Elements are mercurial—so is glass, which is liquid, not solid. It’s deceptive, like my breasts. It looks solid, but it’s not. They look real, but they’re really not. Think mirrors, thermometers, Mercury with his caduceus. If you squint, caduceus looks like cadeau, the French word for gift. Each day is a gift is a platitude my pharmacist told me—language I prefer to ignore. Mercury’s the god of lies as well as medicine.
While I was lying in the MRI the first time, I tried to remember the periodic table. Alkaline metals are the first group—hydrogen lithium sodium potassium rubium cesium…Hydrogen and helium are in the same period—H and He, the first period. In school my first-period classes were PE, Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus. Holly Hawes was in all of my first periods, and she died of breast cancer. My first period was New Year’s Day 1974, during the Rose Bowl Parade. I don’t remember my last period. Chemo stopped it.
Later, in the PET scanner, I catalogued alkaline earth metals—beryllium magnesium calcium strontium barium radium—somewhat reactive. I reacted to my first period with joy and a sense of relief. Maybe now, I thought, I’ll get breasts. I had breasts for the next 42 years. Then I had one, then none, then two. My torso was curved, then Amazon, then flitter-flat, then round again.
I don’t remember much about chemistry except for Coach Mac and the periodic table. Chemotherapy was periodic. Poison was pestled to perpetuate me. Sometimes I wanted to die. Sometimes I didn’t. Coach Mac made elements and compounds clear as water, two hydrogen, one oxygen. Patterns were easy when he explained them. Sometimes I wanted to live. Sometimes I didn’t. That was a pattern I started to recognize.
I never loved the earth, until I thought I might not see it. I never loved the air and never thought about it, never worried about breathing, until I showed the scars to my lover. I don’t remember all he said, just Don’t worry, so of course I held my breath and did. Louis was a pharmacist, and he left me. After that secession, I decided on reconstruction and against being an Amazon.
My scars resemble the Phoenician letter for hook, which became our alphabet’s Ff, Uu, Vv, Yy, Ww. The letters are paired, the way my breasts came back. They’re perfect now. The scars still feel as though there’s a fishhook tugging at each nipple.
I was the exception to the elemental rule of the operating table. I awakened, came up through air, then went back under, like a fish snagged on a line. I was baptized, I reacted, I was reactive, I was radioactive. I went flat but didn’t flatline.
When my breasts—or rather the cage of ribs where breasts were and would be again—were outlined with radiation tattoos, they looked like the Phoenician symbols for wheels—round with quadrants, like not-so-little hot cross buns. What was that old rhyme—some like it hot? some like it cold? Radiation therapy burned, then I was cold for weeks and weeks.
I used to be so jealous, wrote a friend. You were the one with boobs. Was that meant to flatter? Well, reconstruction made me flatter before I was rounder. I wore tissue expanders for months. I mummified my breasts in Ace bandages for nearly a year. She wrote, Did vanity make you have surgery? There’s an element of truth in that. Is it vanity to want a silhouette? To want a lover, one who wants you back?
The mercury glass on my bubble mirror tarnishes like sterling, blotches black with bloom (shadows doubly shadowed on my mammogram). Here are my breasts—dimpling, scarred. My nipples look like a puddle pocked with rain, concentric circles (a dartboard on the diagram the plastic surgeon drew).
Dame Fortuna’s a wheel, and I hope I’m on the upswing now—or some element of that gondola ride through the air. My oncologist tells me, Things are looking up. I look up my horoscope—Cancer, today’s a good day for love. The zodiac elements are fire, water, earth, air. I’m water. The last three men I loved were water. My best love was fire, and we burned and we quenched.
Now that I have newer breasts, people look at them. I don’t know whether it’s admiration or investigation. When I look at my breasts these days, it’s mostly in the mirror, when I’m brushing my hair. It’s grown in, it’s grown long, it ripples to the small of my back. Most days I wear it loose. That pharmacist called me six weeks ago, but I didn’t pick up. Not reacting is also an answer.
Cleave, Pamela Johnson Parker’s first poetry collection, won the 2017 Trio Award (Trio House Press). Her poems and lyric essays appear in Iron Horse Literary Review, American Poetry Journal, diode, Poets and Artists, Gamut, Spaces, and Muscadine Lines. Parker’s poems are also included in the anthologies Language Lessons: Volume 1 (Third Man Press, Nashville) and Best New Poets 2011. Parker’s chapbooks are Other Four-Letter Words (Finishing Line) and A Walk Through the Memory Palace (Phoenicia), which won the inaugural Qaartsiluni Chapbook Prize.
Parker lives in Kentucky and works at Murray State University in the Department of Art & Design Department.
People always said heat waves weren’t what they used to be. Every morning the humidity crawled in from the swampy gardens, seeping through the mosquito nets and into the mattress. The bedroom’s discomfort would ignite and he’d have to put it out with the hose from the house next door. Just before waking, his dreams would turn vivid and continue whatever had happened the night before. This-guy—symptom, loner, trudger—thinks mornings are strange, out of place.
As he descends the stairs, he’s met with the occupations his father used to threaten him with, like a line-up of ghosts: this-beggar reading tarot cards on a bench in the square; this-numbskull selling water bottles on the corner of Atlantic and Nostrand; this-busybody reading a book, sprawled out on the sidewalk, covered with that blanket that this-guy, this animal, stepped on yesterday as he made his way home from work on East 11th; this-guy falling, feeling the city’s pavement under his back; dirty streets scorching in the sun.
The concrete boils. He sees it in the celestial wakes that rise up from the asphalt and the smell emanating from the pee-puddles trailed by the garbage trucks as they cut across the city with their sculptural workers on board. The sidewalks are vaguely sticky. The block-dwellers now occupy their front steps. Some have brought out chairs and fan themselves with the pages of half-read newspapers. Others water the plants to refresh them, and even the moss that reaches like a jungle up through the fence and the red brick walls. He closes the gate behind him, a heavy backpack slung over his shoulder. He seems to be hearing his father’s recriminations, his practical voice. This-guy—dog, gringo, milksop—can’t bear it.
The street is silent for a moment before the cicadas chime in again; they’ve been complaining for months now. The interjected rip-rip sound of the broom was only an interlude: a bus, the beeps of construction trucks in reverse as they drill into wet ears and houses with renovated façades and wealthier inhabitants. Meanwhile, the shouts of people seeking shade beneath the elms, bare feet, shorts clinging to ass-cracks, pants hanging from hips, sleeveless t’s, muscled chests abandoning their shirts atop their bicycle seats, clothes translucent with sweat, thick braided hair gathered as far away from their bodies as possible, which cook in the sun. No one is spared.
