Anjoli Roy

Grandpa was a skin diver: 20 Directives for a Wet-Cat Granddaughter

Blade.

Grandpa knew how to sink himself. At the height of the Depression, in the Long Island Sound, he grew up eeling, clamming, fishing with a rod. He and his dad and uncle would haul in whatever was edible for the family, whatever they knew would sell to upscale restaurants in New York City. The sea provided. After he returned from the war to Southern California, where he and Grandma had met, married, and settled, he turned his body into a blade.

           Grandpa would pack up Grandma and our mom and Aunt Gigi in the rounded body of their green 1952 Chevy and head to La Jolla Cove in San Diego, Grandpa’s giant mahogany surfboard, brought home from Honolulu strapped to the roof. Mom and Aunt Gigi and Grandma would wade and splash in the thin shoreline while Grandpa would haul out that massive reddish-brown long board, the color of old blood.

            “I always thought it was at least 15 feet long,” Mom said.

            It might have been. I’ve seen the pictures. With its pointed nose, it was double the length of Grandpa and then some.

            He’d rest a jute catch bag on top. A diver’s mask and fins would dangle from his fingers, a tire iron tucked into his palm.

            Grandpa would sink himself in the dark water by the 75-million-year-old sandstone sea cliffs where it got deep fast. His breathed-up lungs stood in for a tank. When he swam, his crawl was smooth and easy. He looked like a running stitch. No splash.

           “Did he have a wetsuit?” I asked Mom.

           “No,” she said emphatically. “Just thin trunks, sweetheart.”

           I forgot to ask about weight belts.

           “Did he ever try to teach you or Gigi?”

           “I’m sure he would if I’d asked him.” She paused. “His swimming. To this day, I think about it. . . . He had those long arms and he’d just move. He could go forever. I wish I was like that.”

           With the exceptions of Grandpa and Grandma, we are a family of wet cats, preferring to float around or doggie paddle or skim the surface. Even in our most practiced water times, we maintain a look of the near-drowned.

           Later, when Grandpa wasn’t diving much, or when the seasons turned and it was too cold for it, he would take the family to Point Loma on a negative tide. He’d wait for the water to get low low. Then he’d wade out into that icy water, sometimes chest deep, and poke around the rocks, hoping against moray eels.

           The reason for all of his hunts in the Pacific’s silty silver water was the camouflaged and striated, dull shell of a low mollusk with a red hue.

 

 

 

Stretch.

Abalone have been celebrated and consumed throughout the world perhaps since the beginning of time. Long before Grandpa came to California, the Kumeyaay [Koom-yai]—who are indigenous to the area now called La Jolla Cove—ate them too, turning their remains into abalone shell fish hooks. Who could resist such delicious gastropods?

           Abalone shells might be prized for their pretty insides—coveted sunset pinks and aquamarine blues—but young abalone shells are incredibly weak. Octopus prey on juvenile abalone, as do crabs, lobsters, starfish, and snails. It is said that abalone in shallow water risk being smashed by storm-tossed rocks.

           Ninety percent of abalone deaths occur in this juvenile phase. Though it’s difficult to imagine, this rate is typical for survivorship of marine organisms that produce millions of larvae in the water column.            

           It’s probably a good thing, then, that shells of abalone that succeed at reaching adulthood are exceptionally strong. Adult abalone often live up to between 35 and 54 years. Their shells are their protectors: they are made up of microscopic tiles of calcium carbonate, the same compound that makes marble and limestone. Those tiles interlock as tiny bricks. A clingy protein binds them together. It is said that when an adult abalone is struck, the tiles slide apart to prevent shattering. The protein stretches, absorbing the blow.

 

 

 

Absorb.

Our grandpa wasn’t a violent man, but he grew up eating from the sea. He knew how to club the head of a fish on the hull of his aluminum skiff. He knew how to hook what was biting.

            Grandpa’s father, named Albert, was a German Irish American fisherman from Queens. Grandpa’s mother, named Elizabeth, was a German immigrant who came to New York from Romania. Her father pulled her out of school once she finished the sixth grade to work in a dress-shield factory. A precursor to chemical antiperspirants, dress shields involved pieces of rubber sewn into cotton fabric and worn in underarms to protect women from sweating through their dresses.

           “That was when you only had one dress, and it couldn’t be washed,” Mom said.

           In that dress-shield factory, while cutting a cardboard box they used for mailing, Great Grandma Elizabeth lost the tip of her pointer finger on her left hand. Her dad, bent on returning to the old country a rich man, kept the twelve dollars the factory man gave Elizabeth and refused her the surgery to repair her digit.

           Five or six years later, when Elizabeth’s father had amassed enough money, Elizabeth eloped with Albert when she was just 18 years old to avoid having to return to Europe with her father. Seven-and-a-half months later, she gave birth to an eight-pound “preemie” who would become our grandpa.

            Albert was a drinker, and he was violent. Grandpa protected his mom. He likely absorbed blows.

            When Grandpa graduated high school the valedictorian of his class back in Long Island, a recruiter from Brown came to the house and said he was looking for quality, top-notch students who would benefit from college but didn’t have the money to attend. This recruiter wanted to offer Grandpa admission and a full ride. Grandpa’s mom turned the man away.

            Albert had wanted to pull Grandpa out of school when he finished the sixth grade, but Elizabeth had insisted he stay in school. She knew she couldn’t fend off Albert any longer. They needed Grandpa to work. They needed the money. Already in his senior year, Grandpa was hauling in catches from the Sound with his dad and uncle. He was working the night shift at what was then called the local “insane hospital” too. The family couldn’t make it if he went away to school.

            It wasn’t until Mom was born and old enough for Grandpa’s mom to tell her about it that Grandpa learned how he’d been admitted, how he could have gone to school for free.

            “I was so excited to tell him,” Mom said, “because my mom was college educated and it was clear to me Dad had always felt like he hadn’t been good enough.”

            “How did he react?” I asked.

            “Very muted,” she said. “I just wanted him to know. He was good as anybody and better than a whole lot more.”

            Grandpa went on to work at the telephone company. Grandpa, who might have had a job like its own harvest.

            “I’m so proud of you girls,” he told each of my sisters and me before we flew from our hometown nests in Pasadena to university in San Diego, Atlanta, and—for me—New York.

 

 

 

Move.

Abalone don’t move very far during their lives. Juveniles graze on rocks for algae. As they grow, they rely more on drift.

 

 

 

Hand.

Though he was born and raised in New York, Grandpa didn’t stay there. World War II brought him to the West Coast where he was stationed as a marine and, on one fortuitous day, he stood on the side of the road with his buddy hoping for a ride to some place to spend his day off.

A woman pulled over and said, “Here. Hold this duck.” She handed a duckling to him.

            She was a navy nurse en route to see her family in San Diego, the duckling one of her nurse friends had gotten as a present for Easter. She was probably taking the duck to her older sister Virginia, who had a small family farm.

            As she started to drive, she explained, the duck wasn’t staying put in her lap. She was grateful to have some company to help her.

            “Going to the local bar?” she asked. “I don’t think they’re open, seeing as how it’s Sunday.”

            Grandpa said he didn’t drink. He and his buddy were a couple of guys from New York. What was there to do around these parts?

            In this moment in the story, I imagine Grandpa worrying that the little duck might poop on his trousers. I imagine the duck settling its little yellow body in the warmth of Grandpa’s broad and gentled fisherman’s hands.

            The woman looked at Grandpa squarely, remembering her brief stay in Honolulu, where she’d been working as a nurse in a maternity ward just months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Everyone had been so nice to her there, when she’d been the out-of-towner.

            “Have you ever picked an orange?” she asked, with what might have been a glint in her eye.

            And so she took the two men home to her family’s house for dinner. At the end of the night, she gave Grandpa her number.

            This woman is my grandma. She used to love to tell this story.

 

 

 

Prey.

Mature abalone have an easier time surviving than their younger counterparts, but they are not without predators. Cabezon fish, whose name means stubborn or big-headed in Spanish, can dislodge them and swallow them whole. Bat rays can crush mature abalone with their jaws. The sea otter is the deadliest abalone predator, capable of consuming all available abalone for miles.

            With the explosion of British desire for otter pelts in the 1700 and 1800s, the otter population plummeted off coastal California, which in turn led to anemone—another favorite prey of otters—reproducing unchecked. These anemone decimated the kelp forests around which abalone fed and made their homes. Abalone feed on giant kelp, bull kelp, feather boa kelp, and elk kelp. With the kelp suffering, abalone suffered too.

            Meanwhile, in the 1850s through the mid-1900s Chinese and Japanese immigrants arriving to the US started hunting abalone. White Americans like my grandpa developed an increasingly ravenous taste for them too.

            During World War II, American soldiers were shipped abalone in cans. On the California coast, abalone sandwiches were a common menu item.

            Today, with otters on the protected list, and even with abalone on the hunting restriction list, abalone remain at odds with rebounding marine animal and human predators alike.

 

 

 

Tear.

In basic training on the East Coast, Grandpa was a tail gunner, which means he was supposed to be the person who sat, rear-facing, firing guns at planes that were firing guns at him in the sky. The story goes that he would puke each time the plane dove, so he never saw action. At his station in the South Pacific, they moved him into communications, where he kept track of pilots and facilitated connections between different posts.

            “This is for the best, of course,” Mom said. “The life expectancy of a tail gunner was a few hours in combat.”

            While he was away at war, Grandma waited for Grandpa in California. They were newlyweds, two shells just joined and already torn apart when he got called away. Grandma drove him to where he had to report for duty. She followed his bus as far as she could, weeping at the wheel.

            Some sixty years later, in December 2003, when Grandpa died, Grandma consoled the rest of us by telling us this story: “Here I was, having just found the man the Lord had made just for me, and he was already leaving. I just couldn’t—” she mimed crying hard. “That’s why I’m not crying now,” she said. “I got a whole lifetime with your grandfather when he came home. I’ve cried all my tears for him already.”

 

 

 

Succeed.

Abalone are a type of gastropod, which are rare among animals due to their success in all three major habitats: ocean, fresh water, and land.

 

 

 

Skin.

How is it that a boy raised in Long Island learned to skin dive so well? None of us thought to ask Grandpa when he was alive. Maybe he learned when he was stationed in the Solomon Islands. Maybe it was when he took leave in Honolulu. Maybe he learned in San Diego.

            Grandpa, who taught you to skin dive? Who taught you to gather these single-shelled animals with gentle hands before they sensed danger, before they suctioned down on rocks so tight no prying could release them? Who taught you to stick them on the skin of your thighs so you could gather more than one during a single breath?

