Spring 2024 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

A girl stands on the street holding a tray of cheese. It’s Ingrid, but I don’t know that yet. I’m a week out of art school, looking for a job to make rent. I approach her, say hello, take a sample and pop it in my mouth.

There were some wailing changes in me, each one more pressing than the last. First, my skin became impossibly soft, tender, and damp to the touch. Second, it began to smell like the sea. Next—as my boyfriend told me with my teat in his mouth—I began to taste like salt until I was too bitter to bear and we would spend our nights laying back to back, too embarrassed and disgusted to move or talk or fuck. Then, my color lost the dull gray overlay of the city skyline and turned brassy blue: my hair, my face, my teeth, all dipped in ink and polished shiny, until I became a statue sitting away in a collection. My nails turned tough like plates. I even developed headaches: spikes to the head that left me suspended in the dark for half of the day. That, I blamed on my lenses; I wore thick glasses that left me considering surgery, and then the headaches came on. I booked myself a consultation, hoping for a permanent solution.

Lily King is an award winning American novelist. Members of the Fiction Board Katie Catulle and Serena Jampel interviewed her over Zoom on February 26th, 2024 to talk about writing: membranes, rules, and how badly we want it to be fun. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“We should go up to Salem for the Fourth,” he said. “Catherine will be in town.”

     The world contains
crab fried rice & is thus beautiful.
     Or: crab fried rice
is more beautiful than the world.
     Which is true?

     They keep drifting in,
these yellow petals, through the kitchen window—
     look how our dog
paws at them, sniffs, as though they are soft
     scraps of his lost

                    after Halyna Kruk

Good sons have found me crying
in local park ditches, where I’ve been
called chink & faggot all the times

before & after. Still, I return. I keep
trying, like a good son, though not quite
as good. I’m more bird than human,

rolling in the mud I’ve made. Above me,
forefathers looking down from pavements,
carrying guns like bodies, kissing guns

like bodies. I let them repeat history.
The flowering branches in my way—snapped.
The cicadas that warned—sorry, sung—too loudly,

they squashed for me. I’m in good hands,
wrapped in good guns. When released,
there are bullets in the trees chirping

about standards, phone calls flying
in between trees, the trees moving
toward me with legs. I don’t remember

why I was crying, but there were guns
all around the clearing. Big beautiful guns
shoved into my mouth & don’t kill.

                                    after 鲁迅

For all the places I kneel on bruised
knees: a sheet of snow, scarred streets,
the crusted carpet on my sand-scratched
floor. How new boots leave marks on my bare
ankles. How a spring snaps in my mattress—
I wake up to all the sparrows dead
on my windowsill. Winding kinesiology tape
around my ribs until all the air flees.
Google says it’s normal. This shortness of breath.
This bruising. This inflamed voice box.
Silence. The fear of disturbing the sleeping,
of their knuckles against the back of my throat.

Smoke your smell sell your smoke
smell your tell your sugar sweet smoky the smoke smell
smoky clothes made war the scent the smell
tales of home my tell smell the smell
ashes sang pit against pit against queen smiling
smell smoke smooth the smoky spicy smell we sell we smoke
sunday on blazoned screens on smoke brought home
unwell rest smell the smoke hell to-go and choke
grandma worked days stiff smoky
family the fire we smoked and toasted burnt
me: welcome to smoke just here is home
try one our smoke sell smoke smell

     I’m no philosopher, but some days I think
we were put on this pale blue dot to have long ass debates
     over ways to make coffee & levels of sugar
in tea &, most importantly, the correct placement of semi-colons
     in the soul. Ah nitpicking, quibbles,

"Intellectual portraiture is also self portraiture,” Adam Shatz confesses in the introduction of his first essay collection, Writers and Missionaries. To step into his apartment, then, is to step into something like a house of mirrors. I was reminded, as I removed my shoes and made my way further inside, of the young Sontag, “hearing the siren call of the first private library [she] had ever seen” on her pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s. I was trying not to make the wanderings of my glance too obvious to my host. Yet, in the corner of my eye, whispers: BARTHES DERRIDA FOUCAULT.

Parul Sehgal calls herself ‘congenitally secretive’ and her work ‘conspiratorial.’ She describes writing as ‘secreting shameful sentences’ and reading as ‘subversive’ and ‘stolen.’ Teju Cole once called her a ‘good smuggler.’ On a Monday afternoon in almost-spring, both of us late on our deadlines, Sehgal welcomes me into collusion.

I am hungry to throw myself into the shoe-scratched darkness of a dance floor. Call it the thrill of a greenhorn: as the air thickens with salt and bodies, I wait, as a follow-dancer often does, in a dance before the dance. A lead dancer walks in my vicinity, I flick my eyes up. If their irises catch in the light and they extend a hand, they desire to share this moment with me.

The winter of our freshman year was subsiding into a long chill drizzle when Hugo, Varya and I decided to go treasure hunting.