This-guy—demented, transcendental—opens the car door and slams into the dense smell of old things. He is forced to lower the windows and confirm, circling the car, that nothing has come loose during the night. Not a single piece, right, Dad? The once-gleaming leather seats, now looking more like armadillo scales, start to air out. And as soon as he can bear touching his bare legs to the grayish surface, he starts the ignition, hiding his face. Shame sweeps through him a little. Maybe no one would notice, huh, Dad? The smell of gasoline fills the car. He grunts. Almost a miracle that the car starts at all, said the mechanic who’d fixed the dent just after he bought the car directly from its twenty-sixth owner, the one who offered to repair the mark, mend the o around the inverted y decorating the chassis, remove the brown stickiness slicked across it, replace the lost tire, the missing wood panels, paint over the scratches keyed onto it (who knows where or in what neighborhood) by some passer-by who’d glanced at the ’79 Mercedes and seen a millionaire to be despised. Who’d seen a proud family man, a father like his own, with children and purchases filling the trunk where this-guy, reneging on his father’s designs, now keeps a blanket and an orange traffic cone in case he gets stuck somewhere. This mirror, this metal. What had happened with the car had also happened with the father: reneging on the son’s designs, he had departed forever in a car like this car, perhaps the very same. Both car and father, then, had left him with a vague memory of a snazzy suburb in a city booming with the automotive industry. Just watch out. Tomorrow it might be you.
He focuses on the maneuver. It takes half an hour just to move it to the other side of the road. He doesn’t look at anyone, although he notes their presence on the stoops and sidewalks. A blue tide surges from the hot exhaust pipe and it makes children cough, old men curse, and youths cover their mouths in the attic of the house next door. This-guy—violent, crease-browed—pretends he doesn’t hear them; he’s dedicating his own internal insults to the father he barely knew. Right?
It’s going to explode. Outside the car’s grimy windows, he confirms, the world looks even hazier and more toxic. Doan yu theenk? He struggled to fix his eyes on the origin of the hoarse, forced voice. A body seated on the stoop of the house next door. One of its eyes obscured by hair, the other half-closed and streaked with makeup melted in the heat. I don’t think so. The colors reappear along the road. The woman sitting on the stoop, the notebook-neighbor, wipes the sweat from her hand on the piece of pant-leg hanging from her thigh and tucks her piled-up books under her arm when she gets to her feet and climbs the stairs. Her fingers are stained with ink. Have you taken it to the shop?Cars aren’t supposed to give off blue smoke, she coughs. Who, beneath this heavy sun, could possibly know more about cars than this-guy—foppish, pinched. His father, perhaps.
At a table in the library, he rereads a novel about an urban project that transforms a dilapidated industrial city into a model city occupied by artists. According to the narrator’s plan, each artist would be assigned a bedroom and studio in the old buildings, refurbished with a rich state’s cash, as befitting their experience and résumé. Artists would come to this model city wearing only the clothes on their backs and would be provided with everything else, and likewise would be obliged to construct everything else. In their role, which would fall somewhere between creation and unemployment, the artists would receive paltry salaries until they managed to establish themselves. He’s flooded with laughter as he reads. A real man is a working man, right, Dad? He makes a note on his computer: after the successive failures of automotive industry, the US can be interpreted as model of failed hyper-industrialization, with an income equality typical of poor countries. A country that belongs to two worlds, both colonial and imperial. Does the novel suggest that there’s something respectable about being unemployed? He stops typing at the memory of a termination letter, an empty job, a suburban garage with no car in it.
When he gets home, various neighbors are chatting from their front porches, calling over their gates. Asked about his writing, this-guy offers a vague answer, determined to obscure his doubts as to whether two years of solitary interpretative work on Detroit’s automotive industry could make any sense to anyone other than himself. They inform him that the neighbor is also writing her doctoral dissertation. Then, gesturing across the street, they mention that the couple who recently moved into #1454 are writers, too, and swimming in money. They look at the dark façade, suddenly more ornate under the construction tarps than anyone had ever seen. The neighborhood is, then, the model city. Isn’t it? Its small quarters and floor-divisions serve only to lodge the pencil-artists who need nothing more than a desk and a window. This-guy—corrosive, vegetal—gives a final glance at the moving van before saying goodbye and going in.
He peers attentively into the screen. Perhaps the true protagonists of Lelouch’s 1966 film Un homme et une femme are not in fact the characters played by Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, but rather the car, its speed, the rain. They’re damaged souls. A Formula 1 driver races along French highways and into the arms of the woman he’s been romancing. Both are recently widowed. Her husband had worked as a stunt double and was killed filming a car sequence; his wife, increasingly distressed every time he took the wheel, had committed suicide. Condemned to repeat their trauma, much of the film involves the racecar driver traversing the distance and a harsh atmosphere evolving between him and his new love. Death inhabits the past; death approaches with its foot on the gas. The racecar driver, however, reaches his destination in his supercar—the latest model Alfa Romeo—that will plunge off a cliff at the toss of a stone.
At night, this lost soul, this animal in heat, dreams he is carrying on a conversation with his neighbor in which she argues that writing a dissertation could become a method of automatic writing, as practiced by the surrealists and other artists obsessed with the subconscious, if it could access the part of the subconscious that retains empty forms over and over again. In the dream, the neighbor explains her theory by sketching a brain with blue pen. This-guy feels the pressure against his temples. Instead of unleashing the imagination, her hoarse voice continues, you enter a place full of lugares comunes. The drawing is now a turban heaped with flowers, pineapples, other fruits, the one Carmen Miranda wore in the movie about Rio de Janeiro, or about Havana, or about anyplace with dark skin, red lips, a flat belly, and a Latin accent, like the neighbor’s. The dream features young women who have been trained to say, in English, Americans always say my hat is high.
He wakes with a headache. When he sees the neighbor eating a banana, this-guy—small, drowsy with heat and insomnia—thinks of her strong accent. In Detroit it was cars; in Brazil, bananas and women. Don’t you think something interesting could be written about this? Gud moarning. That evening, she would write a chapter about the guy who would speak to her in a distant dream. Carmen Miranda was catapulted to fame in a dress characteristic of northern Brazil. Her physique was convenient: fair skin, almond-shaped eyes, perfect smile; the perfect banana da terra. The lady with the tutti frutti hat. Despite her millions, Carmen Miranda tried to escape the stereotype. But, as usual, the pact wasn’t quite so easily broken. World War Two suppressed the national appetite for exoticism, replacing this business with the white-skinned arms trade.
He pauses beside the window of the rattletrap. This-guy—docile, eternal son—keeps his eyes on the ground. The battered bumper. The yellow paint like a wayside shrine from another era. The blue blankets disheveled in the trunk, expelling a smell of forest and pasture. This shit’s gonna explode. The hot coffee searing his tongue, but not as hot as his neighbor’s attic, where she swims in books and movies. Earbuds always in her ears. A little notebook where she writes things down.