            “We’d always laugh because he looked so ridiculous,” Mom said, conjuring a memory of him walking out of the water, covered in shells. “He’d be lumpy with all those abalone stuck to him under his shorts, so we’d laugh. But of course we ate the abalone, and we loved it.”

 

 

 

Eat.

To my knowledge, I only met our Grandpa’s mother, Elizabeth, once. I was little—maybe three or four—and I don’t remember if she baulked at the brownness of her half-Indian great-grandkids or our dad, her brown grandson-in-law. I don’t remember if I noticed the shortened pointer finger on her left hand. I only remember two things: 1) she sat on a cushioned recliner, knitting or crocheting something, and smiled at me nicely when I came over for her to get a better look, and 2) when Grandpa cut me a bite of an abalone steak he’d made—it was sweet and a little rigid, something with a pleasurable resistance that I sank my crooked incisors into—and I said yum and I want more of that, she’d laughed and laughed, perhaps because we are an eating family

 

 

 

Spiral.

Some gastropods are edible, like conch, conical limpets, predatory heavy pointed spiral whelks, and of course abalone. As marine gastropod mollusks, abalone are marine snails. The spiral common to snails is flattened in the abalone shell.

            Several different kinds of gastropods may also be used in the preparation of escargot.

 

 

 

Snail.

When I asked Mom for the story about the time she got caught eating snails in the backyard, she said, “I’d tear up the house right behind Mom when she tried to clean up, so she would put me outside in the yard. This one time, when she went to let me back in, she found me with snails smeared all over my face. She said I just gouged them out with my fingers.”

“Did you get spanked?” I asked.

            “No! She scolded me, I’m sure, but there’s no point pounding on a baby that’s that small. They don’t understand it.”

             To snail is “to move, act, or go slowly or lazily.” In this lesson, a child caught eating snails might snail in her understanding.

 

 

 

Turn.

Conch and abalone, with their tough meat, are often tenderized before human consumption.

            Abalone’s bodies are encased in a mantle, a word that conjures loose cloaks or shawls draped across shy shoulders.

            The foot of an abalone contains tentacles that extend beyond the shell wall of the living animal. These tentacles appear frilly or scalloped, like the hem of a dress.

            The secretion from the mantle is what gives the inside of the abalone’s famed shell its colors.

            Today, abalone shells have found themselves turned into buttons, inlaid in furniture and musical instruments, and jewelry. Manipulating abalone shells takes some skill, though, and some risk. Breathing in dust can trigger allergic skin reactions and asthma attacks when the shells are broken down and released into the air.

 

 

 

Preserve.

“Inside, those abalone shells are just gorgeous,” Mom said. “Dad would get the big ones that were legal size, which had to be over five inches, and the insides of the shells are just exquisitely beautiful. It just killed him. He had to figure out something to do with them.

            “Finally when the epoxy glue came out,” Mom continued, “Dad discovered he could preserve the pretty color of the shells. We all loved how pretty they were. He wanted a way to save that beauty.”

            Eventually, Grandpa took to pouring the epoxy into moulds—like for gelatin, but higher quality. Pouring them into wooden moulds was the way he had the most success. So, it was in this way, after breaking down the shells, that Grandpa would inlay pieces like mosaics into a coffee table where Grandma would play solitaire long after he was gone. He made pieces to hang on the wall.

            I have one of Grandpa’s pieces in the shape of what might be a maple leaf. In this mould, Pacific abalone is inlaid in the symbol of a New York tree. The underwater luster of the shell pieces preserve in epoxy two places he loved so much.

            I look up at this piece today and wonder how it is that I never thought, when he was alive, of Grandpa as an artist.

 

 

 

Respire.

The abalone’s dish-like shell is characterized by a single row of open respiratory pores. These holes become filled in, one by one, as the animal grows. The last few holes remain open as waste outlets.

 

 

 

Transmit.

I also have two of Grandpa’s unbroken shells that have traveled with me from Los Angeles to New York to Honolulu to New York again and finally back to Honolulu, where I live today. They hang amid the steamy water of our bathroom on the ground floor of the house we rent in the back of oftentimes rainy and muggy Pālolo Valley. I like the look of them, like two satellite dishes, transmitting messages from here to the spirit realm, wherever that might be, wherever Grandma and Grandpa now are.

            When my partner hammered a single nail in wall to hang each shell beside the toilet, we did not know that we were using what was the animal’s waste outlet to hang the shells above our, ahem, waste outlet.

 

 

 

Grow.

Abalone take a long time to grow. They might take twelve years to reach seven inches, growing about an inch per year for the first few years and then much slower after that. Once a red abalone reaches eight inches, it might take another thirteen years to grow another inch.

            The largest red abalone in the world was gathered in 1993 in Humbolt County and measured 12.3 inches.

            If my math is right, that means that that abalone was upwards of sixty-four years old, which means it could have first started growing in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, when ninety percent of the other young abalone in the water column around that destined-to-be-record-setting abalone perished, and our young grandpa was just twelve years old, likely in the sixth grade, and his father, Albert, was trying to pull him out of school.

 

 

 

Ghost.

The abalone shells I have are seven and seven-and-a-half inches, respectively. They might have taken a dozen years, each, to get this big. They might have taken more.

            Today, La Jolla Cove is an ecological reserve. No fishing is allowed. Neither is the collecting of invertebrates or seashells. Some kind of idyllic afterlife might feature Grandpa still ghost-diving for abalone there along with the many divers before him. Living humans are forbidden from the fold.

 

 

 

Listen.

Western science considers abalone primitive animals, even though their hearts rest on their left side, like yours or mine. Blood flows through their arteries, sinuses, and veins.

           Abalone shells have a small, slightly elevated spire and two to three whorls. The last whorl, also known as the body whorl, is called an auriform, which means “shaped like a human ear,” giving rise to the common name for abalone, “ear shell.” Abalone also belong to the genus haliotis, which means “sea ear,” which begs the question, of course, what are abalone listening for?

           Grandpa grew up fishing from a sound. Fishing in sound. Fishing for sound. Who was speaking? Who was listening for whom?

            In Les W. Field’s Abalone Stories: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California, a Pomo elder named Florence tells a story about how abalone was the first creature to live in the ocean. This first abalone was neither male nor female but could nevertheless produce offspring. This abalone is said to still be living today. The death of that first abalone would mean all other abalone had died. This, Florence said, “would be like the end of the world.”

 

 

 

Rupture.

Grandpa stopped diving when he ruptured his eardrum. He knew something was wrong when he tasted seawater even though his mouth was closed. What was going on? He couldn’t tell which way was up, and he was down deep. He had to follow his bubbles to find the surface.

            I imagine Grandpa calm, despite this potential drowning.

            “Was he in a lot of pain when he came out of the water?” I asked.

            “I’m sure he was, but he didn’t let on,” Mom said.

            The ear, nose, and throat doctor couldn’t see Grandpa’s eardrum because of all the abnormal bone growths he found in Grandpa’s ear. These calcifications, found on the ears of surfers who frequent very cold water, had to be removed.

“This was not my dad’s favorite surgery,” Mom said.          

 

 

 

Me.

You could say I grew up without a sea ear, or, rather, the ability to dive. A childhood of ear infections with tubes and surgeries required me to swim with my head above water and with big wax plugs in my ears so I would not flood my brain with chlorine or ocean or even bath water. In my adulthood, long after the tubes exited my body and their remaining holes closed shut, the habit of keeping my head above water has proven hard to break.

            I’ve devoted years to fighting my wet-cat nature, but I don’t think I’ll ever be good at diving below the surface.I never touched the blood-colored surfboard. I’ve not held a living abalone that I remember, though I swear I can feel it there, suctioned on my palm. I stand here among odd facts and secondhand stories cobbled together with no workman’s grace. This page stops ankle deep in biting water.

 

 

 

Grandpa.

Today, living in Honolulu, I move, perhaps, amid Grandpa’s memories of these same waters where he may or may not have learned to skin dive, and where Grandma learned the importance of caring for one another, including those who were far away from home.

            Once, I paddled out on my long board to a break I had foolishly entered even though I was not familiar with it. I dove too late under a wave that was about to crash on me and had to ditch my nine-footer—small for you, Grandpa. I felt the crashing wave race forward with my board in the whitewash as I was dragged behind it like a doll. I cringed, hoping that we were not heading for collision with the exposed rock I’d paddled out past.

            As I braced my human body for impact, sunk as I was in that fast-moving water, I listened for you, Grandpa. I, your youngest granddaughter, who you used to call your fishing buddy, did not know how to turn myself into a blade. But I thought about your underwater grace and how smoothly all of the stories say you moved. I watched the surface above me and remembered not to fight.

            This momentary presence of mind, with my mouth full of ocean water, did not turn me into you, Grandpa. But, it may be the closest I’ll come.


Reference List

Branch, John. “Prized but Perilous Catch.” 25 July 2014. New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/sports/in-hunt-for-red-abalone-divers-face-risks-and-poachers-face-the-law.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Invertebrates of Interest: Abalone.” 2019, https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Marine/Invertebrates/Abalone#29972976-how-fast-do-abalone-grow. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

Field, Les W. Abalone Stories: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California. Duke UP, 2008.

FISHTECH. “Facts about Abalone.” N.d., http://www.fishtech.com/facts.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

“Kumeyaay History.” 18 Sept. 2019, http://www.kumeyaay.info/history/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

Neumann, Anna. “An In-Depth Look at Abalone: Part I.” 23 Dec. 2014, Reef Check, https://reefcheck.org/reef-news/an-in-depth-look-at-abalone-part-i. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

——. “An In-Depth Look at Abalone: Part II–A Brief History on Abalone Fisheries and Regulations.” 26 Feb. 2015, Reef Check, https://reefcheck.org/reef-news/an-in-depth-look-at-abalone-part-ii-a-brief-history-on-abalone-fisheries-and-regulations. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

OB Rag. “Remember When There Was Plenty of Abalone Along the San Diego Coast? Why Did They Disappear? Here’s One Project That’s Trying to Bring Them Back.” 19 July 2018, https://obrag.org/2018/07/remember-when-there-was-plenty-of-abalone-along-the-san-diego-coast-why-did-they-disappear-heres-one-project-thats-trying-to-bring-them-back/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

“Snail.” Merrium-Webster. N.d., https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snail. Accessed 24 Jan. 2020.

