we, all of us, already know: which is that we are under the constant threat of punishment for non-conformance by failing to follow a system of narrow, rigid protocols designed to ensure our continued acceptance/inclusion in the Academy, and for me—and Dear Reader, for you, too—this threat shows up in both the capital “D” Discipline of our “transgressive” field of study, as well as the little “d” discipline of our daily efforts to huff and puff in the hopes of blowing our defensively patriarchal academic house down, whilst simultaneously building a new house, a queer house, a transnormative, feminist, anti-colonialist house of color and merry gender-fuckery.

We know the threat of non-conformance in our blood and our bones.

Flint | 43 But what about discipline & pleasure? The pleasure of not conforming, of refusing to conform? The pleasure of encounters with critical theory that show us who we are and who we quite decidedly are not? The pleasure of troubling gender ala Judith Butler, or the sexy thrill of coming upon the concept of the “socially apprehensible citizen,” a deliciously fraught term coined by revered academic icono- clast and trans*fabulous Sandy Stone? What about the pleasure of fighting the good fight, the purpled bruise now yellow and healing?

For this author, that pleasure takes the form of performative writing. Writing that is academical- ly rigorous, athletic, and difficult. Writing that is joyfully queer and unapologetically transgressive. Writing that knows when to kneel and present its neck for the collar, and when to slip both collar and leash three blocks into a very long walk. Writing that rubs up against an intellectual conundrum, rubs up against our own confoundment, that straddles the threshold of in/comprehensibility as we navigate the delicate tension right there at the edge of understanding; writing that gets closer and closer and teeteringly closer, until you are, until I am, yes, almost there, almost yes, there, until we are there, yes, yes, there.

VI. Teleological Aim

The Standards require that the struc- turing logos of an academic work, as well as its functioning logic, behaves as a telos, a focused propulsion toward an identifiable end-in-sight. The propulsive thrust of the teleological aim minimizes the risk of the author staring at the sky in the hope of seeing a hawk floating in the thin air of rarified critical theorizing, and maundering off into a thicket of tangen- tiality, lost in Mary Daly-esque A-maze- ment, for lest she wishes to suffer the threat of losing her standing in the scholarly symbolic order, the author must stay the course of the discourse, of course.

VII. Conclusive Conclusion

This text, this author, is, theoretically, vertiginous with desire.

(Did you see that hawk? It just flew over our heads.)

“Yellow and Blue” by Derick Smith Back to Table of Contents Flint | 44 “Runners 3” by Ellen Mueller

“Runners 4” by Ellen Mueller Mueller| 45 Back to Table of Contents oneiromancy | Sean Patrick Mulroy

winged horse, a man. gladiator? man. fire, home invasion, my own face, frozen in shock, a javelin thrust through my side? a man. always. now, a man. though I have not always fought my heartbreak with diplomacy. I am president of my body now. I court the foreign powers. I see a man, and dream another set of gasping angles, heart throb, dream another set of gasping sighs to drink a tall and strong one, numb and dumb as bourbon poured into an open wound.

an open wound? a man. a glass of water in the desert? man. a wedding party, gunned down by an automatic weapon? romance. my father. my childhood. my life. the end of it—a man.

Back to Table of Contents Mulroy | 46 I hit my head so hard, the words fell out | Sean Patrick Mulroy

Here is where the breathing world, entangled and perspiring, bleeds into the ground.

Weeping cherry tree, my forehead burst with letters etched in red on falling petals. Paragraphs exploding from a windswept branch.

Here, the hex is drawn in blood across the sidewalk.

Accidental death will spiral through your family.

And family, a swarm of raging stanzas horneting the eaves of every house in which you’ve lived.

Your life so far, a migraine echo. Marriage like a milk gone sour.

Careful, you. See how easily we break? Precarious, what carries us. The skull a chalice, balanced on our clumsy shoulders. Tongue a spout that spills out everything we are.

Mulroy | 47 Back to Table of Contents kursk| Sean Patrick Mulroy

The boys are still inside me, white navy caps float through my gut, a fleet of sleeping pills. I’m a kissing fish, confused. The swallowed captain, nodding in his uniform. The pearls of air that dribble from his lips. The clouds of red.

Metal bullet full of bodies. I am this: a waterlogged balloon of lead. I aim towards the bottom. I fly through the under dark. I am weighed down by design and undone by my own weapons.

I want to tuck the sailors into bed. I want to let them rest, but you keep kicking at their names until everyone is crying.

Can you hold me down here, down where I belong? Can you hurt me in the ways I need most to be hurt? Can you be the fist that most resembles my own heart? A man, drowned, beating on the walls from the inside. A furious bird with claws of shredded bone.

Back to Table of Contents Mulroy | 48 We are Here to Resist Your Orientalist Gaze: Examining the Corrective Queer Poetics of Darkmatter’s Spoken Word Poetry |Rita Mookerjee

raveling from coffee shops to universities across the nation, the spoken word poet duo known as Darkmatter (sometimes written DARKMATTER, DarkMatter, or Dark Matter) carries with them fiery messages of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and all out evolution.r Together, South T 1 Asian trans artists Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon take up the microphone and the pen, working in the mediums of written and spoken word poetry, prose, and essays. Though both members are very outspoken on their personal social media pages and blogs, they are at their most formidable during live performances. Refusing to fulfill any kind of visual expectation, they take the stage decked out in everything from the quasi-preppy staples of a graduate student to edgy 1980s-inspired designs in bold graphic prints. Sometimes they present themselves in a casual manner, wearing sweaters and trousers; other occasions call for bold black lipstick and androgynous statement pieces. Regardless of their appearances, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon deliver spoken word poems that resonate with explosiveness, confrontation, and utter fury. Most of the poems are between three and five minutes long; the artists recite from memory, sometimes gesticulating or coordinating movements, other times remaining still, using just their hands and voices to tell the story. While the exact nature of Darkmatter performance tactics varies, one constant is their biting social commentary and willingness to bring their audiences well out of their comfort zones. Take for example this selection from Balasubramanian’s solo piece “Trans/national”: When I tell my mother how long I have been sitting with the shiftiness of a female body, she cries, like a million dif ferent kinds of monsoon tears. She tells me about the white men who colonized her land, her nightmares her mother’s saris soaked in salt water, the traumas she screamed about. And this, this is the face I remember when I speak to white trans men and witness the million different ways they take up space in my community and speak for trans women of color and treat femmes as arm candy and do not own their position as white men. Brothers, what I mean is did you think the “M” in “FTM” stood for misogyny, what I mean is, what about your female socialization did you think gave you a free pass at patriarchy, what I mean is I understand that your bodies have not always been yours but they have always been beautiful.

Balasubramanian does not deliver this poem with the gasping, rat-a-tat cadence often seen in spoken word performances; rather, the delivery feels like a dramatic monologue and even more so like an earnest confession colored with outrage. As the tone of the poem shifts from sadness to anger, Balasubramanian’s words become heavier and their speech slows; they take pauses to articulate the “call-out,” or the moment in the poem where the speaker confronts a specific party or individual in order to draw attention to forms of bias, oppression, and hypocrisy. The call-out is central in understanding what I refer to as “queer corrective poetics,” which is the hallmark of Darkmatter’s project. I seek to define this intrinsically interrogative property of the duo’s work that champions the visibility and audibility of queer and trans people of color. I find this noteworthy because Darkmatter refuses to blindly ally themselves with queer America or with South Asian-Americans for the sake of community-building. Instead they confront both groups (as well as heterosexual white America), thus exemplifying a particular brand of self-assertion that queer people of color sometimes abandon in the

1 Vaid-Menon self-identifies as a brown femme as well as trans and asexual on their blog returnthegayze.com. Balasubra- manian also self-identifies as trans. Mookerjee | 49 interest of creating “solidarity.” In listening to Darkmatter performances, it quickly becomes evident that Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon are bringing forth a new generation of transnational queerness that is highly aggressive and unrepentant.

Darkmatter is self-described as a “trans South Asian art and activist collaboration” (“About”). On their group website Darkmatter Rage, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon explain that they met as undergraduate students at Stanford University. The two initially did not get along as a product of what they term “peacock syndrome,” which occurs when “you meet someone who shares all of your fringe identities, all the ways you grew up thinking you were ‘unique’ and instead of loving them you get defensive and competitive” (“Background”). Eventually, the pair began creating poetry together. It was then that they realized how intricately they were connected in terms of their personal backgrounds, lived experiences, and traumas. Once they entered the slam poetry community, they were struck by the dearth of South Asian performers. As a result, they decided to launch a poetry tour together. In 2013, the pair traveled on buses across New England to different universities connecting with other queer/trans people and people of color2. This tour was the impetus for their collaboration; Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon graduated from Stanford and moved to New York in order to pursue their art. They have performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, dozens of events like the Asian American Pacific Islander Literary and Performance Arts Festival, as well as universities all over the country and overseas. They are currently touring and are available for readings, shows, and workshops. Past examples include “Brown Girlz Do it Well: a Queer Diaspora Remix” that discussed issues of the diasporic community, family, and activism. Another Darkmatter workshop, “The Revo- lution Will Not Have a Bibliography: Student Activism In The Corporate University,” addressed the repressive nature of the academic industrial complex as well as strategies for affecting change. Their current performance entitled “#ItGetsBitter” considers the implicit whiteness of mainstream LGBTQ movements and envisions new spaces for QTPOC.

Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon felt that their “names would be too long to fit on a flyer together” and so they ad- “This acts as a metaphor opted the moniker “Darkmatter” (“Background”). In their Blue- stockings Magazine interview, they discuss the meaning behind for racism, homophobia, their group name Darkmatter: it refers to “a mass that does not imperialism, etc...” respond to the whiteness of light, leading to its refraction or dissolution … endlessly expanding the universe until its rupture” (Darkmatter, “Interview”). In a Q&A session at Princeton University in 2013, Balasubramanian explains that dark matter constitutes 96% of the universe, but it cannot be seen; it is only understood through its effects (Daily Princetonian). This acts as a metaphor for racism, homophobia, imperialism, etc., and the subsequent backlash against such forms of discrimination and oppression. As such, the duo creates art in order to elucidate social issues that have been effaced and to name feelings that otherwise go unseen. As a term that evokes outer space, dark matter speaks to how the artists feel the need to journey into uncharted territory to arrive at a new, brown, queer discourse. Balasubramanian explains during the Q&A, “I’m going to space. The earth has been fully mapped in all these geographies and histories of violence…. I’m over it and I’m really exhausted so I’m going to get my crew

2 From this point on, I will abbreviate “queer and trans people of color” as “QTPOC.” It is important to note, however, that Darkmatter also allies themselves with cisgendered, heterosexual women of color since they see women of color as subject to the same systems of oppression. Mookerjee | 50 and go into space.” To contrast, Vaid-Menon jokes that they have one leg on the proverbial spaceship and one leg on the ground, hoping to “find and make effective relationships with sites of power” before departing entirely from the discursive structures already at play. While the two do not see their project as enacted on the same planes, it is evident that the invocation of dark matter brings to mind a sense of boundlessness, an all-encompassing force greater than the institution, the nation, or the globe. Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon understand community building as an essential component of their brand of art-activism. Vaid-Menon states that the crusade for “gay rights” usually serves to empower the white, masculine, middle class (Darkmatter, “Interview”). They argue that the only way to affect real social change is to avoid becoming a monolith of queerness. They are concerned with ideas of gender and sexuality as well as trauma, nationalism, monolingualism, and privilege, and constantly engage with these concepts in their work.

As previously stated, I locate queer corrective poetics at the “‘The earth has been marrow of Darkmatter’s spoken word art. The function of this poetic mode is to negotiate new discursive spaces for queer/trans fully mapped in all people and people of color, while criticizing groups that perpetu- these geographies ate systems of marginalization, especially those who claim to ally themselves with QTPOC. Queer corrective poetics is confrontational, and histories of parodic, self-aware, unapologetic, and didactic. I will unpack these violence….’” individual qualities as they appear in Darkmatter’s work in order to show their importance and interconnectivity.

Confrontational

I briefly introduced the call-out as a discursive tool in Darkmatter’s poetry, but it plays a crucial function in their performances. While Darkmatter certainly strives to educate the public about issues involving and surrounding QTPOC (more on this later), they do not have any qualms about singling out parties who they take issue with. More importantly, they do not invite the dominant culture to partake in systems of community building. Darkmatter owns their anger toward white patriarchy as well as queer white groups that they feel exhibit complacency with the system and consistently mi- noritize QTPOC. I have found that dialogues regarding queer/gay rights often become preoccupied with raising visibility; Darkmatter pushes past this concept and makes it clear that they are not interested in simply being seen. Of course, Darkmatter sometimes uses visual elements of clothing and makeup to blur their gender identities. As I stated earlier, doing one performance in dresses and com- bat boots, and another in sweaters and brogues, demonstrates a visual code-switching. Balasubrama- nian and Vaid-Menon use their physical appearances to destabilize the concepts of gender, thereby confronting audience expectations of who they are and how they will be read.

The property of confrontation is also important in understanding their medium of spoken word. The best way to demonstrate how this works is through the concept of interpellation as defined by Louis Althusser. Darkmatter’s poetry shows how the “Hey, you!” that hails queer and trans people of color (particularly South Asians in this context) often serves to homogenize their experiences and exoticize their racial identities, even when done in ostensibly good faith (Althusser 174). Darkmatter uses their art to not only respond to these interpellations, but also to shout back (via the aforemen-

Mookerjee | 51 tioned call-out) and to call forth the QTPOC who have been made invisible and inaudi- ble.

Parodic

Often, Darkmatter will incorrectly interpellate subjects in their poetry through name-calling and mimicry. On the surface this parody functions as a humorous rhetorical device, but it also reveals exactly how reductive such systems are and why those guilty parties should end their fetishizing, marginalizing practices. Darkmatter’s irrev- erence is what makes their poetry so explo- sive. Also, Darkmatter makes use of recog- nizable discursive structures, such as the confession, as well as devices like sarcasm and hyperbole. Though the poem “White Fetish” begins with the phrase “I have a confession,” the piece is laden with irony and deployed as parody. In other words, setting up a false confession is a re-imagination of the ritual. Darkmatter re-appro- priates the practice of the confession and tailors it to their message as a way of seizing “Tesseractory Factory: Space Madness” by C.J. Hungerman audience attention and challenging expectations. This device is successful because when it becomes clear that the confession in question is in fact a laundry list of faults (in this case, on the part of white liberal gays), the audience laughs. Other instances of parody can be seen in Darkmatter performances through the use of mimicry; the duo sometimes adopts a certain voice or a highly legible body language (take the white liberal feminist in “White Fetish”) so that there is no room for interpretation in the call-out. Besides the White Liberal Gay, some of the characters that are mimicked include the Progressive White Feminist and the Fetishizing Philanthropist. Certain East Coast/West Coast tropes of queerness also come into play, such as discussions of Brooklyn and the Castro.