The conversation gets off to a vague start. This-guy—very quiet in the corner—fucking hates cars. He’s going to put this personal anecdote in the first pages of the introduction. He was born the same year Saddam Hussein received the keys to the city of Detroit. His father worked in one of the offices on the outskirts. He earned good money until he fell prey to a mass layoff. The house in the suburbs started to come apart at the seams with a despondent father inside it. Don’t you believe me? His voice is a thin thread. This-guy barely remembers him except for the ’79 car he bought in hopes of it being the one that once belonged to his father, repairing it in hopes of repairing his memory of his father. This-guy—stereotypical, automatic—would write the best academic article.
The fountain-pen-resting-on-the-marble-table-neighbor, the coffee-cup-neighbor, tells him she’s writing about people who travel by plane. One woman, pen in hand, took a flight to keep from disappearing like the people in her novels. A few years before, she’d shattered a champagne glass in her hands after feeling humiliated by an award she hadn’t received: it had been promised to her; it was, as they say, cooking. But she was never much of a cook, you know? Then she’d fired a gun she always carried around in one of her patent leather purses, a gun with a crystal handle that she fixed on an old boyfriend she hadn’t seen in a decade. She came to Nu Yoark in 1944, this Bombal woman. She changed her hairstyle and avoided looking at herself in the mirror because it called her Luisa and it called her María. She only allowed people to take photos of her in places where she’d already located a small glass within her field of vision; it contained, according to her, a small dram of her health. She picked up a pen and got married. What else could she do with that exquisite education and the absent mother she bore like a transparent, ghostly body? Maybe in California, or here in New York, her pen could set the limits she’d so struggled to describe, constantly repeating the word Luisa, the word María from afar. She could even marry a count who would give her a noble daughter; she could even write a screenplay that the count would sell. But in the end she just went back to Chile, without a pen and with various broken glasses.
This-guy—scrawny, foul-smelling—and the coffee-cup-carrying-neighbor now make their way toward the art gallery. As a teenager, this-guy, this piece of garbage, spent lots of time with his friends in abandoned suburban houses, spray-painting and sometimes destroying them with machetes and fists, music and beer. His drawings always depicted car parts, just like the Peruvian artist who had part of a car in half his studio. When this-guy tells the coffee-cup-neighbor and the car-parts-artist that he writes about the automotive industry and unions in Detroit, the paintings-man tells him that his agent had bought an entire neighborhood there. To found an artist’s residency. Every house cost him a dollar and he pays the property tax in artworks.
This-guy—singular, enchained—walks around the gallery, observing the pieces on the shelves. It’s as if he were looking through his father’s eyes. This-guy zipping up his pants in the bathroom, brushing a hand across his face in the mirror, brown socks. Taking out the trash, a line of black garbage bags accumulating on the sidewalk in front of identical houses painted different colors. Doing the numbers with a five-dollar calculator, his fingers laced in his black curls, sweaty and slick. Sitting on the subway with half a cheek turned outward, about to get up at any moment. Dialing an always-busy phone number and eventually leaving a hesitant message. Later, scraping shit from a shoe, wondering what the fuck he’s doing at 11 p.m. when the neighbors greet him with a shoe covered in shit. Spying on the neighbor on the stairs of the house next door from his own window, imagining her: the neighbor squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, the neighbor walking down the street, the neighbor stopping in front of a stained glass window, sitting down after pulling out several boxes of books. This-guy drinking coffee in the middle of summer, reading on the subway, in the house of the neighbor who has no family in this country. And this-guy, who does he think he is?
At nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the metal seems alive. And so this good-for-nothing leaves it stranded in the middle of the road again. The rolled-down windows and uttered insults make him lower his eyes. His white muscles try to move it a few centimeters toward the sidewalk. Isn’t that better, Dad? The men who linger in the street every day, the men this popinjay doesn’t so much as wave at, stare at him from a distance without altering their day’s affairs, their impalpable commerce. The strength of such arms would move this car like a feather. Library body, he hears like a whisper. It was bound to happen. The tow truck guy sits for several minutes in the driver’s seat, texting, despite the horns blasting on both sides of Dean Street. This-guy—chicken-skin—is getting anxious, tormented by the pages he’s stopped writing. Maybe it’s time to sell it. The sentence hits him with a drop of acrid sweat. The hoarse voice reads his mind. The neighbor appears with her short-shorts, skinny legs, belly bared, damp shirt, bag on her shoulder, an expression somewhere between irony and concern. It was bound to happen.
They watch the operation in silence. In Chile, we could get in with him or go in your car. They stop a green cab. This-guy opens the door for her and immediately regrets it a little, is a little ashamed of such chivalry. Don’t you think? The neighbor watches him count his bills and warily chews her gum. Her gaze shifts as she maybe wonders why she offered to come along and whether she can still get out before things get weird. This-guy—foggy, firm—tells her he can’t sell it, no one would buy it anymore. It was never expensive, he clarifies at the jobless neighbor’s incredulous look. Typical. Look at this-guy. In Detroit, buying a German car was read as an act of defiance. This model has electric windows, a sliding roof, air-conditioning, interlayered windshields, a collapsible steering column, central locking, an electric mirror on the driver’s side, automatic transmission.
This-guy—who doesn’t take his eyes from the driver in front of him—talks incessantly the entire way, unsure whether the sweaty-skinned neighbor is listening. The inverted-y turbo diesel model appeared in 1979, a novelty for this kind of family car. Its six-cylinder 0M167 engine has a 125-horsepower capacity, like this one, exceeding 320 kilometers per hour on test drives. The model, which can accommodate a stroller, was designed for suburban life and fantasies of far-off travel. At 179 centimeters wide and 149 centimeters high, it leaves a lot of space for its seven possible passengers. The roof rack measures a little over one square meter. The body is steel and the fuel tank is located above the rear axle. Its design ensures the very highest safety standards, right, Dad? It absorbs shocks and enables maximum visibility in all directions. It saves the lives of young bourgeois families, offering a soft-close mechanism with child-proofable pin locks on the doors and panoramic windows. The broad bumpers, embellished with elastic material and wide rubber edges, complete the design. The glory of days past. So what was your father like?
The heat falls onto them and sears their skin. The notebook-neighbor shields herself with a copy of El Especialito that she’d pulled from the newspaper dispenser on the corner. Looking out onto the street, she lets the flitting heat-stunned bugs alight on her arms. Even smashing them would be too much work. This-guy—he who seeks the remnants of his manliness—thinks as he closes his wallet that he should probably shoo them away, shouldn’t he, Dad? What are the chances of a man forever shattered by a father’s absence? This-guy thinks of Roberta, who was traveling around Denmark the last time they spoke. I didn’t know we’d come all the way to Jersey City. The neighbor’s forced, almost sleepy voice seeps out of the old radio that was the humidity itself. This is Kennedy Boulevard. This transplanted underdevelopment that our families flaunt. Conspicuous, incongruous. This-guy—dazed—moves his jaw from side to side as he always does when he doesn’t know what to say. They walk from the bus to the ferry and lick red and blue popsicles, like the flags of France, Texas, and Chile, with the little choo-choo-train chugging along in the poetry of Lourdes Casal, transformed into una revolucionaria on Kennedy Boulevard. Since she was a distinguished diplomat and intellectual, no one dared to say lesbian. Ensconced at home or at the office, some swore on their loved ones’ graves that they’d met the boyfriend who’d broken her heart and left her this way: sort of masculine, devoted to the life of the mind. She came here as a Cuban, a rosary around her neck. She came here black. The Yuneited Esteits, the need to become a revolution. I carry this marginality, immune to all turning back.