 

Anjoli Roy is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu. A VONA fellow and a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she earned a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her book-length manuscript has been a finalist for the 2040 Books James Alan McPherson Award and the Autumn House Nonfiction Contest and was shortlisted for C&R Book’s 2019 Awards for CNF/Memoir. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Asian American Literary Review, Creative Nonfiction, Entropy, Hippocampus, Longreads, and others. www.anjoliroy.com

 

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Jennifer Murvin

Lifeguard

 

Jennifer Murvin’s stories, essays, and graphic narrative have appeared in The Southampton Review, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, The Florida Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, CutBank, Indiana Review, Post Road, American Short Fiction, The Sun, Mid-American Review, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2015 American Short(er) Fiction Contest, judged by Stuart Dybek. Jen teaches creative writing at Missouri State University and is recurring faculty for the bi-annual River Pretty Writers Retreat. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University and is the owner of Pagination Bookshop in Springfield, MO. Find more at JenniferMurvin.com.

 

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Chloe Martinez

Still Life

 

Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. Her forthcoming chapbook, Corner Shrine, was selected by Geffrey Davis as the winner of the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere. She is the Program Coordinator for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in Religious Studies. She’s vaguely on Twitter @chloepoet; see more of her work at chloeAVmartinez.com.

 

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LaToya Jordan

Offering

The first time I birthed a blood baby it plopped to the tub floor and slid to the drain, trail of red staining the porcelain. I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a chunk of canned cranberry sauce. It wobbled in the shower spray, too big to be washed away. I pressed my big toe against its smoothness and smashed it down the drain in pieces.

The third time it happened, I picked up the thing to examine it, turning it around in my hands, soft and squishy like an overripe plum. “Keep me,” a voice said. I slipped and almost dropped it. I turned off the shower thinking the water was playing tricks on me. Trevor wasn’t home, so it couldn’t be him. “Keep me,” the squeaky voice said again. There was only this bloody blob in my hands. Sitting naked on the tub’s edge, I looked for a mouth. No arms or legs, no mouth or face, but its voice vibrated in my hands; it was all heart. “Keep me,” it pleaded.

I grabbed a towel, raced to the kitchen, and got a dessert bowl from the china hutch. I’d been saving the silver basket weave patterned dishes for a special occasion. After 12 years of marriage, I thought we’d have more things to celebrate. I thought there’d be children and chipped china. I wiped dust from the bowl with my towel and placed the blood baby gently in. I set the bowl on the windowsill that got the most sun. 

Every month a new blood baby came to join her sisters. The oldest lost her luster and shriveled to a burgundy-black pea. The youngest was silken, wet. I organized them around the bowl by birth date, a blood-baby-stages-of-metamorphosis clock. Trevor shunned the window, passing it with eyes focused on the floor or body glued to the opposite wall. Avoidance was his coping strategy.

I found joy in sitting by the window talking to my blood babies as they aged and withered. Sometimes we sat in silence. Sometimes they said sorry on behalf of my uterus. Sometimes I’d teach them songs we’d sing together in harmony, but I loved hearing them call me Mama most. Once they became crisp pebbles, I returned them to the earth, buried in our small backyard beneath a circle of smooth stones.

***

The doctor said I had abnormal growths called fibroids, but I heard fruit. One, a plum, another a grape. My uterus became a small orchard. I gave thanks to its inhospitable environment for sustaining fruit. I signed up for Your Baby’s Fruit Size This Week emails and learned a plum is the size of a 12-week-old fetus. I’d never made it past the blueberry stage with my pregnancies, but my fruit continued to grow. Plum became orange, grape became plum. They drained me as they grew. I craved blood, going from well done to medium rare red meat. I told the staff at the steakhouse near my job, “The baby likes steak!” Then grapefruit, then orange again. Out of breath walking up the stairs, stars in my eyes when I stood up too fast. Then honeydew melon, then mango. Strangers gave me their seats on the subway. I gladly sat down while rubbing my belly. 

My weekly baby-size email said I had heartburn, frequent urination, trouble sleeping, and my internal organs were being squished. It also said my baby could hear and its kidneys and liver should be fully functional. I wondered if Honeydew and Mango heard me when I groaned in pain. Did they feel responsible? My doctor said they were dangerous and had to be taken out. I woke from surgery with a flatter stomach, a new scar above my pubic hair, but no fruit, no babies. In online groups, no amount of calling fibroids fruit made people like them—they were always monsters. But I miss my little monsters and how they showed me what a pregnant body would look like on me.

***

My mother used to say to me, “Never throw your hair in the garbage because birds will find it, use it in their nests, and you’ll have headaches for the rest of your life.” As a child, I’d picture pigeons pecking my brain like worms. After cornrowing my hair, she’d put the little bundles of shed hair in an ashtray and light it. I’d watch, mesmerized by how the hair sizzled, quickly becoming ash. 

After the doctor said I couldn’t have babies, I began leaving gifts for the birds in our backyard. It feels good to have my own ritual now. My hair is perfect for nests, soft and coily, dark brown to easily blend with other nest materials, a few wiry grays for strength. During the week, I gather hair from my brush or finger detangling. I put the strands in the same bowl by the window my blood babies spent their short lives in; Trevor still avoids that window. By the end of the week, the bowl has sprouted. On Saturdays, after Trevor leaves to coach football, I scatter hair mixed with twigs and birdseed on the grassy section of our small yard. 

After the hair is spread, I sit in a lounge chair on the patio, sip chamomile from a silver-lined teacup, and wait. Two tiny birds I call Kiwi and Tan have been coming for birdseed for a long time. They like the hair, taking pieces in their beaks and flying up to the top of our towering London planetree. Their nest is hidden by leaves and branches, but I know they’re pleased with my gifts because they leave me trinkets near the feeder: feathers, ribbon, small colorful beads, a keychain in the shape of a house. It feels good to know that something beautiful can be made with my body. When the pain comes, it’s not a headache, but sharp beaks at my belly, pecking at my already mangled uterus. There’s still life inside me.  

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Thick-Skinned Sugar (Finishing Line Press). Her essay, “After Striking a Fixed Object,” is listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2016 and her writing has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and more. LaToya received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is a mother to two amazing kids and wife to an English teacher. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

 

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Rachael Daum translates Natalia Rubanova

Scherzo: Romka and America

Romka discovered America. America discovered Romka. So, continent after continent, Romka and America discovered one another.

America was born on October 12, 1492: she was much older than Romka, true, though she had no reason to suspect it. To Romka, America was formed by two mainlands—North and South. She drew a border: with the Dariensky Isthmus and the Panama Canal she separated herself from those pesky outsiders.

“You are My New World!” Romka often told America.

“What are you copying Vespucci for? He would call me that.”

“You’re My New World!” smiled Romka, and pushed aside the book about the seafarer who christened the southern part of her America his New World. Romka was happy that it was, at least, only a part, because she’d claim something for herself and no one would dare stop her.

“Do you also dream of finding the shortest sea route to India? Do you wish to be a Columbus as well?” wondered the undiscovered part of America, Not-North-Not-South. “Do you have three caravels? Will you sail the Atlantic on three ships?”

“I don’t know,” smiled Romka. “Do you need me to do that too?”

“Once there was a man, his name is somewhere in the reference books now, who discovered me. He had three caravels—Santa Maria, Pinta, Niña. He reached the Sargasso Sea, and then the Samana Cay on my birthday.”

“When is your birthday?”

“October 12, 1492. But I’d like to change the date. I want to change it to today—I’ve been born again! No, I’ve been born alive…”

“How ancient you are.”

“Who are you?” America melted under Romka’s gaze. “Why is it so easy, so good, for me to be around you? Where did you come from? Your name holds half the world—Roma, Rome, Roman de la Rose, Romantism, romance, Romanche…”

“What’s Romanche?” asked Romka.

“A trench in the Atlantic, not far from the equator. It’s an abyss. Do you want to see?” America had already opened a fat book before Romka had the chance to stop her. “Look, I found it! 190 miles long, 12 miles wide, 25,463 feet deep! But you… You’re—bigger. Wider. Deeper! I can’t go on without you. You are my eternal city, my Rome! You stand upon me like the Tiber! Your struggle for infinite freedom is boundless. Though your dream is far from reality…”

“You are my dream. You are real,” Romka took America in her arms, forgetting about the isthmus separating the North and the South: Romka’s America was Not-North-Not-South, and so—was her own. She was the one that Romka alone had discovered.

“You know,” America stretched out dreamily, “you know, I just can’t understand why—” but the Atlantica wind drowned out her words; Romka nuzzled back-to-back with America, and whispered ardently:

“I discovered you, you hear me? Dis-cov-ered! I discovered you like no one before ever had: they couldn’t! And no one will ever be able to again! You’re the most real of all the Americas, the only one! Not-North-Not-South!”

“Do you want some rum?” America suddenly asked Romka. “Sometimes we need this fermented sugar juice more than water.”

“I want everything with you,” Romka answered simply. “Everything. How could I live without you? It’s already been long enough.” Romka raised the steel mug to her lips.

“I was born the first time on October 12, 1492,” whispered America, looking away.

“That’s just records. You were really born on February 22, 2003.”

“And you?” America’s cheeks flushed.

“And I…”

All roads in America lead to Rome. All roads in Rome lead to America.

And so they lived: Romka and America.

translator’s note:

When renowned Russian theater director, founder of the Moscow School of Modern Drama, and dissident Joseph Raihelgauz was asked to describe the impact of Natalia Rubanova’s writing, he had the following to say (in my translation): 

Nothing is real, except music. Or rather, not even music, but the elements, form, devices, genres of music. First a musician, Rubanova thinks musically. And the relationships between the characters line up precisely like this, not like that, not because they’re a girl and a boy, or love one but not another, or one remembers and the other has forgotten. But because they are, for instance, separated by a tritone—a musical interval, a sharp dissonance. 

Natalia Rubanova’s writing is informed by so many different factors, but musicality—and the breaking of musicality in her collection Karlsson, Dancing the Flamenco—is a great one of them, as Rubanova is a classically-trained pianist. (I myself played the French horn for six years, which is a long time to be bad at a heavy instrument.) This collection is fashioned as a symphony, each piece named for a movement (cante hondo and so on), which has laid out its own set of challenges. But when I was introduced to Rubanova, I couldn’t resist the urge to take up this challenge: How to navigate the musical intervals of her work, how to render the dissonance? As I have been translating these stories, I am confronted over and over with the question of how to strike the dissonant chord in English without it just sounding like a bad translation? How to make it weird, without it sounding wrong? I admit this is something I continue to struggle with in translating her stories, but it’s a challenge I’m eager to continue. 