Darkmatter’s queer corrective strategies are specifically parodic, as opposed to mimetic. While they deal with serious subject material, the fact remains that Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon are live performance artists. Their ability to use levity is not only entertaining, but it also demonstrates a special dexterity with language and a good comprehension of performer/audience relations. In YouTube videos of the pair’s shows, lots of finger snapping and murmurs of agreement can be heard when strong points are made. By including poems with both somber and comedic tones, Darkmatter keeps their audiences highly engaged. This is not to say that all art activism must use comedy to con- vey a message. Rather, I see humor as a productive tool in Darkmatter’s poetry in that it captures and retains audience attention.

Mookerjee | 52 Self-aware

Defining the self-awareness of a queer corrective poetics is fraught with tension because doing so highlights some of the ironies in Darkmatter’s work. Returning briefly to the idea of parody, Darkmatter’s deployment of certain acts of mimesis signals their familiarity with the groups they are mocking or criticizing. For example, in “Bollywood Divas,” Vaid-Menon acts as the Privileged White Liberal. In order to replicate the set of behaviors that would constitute that character, Vaid-Menon is, in fact, admitting to having been part of that character’s world in some shape or form. While they pursue their art full time in New York, there is no doubt that Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon benefit greatly from their Ivy League educations and their status as upper middle class people of color. Though the duo is quick to defame the academy and to locate universities as proponents of systems of oppression, many Darkmatter shows take place on college campuses and college-allied platforms like TED Talks3.

Darkmatter resists being associated with the academy in the same way that they resist being interpellated as American (I will discuss this resistance more in the context of José Esteban Muñoz’s work on disidentification). The members of Darkmatter do not self-identify asAmerican or South Asian American in their work or on their social media sites. They point to their Indian heritage much more often, especially in poems where they discuss the formation of gender identity. Yet, to my knowledge, the duo’s performances and essays are all in English. This certainly complicates Dark- matter’s status as an Anglophone performance duo, but it must be said that Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon are aware of the tensions in their work and positionality as educated trans people of South Asian descent. Their acknowledgment of their privilege and their choice to use English as a medium speak to the complicated nature of being a transnational subject. Darkmatter’s work is all about navigating bodies, cultures, languages, and spaces. As such, there are bound to be some knots and contradictions in their work. I maintain that the self-awareness of Darkmatter’s corrective poetics is a factor that distinguishes it from other confrontational forms of art activism. Despite their Stanford backgrounds, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon have divested themselves of careers as academics. While they have been a part of the white bourgeois world they rebuke, Darkmatter iterates the difference between being a member of that group and being a paying guest. Though Darkmatter is quick to provide a list of guilty parties in their poems, they do not figure themselves as exempt from the same sorts of accusations. They lay claim to their particular subjectivity as privileged brown trans people and try to use their status to affect change and seize agency.

Unapologetic

At the same time, the members of Darkmatter name their personal contradictions, but they do not try to qualify or soften their accusations and assertions about others. Though they strive to build centers of support for QTPOC via their blogs and Facebook pages, they are not in the habit of trying to change the minds of those they feel are complicit with systems of oppression. Instead they own their grievances and use their poems to stage the call-outs and the reprimands. They are not afraid to criticize queers who ignore or do not fully comprehend the systematic oppression of LGBTQ people, not just in the United States, but globally as well. Similarly, Darkmatter is judgmental of South Asians 3 Alok Vaid-Menon gave a TED Talks speech independent of Darkmatter. I mention this because it associates one member of Darkmatter with the popular lecture series, which is primarily geared toward academics. Mookerjee | 53 who live in America and benefit from a system that they feel prioritizes certain people of color over others without interrogating that system and calling for justice for all ethnic minorities4.

Didactic

While Darkmatter is interested in castigating white liberals, white complacent queers, complacent brown intellectuals, and so forth, they implicitly list “Do’s” as well as “Don’ts” in their poetry. In their series of call-outs, they are naming the behaviors and attitudes that shape systems of discrimination, fetishization, and appropriation. Darkmatter’s “Don’t’s” appear rather frequently and clearly in their poetry. They highlight the teaching moments in their poems through imperative language, increased voice volume, expletives, and sometimes comedy. In this way, the parodic property of queer corrective poetics is also linked to didacticism in a “this is funny because it is wrong” way. Darkmatter takes these moments a step further so that their didactic comedy can be summarized as “this is funny because it is wrong, and now I am going to tell you why.” It is important to note that the queer corrective poetics is not invitational; Darkmatter is not inviting the offenders to change their ways and enter the space they seek to negotiate for QTPOC as allies. They are figuratively convicting the offenders of their crimes and writing them citations so that they will not commit the same wrongdoings again.

The other side of the queer corrective poetics’ didactic coin is that it creates solidarity among QT- POC. Darkmatter does this while highlighting their distinct positionality as queer, trans South Asians so as not to be guilty of essentialism or homogenization. Darkmatter raises questions about issues within the trans/queer community such as gender conformity, misogyny on the part of trans men, and the exoticization of QTPOC. As the title of this essay suggests, Darkmatter seeks to defy and denounce popular and systematically accepted forms of oppression in order to dispel stereotypes and seize human rights.

Much of the queer corrective poetics is contingent upon the idea of disidentification as defined by José Esteban Muñoz. In Disidentifcations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz defines the term as a “survival strategy” wherein the queer subject identifies with something that was not meant to be identified with (Muñoz 5). According to Muñoz, the production of queer identity and discourse takes place within the liminal spaces between race and sexuality. Though Muñoz is talking about disidentification in the specific context of African American and Latino performance artists, I feel that many of the artistic motives outlined here are congruent with those of Darkmatter. Within minoritarian discourse, Muñoz positions disidentification within a “reconstructed narrative of identity formation that locates the enacting of self at precisely the point where the discourses of essentialism and constructivism short-circuit” (6). Disidentification is fluid in that it does not reproduce the ideology of the dominant culture, but it also does not diametrically oppose it. It functions as more of a bridge in and through the dominant culture such that both large scale and small scale instances of resistance and reparation are possible. I use the notion of a bridge because I want to capture an arc of possibilities and stress that disidentification and queer corrective poetics are about escaping binaries. Muñoz hones in on queer performance art and emphasizes the use of spectacle as a way of negotiat- ing a space for the queer subject to be seen and heard. Muñoz sees performance as a way to reclaim spaces that queer people often get “locked out” of (1). Disidentification gets enacted on multiple 4 While this is a racial issue rather than a gendered one, I see the two as linked because Darkmatter sees queer rights advocacy as an intrinsic part of decolonization, which factors into their poetic project on a grand scale. Mookerjee | 54 planes, much like the queer corrective poetics.

Much of Darkmatter’s poetry embodies minoritarian discourse that makes use of disidentification. Disidentification is beautifully exemplified by the poem “White Fetish,” performed by both Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon, wherein they mock their privileged, white, bourgeois peers: Like, I would love to cuddle in the ugliest sweaters with you and listen to David Sedaris and plan our future lives together. We can rent one apartment in Brooklyn and the other in the Mission and stare at the same Che-shaped constellations together at night time. I want you to pick me up on your way back from your unpaid internship. I want to jam in your Prius to your hip-hop. I want you to tell me more about your gap year. (Darkmatter, “White”)

Here, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon return the fetishizers’ gaze and mock the dominant culture’s norms. Another portion of “Fringe Science Director: Subject 19” the poem: “Once, a white woman asked me where I was from— by C.J. Hungerman no, where I was really from—then told me she was visiting In- dia with her non-profit that year, and I said, ‘Oh, tell me more. Oh take me with you’” (Darkmatter, “White”). This section captures the issue of being overtly labeled as an Other and misread by a member of the dominant culture. Here, the speaker is given an exotic-object position by the woman in the poem. Moments like this iterate the narcissism of white Westerners who adopt a savior complex and confuse their objectification of non-Western peoples with being cultured. Playing the White Liberal Philanthropist speaker, Balasubramanian pretends to be enraptured by this woman’s upcoming NPO trip to play into the woman’s assumption that her Western gaze represents an ultimate, altruistic truth. This performance of disidentification is simultaneously comical and correctional. It epitomiz- es the queer corrective poetics since Balasubramanian irreverently mimics the expected reaction to the superficial altruistic statement, and because it garners a lot of audience laughter. The fluidity of disidentification allows itself to be easily applied as a performance tactic and can be eadr through the lens of any of the five criteria of queer corrective poetics.

In order to show just how much these artistic strategies are departing from earlier discourses of queerness, I turn to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet as a starting point. In con- structing a queer corrective poetics, the vast majority of my research includes Sedgwick because this text recognizes such a myriad of queer5 issues and anticipates many of the questions seen in contemporary queer scholarship and in Darkmatter’s poetry. Consider the following stanza from one of Alok Vaid-Menon’s solo poems: we do not yet have a word to capture that initial sense of recognition: of a body becoming coherent to itself, an object becoming subject, brown becoming white. (Darkmatter, “When”)

5 I recognize that Sedgwick’s work predates the term “queer.” I use it to refer back to Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon since they self-identify as queer as opposed to “gay.” Mookerjee | 55 This excerpt not only points to the stakes of visibility and self-actualization, which constitutes the core of Darkmatter’s artistic project, but it also touches upon several of Sedgwick’s points regarding coming out and the whitewashing of LGBTQ discourse. Sedgwick notes the reductive properties of the hetero/homosexual binary and how it promotes gender separatism. The gay closet has prescribed a particular set of experiences for queer people and privileges certain groups over others. Sedgwick aptly reveals the white masculine bias of Western gay discourse and how it has been “inexhaustibly productive of Western modern culture and history at large” (69). She also notes how the gay closet functions as a distinct emblem of homophobia that is not mirrored in other forms of discrimination. Sedgwick argues that racism, religious intolerance, and ableism are based on “stigma[s] that [are] visible in all but exceptional cases” (75). In other words, the legibility of queerness remains unstable and for this reason, the closet is able to maintain its power. While it can be assumed that Darkmatter is invested in dismantling many forms of oppression and discrimination, Sedgwick’s points are crucial because they emphasize the unique stakes of the gay closet as a loaded symbol in the discursive imagination and how it operates on insidious terms.

Sedgwick’s text embodies the dialogue about visibility that is the hallmark of early modes of thinking about queerness. Darkmatter has departed from just being concerned with coming out of the closet. This is because coming out of the closet does not mean that the queer self will be seen. As such, visibility marks only the beginning of the actualization of the queer individual. Since Balasubramani- an and Vaid-Menon are grappling with being QTPOC, they have more to tackle than just the closet. There are multiple avenues they must navigate in order to be correctly interpellated as queer, trans, South Asian subjects.

While the gay closet is still a prevalent cultural construct and many queer people remain confined by its laws, there are other dominant notions of what queerness looks like in the present, namely in the context of race and class. In Dennis Altman’s “Rupture or Continuity? The Internalization of Gay Identities,” he illustrates how images of queer people are still largely informed by the nation’s middle class. In “On Drag” the speaker discusses how they must “pledge allegiance to the American fag” in order to participate in queer United States culture (Vaid-Menon, “On”). The overrepresentation of the white, middle class gay male promotes a consumerist agenda that disseminates Western modes of sexual and gendered identity in a single, non-negotiable image. The rhetoric of human rights advocacy organizations and HIV/AIDS groups is often laden with values of the West that do not particularly acknowledge or accommodate the queer diaspora or transnational queers. Muñoz also discusses this problem, what he terms as the “phenomenon of the queer is a white thing” (Muñoz 9). As such, many people, Darkmatter included, do not identify with the queer models put into play in the United States. This discomfort is explored in “A Breakup Letter to Stanford University.” A portion reads: Now you are twenty-one years old and your grandparents tell you that they cannot make it to your graduation but they swear that they are so proud of you you the dandelion seed somehow blown across the ocean and blooming into a brown man, receiving a degree from an elite university untying his noose and re-tying it as a bow tie. This—this is how you disguise a skin with a suit. This—this is how we have always been told to make brown beautiful. (Darkmatter, “Breakup”) Mookerjee | 56 Within the specific stage of the academy, Darkmatter makes it evident that they do not accept being absorbed into the elite white culture of the university. They argue that a larger, more oppres- sive force is at work there, one that seeks to control people of color. In Altman’s essay, he gestures to economics within the text to explain how globalization is just a cloak for capitalism; he examines the contemporary plight of queer people and the ostensible inescapability of capitalist imperialism, which is detailed in the poem. He concludes that homosexuality is in a constant state of “interroga- tion” and that tensions continue to exist between Western and non-Western queers regarding freedom of expression and legibility of sexual and gender identity (Altman 35).

It would be amiss to proceed without considering the important work of Gayatri Spivak regarding Third World (and diasporic) subjects and their positionality. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak examines the inherent problems of examining non-Western cultures through a Western gaze (in this case, through American modes of queer theory). She articulates that the dominant discourse “privilege[s] the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history,” and so the subaltern is often reduced to an object and the intricacies of his/her/their personhood are effaced (Spi- vak 76). As QTPOC, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon are doubly Othered and reduced, so they constantly have to find spaces to inhabit within discourse that allow them to speak as both subalterns and as queer trans people. Synthesizing these subject positions is always a point of tension in their work, especially in the context of private family life versus public life, traditional views versus modernity, Indian gender norms versus Western norms, etc. In particular, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon grapple with their status as Anglophone poets and, to some extent, lament the choice to use English as a medium. They have several poems that focus upon the insufficiencies of using English as a queer, brown, poetic medium. Returning to Vaid-Menon’s “When Brown Looks in the Mirror and Comes Out White,” the seventh stanza reads: we do not yet have a word in the english language capable of accounting for all of the hurt hurt people do because this is not what english is for. you see english is for hurting. english has no words to discuss itself because then maybe it would have to stop speaking.

This piece is concerned with affect and gestures to the violence of colonialism via the spread of the English language. It depicts the limitations of the subaltern subject and how language operates as a mechanism of control, deploying the confrontation tinged with the didactic. Spivak makes it clear that gender and sexual difference further complicate the subaltern’s voice. This is illustrated through her discussion of the abolition of sati (ritualized widow sacrifice), which was “generally understood as a case of ‘White men saving brown women from brown men.’” Again, this brings up a critique of the white messiah, as well as questions of agency and the implicit whiteness of Western feminism/ crusades for women’s rights. While the advent of Western feminism helped to elevate “women’s voice-consciousness,” Darkmatter shows how feminism’s existence as a Western imposition upon Othered subjects creates tension (93). I will return to this concept in my analysis of Sonia Otalva- ro-Hormillosa’s work on Asian American queers.