At the entrance to the public library, this-guy—he of the millenary void—has lost all desire to write. He sits and promptly falls asleep. When he opens his eyes, the keyboard has marked its squares into his cheek, so crisply inserted that it hurts to pull away. Through the window he sees Kowalski’s tight pants, the ones he’s been dreaming of these past few nights. The small body is surrounded by snow, getting into a white car, and this-guy, who knows nothing, realizes it’s November. According to the photos he’s pulled from various abandoned boxes, his father looked nothing like Barry Newman. His father looked taller, and only in one photograph was he wearing such tight pants. Vanishing Point came to theaters in 1971. His father must have been in Los Angeles, bound for Detroit, or maybe even in Mexico City. It meant something, didn’t it, Dad, that the film was showing in theaters while his own slender body and prominent nose were getting into a car and driving around the US, as he’d previously done in who knows what border town of a country divided in the ’90s. It must have seemed like quite an adventure, right? Watching TV and staring at the screens of wherever you were from.
On a beat-up VHS, this-guy—invertebrate, practically Iberian—watches the movie again. Kowalski’s trip from Colorado to California in record time, sleepless and hyped up on speed, is intercut with various flashbacks informing us that he is a Vietnam veteran, an ex-cop discharged for reporting his partner’s perpetration of sexual abuse, an ex-motorcycle racer, an ex-Formula 1 driver no one remembers, and the lover of an ethereal woman who is no longer there. The melancholy, ethical, suicidal masculinity of Kowalski, who has no first name, never sleeps. The women are all one woman or they’re the sweet sun on the horizon, the fantasy of death. The lonely man in the desert. With his car. On fire.
In the first scene of Vanishing Point, the white Dodge Challenger—Challenger could easily be the character’s first name, come to think of it; the father’s—hurtles down the highway at top speed, such that man and car simultaneously embody Renaissance and Futurist ideals. The final scene repeats this to the death. The consciousness of an evaporating country.
The final collision could also be interpreted as the purest, simplest form of propaganda. During the years prior to the film’s premiere, numerous complaints were filed regarding faulty car-manufacturing at the Ford and General Motors plants in Detroit, including the most popular and exclusive models. Sales dropped by 93%. The fact that an expert driver like Kowalski crashes of his own volition into earthly bulldozers shifts blame from the industry, engulfed by confrontations with unions and popular movements, to the client—creating, in the process, the fantasy of heroism that outlives anyone who dies at the wheel.
I’d check the crash reports if I were you. When this-guy tells the whole story to the neighbor, who is buying a cup of coffee at the corner deli, she tells him that the screenplay was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. There can’t be too many cars like that one. Can there? This-guy, who doesn’t know exactly who that is, mumbles something about the screenplay. The neighbor, not taking this-guy—strapped, fetishistic, calculating—very seriously, smiling slightly on the third floor of a house with a mattress on the ground, hands him a copy of Tres Tristes Tigres and tells him that the screenplay is archived at a nearby university.
And what you write is suddenly real. The ink-stain-on-the-face-neighbor closes her fingerless gloves around a steaming cup of coffee and glances up, sheathed in a black wool hat, to the thirty-fourth floor. The thing is that writing can never be automatic enough, because the writer always has to come back, pick up the pen, get hold of a body to print things onto. She looks at him steadily. So I can’t have been the one who said that in your dream. Pero qué sucede if you don’t have a body when you come back, she said to the guy who was a family man in last night’s dream.
The full-bag-of-books-neighbor is standing on Mercer St. before her writing day at the library. Ana Mendieta left her country in a fish tank. She was put there when she was twelve years old. From the other side, she saw her father, the one who kept the guns, the one who went to jail, saying goodbye to her. She kissed the Miami ground when she got off the plane, as she’d seen a priest do before 1959. She turned from a messiah into a child in a refugee camp, a house in Iowa, an orphanage. From family to family, her strong Cuban accent was perceived as a mark of inferiority. She used her body as a transformative entity; so, too, the language she shared with her mother and her mama. Her body left landmarks in galleries, in pits she dug in fields, in museums in Britain, Rome, Berlin. On city streets, in the voices of New York, in photographs, in tracts of land outside Havana, was a silhouette of Ana Mendieta’s body. A silhouette was left when she fell from the thirty-fourth floor, naked, as in her performances. ¿Un cuerpo que escribe su futuro?There’s always an open plaque on the floor.
The back-pain-neighbor sneezes and covers the viscous liquid that jumps from her nose. She stays in position, tissue at her face, as if counting the seconds it took Mendieta to hit the ground. Lo que debe haber sido. This-guy knows she’s murmuring in her most intimate language, the one she speaks deepest inside herself. It sounds to this-guy like a lament for who knows what. Walking, taking little sips from her coffee, the neighbor tells him that she’s looking for work. This-guy—he of the raised eyebrow—doesn’t understand what this has to do with the Cuban artist’s suicide. What happens in the model city isn’t a real job, right, Dad? Sometimes people who catch sight of him on the street think he does something feminine, like keep a diary. When they part ways, he sees it’s snowing and realizes he never asked her where the jobs she’s looking for are found.
The street is lit by burgeonings of snow. It falls from the trees; it falls from the rooftops; it falls, like this-guy’s gaze on the third floor. The notebook-neighbor now has a suitcase she takes out for a walk several times that month. He doesn’t see her for days. The frigid mattress, the solitary nights—they intersect with the stripped tree branches tossed by wind like a falling, falling angel. At night, looking out the window from the corner of his eye, his drowsy eye, this-guy—mute, blank—confuses the snow with people walking down the middle of the road. Bodies are unrecognizable under coats, parkas, hats, boots, gloves, balaclavas. The snow illuminates the street; there are shadows where there didn’t used to be. Less light. They file along after the last big snowfall as if on a movie set, orderly, one a night, while this-guy shovels snow around three in the morning without a single light on. One night he sees a big man with a child in his arms. They’re wearing the same garments; they’re the same person on different planes. The next night he sees two people walking side by side, a man and a woman. Every so often the woman slips, moving awkwardly in a way he recognizes at once. Roberta. Holding the hand of another man whose face he doesn’t see. He doesn’t stop, just tells her it’s unwise to walk across the layer of snow that sifts between them. When he wakes, he sees that the storm has passed and the snow has heaped up on cars, in the streets. The night allows him to make out a single silhouette, a slight body dragging along a suitcase. He of the shovel-in-hand hurries to help, but he hears a car engine behind him, a shuddering accelerator. When he turns around, this-guy, blinded by the light, wakes up.