There is a lot of playfulness in Rubanova’s writing, and it is this playfulness that sets the tempo of her writing—this is a struggle to bring into English and requires much mulling, letting a note play out as long as it might. The breaking of traditional Russian form, queering her text musically within a queer text—music as queerness, and queerness as musical dissonance—as Raihelgauz points out above, is a delicious defiance that deserves to be read by a wider audience. Especially as a queer woman, and so a queer translator, myself, I am drawn to using my platform to translate the really brilliant works of a woman who is now barred from publishing them because of their open LGBTQ+ content in a regime that prohibits the spreading of queer and homosexual works. For Rubanova, space is irrelevant and malleable. It is the invisible—music, sound, and love—that is irreplaceable, fluid and yet stable, fleeting and yet permanent. It is the inconvenience of the love of people for others despite what might seem physically permanent that makes these stories unsettling, striking a beautiful dissonance in tone and content.

Rachael Daum works as the Communications and Awards Manager of the American Literary Translators Association. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Rochester and MA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University, and received Certificates in Literary Translation from both institutions. Her original work and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Words Without BordersTupelo Quarterly, Two Lines, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She translates from Serbian, Russian, and German, and currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany. You may find her on Twitter @rclouisedaum.

Natalia Rubanova lives and works in Moscow, Russia. She studied piano at the Ryazan Musical College in the 1990s, and received her bachelor’s from Moscow Pedagogical State University. She has published four books, and her short stories have been published in over sixty anthologies. Her plays have been performed in Russia, and most recently in London at the SOLO International Festival, where she was awarded the prize for Best New Writing. In 2019 she was awarded the Turgenev Prize for her short story “Don’t Cry, It Doesn’t Matter,” and the Hemingway Prize (Toronto) for her cycle of critical journalism articles. 

 

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Michelle Quay translates Bijan Najdi

pool of nightmares

After twenty years away, Morteza was arrested his very first day back in his hometown on charges of murdering a swan (they’d seen him holding a dead swan by the feet, its long neck hanging down, beak dragging in the white snow). Neither of the town’s two police officers cuffed Morteza on their way to the station. The dirt path was covered in a thin layer of ice, which occasionally broke, filling the officers’ boots with water.

The police station courtyard evoked a prison, though it didn’t smell like one. An old, toothless woman with red gums was yelling, “Where are you? Mash Isma‘il?” 

Morteza stopped to examine the woman more closely.

“Move along,” one of the officers said. “She’s off her rocker.” 

“Is Mash Isma‘il still alive?” the other officer asked. 

“If Mash Isma‘il were alive…” she replied. “If Mash Isma‘il…” 

Morteza reached into his coat pocket and fished out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one in the hallway, sitting down on a wooden bench. Now the officers cuffed him. Just to take a drag from his cigarette Morteza had to bring both hands up to his scruffy, smoky-black moustache. By the time he had finished it, the snow was falling again. The sergeant went out to the steps so he could escort the head officer across the yard under a plastic sky (that is, he was holding an umbrella). The lieutenant brushed the umbrella aside and took off his hat. Flakes of snow were melting in his hair. 

“That woman here again?” he said. 

“She went to the coffee house and was telling people, ‘If you give me ten tomans, I’ll show you my ears.’”

“She really did that?” the lieutenant asked, taking the stairs three at a time. 

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said from behind him. 

“Leave her be,” he said. 

The lieutenant was so tall the sergeant practically had to run to keep up. Walking through the entrance, the lieutenant asked, “What’s the deal with this murdered swan?” 

“Over there, sir,” the sergeant replied. 

The lieutenant stopped and looked around for the corpse of a swan: “Where?” 

The sergeant pointed to Morteza on the bench and said, “Get up, let’s go.”

Morteza was staring at the radiator, thinking a heater without a flame wasn’t worth a damn thing.

The lieutenant came in. He laid his hat on the table and ran a hand through his hair as he stood next to the window, which looked out on the pond. The pond was so far away only the vague blackness of a bridge – which looked nothing like a bird – stretched from the near side of the pond to the far side. 

The swan report was lying on the glass desk, while on the pink shelf the fan had its back to both window and winter. 

The lieutenant sat behind the desk and scowled like old times at the sound of the squeaky chair. He stared at the ringing phone so long that eventually the sergeant picked it up.

“It’s the mayor, sir.” 

The lieutenant took the receiver. “Yes, it’s me. Of course…. No … Yes, he’s been arrested… It’s just as you say. That swan belonged to all of us… We’ll dispatch officers to patrol the pond immediately… Rest assured… You too.” 

As soon as he hung up he yelled, “Sergeant! Bring him in.” 

Morteza came into the room with all the buttons on his coat undone. He held his handcuffed palms out like he was trying to offer someone a handful of air. His eyes, it seemed, had adjusted to the darkness around him, or perhaps he’d been looking at a lot of bright lights at once. He opened and closed his mouth like a freshly-caught fish, or like someone asleep, breathing noisily. 

“Sit!”

Morteza sat on the nearest chair. 

“Hungry?” The lieutenant asked.

“No… I mean, well, now that you mention it, I think I am.” 

The sergeant opened the swan file. Morteza listened as an ambulance in the distance turned on its siren and faded even further away. 

“So? You were saying,” the lieutenant prompted. 

“Me? No, I wasn’t saying anything,” Morteza replied.

“Did you mean to sell the swan? Or… eat it?”

“Sell the swan? Eat it?” 

“You were seen,” the lieutenant said. “Let’s be civilized, now. Didn’t you kill the swan?” 

“Yeah… I mean, I guess so. I killed it. It just happened. How can I explain? All of a sudden I saw the body in my hands.” 

That morning, just as Morteza had stepped off the bus in his hometown after twenty years away, the smell of the tea gardens hit him, wafting up from the open collar of his coat. Even though the weather was cold and tasted like rain, Morteza headed towards the hostel on foot. He entertained himself by reading the flyers on the walls. A young soldier was smiling in a funeral announcement. The sound of a man praying emanated from the window. Morteza arrived at the hostel and rang the bell. He was extending his finger to press the button again when a sleepy old man opened the door and said gruffly:

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Do you have any rooms available?” Morteza asked.

“Rooms? What kind of rooms?” 

Morteza looked up at the sign above the door which read, “Iran Hostel.”

“Is this not the hostel?” he asked. 

“It was, son… it was. It definitely was, once.” And he closed the door. The clink of washing glasses and plates was coming from across the street. Morteza went into the coffeehouse.

The lieutenant asked, “How did you end up by the pond?”

“I wasn’t trying to go to the pond, I was headed to pay my respects at Aseed Hosayn’s resting place. They’ve paved over some of the roads and I couldn’t find it. I asked a woman I bought some bread from…”

The woman pulled some sangak bread out from under her veil and pointed him towards the glossy white at the end of the street, where snow and morning seemed to merge into one. That was where Morteza heard the sound of the swans, on the corner of that street. He turned and saw lights encircling the pond, still on for no reason, as if they imagined there was still a bit of night left. The pond was the same size and shape it had been twenty years ago, except now there was a fence around it. They had gotten rid of the roses and heather, and nothing was reflected in the water but the image of the light posts. Well, except for the sky, but it was so cloudy you couldn’t see it anyway. 

“So where were the swans?” asked the lieutenant. 

“On the other side,” Morteza said. “I was on one side, they were on the other.”

The pond was so deserted only Morteza’s footprints walked on the snow. The water was silent. Step by step, he moved to go sit on a bench beside the pond. It was so buried in snow, you couldn’t tell if it was made of wood, stone, or cement. Morteza quickened his pace. He even ran a few steps. 

“Why did you run?” the lieutenant asked.

“Because the sound of my footsteps was behind me…. I liked it. It had been years since I’d walked in front of myself like that, let alone run a few steps. It might have been the distance from your desk to the window there. You can hardly call that running, can you?” 

He looked at the sergeant, who was taking notes.

“Sir, should I record that too?” the sergeant said. 

“These days you can’t understand what people are saying, or what they want,” the lieutenant replied. 

Morteza turned toward the window and said nothing. The window was sweating. You could write a note in the condensation and put the date under it. The lieutenant was so quiet Morteza turned back around to look at him. In the interval he’d been thinking, “If this old guy had been killed (how old was he again?), there’d be a swan sitting on the chair across from me instead of this skin and bones in a coat.”

“It’s so much easier to talk to swans,” he said. 

“What?” said the sergeant.

Morteza heard the sound of a door opening. He saw a white teacup on a tray, headed for the lieutenant. Just as the tray was set down on the desk, the lieutenant motioned for it be put in front of Morteza. The teacup was lifted from the desk, and the scent of the tea gardens circled the room. Morteza’s throat was like sandpaper; there was a cough tickling it. With the promise of a hot cup of tea and cigarette before him in a few moments’ time, he completely forgot about the pond, the swan, and cuffs tight around his wrists. 

“Uncuff him, Sergeant,” the lieutenant ordered. 

The ceiling lamp lay upside down in his teacup. Even after the sugar dissolved in Morteza’s mouth, it was still white. As the hot tea went down, Morteza could feel the warmth tracing down his throat, through his chest, and into his belly. Leaving his tea unfinished, Morteza struck a match for his cigarette and closed his eyes with the first drag. 

“What did they do with the swan?” the lieutenant asked the sergeant. 

“They put it in the parking lot, in a plastic bag,” he replied. 

“What did you kill it with?” the lieutenant asked. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” 

From behind a cloud of smoke, Morteza said, “With an oar. At least I think it was with an oar, I don’t know.” 

“What do you mean you don’t know?” said the lieutenant. 

“It was full of oil out there,” he said. “Gasoline.” 

To see the swans up close, Morteza had to walk half way around the pond. There was a boat overturned in the snow. Between the path and the pond, a man was kicking the tire of a semi cab and occasionally blowing on his hands. The open hood of the truck had spilled the guts of a big box of wrenches onto the snow. A broken bottle (it looked like brake fluid) was face down in the water up to its neck. Gasoline was being spewed into the pond like vomit from the tipped-over plastic gas cans next to the fence. The water was greasy; the oil moved slowly with the lapping waves. Patches of gasoline, grey and purple, continually grew larger. When Morteza looked out at the mess on the water, he could see the swan too. The lieutenant thought of a bird he’d seen on the news that scrambled out of the mire after an oil spill on the Persian Gulf and dragged itself on its belly across the sand, but the lieutenant couldn’t recall its name. 

Morteza said, “Then I…” 

“Wait!” cried the lieutenant. “Hold on just a minute. Don’t say anything.” 

He turned his back to the room and looked out the window at the long bridge which straddled the pond. The sergeant paused to look at the lieutenant’s thin shoulders, or at Morteza, or at the shiny brim of the hat sitting on the table. The warmth of the room didn’t match the snow falling outside. The lieutenant undid one of the buttons on his uniform and without turning around said, “So?”