According to Spivak, analyzing Third World and, for my purposes, diasporic issues from a West-

Mookerjee | 57 ern standpoint always carries the risk of implementing some sort of colonial or Orientalist principles. Literature produced by the subaltern, or in this case, the transnational queer self, lies in danger of having its merit conceptualized in total opposition to the linear, patriarchal, heteronormative narratives of dominant Western discourse. This relegation further invalidates the Third World and drowns it in tokenism. Though Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” is more concerned with the silencing of non-Western cultures and the misrepresentation thereof, diasporic and transnational literature can also be exoticized and praised on the basis of its difference, rather than the caliber of its content. While the members of Darkmatter reinscribe Anglophone poetic narratives and subvert them to create new elements of queer, brown literature, there is the potential for the subtleties of such writing to be lauded solely on the basis of Otherness. This would be a regrettable and essentializing move on the part of Darkmatter audiences, but without at least a rudimentary understanding of the history of South Asians in America and the specific invisibility of South Asian queerness, the margin for reduction exists. That is not to say that Darkmatter does not aggressively strive to confront those who would misunderstand their subject positions or incorrectly interpellate them. In poems like “Bolly- wood Divas” and “White Fetish,” the speakers metaphorically hold up a mirror to the fetishizers and perform hyperbolically white or bourgeois characters or catalogue the offenses of these groups in order to counter notions of exoticism. A portion of “Bollywood Divas”: JANANI: Hold on a second. We are not here to be your widescreen bottom Oriental fantasy. ALOK: We’re not here to stir your exotic Starbucks chai tea latte, pluck your eyebrows, and do your henna. JANANI & ALOK: We are here to resist your Orientalist gaze [synchronized finger snap].

In this way, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon become “shouting subalterns.” They not only assert themselves as transnational QTPOC, but they also break down assumptions that others might have about their cultural, sexual, and gendered identities. Toward the end of “Bollywood Divas,” the performers change the meaning of the well-known texting abbreviation “SMDH” (“shaking my damned head”) to “shaking my diasporic head.” By using the language of the groups they wish to indict, they create new systems of discursive meaning that poke fun at, but ultimately challenge, the dominant culture. I return to Balasubramanian’s comment regarding the desire to go into space in order to escape the systems of hegemony that permeate discourse (Daily Princetonian). While this comment is tinged with levity, it is clear that Darkmatter is serious about the need to explore new territory in order to truly negotiate a space for their ideas.

In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath locates queerness in multiple spheres of South Asian culture and the diaspora. She begins by discussing the pervasiveness of patriarchal values, drawing from classic postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha (Gopinath 5, 81). Like Darkmatter, Gopinath identifies a queer, utopian imaginary in the West. She raises interesting questions of “reterritorialization” and of the configuration of queer desire in the Third World. Impossible Desires manages to weave feminist ideology with queer theory without effacing the stakes of the latter or making matters aracial. Using the example of British Asian music, Gopinath emphasizes the gravity of audibility. While early queer discourse invested mostly in visibility, Gopinath introduces the importance of being heard as well. I point to this not only because

Mookerjee | 58 Darkmatter is a spoken word performance duo, but also because of the corrective powers of speech. Rather than appearing as “South Asian cultural signifiers being inserted into mainstream popular culture as dehistoricized fetish objects,” Darkmatter’s use of Indian cultural elements and references can be seen as requiring their audiences “to be literate in the cultural referents of Asian immigrant communities and to acknowledge that Asian cultural forms are already an intrinsic part of the cultural landscape” (41). In “On Drag” Vaid-Menon uses the analogy of stirring white sugar crystals into brown chai to illustrate the absorption and subversion of the dominant culture into a new discourse that better represents them.

In the “Bollywood/Hollywood” chapter, Gopinath describes strategies for performing queer “viewings” (as well as readings) that help intrinsic queer properties of a given work come to the fore- ground. This can refer to the locating of “potentially subversive performance and visual elements” (96). In the context of a Darkmatter performance, this could be understood as Darkmatter’s non-gender conforming attire/makeup or their use of traditional forms, or the subversion of the confession described in the introduction. With regards to popular cinema, Gopinath posits that this type of viewing allows for the creation of an audience that is located in different places and for “multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings within these various locations” to accrue (99). For Darkmatter audiences, it is probably not too difficult to assume a queer viewing position given the highly rhetorical content of the performances. That aside, there are definite contradictions in Darkmatter’s work, so the practice of queer viewing makes these tensions visible and places Darkmatter in a position of vulnerability.

Though Darkmatter’s work contains a lot of feminist sentiment and the group members have explicitly stated their support of cisgendered, straight women and women’s issues writ large, West- ern feminism naturally presents some ideological clashes in the context of their work. For QTPOC, allying oneself with American feminism or feminist interests often has implications of assimilation. In “The Homeless Diaspora of Queer Asian Americans,” Sonia Otalvaro-Hormillosa explains that discourse surrounding Western nationalism has often alienated race and gender, or ignored gender entirely6. She defines citizenship itself as a kind of performance. Darkmatter’s performance of citizenship marks belonging to an entity, such as a queer corrective poetics, rather than a geographical location. Otalvaro-Hormillosa uses the analogy of “border-crossing” in favor of “hybridity” since the former suggests an entering of separate spaces without reaching a point of synthesis. She exposes some of the negativity surrounding the notion of “hybridity” in a specifically racialized sense including the problems of unjust labor forces, corrupt immigration practices, forced internment, and general racial prejudice (103).

Borrowing from the work of Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Otalvaro-Hormillosa defines “finding a home” as the queer Asian American individual’s process of locating a space for belonging while existing as a multiply Othered body (111). Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s work also moves beyond the black/ white dichotomy that dominates discussion of queer people of color in the United States. I do not believe that the artists of Darkmatter necessarily conform to Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s idea of “traveling citizenship,” but I feel that the author’s argument speaks volumes to the duo’s artistic purpose (112). This can be seen in a passage from Balasubramanian’s aforementioned “Trans/national”:

6 In the case of this article, “Asian American” primarily refers to queer Filipino Americans. That being said, I feel that Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s assertions about decolonization, authenticity, and belonging are still applicable to Darkmatter. Mookerjee | 59 When I tell my grandmother that I’m am finally ready to be honest with my body, she says, ok, but make sure to call me more often, and I’m am sending you a drum set. For days I have no idea what she means but then I realize that in India only boys ever play the drums, and what my grandmother means is there are ways of being a man that do not involve being an American man, that you can still play your music with us, that I do not have words for this process of your becoming but I will work around it with art and love. (Button Poetry)

The function of “Trans/national” is to show the nego- tiation of a brown trans self that does not have to bow to Western norms. While the language of the poem is very hopeful and shows how kinship and gender work cross-culturally, there are still vast issues surrounding “Tesseractory Factory: Madness” the actualization of South Asian queerness outside of by C.J. Hungerman the U.S. In the aforementioned Princeton interview, Vaid-Menon detailed their experience performing their poetry in India (Daily Princetonian). Dennis Altman warns against the “romantic” notion that non-Western cultures are somehow more accom- modating of queerness and sheds light upon nuanced, globalized systems of oppression and injustice (89). Vaid-Menon’s experience performing their poetry in India speaks volumes to this idea. While they were initially excited to see other queer South Asians, Vaid-Menon realized that they, as a South Asian American, were actually being fetishized for having a Western accent and education. It oc- curred to them that despite being queer brown people, they experienced different realities and did not share the same struggles. They recall audience members approaching them after a performance saying, “’It’s so cute that you have diasporic angst’….They really didn’t understand my racial traumas” (Daily Princetonian). Though Darkmatter performs predominantly in the United States and much of their material involves the diaspora, this distinction is important because it works against the monolith of queerness that the duo strives to undo.

I maintain that through Darkmatter’s complicated position as a Western-educated, Anglophone, trans South Asian poet duo, they show their dedication to shaping new modes of queer discourse while employing their queer corrective poetics as a spoken word pedagogical strategy. A 2014 Face- book post from the group reads: we’re committed to a politics that does not leave anyone behind. we’re committed to bringing our mothers, our ancestors, our communities with us into our movement work. we refuse to be seduced by a western queer politics of disposability that’s about our own individual emancipations and not the collective liberation of our peoples. we will not be tantalized by imperialism’s insistence on labeling our own as ‘backwards’ or ‘homophobic.’ we will not rehearse a reactionary and self-serving agenda of only seeing ‘LGBT’ identities as oppressed by gender and sexuality (as if cis ‘straight’ women of color do not also face these systems of control). our trans identities are about fighting for the eradication of all forms of gender violence. (Darkmatter, “We’re Committed”) Mookerjee | 60 As such, it is apparent that Darkmatter has an artistic vision that spans several social issues and is firmly committed to the pursuit of justice for all those who suffer under white, heteronormative patriarchal oppression. While Darkmatter has benefitted from systems of class and education in the Unit- ed States, they are not afraid to acknowledge their privilege and use the resources they have earned to spread their message; they shout with brown, transgendered, and transnational voices in the name of awareness, tolerance, and equality.

“About.” darkmatterrage. darkmatterrage.com, n.d. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left, 1971. 127-88. Print.

Altman, Dennis. “Rupture or Continuity? The Internalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 48 (1996): 77-94. JSTOR. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.

Artist360. “DarkMatter: Art•Work full interview.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 9 Sept. 2014. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Button Poetry. “Janani – ‘trans/national’ (CUPSI 2013).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 17 Apr. 2013. Web. 4 Sept. 2014.

“Background.” darkmatterrage. darkmatterrage.com, n.d. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Daily Princetonian. “Because You’re Brown Honey Gurl |Q&A with Dark Matter.” Online video clip. You Tube. YouTube, 2 Apr. 2013. Web. 4 Sept. 2014.

Dark Matter. “Bollywood – DarkMatter.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Sept. 2015. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

---. “Breakup Letter to Stanford University – Alok Vaid-Menon.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Apr. 2014. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.

---. “Gender Studies – Alok Vaid-Menon.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 16 Sept. 2014. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.

---. “When Brown Looks in the Mirror and Comes Out White-Alok Vaid-Menon.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 1 Sept. 2014. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.

---. “White Fetish – DarkMatter.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Apr. 2014. Web. 4 Sept. 2014.

Darkmatter. “Interview with Darkmatter.” Interview by Ragna Rök Jóns. Bluestockings Magazine. N.p., 19 May 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

---. “We’re Committed.” Facebook. Facebook, 8 Nov. 2014. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print.

Otalvaro-Hormillosa, Sonia. “The Homeless Diaspora of Queer Asian Americans.” Social Justice 26.3 (1999): 103-22. JSTOR. Web. 15 Sept. 2014. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 66-111. Print.

Vaid-Menon, Alok. “On Drag.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 2 April 2013. Web. 4 September 2014.

---. “When Brown Looks in the Mirror and Comes Out White.” returnthegayze.com, WordPress. 8 June 2014. Web. 8 Jun. 2014.

Mookerjee | 61 Back to Table of Contents Back to Table of Contents Matsumoto | 62 Lu | 63 Back to Table of Contents different frequencies | Tyler Atwood

in one dream I am an astronaut attempting to escape a dying planet which is probably a metaphor for something I am avoiding like calling my student loan servicers or filing my taxes the sun will unr out of fuel in six billion years but we probably won’t be there b/c a professor of philosophy once told me the chances of my dying in an artificial-intelligence-related disaster are higher than chances of dying by cancer or heart attack western civilization a precarious bubble I think I am an astronaut in the dream b/c I wonder will interstellar space travel be our salvation or will we too become like the others a layer of artifact separated by burned earth don’t know but I think I believe in you the way I believe in teeth digging into flesh & honey & lies & in the endless collision of lovely first lines in the dream when I am an astronaut & I know if we had nuclear war no one would see even on the nearest star I pray I talk to myself I become frustrated w/ the silence & stop how far from home I do not know but I hear no transmission searching innumerable stars grinding teeth twist the dial push the needle somewhere I might believe there are no further broadcasts or we may both be receivers but tuned to different frequencies in the dream I am an astronaut floating light-years from home I see myself fall into a black hole but you don’t see me fall in b/c everything is a matter of perspective you see me poised on the event horizon where I might believe the stars are static & screaming if you eventually do see me fall in the question of whether I am incinerated right away or pulled apart over time has serious implications but not ones I fully understand

Back to Table of Contents Atwood | 64 “The High Overdrive and Its Indefinable Consequence”by Ryota Matsumoto

“Stretched Into an Infinite Vapor of Spectral Resonance” by Ryota Matsumoto Matsumoto | 65 Back to Table of Contents Roommates | Jessica Barksdale

hen Frank’s younger wife left him and then Claire’s second husband died, their two sons put them in a home. A house. In Phoenix. A house the older son Greg had bought and lived Win, moved out of, rented, cleared out, and then organized for them, Claire and Frank, his divorced parents. Divorced as in forty-five years divorced. Divorced twice-as-long-as-they’d-been- married divorced.

No one ever imagined this ridiculous scenario, assuming that Frank’s wife Joanna would outlive him by decades, taking care of him as he moldered in his soggy diapers. Of course, Claire did pri- vately believe Joanna outlived him in most things, but seventy-year-old Joanna was now doing so in Manhattan with her much younger (fifty-eight) husband.

The good news for Claire was that she was strong. Walking on her own two feet. Un-medicated (for now).

“All there! My parts mostly intact,” Claire would tell anyone who’d listen, not that anyone did anymore. Those who used to—some avidly—had died, one by one. Her bridge group, her theater club, her best friends from back when her children were actually children. The women she’d sat pool and court side with. Carpool, Boy Scouts, 4H. As of last spring—Bernadine, whom she met first when she and Frank moved to the suburbs from San Francisco—all were gone.

So Claire had made do. Strolling around her neighborhood, talking to the dog walkers and parents with perambulators. She spoke to and emailed each of her three children weekly. Opened their “care” packages, the same way they must have opened hers when they were away at college. What did they send her? Goji berries, flax seeds, probiotics.

She drove to her hair appointments, the grocery store, the library. Pedicure now and again because it was tough getting to that real estate these days. Marie, the gal who did her toes, always had some gossip about the clientele, most of whom had been going to the shop for years. Careful with her shiny new polish, Claire always came back home a smidge smug.