Translator’s Note:
“Cars on Fire” is told, careeningly, from the third-person perspective of an unnamed English-speaking, US-American male narrator (referred to only as “this-guy”). This-guy lives in New York and has three primary obsessions: 1) Detroit, the city of his birth, the subject of a novel-in progress, and the place where his father abandoned his family; 2) his ’79 Mercedes, which is the same model of the car his father abandoned him in; and 3) his neighbor, an unnamed, Spanish-speaking, Chilean female Ph.D. student, with whom this-guy shares scattered conversations and interactions throughout the story and the several seasons of the calendar year it covers—and whom he otherwise spies on and pines for in the aftermath of an uncertain separation from his girlfriend. Even before translation, the story is essentially and profoundly bilingual: Mónica Ríos chronicles, in Spanish, the perspective of her monolingual English-speaking narrator, who observes and overhears his neighbor go about her daily life in a language he cannot understand—and who becomes, obliquely and provocatively, a co-narrator of the story itself. My primary challenge as a translator was the question of how to recreate this refracted bilingualism in the other direction. In Spanish, Ríos scatters the text with English-language words and phrases, and she has occasionally used Oulipian techniques to sow her rich, erratic, sometimes marvelously spiky syntax with unexpected adjectival combinations and descriptions that can border on surreal. In these ways, among others, Ríos transforms a structurally simple narrative—a love story, ultimately, that progresses through the seasons of a year in New York City—into a set of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic ruminations on language, culture, relationships, intimacy, loneliness, and loss. The version of the text published in Anomaly is a long excerpt from the full ~7000-word story.
Robin Myers was born in New York and is based in Mexico City. She is the author of several collections of poetry published as bilingual editions in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. Her translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Inventory, and elsewhere. In 2009, she was a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was a resident translator at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her translation of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s book La lírica está muerta / The Lyric is Dead is forthcoming from Cardboard House Press in 2018.
Mónica Ramón Ríos is a writer, scholar, and editor. She is the author of the novels Segundos and Alias el Rocío/Alias el Rucio, as well as the short story collection La paciente (forthcoming). She has published the essays “La escritura del presente,” about scripts by writers, and “Cine de mujeres en postdictadura.” She also contributes to La Tempestad (Mexico) and Buensalvaje (Spain). She has been a member of the publishing collective Sangría Editora since 2008. In 2017 she created the feminist literary gathering AFest. She teaches at Fordham University.
We are understandably afraid of blank screens. It’s almost too much time to hide out, too early given over.
Never comprehensive, we fail our tests, with purpose futures’ pawn, and wailing we just let slide.
Luring you from bed, into love words, onion bread, Hungarian salami, bossa nova, all fingers to dawn.
You’d dress me in mesh and lace, I’d dress you is the problem. What kind of girl does that?
So eager to throw you down, bitch you out. Near these old books; on the phone what I won’t do.
Poured country pie, poured midnight’s girth I’m thickened, pregnant or smoldering…
Dust is poor lacquer, but about my desk, endless piles planted heaps of business cards, receipts, family photos.
Dragging Badly Behind
i.
Did I censure you? Well worn, the defense of in love. Please could I give it again? Not the gift, the quiet’s bite.
Like water is higher in this zone and warmer now than forecast. Didn’t notice? Dragged around, too many are royal eating out.
Do you ever think you might want escape? would live with carpets? employable thoughts? wretched punctures in sounds, cartoon
crackly edges of the thing pulled from how you feel, barely audible? Earn the urge to throw up, clench teeth.
Menacing, she’s in the light’s withdrawal. Medicated wants a breakfast, to extract payback or playback
when separated from their parents, children who were raised by ear, dirtbags, tied up for years.
In prison, in their country of white granite between bottom and sky, face stricken true from the world.
Chirp: it is not a fair thing. What is a fair thing? Just know if I sounded like a hotel, I was. You decide
dragging isn’t over the hump. Stolen thing about being in love likes to have stirred before
hounding the repetition. Placed on the mat, being readies you forlorn into fall.
Childhood’s rushes stall all about my analysis as if placed on the royal ride, just so.
Bobby pinning lights to what happened, green shadows across someone else’s library steps.
At night, its bunk, faint impressions of all night oil stains, flaked skin and hairs, oils, snot and found.
Most people aren’t white, but in certain lights some of us utmost, skin olive crepe or crayon in—
Not too shabby, lanky black haired buyer, funerary mood, whipping about what you’ll do,
interviews with past selves, its imposters, heirs and cheats. Feign wishes easily put down
fastened feet on land no more. Tried out, without solace the night before, it’s in fires.
ii.
Sail ferries are lithesome, easily disdained how sea rocks are patient, knowing worn slick.
Time plateaus, when we loved and others, fleeting hinged together words for things,
mannered dis-interruptions, or not even screens, glimpse forecast form from
iii.
(i just miss oceans do you do you? If i didn’t live near you choose! No, you! Would i would you just fault at sex again lend body or two what again what races feeling were a wheat shaft in a red field taken
free times holding hands later you narrate it at a dinner party like a story
i didn’t at sex again my father’s “I felt” falsified you guess where oceans live, again do you? do you? amiss
only she didn’t show up, did she?
Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Wanting in Arabic, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1, and co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on Transgender Cultural Production. At the University of Winnipeg she organized the conferences, Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres. Her writing is available in recent and forthcoming issues of Angelaki, The Capilano Review, Sinister Wisdom, Somatechnics, and Vetch: A magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics. She is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University. You can find her on twitter @anasemia.
Ya’aburnee—may you bury me, says a lover in Arabic Whereas not all Arabs speak the same language
Whereas we visit the ruins of Byblos, to look at the remnants of Rome Byblos may have been occupied seven thousand years before Christ
Whereas It is complicated because it is a sacred place and we do not want to use live ammunition Said the IDF spokesman when Israeli snipers surrounded the Church of Nativity
Whereas Samir the bell-ringer is shot in the chest and wrapped in plastic Whereas the Palestinian residents of Bethlehem were unable to bury their dead
Whereas what is the sound that makes God Believe your side of the story
Whereas Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still cannot own land Whereas my parents are born as tourists to the ruins
Whereas in the United States the Muslims are ruining this country Whereas on the 11th of September I see my father cry for the first time
Whereas my father teaches me the short syllables of Alhamdulillah and Democracy Whereas the diagnosis of patriot will not cure enemy
Whereas during an anonymous phone call he is told to go back to Iran I visit his refugee camp at the outskirts of Beirut in clean sneakers
Whereas in my sole authorized nation it is my civic duty to vote For the candidate who will administer more polite death
Whereas the fantasy of love is also a fantasy of return I wanted you in the damp green; slow as rot, a home of gape
Whereas Frida names a drawing “Ruin” and dedicates it to Diego Whereas with my fingers inside of you I don’t know if I am looking
For monument or erosion Whereas here is when I find a way to ruin the moment
Whereas you buried me In the wrong plot, on the wrong graph, in the wrong bell of time
Whereas I don’t get to touch the yarrow laid at my tomb There is always something left behind that is never mine
Abortion Fantasy
in The city I am most ravenous red thread cable a throat a poem about revision I am cells roam unopposed refuses to exit the uterine border The city only wants the stranger me with commerce we are most dangerous and I conjoined with notes of biology state hood I the stranger as cells before revealing The city does not want the stranger see women’s pod see eugenics procedures The city subsidizes begging complicit blood plots Genital form to offer more than The city does not want the stranger a carnivorous womb trap heliamphora an invasive species of clit the stillborn mushroom body forcing an occasion of treason
fist fulls of escape route this is arable but echo the stranger I patrol and part when it fills in here the stranger undesignated by outbreak will scrape a strain of our conspiracy see sister sterilization board election or elective I come and go between sore reproduction I want I want I want out
Processed with VSCO with 8 preset
Zaina Alsous is a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora and an abolitionist. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Offing, decomP, The Margins, Radius, Glass, Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere. Currently she is an MFA candidate at the University of Miami.