Morteza pointed his finger to his chest and quietly asked the sergeant, “Is he talking to me?” 

The sergeant nodded. 

Morteza continued, “I waved my arms at the swan and yelled out, ‘Don’t come any closer! Please, for the love of God, don’t come closer.’ But it’s like swans can’t hear or something. Or at least this one couldn’t. It didn’t see me at all. That was when I went towards the boat…” 

As Morteza turned the boat over, put it in the water, and rowed toward the swan, the lieutenant paced back and forth across the room, back and forth, and the sergeant tried to take down Morteza’s every word. 

“I was approaching the swan, and the oil and gas were closing in on it. By that time, I’d completely forgotten I’d wanted to visit the grave. My fingers were around the oar, but I couldn’t grasp it. I was frozen. With the paddle, I pushed the swan so it would move away or turn around. It had its neck bent over the water like a person… like a person looking down at a photo album. ‘It hasn’t seen me,’ I thought. I hit it with the paddle, then hit it again. It moved slightly away from the oily, nasty water, but then the gasoline surrounded the boat. Then… then the gasoline slid under the swan’s belly. Now I, the boat, the filth, and the swan were all mixed up.”

The lieutenant was pacing. The sergeant had fallen behind in his notetaking. The oar came out of the water and went back in. The swan was flapping wildly in the water. Morteza leaned over the edge of the boat and stretched his arms out towards the swan. 

“Suddenly I grabbed it and dragged it into the boat. I don’t remember if I grabbed it by its wing or its neck. I pulled it onto my leg. It flailed so frantically my clothes got soaked. My coat still smells like oil…. I mean my entire body smells like an oil wick!”

The lieutenant stopped walking. He stood over Morteza, and Morteza said with his hands outstretched, “That’s when I saw it lying in my hands; the body was in my arms and its head was lying on the floor of the boat… the floor of the…  the floor…”

It was raining outside the police station. Morteza’s face was wet. Beside the pond, a boat was filling up with water. 

“Why are you crying?” the lieutenant asked.

“I’m not crying,” said Morteza. “I have cataracts. It’s been happening for a while.”

The phone rang, and the sergeant picked up.

“Hang up that phone, Sergeant,” said the lieutenant harshly.

Morteza wiped his face with his hand. In the station parking lot, the swan in the plastic bag had no idea it was dead. The pond didn’t realize one of its swans was no more. The lieutenant said something under his breath.

“What did you say?” the sergeant asked.

“I said let him go.” 

Morteza left the room. Outside the town, a semi – one of those eighteen-wheelershonked at some ducks that were crossing the road. They scattered, terrified.

Translator’s Note:

In the very first sentence of Bijan Najdi’s “A Pool of Nightmares,” we are informed that our protagonist, Morteza, has done the unthinkable – he has accidentally murdered a swan. While at first blush a comical satire on small-town life in provincial Iran, Najdi’s tale develops with unhurried fascination into a meditation on everything his country has lost between the Iranian Revolution of 1979, through the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and the narrative’s present, circa 1994. Among those things lost are a sense of order, and a sense of the individual’s ability to take action in the face of slow-moving, inevitable disaster. Najdi’s stealthy narrative device of shifting between past and present highlights the gaping chasm between the town of his recollection and the reality of the present moment.

The greatest challenge in translating this piece came in attempting to render Najdi’s unique style of description, which is often purposefully indirect and presents as a bit of a puzzle. For example, the description of a lamp reflected in a cup of tea is described as though it were ‘[lying] upside down in his teacup.’ I attempted to retain the intriguing style of circuitous description without making it impossible to follow the action.

Michelle Quay is currently Assistant Instructional Professor in Persian at the University of Chicago. She has taught Persian at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she undertook her Ph.D. research on Classical Persian Literature, and was awarded her doctorate from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, in 2018. Her literary translation work has appeared in such publications as Asymptote JournalWorld Literature Today, Exchanges and others.

Bijan Najdi (1941-1997), from Lahijan, Iran, was an experimental poet, fiction writer, and pioneer of postmodernism and surrealism in Iranian literature in the 1990s. He had a late-blooming but very successful literary career, and his collection Cheetahs That Have Run with Me (1994) in particular generated considerable popular and critical acclaim for its fresh use of modern literary techniques in Persian. 

 

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Carson Faust

Faces and Darkness Separate Us

I. Bloody Mary

It was the white God’s day of rest. That did not stop Vantrilla Friendly from sending her daughters out to fetch water. Vantrilla sat before the mirror every morning and pulled the strands of silver from her long black hair. She woke at dawn with her husband Carlisle. As he spent the morning working in another man’s field, she avoided all light that didn’t reflect from the glass. When she cooked biscuits for breakfast, the curtains in the kitchen were drawn. When she swept the living room, she would move between the patches of sunlight.

On days when the South Carolina sun beat on the fields and brought Carlisle’s skin from russet to red, she sent her daughters out to the well to bring water home. That way the light would not touch her. The light would not darken her.

Her three daughters. It was their fault. The lines in her forehead deepened and the rings around her eyes darkened and her hips widened every time she thrust one into the world. Vantrilla grew more tired every year since she pushed the first one out in 1905. Never thought she’d feel so haggard by age thirty-four. It worsened every day.

Her own mother had worn age with grace. Even when Mama looked like leather on her deathbed, her chin was high and her eyes glimmered. Vantrilla did not inherit this poise. Every line, every wrinkle, every gray hair weighed her down. If avoiding sunlight was the only way to fight, then that was what she was going to do. It wasn’t about beauty. No. It was about control. She couldn’t control how people saw her, but she could control how she saw herself.

Mama had worshiped the sun, like all of her mothers before her. In the stifling heat of summer, they would all dance for the Green Corn Ceremony. For the corn to grow, they had chosen to wither. Vantrilla refused to wither as they did, and the crop still grew. They were foolish. All that time in the sun made their skin so deep that when the white folk came around with their pens and papers, they marked them all down as Negro. As Vantrilla’s people lost their dances, their stories, all they had were the words that were written on those papers. That were written by people who knew nothing about them.

Vantrilla knew that Carlisle thought she was sick. Because she refused to leave the house when the sun shone. She knew that if he weren’t so beaten down by the end of every day that he would’ve taken a lover by now. If he believed in a hell, he would not be afraid to burn there. He burned all day long. Even if he had a lover, there was nothing for Vantrilla to do, just as there was nothing he could do to bring her into the sun.

The girls were old enough to do all of the work outdoors now. They had aged her enough already, so those tasks became theirs. Eliza was the eldest, almost a woman now. She carried the two largest buckets in, her cheeks flushed and dark. She was always the first one to return, long and lean like Vantrilla. Letha, though she was the youngest, usually was back second. She was nine and still got away with carrying only one pail of water. Rosalie was short and thin like her father. Carrying two pails was more of a strain for her.

With the water Eliza brought home, Vantrilla would wash the floors and boil corn for supper. The water Letha brought in would be for drinking. Much of it would be saved for Carlisle for when he came home. With the water that Rosalie brought back, the whole family would bathe. Vantrilla bathed last. Sat in the tub that she had lowered Mama into in the months before she died. As the water rippled, twisting the reflection, her face looked like Mama’s.

Rosalie made sure her sisters stayed awake past dark. After she was sure Ma and Pa were asleep, she took a candle from the kitchen drawer and the box of matches she had hidden under her mattress and the three sisters snuck into the bathroom. If Ma found them with matches, they would be in a lot of trouble. Not because the fire was dangerous. She didn’t care about that. She cared about how much the matches cost.

“I still think this is a waste of time.” Eliza said. She had the biggest bags under her eyes.

“We have to get up so early tomorrow, Rosalie. We got to do this tonight?”

“Haven’t you always wanted to see a spirit?” Letha asked. She was more excited than she let herself sound. Just as she was on the walk home from the well, when she planned this with her sisters. “Cousin Will said he saw one when he did it.”

“Cousin Will might be our dumbest cousin,” Eliza said. “And that’s an accomplishment with how many cousins we got.”

Eliza always joked that she couldn’t crush on any of the boys because they were related to all the boys. It was more truth than joke, though. Just about everybody left in Four Holes looked about the same. “Come on, it won’t take long. Y’all just scared.” Rosalie knew she had them now. Eliza was too proud, and Letha wouldn’t want to feel left out.

Finally, Eliza snatched the matches and lit the candle. As brave as Eliza pretended to be, she wouldn’t say the words. Letha and Eliza both looked at Rosalie. Rosalie did it, heart pulsing, but still only three faces flickered in the mirror. The closest thing to a ghost was the smoke from the candle after they snuffed it out.

yraM ydoolB .I

The mirrors’ eyes are open now. The girls stood before them in yellow candlelight. The tallest one had her arms crossed, waiting for something to happen. The smallest looked terrified, her face somehow chalky and dark. The middle one, they could see most clearly. Her face and body were wider than the other two. She was hardly taller than the smallest. She was the one who held the candle. The one whose voice they had swallowed.

Mirrors all talk to one another. Much like all rivers flow to a larger body of water, mirrors all flow to the same place in the end. The mirrors in the house watch them, all together. This kind of sight can grow. They see through the light reflected from windows and water. When the girls peer into the black eye of the well, the black water looks back.

The mirrors watch as the mother’s hair goes from black to silver faster than she can pluck. Her hair and skin lighten until she is pale and colorless and beautiful. White as a ghost. They watch as the father’s body breaks—his eyes become glossy, his back twists, his hands become raw. Their eyes are hungriest for the girl that woke them. They watch her grow. How her breasts and belly swell. They watch her weep after the well takes the smallest sister. That black eye holds that girl’s body forever and her rot poisons the water.

They hold the things that can’t be reflected. Each mirror holds the smallest sister’s face. Her dark body. When the mother passes, her body thin and white as bone, they take it from her. They put the dead mother and daughter in every corner of the room. The girls wanted to see ghosts, so they give them. The little girl’s dark body, ugly as it was, was perfect for hiding in shadows. The dead mother’s body—with its long arms and legs made pale and elegant by death—was perfect for reaching, for clawing. There is skin that gives back light and there is skin that takes it in. Skin that takes it in, like all things that take but do not relinquish, becomes impure.

II. Bloody Mary

Grandma Rosalie looked in mirrors even though she couldn’t see anymore. Back when Ariel used to visit Grandma Rosalie at her old place, her attention always turned to the mirrors. Now her grandma was staying in their guest room. Her eyes were getting bad, so Mama took care of her. Well, Ariel helped too. Mama stayed home with Grandma Rosalie on days that Ariel worked day shifts at the 4-Mart, and Ariel was her caretaker at night when Mama worked longer shifts at the hospital in Ridgeville.