But there had been mishaps. Her car flooded because she hadn’t been able to close the sunroof. The emergency brake she thought was off wasn’t, Claire pulling over to a flume of acridity and bil- lowing smoke. She stopped using her cell phone, her computer, even her television, as all electronics seemed too confusing. Most of this was understandable. But then she’d had that accident in the gym. Really, it had been the trainer’s fault. That bar slipped right out of its moorings. It had nothing to do with her. But after that disaster, the MRI, the blood work, the neuro consult. The conferencing. The car, parked for good in the garage. Lots of crying, mostly hers.

Frank had been worse off. Neighbors called when they hadn’t seen him in a week. Turned out he was holed up on a leather recliner with a box of Saltines and a bottle of Knob Creek, curtains closed, Barksdale | 66 lights off. Watching those reruns of 70s shows. At least he knew how to use the remote. Joanna MIA, the neighbor called the elder son, number on the wall: Emergency Contact.

So there the former spouses were. Eighty-eight and ninety, hanging on like crabs, despite the earlier heart attack and cancer, bum hips, hip replacements, knee replacements, and loneliness. In the mornings, a slow stroll around the block. Puzzles and lunch and long naps. In the evenings, lugubri- ous card games on the patio, hummingbirds buzzing by like warplanes. Sometimes, TV, but usually, both of them shuffled off to bed early, both on the arm of an aide, one who would sleep in the third bedroom, baby alarms on her bedside table. The good news thus far was all the aide had to deal with was a snoring duet.

Their younger son Chris filled the place with needed medical-type equipment (furniture that cranked up and down, clicking and clacking). Claire’s daughter Jane was hard pressed to help her half-brothers, both of whom were in their mid-sixties. This girl/woman, born when Claire was forty-four, had been a trouble-maker, a wild-child, a free-spirit, but through therapy, rehab, and lots of higher education, was finally a full professor at a small university in Tacoma, Washington. But on that salary, all she could do was chip in to pay for the home health aides, two women (plus a relief aide on the weekends) who took turns, day and night. Also, there was the housecleaner, the gardener, the pool guy. The groceries and drug store supplies came by delivery truck. At night, Claire heard the automatic sprinklers whirring.

How did poor people grow old and die? Claire wondered. Not that she or Frank were rich anymore, but their sons were.

Right now Frank -- her ex-husband, her first husband, her former spouse, the father of two of her three children -- and she sat in matching rockers on the swath of slate patio. The chairs creaked in rhythm as they moved a gentle back and forth, back and forth. Outside, the sandy sky filled with purple, the sun a slim flat line on the horizon that was dotted with saguaro cacti (all alert arms) and smooth blobs of boulders. Without looking at him, she could tell that his eyes were almost closed, but not quite, his slitted vision taking in the last of the day. How many times had she turned to him during school performances or sporting events and flushed with anger that he wasn’t paying attention.

“You don’t know what your own children are doing!” she’d hiss.

He’d raise a hand, say, “It’s three to one. I know.” On the field, the various balls would careen between players, a score here, there. Cheers and clapping. All the while, Frank with his irritating Bud- dha behavior.

“I see everything,” he’d intone, suddenly standing up to whoop as Greg or Chris shot, hit, scored. He’d pat backs, take a swig of Bud, and then go back to his inscrutability.

“You’re killing me,” she’d whisper.

Barksdale | 67 “My objective,” he’d say. “All she needed was a bridle At some point, Claire knew he meant it. and a cowboy.” The good news, Claire realized a few months after the divorce was finalized, was that he hadn’t killed her. Not her body, anyway. Her heart took a beating. Her brain. Her blood pressure. How not? Just forty and deserted by an uncommunicative husband. Off he went to the arms of his beautiful twenty-something mistress. There she was with two pubescent boys and saddlebags. All she needed was a bridle and a cowboy.

No cowboy, much less businessman, appeared on the imminent horizon, so eventually, she started going to the singles parties at the local Presbyterian church. Punch bowl, tables for conversation, bad music from the forties and fifties to dance to. A general junior high dance feel, where even the wallflowers had been pulled from their sticky corners. What else to do? So she danced until the party was over, and then went back every weekend, ignoring her sons’ eye rolling.

Truth was, though, she had to deal with the mirror. Her clothing. No wonder Frank had kept his eyes slit as she disrobed night after night. What had she been thinking? She bemoaned her ugly white Maidenform bras, and after her second singles party, she tossed all her lingerie, buying new bras that stretched and gleamed with shiny synthetic fabrics. Underwear that didn’t go all the way up to her navel. Pantyhose with tummy-tucking support. Then she found one dress, two, both revealing she still had an hourglass figure, despite the two children and recent unhappiness.

Claire didn’t meet her second husband Rich at a party, but she met a woman by the punchbowl who introduced her to Rich a few months later at a cocktail party held off-grid from the singles party circuit. A week afterward, he picked her up in his big Buick, that long bench seat on which she slid easily. All that polyester under her dress.

Two years after that first date, she and Rich married. The divorce had left her the house—and the boys, who refused to go to New York to visit their father, and didn’t, not until they graduated from college and managed to forgive him. She had a new husband, her own car, and child support, and when she and Rich got back from their honeymoon in Oahu, she found a job. Oh, nothing that she’d studied in school. Her skills were long gone, technical information obsolete. But she took the test at the local library and was hired. Request unit. Calling around the county for best-selling or obscure texts. Reading the teletype machine for crucial district information. Chatting with her co-workers. Go- ing out to lunch. At night, she and Rich talked about their jobs over dinner. It was all going so well, but then the pregnancy. Unplanned—wasn’t she ready to go through the change, just as her mother had at forty-three? Hadn’t she felt done as done could be?

Um, no. Jane was born the month before Claire turned forty-five.

Just before her due date, Claire quit the library and dug around for all her baby supplies, long buried in the garage shelving unit. About a second after the nursery was ready, Jane came, squalling, pink, and perfect.

Barksdale | 68 All that life seemed, well, a lifetime ago.

Now behind her and Frank, Marta, the aide who stayed with them five of seven nights, clattered in the kitchen, talking on her cell phone to her son in Juarez, Mexico. Night took over the sky with purples, blues, and black. Stars pricked the sky with tiny fingers. In the distance, coyote yips and someone’s irritating two-stroke machine (motorcycle?).

“Mi’jo,” Marta was saying. “Venga aqui.”

Frank shook his head. “That boy won’t come to this country.”

“Why not?” Claire asked. Neither of them knew Jesus, Marta’s son.

“His mother’s a busybody. Bossy. Just listen. Telling him what to do. Move here. Go to night school. Get a job. Get citizenship. Blah, blah, blah. If she didn’t wipe my ass sometimes, I’d tell her a thing or two.”

Claire glanced at him, hearing his comments from decades ago. “Leave the kid alone, god dam- mit,” he’d said after Greg stole a rocket kit from the five and dime downtown. “He’s got the store owner and the sheriff on his ass. Scare him into next week.”

“Maybe the school counselor,” Claire had said, turning away to her dressing table. “He might need someone to talk to.”

Frank slammed his fist on the nightstand. “He doesn’t need any god damned counselor. He needs to stop the bullshit and grow up!”

All those years, he’d told her she’d coddled both boys. Overdone the birthday parties. Tried too hard. Thought too much about every little thing. Just like Marta, Claire guessed. She wanted to stand up and walk into the kitchen and tell Marta that Greg turned out to be happy.

And rich, by the way. Also, four kids, four grandchildren.

Take that, Frank, you putz.

And yes, she’d take the phone from Marta’s hand and say, “Jesus, get yourself up here.”

Busybody indeed.

Marta hung up and cursed a little in Spanish, flicking on the water to do the dinner dishes. The kitchen lights gleamed on the slick shrub leaves, all varieties unfamiliar to Claire, except the butterfly brush. In the light, the spears glowed violet.

“You never wanted anyone telling you what to do.”

Barksdale | 69 Frank made a sound at the back of his throat, the kind only an old man or a goat could.

“Did not.”

Claire snorted. “Not everyone is like you.”

“Shame that, huh? World a better place.”

As if. God, what arrogance! And at his age, when all the world wanted was for him to be gone. And soon enough, he would be. Her, too. Their boys would come back to the house and take it over, pack it up, fire the aides, sweeping up the small matter of their entire lives. And still Frank was who he was. Her, too, though of course she thought that was preferable. Nicer. She was the nicer one. Par- ent. Person. At least, she hadn’t been the one to leave. And leave he had.

Claire pushed back in her rocker a bit harder, the next rock a prolonged creee-ak.

“Frank, some people actually want a little guidance.”

All these years later, anger. Another husband, job, child, and she still wanted to do her first husband some violence, at least verbally. But at his chuckle, she sensed she’d missed her mark.

Creak, creak, their chairs moved but went nowhere. Splash, splash, the water went down the drain.

Frank patted one of his own bony knees and let out a throaty sigh. “I should have listened to you forty years ago, Claire. Damn if I didn’t pay attention. Maybe if I had, neither of us would be right here now.”

“We’d be old still.” “‘We’d be old still.’” “But maybe not old in this way.”

“Maybe not,” Claire said, wondering where the turns came that made this this happen. A hoot owl hooted and then flew its dark body across the backyard.

If only Claire had listened. But to whom? And to what? Maybe the owl. But even it was gone.

***

It was hard not to worry when she and Frank were at their doctors’ office. Kate, their daytime caretaker, sat next to Claire, reading a magazine, occasionally glancing up at the television that hung from the ceiling. Claire kept her eyes on her thighs, her hands on top, skin veiny and spotted. Inside the examination room with his doctor, Frank was undergoing poking and prodding. She was worried for him, of course, but as she stroked the casual fabric of her pants, she knew she was mostly worried

Barksdale | 70 for herself. What if there was something very wrong with his heart or lungs? His kidneys, spleen, or liver? Any of his crucial systems? He’d be whisked to the hospital or care. Their sons would fold up the house and send Claire to care, too, both of them locked up. Or down. Finished. Lined up with the bungled or the botched, sitting in their wheelchairs and confined like the living dead they were.

“He’ll be fine.” Kate closed her magazine and flopped it on the table. “It’s just a checkup.You know that.”

Claire wanted to swallow in agreement and relief, but her tongue wouldn’t cooperate. So she nodded instead.

“You both are in amazing shape,” Kate said. “Trust me, I have seen everything.”

“I don’t feel very amazing,” Claire admitted. “All bones and stretchy everything else.”

Kate tapped her head. “Both of you are keeping it together.”

The door opened from the inner office, and Kate stood, ready to help Frank, who needed to book another appointment. Claire stared at him, the way he shuffled as he walked. His back a bit humped, his hair a whirl of sparse white, his eyes squinty (and not because he was being inscrutable. Because he couldn’t see). How could this old man be the boy she met when she was not quite twenty-two, living in San Francisco, just graduated from Cal? There he came, bounding up the boarding room steps, his eyes shining, his hair thick, dark, and curly, his shoulders broad.

“Hey, there,” he’d said, pulling up short, breathing a bit hard. “Howya doing?”

Claire had felt every single part of herself still. At his question, she realized she hadn’t been doing well at all. Aside from her married supervisor who harassed her in the breakroom and elevators, she was lonely at her work as a bench chemist at the naval lab. Her sorority sisters and girlfriends at Cal had gone into marriages right after graduation. Only she had turned down her former boyfriend’s marriage proposal—a lawyer who adored her—because she hadn’t adored him, but she’d regretted her decision during the long evenings after work. She bit into her grilled cheese sandwiches and sipped her bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup. What an idiot. Clearly, she could have made do, what with Larry’s family house in Carmel, his apartment on Nob Hill, his ambition that might have led them to Sacramento and then maybe even Washington, DC.

That’s what she got for going into the sciences.

“What are you thinking?” her mother had asked when Claire came home for Christmas break. “Chemistry?”

Claire had been good at math in high school. Chemistry was similar but with molecules. They wanted her to declare a major, but maybe her mother was right. What had she been thinking?

Barksdale | 71 But when Claire saw this shining young man, breathing a little hard after running up five flights of stairs, she knew. She’d been waiting. For him. For his proposal that would come six months later. For the house in the suburbs and her two sons. For the country club summers and dinner parties and friends around the pool drinking g-and-ts from highball glasses. For the vacations to Waikiki Beach and Lake Tahoe. For the family dinners and holidays, his family in San Diego and the trips back and forth. Those shopping trips in Union Square with his mother Adele and sister Susan. And mostly, his stomach against her back, his arm around her waist. His heat. Every night.

Sometimes he’d turn to her—years after that first stairwell visitation. It didn’t matter where. Their house. A park. A movie theater. And in a quick crack of time, she’d see him as he’d been. Aimed right for her.

How could that beautiful man have left her and their two children? How could he have fought over every single cent he begrudgingly sent them? How could he have transformed into this shuffling old coot in front of her, his left pant leg hem drooping under his scuffed shoe?

As they all walked out of the medical building lobby, Claire caught her reflection in the mirror behind reception. There she was. A shock of white hair, a face like a crumpled shopping bag, body like an origami coat hanger. Not even close to the girl standing before the boy on the stairwell, the girl waiting for her life to start. That girl was long gone. “That girl was long gone.” The entire afternoon plan consisted of a puzzle. Cur- rently, Claire and Frank were working on a ridiculous thousand piece jigsaw of the United States. The pieces tiny, the completed object supposedly three feet by two, the thing would barely fit on the game table. As Claire stared at the shiny colors, she wondered if by sending such a time-consuming puzzle monster, Jane thought she could keep her mother busy and alive.

All fifty states, each full of important symbols, icons, flora, and fauna. California—according to the box—replete with the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Texas with The Alamo. New York: the Empire State Building. Etcetera. Worse, the puzzle was shaped like the country, no square edges to find and frame. No real way to feel productive.

“This is too damn hard.” Frank flicked the pile of yellow they’d created and then reached out to unknown territory, one long index fingernail scratching a piece the color of mortadella (A horse? A deer?). All the damn flowers. The red pile was mostly flowers, too. States were big with flowers. At least California had orange, but even the poppies seemed yellow. Hard to put them in the right piles.

Outside, Ramon blew leaves into brown piles. Marta had arrived for her shift and was changing the sheets, the whir of the bed mechanisms cranking up and down, up and down. Something in the oven smelled oniony.

“Why did you do it?” Claire asked.

Barksdale | 72 “Damn piece is yellow,” Frank said. “Where else should it go?”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Claire asked. “Why didn’t you give me a chance?”

Frank pushed the piece toward the pile. “Have at it.”

“Don’t be dense. I mean about us. The boys. Our family.”

Frank shook his head, three strands of white long hair floating over his forehead. One summer, they’d taken the boys to Cancun, before it became what it was to be, big hotels and fancy restaurants. They stayed in a casita by a white sand beach, all of them eating in a larger house for their meals. The boys played in the sand and splashed all day. Claire swam in the water and read a dozen paperbacks in the shade, and Frank built sandcastles and tossed balls with the boys. His hair grew long, his skin tanned. At night in their hard double bed, he made love to her in a way she thought was real.