Snakes are building a nest/in a bed so I walk/ away/ My eyeliner is smeared / rain drops mix with tear drops & dried sweat/ my hair gains new curl before thickly falling/I swish swallow spit champagne and Chambord/ hit clubs so dark / I can’t tell—was that you was that me? / A rhythm pumps through my skin/ move towards/ body heat. / I’ve stopped trying to tell /what my feet are doing / I swim / gasp over water & find warmth/ in isolated spots of my body fingertips/ burn /my breasts/ I am lost/ in the strobes. /I want to stay here forever/ home is a far-gone prospect & the heat is out / in my car but here I can seek out moments of spotlight /No one follow me /because I step/ I bird/ I am a woman whose toes curl backwards/ break off When do neglect and indulgence become the same things? / My emotions suffocate /under dust. I find a section of earth & /pantone. I carry longing / in the scars on my thighs /& when I look in the mirror I wonder/ if my lover would recognize me? / I sparkle pearl & moscatto but break open pink / My thoughts unravel like ribbons / I swim silver skin in / diamond dark, my heart pierces through / the atmospherelight up/ under the moon & / dance shadow, the cool of it all. I hit up an abandoned / Ferris wheel/ redstains across my body & talk /selfsweet tonight climb/ My lungs icicle & /seagulls become discarded tissues behind me/ Mud slides between my toes/ I turn / to a stranger in the water below / whose face is mine but not mine/a cousin I never met / gatita, let’s jump/ she calls /& the ocean comes to me in an embrace, there—/
I Learn from History
The Queen of Versailles gave me lessons on scapegoating over tea, so tonight I lay down, and Every Man steps right over me. From the ground, I can see a squirrel bury a nut, but the future can’t be trusted to arrive.
Pat pat pat pat into the Earth: I haven’t left my kitchen floor in weeks, but I have a plan. Streetlights open up on every block: veins, saturating anything around them. I dream of a step forward each moment, and I will ask the questions that suffocate deep in my chest, the ones that I cough up when I’m alone: red, black, and green.
Why does my anger scare you? Are you afraid of me or are you afraid of what will happen if I stand beside you?
I want to purge this, circle the parking lot, salt the asphalt, grow whole universes in darkness.
But until then, I survive five miles under ice, with other extinct things.
There I indulge in morbidity, watch in silence as my flesh loses blood, stiffens, loosens from my body. The gap between cheek and cheekbone fills with slush water, I come apart under teeth like butter knives, but the fish assure me I am not feeling a thing.
Suzi F. Garcia is the daughter of an immigrant and has an MFA with minors in Gender Studies and Screen Cultures. She is an Editor at Noemi Press, and her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fence, Vinyl, Apogee, the Wanderer, and more. You can find her on Twitter at @SuziG or at suzifgarcia.com.
i, too, have loved a queer body too brightly to see them husk me until it happened. have opened up the internet to escape and seen their virality spake psalm out of my friends’ mouths. have closed my eyes and wondered if this was worth a stranger’s jealousy. to wake up next to them and tell my friends what they look like. to mistake a naked swath of skin for vulnerability. to call it that anyway, even when their mouth scabbed and their hands twisted inside of me as though playing an un-tuned instrument. i, too, have spit all the teeth out of an ex-lover’s name and felt guilty for the blood of it. sometimes, when i hate myself the most, i wonder who will love the faggots if we can’t even love ourselves. and maybe it is my fault. for expecting someone to partake in me and not come away writhed and wounded. for finding someone whose gender mirrors mine like we wouldn’t shatter getting that close. o, god of fast music and neck muscles, show me a queer intimacy that does not end in a dawn that dreads what new bruises it will expose. give me a community that does not sing in octaves made of knives and other poignant garbage. sometimes, when i mourn the death of trust, i feel selfish in my ability to weep over something that is not actually a body. how many times will i get to hate an ex before they die and/or are killed, and then what? do i mourn for the loss of one less person to slander me? do i pity the dirt they will sink into for their contamination of it? do i praise the maggots that will eat their heart, and the obvious metaphor of a thing that once flustered against my hand now cooling from a hate-crime? am i, perhaps, a piece of shit, for imagining a funeral notice i do not even open before throwing out? o, god of first-dates and subsequent road-trips, please stop letting me be broken by people that have also been broken by someone like me. please stop giving me lovers so similar that we become reflections and stop seeing the difference. please please o god of queer idols, stop just fucking stop. there are so few songs we can sing in which we do not have to change the pronouns or mutter them under the baseline. o, god of shy violences, do you think if we told the not-faggots that the faggots also too barrel into us like car-crashes they will stop following us around parking-lots? i, too, have been grinded up against in the mostly-dark and felt my breath stop and still wished for them to leave tonight alive. i, too, have seen a friend swollen with a new abuse and wondered if i blessed their perpetrator’s belly with a bullet, if we are both trans and just pre-dead anyway, would the headline dead-name it a suicide?
Linette Reeman (they/them pronouns) is an Aries from the Jersey Shore, so they’re not sure what you mean by ‘speed limit.’ Their work appears in Blueshift Journal, Maps for Teeth, FreezeRay, Public Pool, and others, they are a multiple Pushcart Prize, Bettering American Poetry, and Best of the Net nominee, and have performed at venues like Busboys & Poets and the Bowery Poetry Club. Currently, Linette is attempting to survive in small-town America. // LINETTEREEMAN.NET
The truth of it is I don’t feel like a man or a woman so much as a Janus-faced alien
from a Ursula K. LeGuin novel; like a radish buried underground, plump,
both womanly and phallic; like a bearded lady king
on a fiberglass throne; like a symphony rather than a single note;
like my body is good—I mean, good enough
as any spare: there’s a pleasure in it,
in doubling, pleasure heady as helium, in being both inside and outside
a skin; in building a second skin
like a dam or hutch, a face to wear like a home
in molting whatever no longer serves me
when and if I feel like it. I may never
remove my breasts because in truth, I like them.