Ariel liked their nights together. Grandma Rosalie told her things that Mama wouldn’t. She told her about Mama when she was a kid, how she used to get in all sorts of fights with the boys at school and how she’d spend half of her recess in the nurse’s office. She told Ariel about the way Mama used to carry around her doll, Little Opal, all weekend. She talked about how badly her daughter wanted to be a mother. And she talked about Ariel’s father, a white man named Earl Riche, and how he walked out on Mama when she told him she was carrying his child.

There wasn’t a single picture of Earl in the house. After Grandma Rosalie told her about him, she looked through every drawer and book and photo album. Nothing. Ariel had gone sixteen years without hearing more than a few words about her father, so any knowledge Grandma Rosalie had, she devoured. The stories distracted from Grandma Rosalie’s mirrors too. Ariel remembered how the mirrors in Grandma Rosalie’s old house used to scare her, and that was a feeling that never really went away. It was a feeling that was getting worse lately. Ariel covered the mirror in Grandma Rosalie’s room while she ate up her supper downstairs.

Ariel stayed as far from those mirrors as she could. It felt like something was moving underneath the sheet. Like something was moving underneath Ariel’s skin.

Ariel took Grandma Rosalie upstairs after they finished their chicken and biscuits. “Can you please take that sheet down, Ariel?” Grandma rocked in her chair, knitting by touch. She stared right at the mirror.

“How’d you know I covered it even?”

Grandma Rosalie let out a dark laugh. “What good is having a mirror when you can’t even see yourself? That’s how you think, ain’t it?” Grandma Rosalie knew just how to make Ariel feel bad. Blind old bat had a knack for it.

“Fine.” Ariel pulled the sheet down and felt a rush of heat.

Grandma Rosalie was quiet for a bit. They listened to the cicadas screaming outside. “You see her too, don’t’cha?”

Ariel looked toward the mirror, waited for her grandma to speak again, afraid to speak herself. There was a shadow in the mirror that didn’t belong.

“I can’t see a damn thing, but when I look in the glass, I can see her. Clear as day.”

Mama and Auntie Eliza had told Ariel about little Letha. She died young. Auntie Eliza could talk about it, but Grandma Rosalie never really got over it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you’ve seen her too. Just like my sister. Just like your mother. You can try to deny it, like they do, but it’ll only get worse.”

“Come on, Grandma. It ain’t real.”

It wasn’t real, and neither were the nights that Ariel dreamed of eating glass and woke tasting blood. And neither were the nights that Ariel caught glimpses of a red moon in the silver when the moon was supposed to be white. And neither were the nights when Ariel’s reflection was not her own, but a dark girl drenched in water. It was water. It was water, wasn’t it?

“She is.” It felt like Grandma Rosalie could see Ariel for the first time in years, the way she was looking at her. It made Ariel’s head feel light. “Ghosts are. You just don’t have any of your own yet. I’m sure mine will get passed along after I go.”

That’s when Ariel understood. That’s why Grandma Rosalie was finally telling her. That’s why it had been getting worse. Grandma thought she was going to pass this along. And she thought it would happen soon.

“You’ll believe it when you see it. And you will.” Grandma Rosalie said. “Just know that ghosts can’t hurt you. But they can try like hell to make your hurt yourself.”

yraM ydoolB .II

Call them Mary, if you must. Call them what you will. Those things that watch all people from behind the silver of mirrors. Some call these things Mary Worth. Some woman, some witch, unable to bear children. Covered in blood. Red from head to toe. Mary fashions Rosalie a ghost of her own. Little Letha Friendly, too young to bear children, and red from head to toe. Her skin, the same color of what lie beneath it. A monster in her own right. All she lacked was the blood, so the mirrors put the spirit into blood.

Rosalie becomes a mother to Esther, Esther becomes a mother to Ariel. The blood gets passed along, and so do the ghosts inside it. The silver eyes watch, in the glint of the scalpel, as Ariel is pulled from the womb. They watch as the doctors with lily-white skin, as lovely as the flower itself, cut Esther’s parts so she will never be a mother again. This unclean mother in sterile surroundings. She needed to be cleaned from inside out. Hollowed out. Nothing could be done about her skin, but the doctors stopped that darkness from spreading.

Esther did not want this, of course. She smiled as Ariel grew in her belly. She filled shoeboxes with little bibs and booties that her mother knitted. She kept them in her bedroom closet, next to her music box. She had a journal full of names. Names that she practiced saying with her daughter’s name. She did not want this, but it is for the best.

She weeps when the doctors tell her. She weeps in the bathroom while her infant sleeps in her crib. While Ariel toddles from room to room. After Ariel leaves for school. After Ariel takes the car to work. Esther clutches her belly as it aches for what it cannot have.

The mirrors can haunt her too. Show her little red babies. They have eaten the light of so many faces, there might as well be one for every name on Esther’s list. Their memories are exact. They drink Esther’s sweet tears. Just because they reflect a face twisted by sadness doesn’t mean they are not smiling.

III. Bloody Mary

Five years pass, and Grandma Rosalie passes with them. Three more years pass, and in them, Ariel falls in love with a man named James. Then nine months pass, and Ariel brings her daughter Elsie into the world. Mama is overjoyed when the doctor places Elsie in her arms. Mama always told stories of mothers that never got to hold their babies, whose babies were given to other families before they even stopped screaming. Mama cries happy tears that drip onto Elsie.

“You forget how warm babies are.” Mama says.

Helpful as she is, loving as she is, Mama nags. She nags that Elsie doesn’t have any siblings. Elsie is already five, Mama says. She needs a brother, a sister, she says. One that’s close to her age. She needs someone to walk through life with, to grow with, to protect and be protected by. But Ariel doesn’t have time for another kid, or money for that matter. Even with all Mama’s help, it’d be too much of a strain. Ariel works sixty hours a week at Ridgeville Clinic. James taught math at the school during the week and worked as a line cook at Hop’s Diner on the weekends.

Ariel and Mama hang the clothes out back, letting the afternoon sun pull the moisture from her linens and scrubs, from Elsie’s Sunday dress, from James’s trousers and button-ups, from Mama’s blouses. When the sheets sway in the wind, Ariel thinks of the sheets that she once used to cover Grandma Rosalie’s mirrors. She thinks of the girl she often saw in the reflections of shadows. She thinks of how much that girl looked like her daughter.

“You’re a wonderful mother, Ariel. Elsie is a beautiful girl. I don’t understand why you don’t want another child.”

“Want has nothing to do with it. We don’t have the time.”

“I’m here. Elsie is easy to watch. I can handle another baby. Wouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“I appreciate you looking after Elsie. But I don’t appreciate the meddling.”

“I just want Elsie to have what you didn’t.”

“I have plenty, Mama. It’s you that didn’t get what you wanted. No matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to give that to you.”

Dollhouse mirrors are always a little imperfect. They warp things in a way that real ones don’t. Strange that the doll has nothing inside of it but air. Elsie could squeeze the head with her little fingers and it would collapse, distorting the doll’s face, warping it into something uglier, something less familiar. Strange, too, that the the doll is so pale. Mommy’s skin doesn’t look like that. Elsie’s isn’t either. Though her skin is a little closer to color of the doll’s. Elsie notices the way that skin lightens for that instant when you apply pressure. Just a little bit brighter, if only for an instant.

Elsie knew her body wasn’t empty like the doll. She knew she was full and heavy. But the first time her skin comes apart, the first time that bright blood stains the world, she is not ready. She is playing. Running back to her bucket of chalk. She falls. She does not cry though. The strawberries inside her body paint the sidewalk, her hands. That prickly sting runs down her leg, like blood. And then through the rest of her body, also like blood.

yraM ydoolB .III

We are not cruel, nor did we ask for this. This is not our fault, but we are truthful. We are not the water, but the light that bends over it. We did not push the girl into us, she is not part of us, but we hold her. Yes, we were part of the scalpel, but we did not cut the young mother. Yes, we drink the water that flows from you, but we are not the reason you weep.

We have followed you through eighty years of blood. We have swallowed your kin. Once the water has been tainted, all you can do is pull up rot from the well.

 

Carson Faust is a queer writer, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuartely, Waxwing Magazine, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Minnesota.

Ken L. Walker translates Georg Herwegh

To the Surrounding Deceased

The armor, your armor, 
turn to your music, our music. Turn 
to your armor—diced quadratus—
thousands if not smashed, flattened—

used in the reductions 
of police piles, despite 
your body as heraldic bearing, 
here’s a brunoise, small coins squeezed

from our throats like egg yolks, 
char themselves onto the cobblestone.    
Dear armor, you’re unscrupulous, 
reprobate. We’re gathering scarves 

to choke each leatherneck—off rope, 
de-sequencing the veil, burning its tassels
to broach the knuckles of succulence. 
Our flame is playing the air 

as if it were a violin, dear armor, 
dear armor, your caboulot rooms 
sink into the cataracts of the horizon,
out where forests act as bankrupt estates, 

dear armor, you are within 
our wrists, in hocks and jowls, 
dear armor, all these smith-smoked hammers,
rebuke-eyed, manually steered conveyors 

that forget all these ruffle-fats 
watching you from inside our gut castles. 
Dear armor, we hear you and see the opus 
in your daguerreotype instance, the opera

in all your motionless tongue. You’re our music. 
We’re still and foaming at the mouth 
without your crépine. Make us more music. 
Dear armor, it’s horrendous you’re unable 

to notice yourself. The asterisk of the waterfall 
is the thunder. Dear armor, divine unattainable 
loins on loins, scorned bodies as shards 
of hail, dear armor, the asterisks of your lances, 

pikes, mêlée ensuing your loneliness, 
a grain of sand on a wave of salt, 
accumulating back into your home 
like a melted seed turned soap.

Dear armor, our desire for your preparation
leaves us alone with complete plates 
licking all the butter, all the Speyer
as if our armor depended upon its evaporation.

Duffel Bag

My drunk singing loosens me 
from the fibers of reality, sleuthing
the caverns of ossuaries 
for inspiration, the kind of conniving

one gets from biased acceptance. 
I am not a flea on a hawk’s wing. 
I am not a wing on a sky’s ear.
I am singing, trusting my phlegm

converts to coins, a mere diversion
to this stranded division
you call being elected. My drunk
song tightens loins, whistling

where the bight meets its former self.
All I have is in the composition
of this Collins. I’ve loved
trollops on mountains

and made a chorus with their
foregone imploring. As I was 
summoned, I sang all I have. My song
loudens with my wallet. My drunk 

singing loosens the sun, becomes
a bloodless diamond. I collect
the spit of trees as they render
cushions in batches to these 

free benders. You went down
on your slaves without asking. 
I climbed the mountain to drop
fools gold bricks on your arched

spine. My drunk singing
untangles what was never there. 
You pierced your slaves
without asking, melting rose petals

in a batch of light so buoyant
you falsified your floating
in gratified parties that bulged
like your gut as its own statue.