“I couldn’t keep doing it,” he said.

“What? Me?”

He shook his head, pressed the hair down on his skull. “The happiness.”

Claire couldn’t breathe or think, though she did feel parts of Florida under her right hand. Orang- es, Miami, the Gulf. Parts of her she’d thought had gone into hibernation panged. Sorrow. Anguish. Despair.

All that happiness.

Now he sat back and looked at her, his eyes and mouth pushed back in his face, muscles slack, his lips parted. “You can’t hide. You can’t sit in another room. I had to leave it.”

“I don’t understand.” Claire’s heart beat in her throat, her ears. She clasped her hands, pressing them together.

”So much easier to have less. It doesn’t hurt—“

“After Joanna took off, they found you hunched like a squirrel over a box of crackers,” Claire spit out. “Are you telling me that didn’t hurt?”

Again, Frank shook his head. “It didn’t. I was just waiting to die. But instead, here I am. Back where I started. With you. Probably the only way I could have managed it.”

Claire stared at him, not understanding one word he was saying. Marta bustled down the hall, clutching sheets. “Dinner in fifteen minutos,” she said.

Barksdale | 73 “You’re saying you wanted this?”

“Who else should I die with?” he said.

Claire wanted to stand, curl her hands under the edge of the game table, and flip it and the puzzle up and over, the country falling to literal pieces. She wanted to storm out of the house, just as Frank had decades before, in a righteous tempest. She wanted to cut him to the bone with words, about how Rich had been three times the husband. A better father, too. How Rich’s money had helped fund the moves to Phoenix. How he was sitting in Rich’s chair. As if Frank could begin to fill that seat!

All of the decades of taunts and slurs and provocations roared up her throat, gunning their terrible engines. She’d waited all this time to say them, and now was her chance.

Claire had given him everything. Herself. Her body. Her life. Her anger. Her suffering. Her tears. And her joy. Her hope. Her surprise. Yes, her sur- “Art History in Nebraska 1” by Ellen Mueller prise. That she could have what she wanted, even when she’d thought life would be lonely nights in a boarding house. That moment on the stairwell, she’d handed it all over, willingly. And yes, with the understanding of how dangerous the proposition.

Here, she’d said. Take it all. Take it so much that it hurts. Take it so much that when you leave, I’ll be left with only your absence.

She’d done it before. So she knew how to give herself to the surprise of Frank, and she could do it again. After all, who else could she die with? Who else but this man on the stair, the old coot with the bad hem.

Claire exhaled, leaned forward, put her shaking fingers on the mysterious yellow piece, pushed it to the pile. Georgia? Alabama, maybe? California? No, Arizona. Some yellow petaled flower of Phoe- nix. Here. Here.

Back to Table of Contents Barksdale | 74 “Art History in Nebraska 2” by Ellen Mueller

“Janson Says 1” by Ellen Mueller Mueller | 75 Back to Table of Contents Rituals | Tracy Harris

t’s a sunny Saturday in May but the room has no windows and the lighting is sallow. There are rows of tables with Formica tops, like a school cafeteria, but I don’t think they serve food here. IWe’re in a large public building in St. Paul, no furnishings, no decoration. Metal bars reach from underneath the tables and attach to long, flat benches that can be folded underneath if the tables need to be stacked against the walls. The walls are covered with scuff marks, so I assume the table-bench combos are frequently moved out of the way.

Scuffed walls, scuffed yellow-green linoleum floor—the room has seen a lot of use. Today the room is filled with dozens of Cambodian refugees, who wait their turns on the metal benches. They are scuffed and battered, too, like the room and its furnishings.

I am one of three attorneys interviewing the Cambodians. It’s 1990, about ten years after the end of the Cambodian genocide. We are part of a local human rights organization, preparing for a mock trial of the Khmer Rouge that will take place in the state capitol building a few weeks from now. The refugees will be our witnesses. We can’t offer them justice for the atrocities they suffered, but we can give them this ritual: a public trial, a chance to testify and tell their stories. I’ve been an attorney for less than a year and am thrilled to participate in this project.

“Did you see them drag your mother away?” I ask the young man seated across from me. As the translator speaks I look up and see my husband across the room, several rows of tables away. He looks lost, and when he catches my eye, he gestures quickly.

“Excuse me for just a minute.” I smile and walk over to Will, tilting my head at a what-are-you- doing-here angle.

“Tracy, your mother just called. Your father died.”

***

Songs my father loved to sing:

“Who Can I Turn To?” An Anthony Newley song from 1964, my father would almost make himself cry when he sang it, especially the last line, “Who can I turn to if you turn away?”

“O, Holy Night.” His favorite Christmas carol, and hard to sing.

Anything from the opera, Rigoletto, but especially “Questa o Quella,” the Duke’s aria about how much he loves women, “this one or that one.’ Dad had to strain for the high A on the lyric, “l’impero non cedo,” and when he got to the end of the song he’d shake his head and laugh, “I’m not a tenor anymore.” He’d sing the duet with me, too, the one Rigoletto sang with his daughter Gilda: “Figlia! Harris | 76 Mio Padre!” But of course I could barely stay on key and didn’t really know the lyrics in Italian.

“Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Ole Man River,” because he liked the low notes and the chance to sing words in dialect.

***

We are on a plane to Boston within a few hours. Jews bury people fast, as fast as possible, so there’s no time for delay. Will and I don’t have children yet, we don’t even have a dog; all we need are airline tickets. Will has already called his department chair; I call a partner at my firm. I was supposed to have a brief ready for him on Monday.

“May I speak to Peter, please?” I ask when his wife answers the phone. “It’s one of the associates from his office.”

“It’s Saturday, he doesn’t take calls from work on Saturday.” She’s been down this road before.

“I know. I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency.”

“You can leave a message for him at the switchboard.” She’s about to hang up.

“I have a project due Monday and I won’t be here.” I’m forcing myself to breathe so my voice doesn’t shake.

“He doesn’t take calls at home.”

“Can you please just tell him this is Tracy, and—”

“Call the office.”

I say the words. “Please, my father just died and I have to fly to Boston, and I know Peter will be waiting for this brief—”

“Oh you didn’t say. I’m so sorry.” Peter’s wife is abashed, and I exhale as she goes to get him.

She’s a lawyer, too, I happen to know, and apparently a more-than-competent gatekeeper. Peter is a young partner at the firm, less social than most, and— thus for me—easier to talk to. He went to Princeton, like my father.

***

Harris | 77 My father’s best, or maybe worst, jokes:

(Tilting a glass of water against his forehead): “Whoops, I thought I was taller than that.”

“Sir, you have a carrot in your ear.” “You’ll have to speak louder, I have a carrot in my ear.”

(Pointing to the sky, on Easter): “Look, there he goes!”

***

We arrive at my house and the living room is full of relatives. I go into a bedroom with my mother and she tells me: he had been mowing the lawn, came inside, and collapsed. She shows me a picture they’d taken on his fifty-eighth birthday, just two weeks before. He’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket, a departure from his usual baggy pants and short-sleeved shirts. He has thick hair, still dark but sprinkled with grey, and a full beard; his eyes are crinkling up in a smile. He’s solidly built, a former football player, and he used to be tall. Arthritis had curved his spine and brought him from 6’1” to 5’9”, but in the jacket his shoulders are broad and there’s no sign of a stoop. He is self-conscious about his posture, but I am only 5’2”. He seems tall to me.

“We had such a wonderful day,” she says, looking at the picture. “Look at him in that jacket.”

Will and I finally go upstairs, put our suitcases in my old room. I finally start to sob. I have not let myself cry, and now when it comes I don’t want to stop. I shake and gasp for air and Will keeps his arms around me. I don’t know how long I cry, but I know that when I stop, I am a little more certain that my father is gone.

Things my father loved to do:

Play the piano. Not classical music, although he’d had lessons. But jazz, boogie woogie, show tunes, anything he could sing along to. Mostly he played by ear, and if he heard the tune, he could play it.

Play golf, until the arthritis made it impossible.

Take pictures. He set up a darkroom in our basement, in the laundry room, and taught himself to develop black and white film. My mother hung his photographs all over the house.

Hide in the den when relatives were visiting. That was his room with the TV and his black Nauga- hyde chair. After I was married, I’d often find Will back there with him, the two of them laughing together, relieved of the strain of making conversation with people.

***

Harris | 78 The funeral is the next day. My father died in the morning, so if it hadn’t been Saturday, the Sabbath, and if I hadn’t been out of town, he would have been buried that afternoon. Not that my family cares about ritual. But my parents are both Jewish, so that tradition provides an easy template for this tragedy. The funeral is in a Jewish cemetery, and they’re bringing in a rabbi. Grandma Betty must have done that, my father’s mother. Neither my father nor my mother had any use for religious practice, but my father’s family is Orthodox and Betty is religious—doctrinaire, my mother would say, and pushy. But no one is going to criticize Betty today.

We ride in a limousine to the cemetery. When we arrive, I get out and look down the hill at the long row of cars idling along the road that snakes into the cemetery. They are waiting to drive to my father’s gravesite. There are so many people: relatives, people from my father’s work who I don’t really know, old friends of my parents who I haven’t seen in years.

The funeral director approaches my mother and places two rings in her hand: my father’s wedding ring and the class ring from Princeton that he always wore. It has a piece of onyx in the center and is so worn it’s difficult to read the inscriptions.

“No,” my mother gasps. “Don’t take those off his fingers, put them back.” The funeral director hurries to the hearse, I assume to open the coffin and return the rings.

“How did they get those off his hands?” my mother asks. She’s looking at each of us, as if we could answer her question. “They didn’t have to hurt him, did they?”

I don’t think so. I wish she’d asked if anyone had wanted to keep the ring from Princeton, but I can’t think of a way to bring that up now without sounding greedy. I don’t think it would be right to run after the funeral director.

***

Things my father didn’t like:

Lobster, even though he cooked it for everyone else. My mother said it was a holdover from growing up kosher.

Shopping.

Snobs. He was proud that he went to Princeton. But in the 1950s it was hard to be there on scholarship, Jewish, socially unconnected. He hung on to the ring, but he hung on to feeling excluded, too.

Bureaucracy. The lab where my father worked once issued a safety memo reminding people to use four thumbtacks on every document posted to the corkboard, one in each corner, to avoid the perils of—it wasn’t exactly clear—crumpled documents, paper cuts? My father would remove a thumbtack every time he walked by the board. ***

Harris | 79 The funeral goes on. There are flowers on my father’s coffin. We don’t wait to see it lowered into the ground. People come back to our house afterwards. The place is packed; we’re lucky it’s warm enough for people to stand in the backyard.

“I’m not sitting shiva,” my mother tells me. “Betty can do that at her house, or at Sandy’s.” That’s my aunt, my father’s sister. “I don’t need all their friends coming here.” My mother has plenty of her own friends, who are busy putting sliced meat on platters, filling coffee cups, emptying bags of trash. The phone rings and it’s someone from the community center where my mother volunteers.

“Anne, I can’t talk right now, I just buried my husband today.” I feel sorry for Anne, who had no way of knowing it was a bad day to call.

Jews don’t hold wakes, we sit shiva. After the funeral, the family remains at home for three days or seven, and people come to bring food and offer condolences. It’s traditional to cover mirrors, to sit on low stools or benches, to tear your clothes in symbolic mourning. Betty and Sandy wear the more modern version of this last custom: before the funeral the rabbi pinned a black ribbon to their clothing, then cut the ribbon. No sense ruining a perfectly good outfit.

“It’s ghoulish,” my mother says. ***

Things my father and I did together:

Solve math problems on paper napkins after dinner.

Talk in funny voices and accents. Our best was a long riff on “Poor Jud is Dead” from Oklahoma, that we’d do over and over with low voices and yokel accents. All one of us had to do was look down and say, “Poor Jud,” and we’d be off. We’d go on for so long that my mother couldn’t stand it; she’d end up stomping out of the room.

Go to Yosemite. I was in school in Berkeley and he had a conference in San Francisco. It felt strange, traveling together, just the two of us.

Speak German, although neither of us knew very much.

***

It gets late and people have to leave. Aunt Sandy takes Betty home. They’ll be back tomorrow, but after that, they’ve agreed, they’ll sit for a few more days at Sandy’s house.

“It was nice so many people from the lab came, wasn’t it?” my mother says. My father had been a research scientist at the same company for more than twenty years, and his boss, Dr. Litt, seemed especially broken up. “It’s too bad Dad couldn’t have been here to see it.”

Harris | 80 “He would have hidden in the den,” I reply.

We smile, knowing my father would have been embarrassed by the attention. “You do your job,” he’d say, “and you don’t get prizes or compliments. But if you support your family and maybe do a little bit of something good, then you’re doing OK.”

A few weeks after the funeral Dr. Litt will write a long letter to my sister Leslie and me, telling us what a good scientist our father was, how people looked up to him in the lab, how everyone loved his jokes.

That night, I surprise everyone by saying we need a drink of scotch. We’re not big drinkers, but we all have some—my mother, Leslie, Will and me.

***

Things my father and I knew but never said:

Rigoletto was the best opera not just because of the music but because it was about a hunchback whose only joy was his love for his daughter.

Religion was mostly nonsense, but not completely.

Being smart or being quiet did not necessarily mean you didn’t care about people or that you were, as my mother once said of me, “as cold as the ice outside.” My father knew I wasn’t.

***

Will has to go back to Minnesota to teach class, but I stay a week.

“They’ll want to do an unveiling,” my mother says, speaking of Sandy and Betty. In Jewish tradition, the headstone is put up a year after the burial, at which time there is an unveiling ceremony. After that, the anniversary of the death is marked each year, by saying the Kaddish at the synagogue, by lighting a jahrzeit candle at home.

In my immediate family, we don’t pray. We don’t attend religious services unless we’re invited for a special event, like a wedding or bar mitzvah. My wedding was in city hall; my parents hosted a party at a Chinese restaurant a few weeks after. I’ve never spoken to a rabbi.

When I go back to work, I catch up, people are sorry. At the law firm we record our billable time in 1/10 of an hour units, which means every six minutes. I note who does and does not take six minutes to come talk to me about my loss, and am surprised at how much it matters.

My work on the mock trial for the Cambodians is good p.r. for the firm but doesn’t count toward my billable hours. The trial takes place a couple of weeks after I return. It’s a success—we’re on two

Harris | 81 TV news reports, there’s a long article in the newspaper. The panel votes to convict the Khmer Rouge of genocide. It is just a demonstration project, of course, but for most of our witnesses it is the first time they’d spoken publicly about their suffering. They are exuberant after the trial; we are in awe of their courage. ***

My father’s religious inconsistencies:

We could celebrate Christmas and have a big Santa in the living room, but not a Christmas tree. Ac- cording to my father, that was going too far.