I won’t lie to prove music to you, music you can’t hear outside my skull.
I can only be my own permission.
Jason Phoebe Rusch has an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Their stories, poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, and Vice, among others. More of their work can be found at jasonphoeberusch.com
Sun drunk and bruised we stop for mango juice, so sweet it jolts the tooth Chickens scurry beneath legs, peck at cartilage and scraps of bone C and J laugh canibalismo Push cainito halves to the plate’s ledge, one for each of my palms Slow I thumb the pits loose, cradle the etymology thick and viscous in the valley of my tongue: purple star apple, golden leaf, abiaba, pomme du lait, estrella, aguay, milk fruit My little lobe glows warm and fat Mouth curled around an old blurred life Violet nights exhausting my dizzy tongue beside offerings: stiff petals moon blood and stone I’ve come here to clear a vision of myself and let it be true How useless imperial language with a mouth for hunger And thirst Ears pressed between veils, straining to hold some silver ephemera not mine to keep
Breakbeat Aubade with Anemones and Lucky Fish
Waiting and waiting, Death I kept waiting. Despite the world’s benevolent violence Wants rich and long, questions curled as cowrie.
See: a thousand lucky fish in the Grimoire of My Life. The wild language of air sucked between teeth and the sibilance we submit to. Is the body not for this If
black writhe of being alive. What steel-clap hand, drunk bones and premonition: sapid pelvis in translation, torso of trap and tropical bass I slither and bend into every note
I slip, maestro, between your thresh and breakbeat, sweat a sea of wild anemones. Salt, so a deep song. Chest warm with the heat of our need and the menthol to come.
High off echolocation, lights yellow the streets. Beneath green rooms, I slip off my thick flit.
Between floors cumbia mouths my name, says descend in and pay nothing.
Give up the veils between us. Ecstatic corona, I pierce through the shrill season, against shudder. Teem brink. Woman in line
with deliverance. Fever. And the February a body begs.
Aricka Foreman is a writer, editor and educator from Detroit, MI. Her work and curation have appeared in The Offing, Buzzfeed, Vinyl, RHINO, The Blueshift Journal, Day One, shuf Poetry, James Franco Review, THRUSH, and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin), among others. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber (YesYes Books), she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She currently lives in Chicago, IL.
what begins in a thigh. bending the knees appears as prelude to elevation. what begins in a thigh. “Nobody has ever mentored me, not even when I was a child!” (George Enescu)
beat(ing), positive or pejorative: in a wind’s blow, I’ll beat you to death, batt(u)allia, blowing up the lake to stir the fish, a time when mountain cocks flap their wings to mate, tapping the ground with your foot then jump etc
all possibilities came down to one: the inevitable. look at the hen tapping. hold it, hen, I’ll cut you: crescendo, tremolo, martellato, flageolet, pianissimo.
“as early as in 1669, Raoul Feuillet came up with the first choreographic notation. he proposes a basic notation of steps, the gait direction and the figure sequence. there are no indications regarding the movement of the arms or of the upper parts of the body.” (Dancing in the 20th Century, Isabelle Ginot, Marcelle Michel)
*
[Aurora sees the old woman’s knitting needles tapping a 2/4 measure. it gradually turns into a charming waltz in 3/4. break. a cry in pain. Aurora is bleeding. eight 4/4 measures, very wide. Aurora starts to dance and gets dizzy. people are amazed. Aurora twirls as if bit by a tarantula, then suddenly collapses.]
[and nothing could have come out of their cry. a coral reef formed around her neck, jewels, so precious any other necklace would be imitating its art. when she opened the mouth her teeth were blunt, like a sea mammal’s. only swans carry such defense camouflage.]
[swans – broccoli. in and out of water. neck under, they are like a silky bouquet. broccoli. who would touch a submerged swan.]
[she pulls the leash; the animal gets out. it wags its tail at her feet, moves around the fallen skin. devilish skin, a sea devil. she takes it in her arms. her body smell wakes the animal. the beast begins to wash her, unnervingly. she lays it down and heads to the horse. the horse’s huge head, eyelids half-closed. the smell is there. millimeter by millimeter, an eyelid opens. the horse chews the skin, then desires to be lifted. man positions himself under the animal and lifts it. they prance synchronously, then let the skins drop.]
[let’s turn our attention from legs to arms. (…) the art of gestures is crammed in between margins too narrow, for great effects. (…) what is lost at the level of legs will be found at the level of arms. (…) the body is no longer a way for the soul to escape; on the contrary, it gathers around it.]
*
“I wish I could fly, to see with my own eyes things hidden underground!” (George Enescu)
what helps you be in flight fly? air: a mixture of gases that form the lower layers of atmosphere, indispensable to aerobe organisms. under ground, memory contains every gesture.
for now, we limit ourselves to events on earth:
“We bind sheaves on fields,
with sweet wine in a jug
Tra la la la la la la la la la la la la la” (Romanian Rapsody no. 1, lyrics by Georgeta Moraru, music after George Enescu)
*
in an atmosphere of calm and normalcy, no horse touches ground, dead leaves are pulled out of their hooves daily. wherever they go, the grass they collect fills the stable. their muscles firm more and more every day and, if you touch them, you feel the warmth of a body in motion.
when they’re groomed, a rope is tied around both sides of their bodies. when they want to laugh, they raise their back hooves and keep them up in the air. you need to quickly sit them down and caress them. you ask something, they thump out a tune with their front hooves, until you stop talking. our heads touch in this silence. they lightly ruminate through my hair, the air they breathe out smells of hay. nothing is similar in getting close to them and other animals. what happens in the space where the huge muzzles breathe has no cognitive memory. thus, Green Beam is about to foal. she fell in love with a Hungarian horse. as a sign of appreciation, they put a Romanian flag in his stable.
it’s not an unnatural posture – the tips of the legs facing outside, in a rotating forward motion, that begins in the thigh, engaging the entire leg. with every song coming from the speakers, the horses keep the music going. they dream of treating it as a material, like lights, cinematic projection or dance.
*
“like the algae on the bottom of the aquarium, lunatics move in front of the world’s sad people, who notice them full of remorse.” (Bernard Castelli)
welcome to a storage space of gestures. they are collected from living bodies. one lies down, another jumps, a third twirls, then ideas start coming.
“at some point the author stops, angrily pounds the table and shouts at the singer: ʽc’est faux!’ ʽit’s out of tune!’”
such shock!
the player retorts: ʽit’s not out of tune in the least bit.’
ʽisn’t it? I can see la here and you are playing sol!’
ʽit’s the same!’
ʽwhat do you mean?’
