Winter 2019 - Double Issue - The Harvard Advocate

You never really know what your mind’s gonna run to when you’re dropped in the middle of a perfect quiet. I’m walking down Sherman and Main, about to hit the bookstore, and the sky’s staring back at me blue as anything, like somebody took a slice of the hottest star they could find and wrapped it around the world. It’s a weird sky. No clouds, no sun, just this unbelievable ice blue like the world’s folding in on itself, all those glaciers at the poles tearing through the air right above my head.

Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink?

I have not yet learned to smile without my gums. In a year I will become an expert at twisting my mouth into a demure crescent, lowering my upper lip to hide the pink flesh holding shelves of teeth in place, lifting my bottom lip instead of stretching it sideways. I will learn to keep my eyes open when I smile, crinkling only the corners so as not to look terrifying or fake. I will begin tilting my chin down to give the illusion of cheekbones.

This morning you sailed a boat.

Not only that, but you taught your best friend how to sail a boat, both of your bare feet slipping on the floor of the Sunfish, leaning out over the Maine lakewater against the tug of the wind on the mainsheet, laughing as she wiggled the tiller back and forth, forgetting if left meant left or left meant right, throwing caution to the breeze until you scraped up against some underwater rocks and you—you, thirteen years old, heart beating faster as you discovered this opportunity for responsibility, imagining the shawl of your mother’s care finally slipping from your shoulders—climbed out of the boat and risked the soft pink soles of your feet against barnacles that could cut like knives, just to push the boat back into open water and save the morning.

There’s this old man who walks along the fence next to the hospital, or, say, down near town, wobbling in his loose, flapping shoes, digging around in the garbage can on the corner, smoking a cigarette, clutching it between his battered fingers, or simply walking with his shoulders braced as if he knew he was some kind of fodder for speculation, because it seems to be so consistent, his homeless rooting, keeping to a pattern, moving south on Midland Avenue for a half mile to Franklin Place and then left on Franklin and down Franklin to River Road, along River Road to Front Street, left on Front and up Front back to Midland, and then, presumably, around again. By virtue of his consistency, he has edged his way into the consciousness of just about everybody who has driven more than once down Midland Avenue, or Front Street, or, to a lesser degree, Franklin Place.

He hugged her until

                 her ribcage exploded

           he held on until
          her hand fell from her

                 wrist       in this

scenario to fall means you never

          get up & the thing is

                 there really is no other
scenario

In my dream the dead have arrived
as escorts. We travel

past cold hills and wolves
wild in a deadlocked field. A corporation

of stars cracks overhead. I lean
my hand where the hunting dogs

chase the rabbit, and they tell me
constellation means assembled

for life. Then they lend me
a shovel and dissolve into night.

There is no other way back. I dig
through snow until the cold metal strikes.

          Stranger, uninvited, you
come up to us on the sidewalk,

my daughter’s hand in mine, you
look at her &

coo, It goes so fast. What, stranger,
is this unnamed it—this day?

her life? our

happiness? Stranger, maybe you
missed it, but just now

my daughter & I hurled

rocks into the emptiness
& we created more

emptiness.

The philosophers say there are words
                 that do things, make themselves
                 real in the world,
so that when you said
                 I promise,
                 you had to have meant it
and when together you said I do
                 the bond was real in every sense.

Those are the examples, but there are others
                 like when I said I’m queer
                 it did something – not to you
                 (tho I guess a little bit to you)
                 but to my world and my body
and when you first taught me the word
                       woman
                       man
                 that did something too.

I think these words are the closest real thing
                 to prayer. To toss a stone across
                 the frozen pond and see if it smash
                 open or skip with grace and stop.

But my voice will not hold my body.
And I don’t know if I can speak transition
                 or swallow it.

Tell me, can I say
                 I am?

When I pulled that great fish up out of Lake Skinner’s
                 mirrored-double surface, I wanted to release
the tugging beast immediately. Disaster on the rod,
                 it seemed he might yank the whole aluminum skiff
down toward the bottom of his breathless world.
                 The old tree of a man yelled to hang on and would
not help me as I reeled and reeled finally seeing
                 the black carp come up to meet me, black eye to black eye.
In the white cooler it looked so impossible.
                 Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not
only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me
                 but for the generations of plunder and vanish.
I remember his terrible mouth opening as if to swallow
                 the barbarous girl he’d lose his life to. That gold-ringed
eye did not pardon me, no absolution, no reprieve.
                 I wanted to catch something; it wanted to live.
We never ate the bottom-feeder, buried by the rose bush
                 where my ancestors swore the roses bloomed
twice as big that year, the year I killed a thing because
                 I was told to, the year I met my twin and buried
him without weeping so I could be called brave.

It’s become as ordinary now
as seeing my face reflected

in the bathroom mirror,
or hovering over the porcelain

toilet. I think, it’s been
nine years since you’ve died.

I’ve made an invisible list
of what you’ve missed. You never

met the man I’ve married. Or
sipped that aromatic bougie drink

at the restaurant with smoked
meats, or pet my dog, or toured

my new house. It’s unfair
but sometimes I pretend you’d

hate it all, judge him, dismiss
the podunk town we live in,

just to make myself feel better.
Other days, your face appears

behind mine laughing in the mirror,
me sharing a sideways secret

about my life that you never
asked for while, outside, someone

hammers away at the door.