No bat mitzvahs for Leslie or me. “Really religious people know that ceremony is just for boys,” my father said. But we’re not really religious and all the Jewish girls we know go to Hebrew school and have the ceremony—and party—when they turn 13. Including our “religious” girl cousins.

My father says practices like keeping kosher or fasting on Yom Kippur are basically meaningless, but he is furious when I suggest I might name a child after him. “What? You can’t name a child after me.” He is genuinely angry. “Jewish people only do that when someone’s dead.”

***

I’m not pregnant when I have that conversation with my father about naming a child after him. I am just thinking hypothetically and, for some reason, share that thought out loud.

My father’s name is S. Richard. His first name is Sheldon, but he never used it, even as boy. When I was in fourth grade I began using my middle name, Tracy. I was stubborn: I told my teachers to call me Tracy, at home I wouldn’t answer my mother unless she used my middle name. Eventually, she got used to it. Everyone did, except my father. My driver’s license, my passport, all say “L. Tracy,” but I allowed him to call me Linda.

I’m surprised that he’s angry at the possibility of my naming a child after him. I know the rule about Jewish names, but I’m surprised it matters to my dad. He grew up in a religious household and went to Hebrew school, but he had taught us that religious rituals were chiefly for people too lazy or too ignorant to make their own moral choices. Still he had lines he wouldn’t cross. I assume this name thing is one of those arbitrary holdovers from his upbringing, like not eating lobster.

“OK, Dad, I was just thinking about it.” I’m not going to argue; I’m in law school and Will and I aren’t ready for children anyway.

In the weeks and months after the funeral, Sandy and my Uncle Marshall will say the Kaddish for my father. My mother will light a jahrzeit candle, not because it’s a required ritual, but because candles are beautiful and they help her honor her memories. She will not attend the unveiling that takes place the following May. Sandy, Marshall, Betty are entitled to their grief and their rituals, but for my mother the cemetery is too sad. My father is in her heart, she says, not in the ground.

Harris | 82 By the time of the unveiling, Will and I are parents to a son.

***

Why I quit my job:

I never wanted to work for a big law firm.

Will and I went on a trip to Santa Fe a few months after my father died, and I special-ordered a piece of Santa Clara pottery. I was waiting for it to arrive after Christmas, and I kept thinking, “When that pot gets here I’ll be really happy.” It took me a while to realize that meant something was wrong.

I could not fill in those every-six-minutes time charts. They were like the fourth thumbtack on the corkboard.

***

“It’s the circle of life,” my mother says when I tell her that I am pregnant. Our family needs good news. My Grandpa Larry dies that fall, at ninety-two. My mother is too worn out to mourn her father.

We talk instead about the baby. Which of the extra bedrooms will we use? Are Will and I hoping for a girl or a boy? On my mother’s side of the family, there has been nothing but girls for genera- tions. My mother’s mother, Grandma Sally, was one of two girls. They each had two girls: my mother had two girls and her sister had one. Grandma Sally always wanted a boy, to name “Gordon” after her father.

“Maybe this will be the one, the first boy,” my mother says. “Wouldn’t Grandma have loved that?”

Will and I take the expectant parents class at the hospital. We buy a crib, and a stroller, and a bottle warmer. We decide that Gordon will be our child’s middle name, boy or girl, and that the baby will have Will’s last name. It’s a long one—Hollingsworth—and that makes choosing a first name tricky. We finally decide on Anthony or Stephanie. They both have good nicknames, but they’re long enough to balance out the “Gordon Hollingsworth” we’ve already put in place.

My father is dead and there is nothing keeping me from naming our child after him, but his En- glish names, Sheldon and Richard, are not great choices for a child born in the 1990s. It occurs to me that there is another option.

***

Harris | 83 Hebrew names in my family:

Father: Shraga Raphael Mother: Menucha Leslie: Lea Shayna Me: Chassia Yentl ***

Even though Leslie and I never went to Hebrew school, we knew our Hebrew names. We didn’t know why we had them, other than that, years ago, my parents hadn’t wanted to upset Grandma Bet- ty by ignoring that particular Jewish custom. And we knew we had been named after dead relatives.

I am not religious, do not believe in rituals, have always wished I wasn’t Jewish. I have associated it with hypocrisy more than anything else, and a failure to think for oneself. But I know that Jews are a tiny population that has been threatened repeatedly with genocide. I understand genocide.

I also understand that my father believed in science and in people being good to each other more than he believed in God. But there was a part of him that held on to being Jewish. The part that wouldn’t eat lobster or let his daughters have a Christmas tree. My child will never hear him sing or listen to him explain the rituals he learned but does not practice. My child will only have me to explain what Judaism means.

I decide to give our child a Hebrew name. Judaism passes through the mother and, like it or not, my child will be Jewish. I vow to do a better job than my parents: my children, boys or girls, may not practice the religion, but they will grow up proud of being Jewish.

“We won’t actually have to call him ‘Shraga,’ right?” Will asks. “Like, out loud?” Will is a back- slidden Baptist-Methodist-Unitarian and the spectre of a child with a Hebrew name is unsettling to him. I give him the exasperated-wife look: raised eyebrows, eyes upward, slight shake of the head.

“I think we just go register it somewhere,” I say.

***

Jewish rituals I’ve attended: “And we knew we had been named after Four funerals. One wedding. dead relatives.” Countless bar and bat mitzvahs.

Jewish rituals I’ve been a participant in: None.

***

Harris | 84 Our local newspaper runs an article about a new rabbi at a synagogue just a mile or two from our house. She’s one of the first female rabbis in the Twin Cities and her name is Rabbi Julie Gordon. The “Gordon” is a good sign. I make an appointment.

I am nervous about meeting a rabbi; I’ve never spoken to one before. I worry that I won’t be allowed to give my child a Hebrew name, since I’ve never practiced the religion. I’m afraid the rabbi will berate me for showing up on her synagogue doorstep for what is, perhaps, a sentimental whim. I wonder if I’ll be turned away.

R.J.G., as Will and I will end up referring to her, makes it easy. She is about my age, with short dark hair, big eyes. She holds my hand when I tell her about my father; she looks confused when I try to pronounce his Hebrew name. Turns out it’s an unusual one, but that’s OK, R.J.G. is undeterred. I am prepared to name a girl after my Grandma Sally, whose real name was Sarah, but I know in my heart that my baby will be a boy.

What I am not prepared for is learning that giving a baby a Hebrew name requires more than filling out a form at the synagogue. If our child is a girl, there is a simple naming ceremony, but if we have a boy there will be a brit milah, which includes a ritual circumcision. R.J.G. explains that the ceremony takes place eight days after the birth, usually in the home. She will be there, but a religious practitioner called a mohel performs the actual circumcision. These days, R.J.G. assures me, the mohel is usually a pediatrician, not just an old guy with a knife. Will and I don’t need to know Hebrew, and we can write our own prayers, or wishes, for our new baby; and we can say something about the rela- tive whose name we’ve chosen to pass on to our child.

“It will be beautiful,” she says, taking my hand again. Circumcision is not one of Judaism’s more crowd-pleasing rituals, but it is the defining act of the faith, the symbolic representation of the covenant with God. Still, this is a lot more than I’d bargained for, a daunting point of entry for a newcom- er to the world of Jewish religious practice. I’ve never even been in charge of lighting the candles on a Chanukah menorah. But I am doing this for my father, and for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. I look at R.J.G. and tell her I’m in.

“People usually serve a dairy meal afterwards,” she smiles. A kosher thing, but I can manage dairy. It makes sense. After witnessing the procedure, the guests probably won’t be hungry for meat.

*** Things I learned about the brit milah:

Circumcision: the surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis.

In Jewish tradition, the first circumcision was performed by Abraham, on himself.

The commandment to perform the circumcision on the eighth day after the boy’s birth is so important that if that day should fall on the Sabbath, the rules prohibiting other activities, e.g., travel or lighting a fire, are lifted so that the ceremony can be performed.

Harris | 85 The brit milah is not simply a circumcision, but a “covenant” ceremony, indicating that the newborn is entering the covenant of the Jewish people with God. In Hebrew, the verb meaning “to seal a covenant” translates literally as “to cut.”

***

Our son, Anthony, is born on a Thursday, about two weeks before the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. The jahrzeit. I call R.J.G., as instructed, once I am home from the hospital.

“Can’t we do the bris on Saturday?” I ask, having counted the eight days. “All our friends will be at work on Friday.”

“They’ll come,” R.J.G. assures me. She’s a rabbi, so I know I can’t argue. We set the time for 11:00.

I get to work preparing a written program for our guests. It’s my first religious event and I want to be thorough. Will and I have written our prayers for Anthony, or “wishes,” as we like to think of them, and I’ve written a long paragraph about my father. We ask friends to read parts of the ceremony, as R.J.G. suggested. I’m typing the English parts and photocopying and pasting the Hebrew prayers into the document, so it will look authentic. R.J.G. has given me the Hebrew text for my name, and for Anthony’s. In the blur of new parenthood I paste a huge section of Hebrew in upside-down, but no one will notice until a few weeks later, when I mail a copy of the ceremony to Aunt Sandy. I also make carrot salad and Monterrey casserole and order a cake. I am six days postpartum, but full of conviction.

R.J.G. was right, our friends do come. Lawyers and chemists mostly, our usual crowd. I am the first in our circle to have a baby and the first to have lost a parent; and I am the only Jew. Even among the chemists and lawyers, in Minnesota there just aren’t that many. So this crowd is not used to in- fants or intense public emotions, and they are unaccustomed to ancient Jewish ritual. But they’re here. They mingle in the living room, somewhat unsure as to whether it’s a happy or sad occasion; R.J.G. takes it upon herself to tend to my mother, who has flown in from Boston.

Will and I are upstairs helping the mohel strap Anthony into the Circumstraint. The Circumstraint is an ergonomically designed “neonatal immobilizer,” basically a plastic, baby-shaped chip-and-dip tray with straps, used to keep eight-day-old Jewish boys still during the ceremony. Anthony also gets a little bit of wine from mohel’s medical bag.

The mohel and Anthony are ready, so Will and I go downstairs. The living room is filled with dozens of our friends. It’s another sunny day in May, but this time the light streams in. Most of the men wear dark suits, but the women have worn spring dresses, and through the sunlight and haze of sleep-deprived motherhood, the room seems beautiful and full of flowers. R.J.G. is standing by my mother, beaming; my mother sits in a place of honor by the table where the mohel will perform the actual procedure. We have chosen our friends Margaret and Jim to carry Anthony in, and they enter now, the mohel close behind them. The ceremony begins.

Harris | 86 I only cry a little when I read what I’ve written about my father; Anthony only cries a little when the procedure is performed. My friends tell me later that they were all crying, but I didn’t see it.

At the end of the ceremony R.J.G. and the mohel burst into raucous Hebrew song, clapping and encouraging everyone to join in. Unfortunately, they are the only ones who know the words. My mother and I have no Hebrew songs in our repertoire. The only Jewish guest is one of Will’s students. Brian makes a brave effort and R.J.G. is a trooper. Together they make it through at least one verse.

Later, the mohel almost chokes on the Monterrey casserole. “The food isn’t usually that spicy at a bris,” R.J.G. tells me. I guess when she advised a “dairy” meal she hadn’t anticipated jalapenos. I make sure the mohel gets a big piece of cake.

*** “I make sure the mohel gets a big slice of cake.” Keepsakes:

The score from Rigoletto that my father used in his college opera class.

A pin my parents brought me from a trip to Bermuda. It’s a ceramic flower, about two inches wide, the petals are all different colors. My father picked it out for me, even though he hates to shop. At least that’s what my mother said.

A photograph I took when, for some reason, Will and I were visiting my father at work. He’s wearing a white lab coat and reaching across a counter and he’s smiling.

A small stuffed torah. Anthony receives this at his bris. It squeaks when you squeeze it.

***

If you’re going to invite thirty people to your house to say Hebrew prayers and watch while a man in a fringed shawl snips the foreskin off your eight-day-old son right there in your living room, you’ve got to have a certain level of comfort with the religious heritage that mandates those sorts of observances. I am not comfortable being Jewish; but after the bris I am exuberant. I have given my testimony: in my family, Judaism will not die with my father; and my son will always have a connec- tion to him. It wasn’t easy. A bris is Judaism in its most basic, old country, Old Testament form. But once you’ve hosted one, there is no turning back.

In the coming years I will host more Jewish rituals for my children, for our non-Jewish friends, and eventually for their children as well. I will teach them all how to play dreidel on Chanukkah, I will lead Passover seders, happy that I heard enough Hebrew as a child to sound authentic as I read the transliterated prayers.

But first, I have to learn. After the bris, I enroll in a class that R.J.G. teaches, designed for people who are planning to convert. I learn that Shavout, the holiday that celebrates Moses receiving the Ten

Harris | 87 Commandments, is celebrated with cheesecake. This is good news. I make a mental note to start cel- ebrating Shavout. I learn that Jews welcome converts. Despite my reflexive who’d-be-Jewish-if-they- weren’t-stuck-with-it attitude, I am pleased to learn this. It’s the story of Ruth: “whither thou goest, I will go…thy people shall be my people.” She was the first convert and became the great-grandmother of King David, so we not only welcome converts, we are open to them reaching our highest echelons. And I learn that Jews value life over ritual.

R.J.G. is clear on this point. The rituals are important. There are many levels of Judaism—from ultra-Orthodox to Reform—and many levels of observance. R.J.G. wishes people would observe more, particularly the rules for the Sabbath. But Jews value life above all else: if stranded on a desert island, even the most observant Jew would eat a ham and cheese sandwich if that were the only way to stay alive. It’s like the eight-day rule for the bris: it’s one of the most solemn commandments, but if the baby is sick, the ceremony waits.

I doubt I would have hosted a bris if my father had been alive; I doubt I would have given An- thony a Hebrew name. But my father was gone and I did not want that glimmer to die with him, that irrational glimmer that insisted, even if he didn’t believe the dogma or follow the rituals, that being Jewish meant something. If I didn’t make some effort, my father would be the last link. Life trumps ritual, but after my father died, memories and ritual were all I had.