My drunk singing loosens
the streets into palaces
and they become trails of the crumbs
of palaces now as choruses.

Body of Civilians: Glowing in the Alps 

Highlands and massifs so stacked— 
flames, candles, pyres collected—
we make up our own sun, volcanic
undoing smoothed, glowing into
the dayless. We zero in on the everything
of starving lions. We invert the hero, 
choke the king in smoking mud-pit. 
This haze in front of my eyes, frozen, 

shouting: Body of civilians, never skeletons!
Look down on the wheat fields.
Somersault between the snow drops.
These fields, ours, no one’s, anyone’s. 
The air at the gorge, that ballet
a stabbed canyon of dimensions—
That, now, in the Swiss Quarter

You monarch, we monarchs, 
body of people, never extinct!
Our assemblage decentralized,
unwavering on the varying velocities 
of meandering destinies. We measure
the mountains, incapacitate 
providence—body 
of civilians, flourishing!

Emulating messiahs we show
our teeth, wrap your prison wire
around our foreheads, 
climb your crowns, mocking
power in our playgrounds
tip toeing across 
your chalet lakes burning
your doors with your own wreaths!

Enjoy your stiff Swiss dance 
as you avoid bending.
Body of civilians, here unending!
Your tables filled with rinds, 
chandeliers ready weaponry, 
broken glass reassembled
for your church portals. Body
of citizens—we are the bridge!

An den Verstorbenen

O Ritter, toter Ritter,
Leg deine Lanze ein!
Sie soll in tausend Splitter
Von mir zertrümmert sein.
Heran auf deinem Rappen,
Du bist ein arger Schalk,
Trotz Knappen und trotz Wappen,
Trotz Falk und Katafalk!

Ich steh nicht bei dem Trosse,
Der räuchernd vor dir schweigt,
Weil du ein Herz für Rosse
Und fürs Kamel gezeigt;
Baschkire oder Mandschu –
Was schiert mich deine Welt?
Ich schleudre meinen Handschuh
Dir in dein ödes Zelt.

Dem Reich der Mamelucken
Weissagst du Auferstehn
Und sähest ohne Zucken
Dein Vaterland vergehn;
Doch wiegtest unter Palmen
Du dein Prophetenhaupt,
Wenn nicht aus unsern Halmen
Du erst dein Gold geraubt?

Du steuerst nun so lange
Im Weltmeer aus und ein,
Und ward es nie dir bange,
Daß du so klein, so klein?
Ist er dir nie erschienen,
Der Fürst von Ithaka,
Wenn deine Sündermienen
In seinem Reich er sah?

Und sprach er nie mit Grollen:
Fort aus dem freien Meer!
Wirf nicht in seinen Schollen
Dein Lügenkorn umher!
Zieh heim an deine Pleiße,
Zieh heim an deine Spree;
Nicht jede Fürstenreise
Ist eine Odyssee.«

Wohl ist er unerreichbar
Der göttliche Ulyß,
Doch du bist ihm vergleichbar
Am wenigsten gewiß.
Im Saus nicht und im Brause
Hat er die Zeit verdehnt,
Er hat sich stets nach Hause
Zu Weib und Volk gesehnt.

Für deines Volkes Rechte

Wie fochtest du so schlecht!
Du standest im Gefechte
Ja, für das Türkenrecht;

Du stirbst auch auf dem Schilde,
Ja, auf dem Wappenschild;
Klag nicht, daß deine Gilde
Fortan bei uns nichts giltl

Den Marmor bringt Karrara
Noch nicht für den hervor,
An den der Niagara
Den Donner selbst verlor,
Der nur in alle Fernen
Zu seiner Schmach gereist,
Und noch vor Gottes Sternen
Auf seine Sternchen weist.

O Ritter, schlechter Ritter,
Leg deine Lanze ein !
Sie soll in tausend Splitter
Von mir zertrümmert sein.
Laß ab, laß ab und spähe
Nicht nach der Wüste Sand!
Dich setze in der Nähe
Dich in dein Vaterland.

Leicht Gepäck

Ich bin ein freier Mann und singe
Mich wohl in keine Fürstengruft,
Und alles, was ich mir erringe,
Ist Gottes liebe Himmelsluft.
Ich habe keine stolze Feste,
Von der man Länder übersieht,
Ich wohn ein Vogel nur im Neste,
Mein ganzer Reichtum ist mein Lied.

Ich durfte nur, wie andre, wollen,
Und wär nicht leer davongeeilt,
Wenn jährlich man im Staat die Rollen
Den treuen Knechten ausgeteilt;
Allein ich hab nie zugegriffen,
So oft man mich herbei beschied, I
Ich habe fort und fort gepfiffen,
Mein ganzer Reichtum ist mein Lied.
Der Lord zapft Gold aus seiner Tonne

Und ich aus meiner höchstens Wein;
Mein einzig Gold die Morgensonne,
Mein Silber all der Mondenschein1
Färbt sich mein Leben herbstlich gelber,
Kein Erbe, der zum Tod mir riet;
Denn meine Münzen prägt ich selber;
Mein ganzer Reichtum ist mein Lied.
Gern sing ich abends zu dem Reigen,

Vor Thronen spiel ich niemals auf;
Ich lernte Berge wohl ersteigen,
Paläste komm ich nicht hinauf;
Indes aus Moder, Sturz und Wettern
Sein golden Los sich mancher zieht,
Spiel ich mit leichten Rosenblättern;
Mein ganzer Reichtum ist mein Lied.
Nach dir, nach dir steht mein Verlangen,

O schönes Kind, o wärst du mein !
Doch du willst Bänder, du willst Spangen,
Und ich soll dienen gehen? Nein!
Ich will die Freiheit nicht verkaufen,
Und wie ich die Paläste mied,
Laß ich getrost die Liebe laufen;
Mein ganzer Reichtum sei mein Lied.

Vive la République! Beim Alpenglühen gedichtet

Berg an Berg und Brand an Brand
Lodern hier zusammen;
Welch ein Glühen! – ha! so stand
Ilion einst in Flammen.
Ein versinkend Königshaus
Raucht vor meinem Blicke,
Und ich ruf ins Land hinaus:
Vive la république!
Heil’ge Gluten, reiner Schnee,
Golden Freiheitkissen,
Abendglanzumstrahlter See,
Schluchten, wild zerrissen –
Daß im Schweizerlandrevier
Sich kein Nacken bücke!
Kaiser ist der Bürger hier;
Vive la republique!
Eine Phalanx stehet fest,
Fest und ohne Wanken,
Und an euren Alpen messt
Euere Gedanken!
Eurer Berge Kette nur
Ward euch vom Geschicke;
Auf die Kette schrieb Natur:
Vive la république !
Blumen um die Schläfe her
Steigen eure Höhen,
Frisch, wie Venus aus dem Meer,
Auf aus euren Seen;
Daß aus deinem Jungfernkranz
Man kein Röschen knicke,
Schweizerin, hüt ihn wohl beim Tanz!
Vive la république!
Auf die Felsen wollte Gott
Seine Kirchen bauen;
Vor dem Felsen soll dem Spott
Seiner Feinde grauen!
Zwischen hier und zwischen dort
Gibt’s nur eine Brücke.
Freiheit, o du Felsenwortt

Translator’s note:

I first encountered Georg Herwegh’s name as I read through Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital. I had long been obsessed with the details of the life of Karl Marx—his friendship with Engels, the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, then volumes of Capital, etc. I went on to graduate school studies in Marxism in a philosophy program but it wasn’t until MFA in Poetry school at Brooklyn College that Gabriel came out with her book  which put me onto Herwegh. Sure, Heine and Freiligrath have always been the more well-known, more accomplished German poets. But it was Gabriel’s book that hinted at Herwegh being at the center of a whole slew of radical philosophers. Bakunin was his best man at his wedding. Arnold Ruge was starting a commune with Herwegh and his wife, Emma, etc. Their lives became more fascinating than their theory. 

Then I went to the Brooklyn College library to see if they had any Herwegh translations but they didn’t; however, there was a copy of Gedichte Eines Lebendigen in German, on the shelves, from the 19th century, able to be taken home. I checked it out. For 3 years straight. I used it to begin translating all of Herwegh’s work. My time studying Hegel and Marx made me familiar with written German. And it did. Once I started to read through Herwegh’s letters and diary entries, he came to full life. He was quite the scoundrel and was exiled nearly as many times as Marx. 

I am using minimal formal frameworks throughout the poem translations. Mainly, I adhere to his line structure and use my own sound and rhythm structure. Herwegh mostly wrote anthems (which, at the time, were incredibly radical and now read more like church hymnal excerpts). So to stray from the potential boredom of a slightly archaic anthem, I am infusing sound mechanisms that spill the explosion of sound from the inside-out. I also use the constraint of not utilizing a word that would be too modern for Herwegh’s years of writing. Basically, if it didn’t exist in or before 1865, then it won’t be in the poem conceptually. While I have translated poets from Mexico, Colombia, and Spain, it’s been the complete project with Herwegh’s work that I turn to the most when I am not writing my own poems. 

Ken L. Walker lives in Kentucky, is the author of Twenty Glasses of Water (Diez, 2014) and Antworten (Greying Ghost, 2017). Additional work can be found in Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail, The Seattle Review, Atlas Review, Lumberyard, and Tammy

 

Georg Herwegh was born in 1817 in Stuttgart, and died in 1875 in Lichtental. He was a revolutionary poet, friend to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and poet in the Vormärz—a period of history beginning in the early 1800s with a literary movement of the same name centered around sociopolitical topics leading to the 1848 revolution. Herwegh is considered, along with Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand Freiligrath, one of 19th century’s the most popular German-speaking male poets, after writing Gedichte Eines Lebendigen

 

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Anna Blasiak translates Joanna Fligiel

GOD THE FATHER

I am six years old and I find out about the apple
passed on from parents to children like a gene,
unfortunately. Fortunately I have Jolka.

Jolka’s mum keeps a little bottle in her bedside table
filled with holy water. It makes warts disappear,
not to mention the invisible sin.

I am six years old and I haven’t been christened.
I worry that I will die and go where
there are more fathers (like mine).