                 “They ate their own children.”
                 —Yang Jisheng, on The Great Famine

In an hour it will be summer
A time to admire wild things
But all our sparrows are shot
Left in heaps of rotting trash

So in the dark where no one is
Awake I dig their bones back
Let you slurp on chicken stew
Pretend I still remember truth

As I skin these bodies one after
Another                  In the morning I say
They are visiting your mother
Gifting us silence                  And dinner

Is now gray water rice a long
Minute of constant lies saying
Words that will be thrown out
Set on fire hoping a few stray

Feathers fall on my skin keep
Me warm and safe as the soil
Burns then maybe I will grab
Hold you tight succumb to the

Terrible                  But I taught you how
To run away when the smoke
Grows closer                  To always look
Up                  Write down what I forgot.

early this evening you dropped by
                 to lean against pillows & talk
                                    about needing. is autumn really

My best friend since second grade.
Same diner, same schedules, same uniforms, same day.

This friend, I used to boss her around (“You be the sick
one now.
Get on the ground and pretend you’re to vomit.”
I’d draw
on her face
with Magic Marker while I held her by a pigtail
while she begged me to stop. Which I didn’t

until she had a face full stripes and stars and pox
and names of boys she liked and boys she hated and
the rides at the amusement park was afraid to go on.
Rolling Thunder. Tower of Screams.
A diner. Her

single mother told her she needed
to make some money and no one cared how she made it.
My parents told me that if I ever planned
to find out if I was any good at anything
I’d better start trying
to find out now. They

had no idea what a list I had of things I knew I could do
better than anyone else. These things had to do
with stealing clothes—from

anywhere: locker rooms, department stores, friends. And
a few other things for which the word
entrepreneurial had surely been invented, although
I hadn’t heard it yet, and even if I’d known
the word and told them what I could trade
between classes
in the staircase
for cash from the middle hollowed-out book, they
wouldn’t have been impressed.
“Get a job,” they said.

And, yes. Just
as they’d known I would, I learned
everything I’d ever need to know about the thing
I was best at then. And

so did my friend.
She’d pass me with a tray in her hands and a French
fry in her mouth. My

friend, the weak sister in my fairytale, in her uniform. Which
was mine as well. Something
pink and short, which she
turned it into the centerfold
of a Playboy magazine
without needing
to take it off, with no need
for nudity or pornography or four staples down its center, no
glossy paper. She

just walked over, wearing it, to some guy, and spilled coffee
on him, and
he laughed. She got a rag. She
blotted him up all over before she brought him
another cup of coffee and his burnt toast—and

oh my God, her tips. At
the end of every shift. She crammed the wad of soft bills
in her purse along
with the cloudy weight
of all those quarters
and heft the strap of it over her shoulder.

I learned
how cold the walk-in refrigerator, where
the ice cream dreamed in the dark could be. No
hurry. We

could dream in there forever, those
frozen tubs, and me. I learned

how it felt to be
solid, and then to thaw, and then
to be consumed, and then—

how hot it was in the kitchen. I
could linger there, being
splattered with those scalding micro-
droplets of grease blown
off the grill by the breeze
of a short-order cook’s sneeze. Never

once did I say, Ouch. But, as if I had, how

many times an hour
the kitchen staff would say to me, Get
the hell out of here
if you can’t handle the kitchen.

I learned
that if I stared
out of the window
of a diner at night, I
could see straight through myself, and I
was a shadow
waiting to happen.
On the other side of me
there was a salad bar. The lettuce

had already browned around the edges. I
was the one who had to toss
those pale leaves around until
the browned ones were on the bottom. And

it was my job to refill the chilled ceramic thing
that held the shredded cheese. She
wasn’t going to do it.

Or in the window, looking
at myself in it, I could see not only
the salad bar behind me, but

the salad bar inside of me, which
stretched into the distance for a million miles
or years, with
its bowls of coleslaw
and it plastic squeezer-bottles
half-full of orange salad dressing. It

was lined up in the past and in the future, like
years of insomnia—my
ancestors’ insomnia, and the insomnia of my children’s
children’s children, all
of us waiting for generations, not
so much for sleep, but for a shift
in the whole idea
of sleep would, for the day when sleep would be recalled
as quaint, and sad. That
salad bar suggested I might be
the first living creature on Earth

who wouldn’t need it.

I learned that.

And when the manager
brought us together said
that one of us had to go, I nodded as
I’d seen my father
nod his head. I cast
my eyes down to the floor
the way my mother did
when she picked up the phone and someone asked her a question
to which she had no answer. “I sure

wish I could turn the two of you
into one girl and keep
you both,” said. Clerical

work, to me, he suggested. I left

my uniform on a hanger in the bathroom.
Before I left, my friend
ran into my arms, sobbing—or
at least pretending to sob. “I

personally thought you were
wonderful,” she said, “at your job,” in

a way that made me
want to die.
That night

I tried to kill myself
by swallowing an aspirin
without water. But it slid

right past my tongue, down my throat.
I was relieved.
I wanted to live. There would be

brownish oceans
in my future, with brownish waves
washing up
on shores. There was

the purity of wolves devouring
the purity of rabbits. And

birds to scribble
all over the sky. Also
bored children and dense thickets, full

of a thousand members
of an audience
standing up and clapping
for a band.

Concert finally over. Everyone
deaf, dazed, just
wanting to get out of there, go home, wishing
they’d never come.
I’d be one of them. But

I’d wait in my seat until the rest had left. Then
I’d see
the lead singer
(too famous to be named) come
back on stage to find
a guitar pick he had dropped. He’d
scowl and wave at me, friendly
and full of hatred. I smiled
and shook my head, which

seemed to startle him. He said, “It
sucked.” He said, “We suck. But
at least we know it, don’t we?”

My reply: it
was perfect. It

changed both our lives. We’d

go on together, forever, and never
need to speak again. We

knew what we did best, both of us, after that, and
we’d do that, exactly—although

in order for you to believe me
I must never tell you what I said.