“When the Moonlight Tightens the Shadows” by Bill Wolak Back to Table of Contents Harris | 88 It matters less what I said than how you read it | Emily O’Neill

what can I say that might taste new / I have keys

to all kinds of houses but can’t remember how

I’d walk to yours / oak leaves hissing under my boots

I’ve kept the grapefruit rind roses / no one makes me anything

but you & soon as it’s built I’ve disappeared it / egg white

foam with little bitters hearts dragged through

this, some accidental admission of guilt / a quail’s egg / no lipstick sticking

to you or your glass / my mouth a proud trick I play by keeping still

by saying always you know what I want / so you order & I eat

I told you he gave me a green dime store ring & it turned me mossy / tarot cards

to convince us to move to Oregon / when I was supposed to be loving someone else

I was wrapping your breakfast in wax paper / drinking a thimble of the good scotch

strange to be attached to who I deplete / to lick black sugar

from the tip of your finger / I’m rude / have been ruder than I can stand

refused purple grocery store flowers / I was supposed to be elsewhere, in love

or closeness / acknowledgement of how sloppy I am at caring for the ones I keep

I can certainly drink / I walk faster when I’ve forgotten where to / there’s a plainness

running from who can see me / it’s too dangerous to tell the truth all at once O’Neill | 89 Back to Table of Contents Lett(er)ing Love | Ames Hawkins

he hands me the letters because they are hers to give. She says she read them all one final time and now gives them to me because I am writing about my father, about sexuality, about art, Sabout his diagnosis of advanced AIDS. She says she doesn’t know why she kept them these past forty years other than to now be giving them to me. Time is so still I can barely hear it breathe. It stills and distills into recognition of this as an instance—similar to birth, death, graduation, marriage—that cleaves my life into halves: the time before knowing about the letters, and the time after she gives them to me.

It is a simple act when my mother gives me the letters, these twenty pieces of mail postmarked between August 20 and October 4, 1966. She hands them to me across the drop-leaf table, the one that sits in front of the couch in the house that she has, by this time, lived in nearly twice as many years as we all lived together on Whittier Road, the place where we made and unmade our nuclear family.

I take the letters from her, count them, note the variety of the envelopes, the range of inks, the handwriting that I know to be my father’s, put them into a large white Tyvek envelope and don’t touch them again for another year and a half.

Hawkins | 90 II.

The first time I read the letters, I am spread out on a wood floor of a studio apartment in Los Angeles. Feet away, the first lover I’ve had in fifteen years sleeps. Here, with two thousand miles between me and my mother, brother, partner, and children, I can finally read them because here, in this space suspended outside and beyond my life—a space between—I can breathe.

I take inventory. In the twenty letters my father sends, he writes on twelve different kinds of “paper,” including a cleaning cloth and a telegram. He sends the letters in eight different kinds of envelopes; many are adorned in original cartoon drawings, covered in random last minute messages. He writes the letters using nine different kinds of ink, including India ink; he employs ballpoint and felt tip pens most of the time. He exhibits six or seven distinct types of handwriting, some in bastardized cursive, some printing, most written using graphic back slant. In the twenty letters, he includes over fourteen different modes/forms of writing, including, but not limited to: poetry, philosophical statements, lyrical sentiments, rants, memories, humor, information, proclamation, confession. He incor- porates a range of visual images and texts, including four different pieces of art, maps, photographic images, and in one of the last letters, he tapes a lucky penny, one he finds significant because it was minted the year of his birth.

It’s the reproduction of a cartoon my father includes in the fifth envelope, one postmarked Sep- tember 8, 1966, that catches me in the diaphragm, causing me to punctuate aloud: “Oh. My. God.”

Hawkins | 91 I stare at the drawing for a long time, considering the gaps, the spaces between. The juxtaposition between this image and the other contents in the envelope: a newspaper clipping from the May 14, 1962 edition of the Albany TIMES-UNION, and a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign. The difference between the materiality of the pen and pencil; the aperture in time made manifest in the variance between the two mediums. The line drawn between “back” and “I” in his comment on the cartoon signifying a pause in my father’s thinking while writing. The distance between the irony of a closeted gay man including this cartoon in a letter to a woman he’s trying to woo, (a woman with whom he will, in a couple weeks’ time, elope), and the “twist” my father can hardly predict. That he sends the cartoon to the woman with whom he will have two children, one of whom will be a female-born child who comes out first as lesbian, then later as a genderqueer/transgenre writer, slices the taught surface of irony.

But this is not all. A second twist ruptures wide the opening, revealing poignancy of ridiculous proportion. My mother saved the cartoon. And then gave it, tucked inside one of the letters, to me. It is now mine, this pre-me rendering. This image, a projection of his story-as-self: both here and not here. This reflection, a foreshadowing of my self-as-story. Let out of the closet. Lettered onto the page.

III.

In the first few years following my parents’ divorce, meals in public space were the setting for most any exchange between my father and me. Red cracked vinyl seats, liquid yellow fake butter topping on white toast, and waitresses with smoking habits served to reinforce a father-daughter relationship that depended upon a thermos full of Bunn-o-Matic coffee for its intimacy. My father and I were “the same,” I thought, as had been illustrated to me through hours and hours of conversation, creative exchange and idea production. We had, I believed, made a wordless pact to remain connected not by what was made explicit, but by ideas existing just out of reach of language itself. We en- joyed each other’s company, playing around with and in words this way.

It was up North, in the Port Hope Bar, over $1.50 hamburgers and 35 cent shells of Budweiser, no more than two feet from a pool table surrounded by men in full beards, mesh-backed baseball hats with heavy equipment insignia, that Dad announced that he was gay. I wasn’t surprised by the announcement. I was betrayed by the delivery, by his selection of the location, by his clear disregard for what I believed had been a tacit agreement in our post-divorce life: we limit our conversation to public spaces because public spaces limit personal conversation.

I heard what he said, but I suddenly became deaf. Blood pulsed behind my eyes and in my ears. Dad’s lips moved, but I could hear nothing but the thumping of my own circulatory system. He was telling me something about how hard this was, about how he had such a difficult time with it all. But, I could hear none of it.

Goddam you, Dad, I thought. This coming out moment. This moment to name. It was supposed to have been mine.

Hawkins | 92 IV.

In high school, I was burdened by something I could not name. Different, and yet similar to the cultural situation Betty Friedan identified in post-World War II America as the “strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform.” Freidan named this image, this cultural narrative: The Feminine Mystique.

One might argue all teenagers are burdened by a discrepancy between a lived reality and image, a sense that they don’t belong. I understood this, but I also knew my particular inability to fit was somehow different. My struggle was connected to a disjuncture I could feel, from the inside out, with respect to dominant narratives regarding gender. I was battling a particular feminine mystique of my own. It wasn’t about whether I had the right clothes, but whether the “right” clothes were right on me. It wasn’t about whether I could get boys to like me, but whether I actually liked boys “in that way” at all. And, it wasn’t about whether I marked the F or the M check box, it was about why there were only two boxes, and that I would always have to think about it before choosing a box, fine with choosing my legal letter, but I also always wondered: why do I have to choose at all?

I had lots of trouble sleeping: couldn’t easily fall asleep; woke up multiple times every single night; laid awake for hours. This inability to sleep made me incredibly anxious, making it virtually impossible to relax. When it got really bad, I would look for one of my parents to talk with me. Most times, it would be my father. He was often still up anyway, watching TV, taking the dog out for a midnight walk to sneak another cigarette. Sometimes, because of his own neglect in placing a fabric order, he’d be working to meet a deadline for the interior design business he and my mother ran. He’d be making something that needed to be delivered the next day, or should have been delivered the day before, something he’d refused to do and so now he—rather than the drapery folks—was sewing someone’s living room curtains in our basement, always without a pattern, most times without a plan.

My father had a short temper. Would scream at fabric. Would get angry with thread. Spit vitriol at the sewing machine. Curse his hands if they made a mistake. If you approached him working in the daylight, he’d yell at you too.

But, these late nights when I’d find him—whether it was 11:00, or 12:00, or 1:00, or 2:00—he would stop what he was doing to talk with me. In that same way people congregate at the best, most intimate parties, we’d move from wherever I found him in the house, to the kitchen to talk. Some- times I would sit on the counter and he’d stand. Sometimes he sat on the counter and I’d stand. Most times we’d both sit on the floor. He’d press his back against the stove, cross his feet at the ankles, and stare at his lap when I’d speak. When I listened to him, I’d count the slats in the kitchen closet lou- vered doors, compare the length of our legs, the shape of our hands.

The procedure was always the same: 1) Me: Identify an insecurity or injustice; 2) Dad: Actively listen; 3) Me: Emote; 4) Dad: Respond and support; 5) Me: Cry. Always cry. Then we’d remain on the floor for hours more. Shift into philosophical discussions regarding life. Grapple with the ineffable, the unknowable, and unnamable chasms I felt between being and self—between body and story, be-

Hawkins | 93 tween space and time. For hours and hours, over the course of years, my father and I engaged in this process of communication, trying out and trying on ideas, sharing our personal perspectives during the wee hours of the night. So many hours spent talking with him, and yet I remember nothing of what he said. His interactions with me are impossible to categorize as fatherly advice.

What I do recall is the bodily sensation I had as we practiced with language. The visceral thrill incited by simply talking, moving from one word to the next. Rolling around together in ideas and words.

I read my father’s letters searching for traces of our late-night revelations. I want to reconnect here on these pages the same way I once did on the floor, in the kitchen, in 1980. When I wore dresses and eye shadow. When my closeted interior designer father was married with children. When the art of conversation became conversation as art.

By the second time I read the letters, my father is dead. I arrive at a writers’ conference in Banff, Canada, two years after reading the letters the first time. Sitting in the hotel room alone, using the second bed as a table, I lay out the letters in a grid, first four owsr of five, then—because I don’t quite like how it looks—five rows of four.

One at a time, I remove a letter from its position and read. As I do, I think about how the story of my parents’ meeting has always been reduced to a series of facts: Patricia Eileen O’Brien (twenty) met George Frederick Hawkins (twenty-one) during the summer of 1966 at Ramapo Anchorage Camp in Rhinebeck, NY, a summer camp for emotionally impaired children. They worked there; they weren’t campers. My mother had come from The University of Michigan, having chosen between two options to fulfill a requirement for her teaching degree. She was employed as a tutor. My father, a student at Buffalo State College, was returning for his second summer as a camp counselor. He had just returned from a semester in Siena, Italy, and didn’t want to live at home. Here, the story opens, they meet. Six weeks after the summer ends, the story continues, they marry. Twenty-four years and eleven months later, the story ends, my mother leaves. Six months later, a closing reemerges as its own beginning, and they finalize their divorce.

As I move across the rows, left to right, I start to think about each letter not only by their postmarked dates, but as a number. By #14, I’m starting to skim rather than read. I become simultaneously bored and fascinated with the process of opening and reading, compelled to keep repeating the motions, opening and looking, moving through them faster and faster. Each one is unique, but together they are now a collection, dependent upon each other for the logic of the whole.

I keep thinking: There’s no there there. They are, collectively, a kind of textual ouroboros. Self-consuming, they are always both full and empty. Each is always both more and less than the one that came before. I had intended to spend all day with the missives and instead, I’ve blazed through them all in an hour and a half. I stare at the matrix on the bed and wonder: what the hell am I going to do now?

Hawkins | 94 VI.

Though I was not at all surprised by the content of his announcement in the Port Hope Bar, the news he delivered on a summer Sunday morning at Harry’s on Mack Avenue shocked me. As if on cue, at almost the exact second my poached eggs and pancakes and his eggs and toast were laid on the table, he looked down and told me he had some bad news. Just as he had imagined, just as he had suspected, he was HIV+.

“What the fuck, Dad,” I said.

He never looked up. His left hand fiddled with the fork on the napkin. I was elievedr that there were no threatening figures only inches from us, no farmers with guns. But I was also annoyed that he had chosen to tell me sitting in the familiar normalcy of this family restaurant booth.

“What the fuck were you thinking? It’s 1995 for chrissakes. You know how people get HIV. What were you doing?”

His hands shook and I could see slender streams of saline on his cheeks, but I was not moved. I did not relent.

“Dad!” I whisper-shouted when he didn’t respond. “I demand you tell me now. I want to know exactly how you got this.”

His answer came so easily, so quickly. The words and story were so tight. I knew immediately it was bullshit. But, I accepted it because there was nothing else to do. Because I had asked for it. Be- cause cultural narratives regarding HIV make it seem as though knowing where and how and who may have been involved in any particular infection are our business. The details of one person’s story relevant to all, logic created via the rhetoric of “safety” and “public health.”

But honesty isn’t necessarily located in fact. Truth isn’t something to be exacted on demand. And words, spoken or written, are never able to take what isn’t and make it so.

VII.

Letter #6 is my favorite in the collection. Rather than rip the envelope across the top seam, my mother tore this one down the right end, removing a slim sliver of paper no more than a centimeter wide. Even though I wasn’t the one to originally create the tear, opening it—especially the first time— felt the way it did to unwrap presents when I was small, as though the act of ripping off the paper wasn’t only about exposing the gift, but revealing the existence of magic itself.

Placing the thumb of my left hand on the bottom edge of the envelope, my fingers across the top, I gently squeezed in order to create a vertical eye-shaped opening—an aperture—in the end. Peeking inside, I spied a particular shade of blue, a color my father refers to in the letter as “neet.” While the color of the letter was both pleasing and unexpected, I registered actual surprise not with my eyes,

Hawkins | 95 but through my hand. As soon as I pressed the “paper” between the thumb and forefinger, I could tell the material of the letter was not the smooth of pressed wood pulp, not stationery of the usual kind. Sliding it from the envelope, I stared at the folded rectangle for a while, turned it over in my hands before opening it, noting the translucence, the fabric-like texture, recognizing the substrate similar to that of dryer sheets.

I experienced a two-fold rush of magical delight. First, that my father had upped the ante, somehow topping his own choices for what counted as a letter-writing surface, shifting multiple times, in the space of two weeks, from India ink drawing, to telegram, to personal memorabilia, to this household item, a cleaning cloth. Had my mother not already been thinking the sentiment she’s shared with me about why she was attracted to my father—I’d never met anyone like him—Letter #6 would have sealed the deal.

The cleaning cloth letter is a different color blue, lighter in hue, and more delicate in consistency than that of the thick blue shop towels mechanics like my brother use to clean grease off their hands, but it is made in the same way: by spinning, then extruding, then compressing, then rolling fibers into fabric. Developed by Du Pont and other chemical companies in the early 1960s, hydroentangled (spun laced) multilayer composite nonwovens can be made of single materials or blends of polypro- pylene, polyester, cotton, and wood pulp. Absorbency, softness, and strength differs depending upon the original raw material, and experimentation and developments in the 1970s resulted in the evetual creation of a wide range of household products such as dryer sheets and baby wipes, disposable diapers and sanitary pads, and air filters for automobiles, air conditioning units, furnaces.

