Winter 2023 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. Among other awards, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, received a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award.

Mantle is asked who their preferred interviewer would be, between Katie O, Jackie B, and Lars V, and Mantle shrugs their skeletal shoulders so slowly, like mountains ascending during tectonic cataclysmic events, as if to leave this earth, only to return, to the frame, a breath of relief. Only a handful want the job. Their presence, Mantle’s presence, is intimidating. But those who know them well say they are very nice.

Should I write it like a letter? A letter that goes on and on until you get tired of it? Until you stop reading, stop making eye contact in the hallways, stop slipping easily into conversations, into green lakes, in and out of clothing. I’m out looking for you on all the street corners. I’m out looking for you under the dumpsters and cactus pots. I’m out looking for you inside your skin, I keep poking past your teeth and down your throat, looking for the music, but I don’t find it there. I don’t find it.

Jack’s mother stood in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette wedged between the prongs of a plastic fork—she didn’t like her hands to smell—as Jack helped his father move out. His father was wearing bermuda shorts and flip-flops, both of which were recent developments. His mom was wearing a light pink bathrobe which was not a recent development but an old one, as he rarely saw her in anything else.

I

It was offensive, how healthy Aoife was. She had broad shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. She wore short skirts with thin-strapped sandals and when she strode across the street in those dumb little shoes, he couldn’t believe they didn’t end up crushed to pieces under her sexy pink feet.

for your birthday I organised a fatal shark attack. the first one in 60 years.
the great white was longer than our bodies put together and the
swimmer is in half. I wish the people hadn’t posted the video. disturbance
of the mind like this makes me forget you are 32. how selfish. we hold so
much blood in our bodies. he was 6'5" so he held even more. it mixed with the
salt like a watercolour. I am going to remember the painting forever,
the stroke of a dark fin, the return of foam white belly, the gnashing pink
flail to the tune of happy birthday. an eerie ice cream aesthetic. I wonder
if you even know what’s happened. more likely you are celebrating your
whole life, oblivious. you like to make things about you, which is why I’ve
appropriated this tragedy in your name. meanwhile the shark is turning
50 and is really bored of your bullshit. off she goes down to the ocean
floor to rest, confused by all the shouting. she doesn’t like people in her
house and she’s tired of no-one respecting that. blow out the candles.
leave her alone.

love had me reeling since the lake, the headlong plunge into barren landscape, where ranks of rolling hills are guarded by black cypress that slant toward bishops. staggering about no man’s land as my rival puzzles over her next move, she bites a fat purple fig then drops it to snowmelt. I stalk like a rook with dark plumes, perfumed, and molting each style like a sable fur coat. my empress preens in expensive taste. I clip on her unwashed braid and feel like a Clydesdale galloping into my 30s; the annihilating, brute whiff of what it means to “have it all—” baby books and dissertations, boss bitch and stinking bibs. consolation? she asks, offering her remedies, her nightshades. I peel my cuticles like eggshells, like archaic wallpaper. who mothered who? dressed me in footie pajamas and laid me down upon the forest floor? was this Plath’s gambit? the unseen latticework of hyphae: overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly our toes, our noses take hold on the loam, acquire the air. we lodge ourselves as truffles, as dreams, adjourned. as wet season spawn with soft fists breaking into Egyptian cotton, the dormant generation becomes sinewy from crumbs, sweeps tidy tercets into the dustbin, heaves through dried leaves, unexcused, not needing light, though a little is nice. we rise like gilled pillars matsutake, hen-of-the-woods—slightly restored, but colossal. as grandmaster of the undergrowth, we inherit stately oak rooms; patient for the poem to swell in the night, up, up toward full-throated spring

It’s the night before your wedding.

In utero, I listen to anxiety crack

open your breastbone, persistent lightning as Pa

The Wife of Willesden, the new play written by Zadie Smith and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, hit the A.R.T. this past February. It’s an adaptation of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (and prologue) from The Canterbury Tales, which you may remember as the most lewd thing you were allowed to read in high school. Being a typical Patroness of the Arts (and Zadie Smith follower), I snagged myself a rush ticket to the performance on Friday, March 3rd.