Jolka is six years old too.
She’s been to six christenings
of her six cousins, so she knows.

I lie on a wooden floor,
feeling all the contents of the bottle on my skin.
Jolka makes the sign of the cross and then

we quickly fill the bottle with tap water.
And only Jolka’s mum wonders
why the warts have stopped disappearing.

BAD BOY, YOU BROKE THE DOLL AGAIN

Children may hide, pretend not to hear
shouting, cries, threats and begging. Escape in their minds,
create a friend, an enemy. Tear his arms out,
his legs, his head, bite into his torso, nails, lips.
They may wet their pants.

Eventually they leave wardrobes. They decide they need to
do something. Defend her. But they never succeed.
They don’t know whom they hate more: themselves
or him? Themselves or her? Themselves. No matter, they’ll grow up
when they start believing that all women are whores.

BLACKBERRIES

I don’t need your ears to talk to you.
Mrs. Danka from the top floor caught me first and straightaway
told our mum that nothing good would come out of me talking to myself.
I remember things like our neighbours’ names from forty years ago,
and what we ate on a particular day of the week, but those German words,
them I can’t memorize.

Remember this story? We were at Granny and Grandad’s together,
and Mum stayed away for so very very long, that you stopped asking after her,
and every day, literally every day we went to the woods, first to pick wild strawberries,
then blueberries, mushrooms, raspberries and finally the time came for picking blackberries,
and our hands bled like Jesus’s.

And then in the woods we saw our Mum. Running towards us, waving hello.
She was so light, so cheerful, as if she had never forgotten us. I wanted to run
towards her, to scream my longing out, “Mum, Mum”, but you held me
back so hard, you gripped me as if in the meantime somebody had turned your soft four-year-old body into a thorny blackberry shoot.

Translator’s Note:

I was first introduced to Joanna Fligiel’s poetry by a mutual friend, also a poet, Wioletta Greg, who compared Fligiel’s writing to Anne Sexton’s.

Indeed, I was immediately taken by Fligiel’s verse.

Fligiel was at work on these poems for a long time. I was delighted when the book containing them took its physical form – Rubato was published in 2018 by a small literary independent press in Poland called K.I.T. Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów.

Rubato is brave and moving; it is stark and at times shocking. Fligiel uses deceptively simple, almost factual language, which is bare, completely devoid of surplus, to the point that it may seem dispassionate. This language contrasts strongly with the themes she discusses (domestic abuse, sexual abuse, death, illness, also loneliness of a child, growing up in communist Poland). But then perhaps this is the only language that can be used to effectively present such themes? Perhaps the language must be free of anesthesia? Whichever way, Fligiel’s poetry provides a very powerful reader’s experience.

As a translator I was immediately drawn to her writing and the challenge it posed—the apparent simplicity of the vocabulary paired with a heavy emotional load, the fact that the language is so stripped, that there is nothing to hide behind.

 

Anna Blasiak is a poet and translator. She has translated over 40 books from English into Polish and some fiction and poetry from Polish into English. In addition to her book-length translations, her work has appeared in Best European Fiction 2015, Asymptote, The Guardian, B O D Y Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation and York Literary Review. Anna writes poetry in Polish and in English. Her bilingual collection Café by Wren’s St James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime is out now. She has worked in museums and a radio station, run magazines, written on art, film and theater. annablasiak.com.

Joanna Fligiel is the founder and editor of Babiniec Literacki and the former editor of Śląska Strefa Gender (2010-2020). The great-granddaughter of a Ravensbrück and Auschwitz prisoner, born in Katowice, raised in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Bystra near Bielsko, she lives in Bielsko-Biała in Poland and in Neuss and Bengel in Germany, constantly traveling between her three homes. She has worked as a bookseller for most of her life. As a child she was a victim of domestic abuse and initially this theme dominated her writing. She has published three volumes of poetry, but wrote more. She is a grandmother, mom, wife and feminist.

 

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Omar Qaqish translates Sadaa al-Daas

Fourteen Winters Old

When we lived at home, winter used to be my favorite time of the year. It was almost like a personal accomplishment that I wanted to show off. I remember bragging about the weather on Facebook like it was something I owned. I would post photos of our charming city with its bustling streets and write something like, “Who cares about Swiss snow when the snow here is alive with the hustle.”

I would take photos of neighborhood kids having snowball fights and upload them next to photos of dreary European cities overflowing with unfriendly snow, their empty streets occupied only by snow plows. I’d add some poetic line like, “Snow visits our streets and sidewalks just long enough for us to take photos in our special winter gear before melting away and revealing the old gray and green colors of the landscape beneath.” 

Winter used to be my favorite time of the year. I spent those months celebrating online with posts about how “winters at home were the most magical winters of all.” 

I had no idea winter could be just as cruel as humans. Then again, everyone else betrayed us, so why would winter be any different?

We were drowning in fear. We wandered, lost, through vast spaces. And all the while, winter’s rains poured down on us, as if we needed more obstacles in our way. We had no idea where we would end up. The constant bombardment left us without options. The attacks banned us from seeking the temporary shelter of awnings and the rain denied us access to God’s exposed streets. Through the thunder and lightning, the confusion and disorientation and madness became worse.

It stopped raining for about two nights, enough to make room for bitterly cold weather that left the women and children crying. We wandered endlessly and chaotically in search of a place without bombing. 

Soon after that, my favorite time of the year revealed its sharpest weapon yet. Snow came down on us like nails from the heavens that blanketed the streets and sidewalks, penetrating our feet and eating at our decaying flesh like the jaws of hunting traps.

My cherished winter didn’t care that we left our houses barefoot, stumbling down staircases to escape the collapse of ceilings pockmarked with signs of unrelenting shelling. Winter was demanding repayment for all those childhood delights, savoring our misery. Not a single scene of our exodus drama went by without winter’s guiding hand.

Our limbs decayed. Our throats dried up like wood. Our lungs filled with turbid dampness. Walking was like cowering through shelling, maybe worse. Every footstep started to feel crueler than a bullet.

In that great wandering epic, children tried out for every role. They played every trick they could to gain the comfort of an arm to carry them. But my body was fourteen years old. I couldn’t play the role of the child.

I remember how I waited for the day when I’d dress like a fourteen-year-old girl, when I’d put on the right kind of make-up and start walking like a woman.

My mind was a pink box full of teenage love stories, dreams that ranged from the pangs of first love to the joys of illicit adventures.

I had been learning the language of maturity, the words to use in the face of constraint, the secrets of the art of charm.    

From the time my father had called me a young lady on my thirteenth birthday, I had been weaving my dreams from the yarns of womanhood and preparing my body for that new chapter.

A few months later, I found myself in an open-air prison, surrounded by flames from every direction. There were no markets to explore and no friends to meet in my new feminine outfits.

I had barely enjoyed being that young lady for a few days before I discovered the bliss of childhood when my mother chose to give my younger sister the last scrap of bread.

With the entire city under siege, we had been holed up inside for days. We lived according to the whims of factions whose loyalties and masters were unknown to us. Finally, the earth itself erupted as the unending deluge of bombardment turned the city into flowing lava. So we decided to leave.

The heaviness would only get worse as my body grew. That was the reality I came to see as I wavered from hunger and weakness among the exiled masses. 

No one carried me. I alone carried my body as I found myself and my family living in a war-torn city where siblings killed each other, supposedly for love of the homeland, leaving me without one.

I sat in the corner of the tent, folding my body onto itself, trying to infuse it with some warmth, and I whispered to my favorite time of the year.

“I hope you leave us forever. Your presence is death. Wind coming in from every side. No blankets. How stupid was I to spend my childhood thinking you were beautiful, my executioner in this naked place between places?

I closed my eyes, my last defense against the cold and hunger and loneliness. I don’t know why I remembered my Facebook page then after months of forgetting. I remembered the last photo I uploaded. It was one of those about the beauty of winters at home. I smiled and wondered.

What’s really surprising about this betrayal — it’s not like anyone cares. Didn’t we spend our childhoods memorizing songs about a homeland that in the end turned out to be a tent as cold as a coffin?

translator’s note:

“Fourteen Winters Old” is a condensed history of displacement and exile told in the voice of a fourteen-year old refugee. The narrator laments being betrayed by her favorite time of the year, winter, through fragmented recollections of the end of her childhood and the arrival of womanhood. In this compact account, Sadaa Al-Daas juxtaposes the innocent nostalgia for childhood experiences of snow and the adult shock of nationalist disenchantment.

If the young narrator’s voice appears markedly poetic in English, it is much more so in Arabic. The speaker resorts to a high literary register in narrating her experience as if to distance herself from her lived reality, as if to write a tragedy into which she can escape from her even more tragic abandonment. In doing this, her voice becomes that of a generation of children stripped of their innocence and forced to reckon with the world of adults. 

Instead of trying to make the narrator’s language seem more plausible or realistic for her age, I preserved much of Al-Daas’s vivid descriptions, similes, and ostensibly mixed metaphors in order to call attention to the unnaturalness of the child-narrator’s forced maturation through the incongruity of her speech. Similarly, I read the narrator’s frequent mixing of metaphors and exaggerated use of alliterative diction as a reflection of her struggle to find ways to describe and process her incomprehensible reality. And so, I resisted the urge or expectation to achieve, by way of flattening out the diversity of metaphor, greater realism in tone. 

I suspect that I have accidentally introduced an allusion in my reliance on words like “wandering” and “exile” where one did not exist in the Arabic, but I chose to leave it in nonetheless as it helped demonstrate the narrator’s recognition of the communal extent of her calamity.

In the story’s final section, where the speaker sits in her tent mourning the hostile reversal of her fortune, folding in on herself in search of some comfort, I tried to recall the complexity of the Arabic’s image. There, the speaker describes her body as a separate being, reminding us of her psychological displacement from her corporeality. I therefore tried to personify the body and show the speaker’s powerlessness over it.

In the child’s final words, we see a heartbreaking and shockingly mature cynicism that registers the certainty of a gruesome fate that brings with it no reprieve, for the coffin is not a final resting place, but the everyday place of shelter.

Omar Qaqish teaches English at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York and is a doctoral candidate at McGill University. He teaches and researches literature by Arab authors writing in English, Arabic, and French (and sometimes Italian). He has also translated al-Daas in World Literature Today.

 

Sadaa al-Daas is an award-winning Kuwaiti playwright, author, and literary critic. Her works include Li’anni aswad (2010, Because I Am Black) and the short story collection, Ma la ta‘rifahu ‘an al-ameerat (2017, What You Don’t Know about Princesses.) She heads the Department of Criticism at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Kuwait.

 

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