Each time I unfurl this letter I see both the George who chose to write on the blue cleaning cloth in 1966, and the George who owned a Swiffer in 2008. I cannot read this letter without considering both the blue cloths that he and his friend Tom used to clean their apartment in Buffalo, and the dry mop cloth extension pole I moved three times: once from an apartment into my house, once from my house into another apartment, once from that apartment into a senior apartment, the one that would be his last.

I am not at all surprised that my father was able to employ a delicate hand to maneuver the black felt tip pen to craft the one-inch puffy letters on this thin, lacy surface. The shape, size, and spacing in and around these bloated letters makes somehow more enchanting, more believable, this particular I LOVE YOU.

His proposal in the closing catches me completely off guard: let’s get married sometime we’re in the same place for more than 2 hours.

Hawkins | 96 Letter #6 enchants me because each time I remove it I know I’ll spend as much time considering the blue cleaning cloth as I will reading the words. I’ll stare at the luminous quality of the fabric, recognizing myself in the impulse to impress the one to whom I write, to imagine alternative writing surfaces, to turn my letters into art. Each time, I know I will fall in love with him just a little bit more—this man-who-was-not-then-but-will-now-become my father. Every time I read the letter, stare at the tiny tangle of fibers on the fabric, hoping to see a way to love myself just a little bit more, too.

VIII.

Three full years—almost to the day—go by before I read the letters a third time. I’m in Sedo- na, Arizona, beginning a month-long self-created writer’s retreat. This time, I’m completely alone. There’s no lover. There are no colleagues. No other writers or friends. I’ve recently left my partner of nineteen years. I’m starting over: beginning again, it seems, to reread these letters in the same moment all things feel as though they have come to a close.

I had always noticed the affective marks my father makes throughout these letters, hyperbolic dashes that make visible his pausing between thoughts. But now, reading in the shadow of the red rock landscape, it’s all I can see. I fixate on them. Do they function only as bridges, connective tissue between gaps? Or are they indicative of the lacerations, faults, and fissures in the narrative he seemed to be working so hard to create?

My father presses pen tip to paper surface and reveals himself between statements. His epistolary synapses make tangible the moments before words land, the ethereal space of imagining and desire, the interplay between what is and isn’t there. Physically engaging with the letters, his hand and arm help him decide what he next wants to say. And so, I quit reading and start listening. I stop looking at the letters only as texts and consider their auditory artistry, the composition as visual design.

I open the first letter sitting on a couch in a place where the surface of the earth appears stained with blood. By the final letter, I am once again sitting in the kitchen on the fake brick linoleum floor. Listening as he reads to me words that tangle, made stronger not because they’re woven in linear order, but because they’re pressed together in spaces of desire that never touch.

Hawkins | 97 Here, in these letters, I have never and always existed. Because he wrote them, I live both within and beyond my body. Because she handed them to me, I love both within and without his breath.

Back to Table of Contents Hawkins | 98 Sun | 99 Back to Table of Contents “The Reverberant Ambience of Interperative Codes an Ancient Artifact” by Ryota Matsumto

Back to Table of Contents Matsumoto | 100 “The Light Breath of Wind at Dawn” by Ryota Matsumoto

“Solar Flares for Transient Modulation” by Ryota Matsumoto Matsumoto | 101 Back to Table of Contents Lover and the Pale Fire of Time1| Emily J. Cousins

o do not love years & youth minutes & change sweet heart no one knows when you’ll be an old song —

we make future out of all things old lumbering steps backward the wrong of un shapely things is still a wrong but your image is re made a casket of gold in my dreams —

I bring you numberless dreams I bring you the tide that wears all down to dove grey sands I bring you numberless dreams —

1 “Lover and the Pale Fire” is part of a larger piece “The Wild Rise” and contains language from A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B. Yeats (St. Martin’s Press. New York, NY 1985.) Cousins | 102 beauty blossoms an apple out of man’s marrow out of season thought kind arrow made of wild you & I new then not —

say I dream it ends in love say I had the beautiful despair say one day the look will still your hands say one day it will make you weep —

murmur sadly little pilgrim you are full of sleep the soft look your eyes once had fled changed now bend down shadow pace upon the mtns face the crowd of stars —

in light pale from the west the wild rise one by one the will of birds I hope you forgive once you are dead —

Cousins | 103 my love meet the garden with still white hand & still white feet —

beauty is ephemera your eyes border of a lake border sorrow under lids hold my thrust of dead leaves in an hour of gentle ness in a once more togetherness —

& ah when the child falls asleep how far away the stars seem when the woods are round blessings fall like faint meteors in the gloom silence dewy as eyes before us lies eternity an old rabbit limping down —

Back to Table of Contents Cousins | 104 Tyler Atwood | comes from a long line of subsistence farmers but knows very little about the planting or harvesting of crops. He is the author of one collection of poetry: an electric sheep jumps to greener pas- ture (University of Hell Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Word Riot, Lunch Ticket, The Colorado Independent, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Denver, CO.

Jessica Barksdale | has a fourteenth novel, The Burning Hour, which was published by Urban Farm- house Press in March 2016. A Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Compose, Salt Hill Journal, The Coachella Review, Carve Magazine, Mason’s Road, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches online novel writing for UCLA Extension. She holds an MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the Rainier Writers Work- shop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Emily J. Cousins | lives, teaches, and writes in Denver, CO. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Saltfront, Sugar House Review, [PANK], and elsewhere.

Flint | is a writer, activist, and itinerant adjunct writing instructor who lives in Los Angeles. She earned an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, and she is interested in hybridity, performativity, and generative genre-tampering. She has presented her work at the &Now Festival of New Writing, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the 2015 Queer Studies Conference at UNCA. Publications include the anthology Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre, Glitterwolf, The Outrider Review, The Gambler, Cactus Heart, Crab Fat, and Round Up, as well as the introductory issue of Two Hawks Quarterly, the name of which was inspired by her poem, “In Praise of Two Hawks Fucking.”

Tracy Harris | is a writer, pro bono political asylum attorney, and arts enthusiast living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Lascaux Review, Mason’s Road, Lunch Ticket, and Tahoma Lit- erary Review. She is a regular participant in the Cracked Walnut series of literary readings in the Twin Cities and a former member of the editorial board of Water~Stone Review.

Ames Hawkins | is a writer, educator, and art activist. As an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Columbia College Chicago, she teaches and co-teaches courses in the programs of Writing and Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literature. She is a multimodal composer who uses writing and art to explore the interstices of alphabetic text, image, and sound; she theorizes the power and pleasure of queer(ing) forms. Her recent creative-critical scholarship appears across a range of academic and literary publications, such as Computers and Composition Online, Slag Glass City, The Feminist Wire, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Water~Stone Review. She curated and co-edited the Lambda Literary Foundations 25th Anniversary eBook Collection, 25 for 25: An Anthology of Works by 25 Outstanding Contemporary Authors and Those They Inspired. Ames also loves to get the written word off the page and onto the stage—she has engaged in drag/queer/story performance in Chicago with 2nd Story, Gender Fusions, Northern Lights, and The Chicago Kings. She was a 2012 fellow at the In(ter)ven- tions residency at The Banff Centre, a Lambda Literary Retreat Writer’s Fellow, and a 2007 Bread Loaf Contributor.

B.B.P. Hosmillo | is the founding co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art and a guest poetry editor at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Anthologized in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry (2011) and Bettering American Poetry (2016), he is the author of two forthcoming books, The Essential Ruin and Breed Me: A Sentence Without a Subject; the latter of which will be released in summer 2016 by AJAR Press with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên and Kaitlin Rees. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Margins: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal, minor literature[s], Transnational Literature, Dostoyevsky Wannabe in Manchester, and elsewhere. He received research fellowships/scholarships from The Japan Foundation, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia.

C.J. Hungerman | anchored down in the great city of Chicago after acquiring a handful of degrees in music, graphic design, and painting during a decade of nomadic time. Here he has exhibited in a plethora of galleries throughout the years, selling art, securing grants and awards, and public art commissions as well. C.J.’s pieces can be seen at the fabulous Fulton Market Kitchen hanging with artists Dominic Sansone, Erik Debat, Erni Vales, and Hebru Brantley. His current public art commis- sion is in Chicago’s new Chinatown Branch Library. C.J. will be creating a sixty-foot custom original piece of art for the space.

Holly Iglesias | is a poet and translator whose works include Angles of Approach (White Pine Press), Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), and Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and individual artist grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the associate director of the Master of Liberal Arts & Sciences Program at the University of North Caroli- na at Asheville. Her current project is The Sturdy Child of Terror, a poetry collection focused on childhood during the Cold War.

Michael Levan | has work in recent or forthcoming issues of Iron Horse Literary Review, The Boiler Journal, Hobart, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and American Literary Review. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saint Francis and writes reviews for Amer- ican Microreviews and Interviews. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and children, Atticus and Dahlia.

Olivia Lu | is an up and coming artist from the Washington, DC, area with a passion for portraits. She is inspired by the wonders of the galaxy and the beauty of human expressions. Her works mainly focus on the conjunction of powerful and fragile aspects of nature and women, with a special affinity for the color blue. With experience in acrylic, watercolor, digital art, and colored pencils, Lu is contin- uously experimenting with new concepts and mediums.

Ryota Matsumoto | is a principal of an award-winning interdisciplinary design office,Ryota Matsu- moto Studio, based in Tokyo. He is an artist, designer, and urban planner. Born in Tokyo, Ryota was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture from the University of Penn- sylvania in 2007 after studying at the Architectural Association in London and the Mackintosh School of Architecture in the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s. His art and design work are featured in numerous publications and exhibitions internationally. His current interest gravitates around the embodiment of cultural possibilities in art, architecture, and urban topography.

Ann Stewart McBee | was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She graduated with a PhD in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she taught undergraduate composition, creative writing, and literature, and served as an editor for Cream City Review. She has published fiction and poetry in Ellipsis, Untamed Ink, So to Speak, Citron Review, Blue Earth Review, and At Length, among others. She now teaches English at Des Moines Area Community College, and she lives outside Des Moines, Iowa with her husband and a smelly terrier. Her novel Veiled Men is looking for a home.

Rita Mookerjee | is a Literature PhD student at Florida State University. She holds an MA in Literature from Temple University. Her research interests include contemporary postcolonial literature, queer theory, and gender studies.

Ellen Mueller | was raised in Fargo, ND, and currently lives and works in Buckhannon, WV as an As- sistant Professor of Art at West Virginia Wesleyan College. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and completed her undergraduate work at Bemidji State University. Artist residencies include Ox-Bow, Virginia Center for Creative Art, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow; Nes Artist Residency (Iceland); Coast Time (May 2016); and Signal Culture (August 2016). Mueller has also published a foundational art textbook entitled Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design with Oxford University Press.

Sean Patrick Mulroy | was born and raised in Southern Virginia. The house where he grew up was built in 1801 and was commandeered by the Union Army during the Civil War to serve as a makeshift hospital. As a boy, Sean loved to peel back the carpets to show where the blood from hasty surgeries on wounded soldiers had stained the wooden floorboards. Now he writes poems. Sean is a candidate in the MFA program at UW Madison, a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, and he has competed eight times at the National Poetry Slam.

Emily O’Neill | is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her recent poems and stories can be found in The Journal, Redivider, and Washington Square, among others. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize. She is the author of three chapbooks: Celeris (Fog Machine, 2016), You Can’t Pick Your Genre (Jellyfish Highway, 2016) and Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles (Nostrovia! Poetry, forthcoming 2016). She teaches writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and edits poetry for Wyvern Lit.

Eugene Sun Park | is a filmmaker and video artist working in narrative and experimental forms. His projects have screened at film festivals, galleries, and microcinemas, including Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival in Greece, Jornadas de Reapropiación in Mexico, DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Korea International Expat Film Festival in South Korea, and Anthology Film Archives. They have also appeared on broad- cast television, including Time Warner Cable. Eugene’s feature-length screenplay, Michael’s Story, was the winner of the Screenplay Competition at the 37th Asian American International Film Festival. He was a 2014 recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and his current project—a short narrative film about Japanese-American confinement during WWII—is supported by a JACS Grant from the National Park Service of the US Department of the Interior. Eugene is the founder and director of Full Spectrum Features, a Chicago-based non-profit that supports the production and distribution of alternative cinema.

Derick Smith | was born in New York, raised in Ireland, and initially began a career in design before moving on to chemical photography, which resulted in his first solo exhibition in New York in 2006. Later, he began to experiment with sculpture and painting after graduating from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2012. He has since exhibited in national and international exhibitions. Derick’s work is rooted in process and an understanding of the technical aspects of a craft that can be harnessed to open dialogues about the nature of visual perception. How does context, the title of a work, the place of display, and even the society in which it is presented affect the way in which the work is read or interpreted?

Haechang Sun | is a New York based tattoo and visual artist from South Korea. He currently works in the medium of tattooed leathers. He completed a BFA, concentrating in sculpture, at Hongik Uni- versity School of Art in Seoul, South Korea, and studied surface design in the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. His recent group exhibitions include Art Yellow Book at CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea (2015-2016); Emerging Artists Exhibition at The Drawing Room Gallery in Cos Cob, CT (2015); WAH Bridges Self at Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY (2015); and Celestial Sunset at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY (2015). He was featured in the first issue of Art Yellow Book #1. Since 2012, Sun has been working as a tattoo artist. He is fascinated by the process of injecting ink under skin, and has started using tattoos as a medium to present his reflections of memories that could transform his current and future self. He believes that tattoos serve as symbols for imprinted perspectives that cannot naturally be removed. He holds firmly to the drawings, yet explores three-dimensional formats that he mastered in college. The focus of Sun’s work is freedom, incorporating his idea that “we are not as free from what we have learned—at school, at home, and in the societies where we were born and raised—as we think.”

Ronald C. Walker | has been painting and showing art since the early 1980s. His works have been featured in over two hundred exhibitions around the United States, including over thirty-five solo exhibits. He studied art at Ventura College, Central Missouri State University, and the University of Kan- sas, receiving both his MA and MFA degrees in drawing and painting. He is exclusively represented by the Mahlstedt Gallery in New Rochelle, NY. His biography can be found in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Art, Ask Art, and a variety of other places. He is a co-founder of the “Suburban Primitive” style along with the Florida artist Carl Knickerbocker. The style seeks out connections between our primitive ancestors and our modern day “sophisticated, civilized way of life.” Mr. Walker lives with his wife and two children in the Sacramento area of California where he teaches art at the elementary school level.

Bill Wolak | is a poet who lives in New Jersey and teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson Uni- versity. He has just published his thirteenth collection of poetry entitled Love Opens the Hands: New and Selected Love Poems with Nirala Press.

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