ʽit’s your chord that’s out of tune, it sounds dissonant! it contains both sol and la. it means I can choose. I prefer sol.’
ʽand yet, it’s la! the author insists hopelessly.
they left it at sol! and they went on. (Alex. Cosmovici, George Enescu, His Music and His Family)
*
you come out of a wound slowly. if you think of it, without it.
you bend your knee and force your foot over the tip.
your identity fuses with your parts.
your identity fuses with the group.
you come out of a wound slowly.
the exit gives the body a voice.
“a quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange.” (Anne Carson, Decreation)
she creates the things she hears
who controls danger
stepping in your own text, sliding into your own subject, without any clear proof about what is factual and what is fictional. who acts upon S? the horse, for example, must be helped. the actor has not become his character. the actor must be hit by the horse to really cry. the domesticated horse must be shoed.
*
the room is changing: the more an object lies inside itself, the livelier its outside throbs. I’m not changing anything, a hole deepens on its own. details get mixed up and frequencies become unstable. what can we believe in?
(id)entity of rain: if the rain stays where it falls, it would form a layer of a certain height
“it is not advisable to repeat art forms. each work must have its internal origin, free from the formalism
of a conception that we thought (or really was) successful on another occasion.” (George Enescu)
*
it is not nice to quote from a body.
you have captured: a finger
the rule is: to startle the palm
with one glance
I hold my self in all the elements that make me.
*
today: in the museum yard, Red comes out to onlookers in his funeral garment. an army of flies dance
around his head. his muzzle is closed for ever, sealed by black ashes. Red, Red – the programmatic character of its symphonic suite.
even the passers-by watch him with no reaction. Red is the most beautiful colour, “those odd sounds in nature, the swish of leaves, the tumult of swirling waters after a brief storm, the birds’ chirp, the larks’ concerto – it carries our thoughts to the house in the forest of Tescani.” (Enescu Today by Viorel Cosma)
in the afternoon, the one dead is resurrected by the indifferent passers-by, who lie about never having had any dead of their own. Red is deathless. Red, carried in a wheelbarrow and buried by the priest-guard-stoker-museographer-artist-friend-of-all-positive-and-negative-dead-or-alive. „Voix de la nature is a substance of unmistakable mioritic essence, a poignant Romanian ethos.” (Enescu Today by Viorel Cosma)
you can’t see those passers-by anymore, with their heads bent and fallen shoulders, their dull color, their stained color. Red hits the piano keys, using a “whole arsenal of musical means, from heterophony to modal climate.” Posthumous in Red! Posthumous in Red!
Anca Roncea, poet and translator. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently attending the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Literary Translation. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Bucharest in Modern Greek and English followed up with an MA in American Cultural studies. In 2012-2013 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Romania and now lives in Iowa City where she writes and translates poems, working on an experimental translation of Tristan Tzara as well as her first book of poetry. She explores the space where language can create pivots in the midst of displacement while incorporating the aesthetics of Constantin Brancusi. Her work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher’s Magazine, and the Des Moines Register.
Monica Manolachi is a poet, translator, editor and lecturer at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of three poetry collections, Joining the Dots (2016), Fragaria’s Stories to Magus Viridis (2012) and Roses (2007). In 2016, Antologie de poezie din Caraibe received the Dumitru Crăciun translation prize at the Titel Constantinescu International Festival of Creative Writing, Râmnicu Sărat. In 2017, her study entitled Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry was published by Ars Docendi, Bucharest. As a researcher and critic, she often delivers presentations at literary conferences in Romania and abroad.
ii.
The slow fish knocks
up the room
opening to the sky.
dwellnumerous ImpregnableGambrelsOccupation —
iii.
I saw myself going — not yet
tiny particle
of charge, of flame.
numerous Visitors — fairest — Occupation —
iv.
If I’d worn a better
number, washed my hands
of the judge’s robe.
Possibility — House numerous Superior — spreading To
gather
One Art
I know you see me
& stay unaroused.
The day takes
a leak & I know you
see me empty of birds, absent
of any more days.
Lose something every
losing practice losing
meant travel disaster
my houses
some rivers
losing have losing’s master
disaster
somewhere, beyond
I did not wear thirst
in the end. I imagined
a river. No,
you laugh, look
& see—it is your misfortune.
cannotbecause
closed myself fingers
mysteriously
imagines
nothing
countries forever
eyes
such mall
Translator’s Note:
In 2013, Pablo Neruda’s remains were dug up from his seaside grave in Chile. Scientists then asked his bones to tell the story of the day he died. Was it prostate cancer that killed him or had he been poisoned? This story fascinated me—that his bones, that all of our bones, carry hidden messages. This is when I began my own search for alternate voices within the very bones, the letters, of poems.
To create these experimental translations, I start by finding Spanish words living within poems written in English. For instance, a Spanish river (río) runs through the middle of “mysteriously” and the word “losing” contains the Spanish word for without (sin). I then select a constellation of these unintended Spanish words and translate them into English to compose new works. The three poems here arose from Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E.E. Cummings.
This process of re-creating poems continues to astound me with the images and sounds and connections that emerge. This sense of discovery and surprise fuels my obsession with locating alternate voices inhabiting well-known poems. At the same time, it feels incredibly important to me to show these two languages, English and Spanish, inhabiting the same page, coexisting within the same sentences, within the same words. I’ve lived in Arizona for the past decade, and this is my own small way of trying to unbuild the wall between us and our neighbors to the south.
There have been many influences along the way to arriving at these experimental translations, and here I’ll offer but two thank yous: to the editors of Found Poetry Review for their 2014 National Poetry Month challenge that introduced me to the text-altering techniques of Oulipo, and to Señor Ruiz, the Cuban exile who landed in a small town in New Jersey and taught Spanish at my high school. As for Neruda’s bones, the first round of scientists found no evidence of poison. Later scientists, however, found an unusual strain of bacteria they can’t account for. All of the stories collected in Neruda’s bones have not yet been told.
Kelly Nelson is a poet and anthropologist who teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University. Her experimental translations have appeared in Structo, Interim, Forklift, Ohio, Best American Experimental Writing and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks and teaches ekphrastic and found poetry classes at her local library. More at kelly-nelson.com.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet whose first book of poetry was published four years after her death. Some early critics balked at her unconventional writing style but she later came to be recognized as a key proto-modernist poet. Dickinson is one of the 39 women represented by a place setting in Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party. Many of Dickinson’s handwritten poems and letters can be viewed through this online archive.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an American poet whose first collection, North & South, was published when she was 35. She served as what we now call the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1949 to 1950 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956, four years after her mentor Marianne Moore won the same prize. Bishop’s life and work were written about recently in the New Yorker.
e.e. cummings (1894-1962) was an American poet whose first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, was published when he was 29. cummings’ poetry experimented with form, punctuation, syntax and spelling and he received many honors including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant and the Bollingen Prize. cummings also published plays and an autobiographical novel based on his experience as a captive during World War I.
