She Writes Her Destiny & Dies by Yousef el Qedra

translated by Yasmin Snounu, Edward Morin & George Khoury

[ed. note: this translation can be found, along with many others in HFR53]

She Writes Her Destiny & Dies

translated from the Arabic

The cloud has begun with quietly smiling

drowsiness. It opens the window

of extension on a song made of rivers

and forests taking place in a novel

written by a woman who lives on a mountain;

her house is made of sugarcane flutes,

and sweet stories of suffering with lovers

whom she kisses off. And she was alone

looking at their pictures during glowing

nights, resequencing them as she pleased.

The cloud goes into a quietly smiling

sleep; it opens the lusty dream about

details envisioned by a soul that practices

running after someone in the gloom

of desire and of brutality.

It phases into absences that are

from eternity that does not begin.

And Resurrection as it dozes is

just a weak light that touches its own blood.

Languages ooze sweat that floods from

their fingers; they experience wounds

that lived in them during vintage dreams.

It smelts their breathing into a map

it is going to draw during a future

wakefulness. For she woke up frightened

by the dew that was frozen by

the cold of its collapsing height.

The cloud wakes up after a sleep bothered

with a past that rivers and forests

bring to life. It shoots arrows into the air

which is about to lose its neutrality.

And the writer closes her notebook

upon the sounds of rain from one cloud;

that cloud bumps the ceiling of its stories;

it pants towards a meaning for a life

that passed like lightning. It dresses up

in normal attire and goes towards the market,

walking the streets in a normal way

without attracting anyone’s attention;

and it forgets her name written on

a book displayed for readers who lose

the ability to read its destiny.

It passes without its senses being

aware of what its memory wrote.

It does not try to think of its book’s

title, whose choice exhausted her.

It dies on the pavement, and someone

holding a tattered newspaper passes by,

covers her smiling face, and goes away.

Contributor Spotlight: Sandra Simonds

When I was a baby poet, I would spend hours reading the two volume set of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I still have the volumes. Between the red covers of those books, in college, I wrote notes and scribbled little pictures (look at the swans, and goblins and flowers!) beside every poem, every play. At the time, it seemed like the pinnacle of poetic achievement would to one day be included in this anthology, and that to enter into it as a poet would simultaneously mean that one had been legitimized and that one had also entered into history itself, even if you only had one lousy, thin page devoted to your poem.

The poet is always a little bit outside of history, even if her verse becomes embalmed in an anthology and the older she gets, the more she sees that the historical narrative of these volumes, the history of poetry, is not only being written in her very lifetime, but that it had, in fact, been written before she was born, through forces completely beyond her control: how she tumbled into this world, into this body, a female body after all, and that there were other factors that would determine the little variations and line structures and rhymes and rhythms of her poems—her class, race, childhood and so on.

At some point after college, and after I got my MFA, I began to read the anthologies through the lens of the writers who had been left out. I realized that they were not untalented but rather, unlucky. My world filled with problems! One doesn’t want to be included in the pages after all—look at all the murder, the wars, the lies and so on. The anthology began to look more like a morgue than a castle.

On the one hand, the history of poetry is the story of memorializing war and sucking up to kings and queens. It is Hannibal crossing the Alps with all those elephants, Washington crossing the Delaware, Mary Antoinette’s little royal head rolling off (good god, I hope they saved that amazing blue dress of hers) but it is also waves and waves of common people doing common things. Slaves. Workers. It’s people doing data entry, fixing cars, the mother who places a dollar under the pillow of her child, the child who is convinced the magical tooth fairy made her visit in the night. The little boy who wakes up triumphant! A dollar!

History also is the accumulation of the smallest things—scrambling eggs for your kids, buying car seats, taking them to school, entering data into a computer. At every moment we are at the end of history which is the very consciousness that we must break through because if we think in this way, it will always be the landlord extorting money from his tenant, always the employer extracting money from his employee. We need a narrative but it must be new.

History and her ghosts and demons are splashing all around us, either encasing us like a piece of art in a museum or ignoring us completely. Here is my little fantasy! We enter the art museum with all of our crying infants and snotty little toddlers, and elderly parents cross the red, velvet rope that tells us that we are on one side of history and royalty is on another and burn Louis XVI’s throne. In fact, let’s save his throne by throwing it into the fire, and why not throw in a few Norton Anthologies as well (of course, we will have to rip out the pages of Blake and all my accompanying doodles!), and maybe a few Monsanto CEOs? Let’s do this so that we can restore some historical memory and have a little time to write poetry after we make breakfast for our kids in the morning.

***

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California, and earned a BA in Psychology and Creative Writing at UCLA and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, Simonds received a PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: The Glass Box (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012) and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009) which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Simonds’ poems have been published in many journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia. Her poem "The End of History is Just Music at the Papal Courts" can be found in HFR53.

Subscription Drive Day 6: J. A. Tyler

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from J. A. Tyler, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. The complete set includes handwritten artifacts from Geffrey Davis, Staci R. Schoenfeld, Lucas Southworth, Chelsea Biondolillo, Sandy Longhorn and J. A. Tyler.

Today is the last day to get a contributor airplane (or all of them!), so don't miss out!

Subscription Drive Day 5: Sandy Longhorn

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Sandy Longhorn, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. For more from Longhorn, check out her contributor spotlight, where she discusses her two HFR53 poems!

Tomorrow our contributor airplane offer will be J. A. Tyler!

Subscription Drive Day 4: Chelsea Biondolillo

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Chelsea Biondolillo, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. For more from Biondolillo, check out her contributor spotlight, wherein she talks about assembling her hybrid essay "Phrenology: An Attempt."

Tomorrow our contributor airplane offer will be Sandy Longhorn!

Subscription Drive Day 3: Lucas Southworth

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Lucas Southworth, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. For more from Southworth, check out his contributor spotlight, wherein he discusses the last sentence of his HFR53 story, "There Isn't Any Ghost."

We will be back next week with contributor airplanes from Chelsea Biondolillo, Sandy Longhorn and J. A. Tyler!

Subscription Drive Day 2: Staci R. Schoenfeld

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Staci R. Schoenfeld, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes.

Tomorrow our contributor airplane offer will be Lucas Southworth.

Subscription Drive Day 1: Geffrey Davis

Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Geffrey Davis, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. For more from Davis, check out his contributor spotlight from last month.

Tomorrow our contributor airplane offer will be Staci R. Schoenfeld.

Paper Airplanes With Handwritten Work from Contributors

Starting tomorrow, subscriptions (or resubscriptions) to Hayden’s Ferry Review will come with a paper airplane featuring handwritten work by a contributor in our Departure issue. Each day will feature a different writer. What’s that? You say you want to collect them all? Well, if you buy a two-year subscription, you’ll get six paper airplanes, one from each contributor. There are limited amounts, so once they’re gone, they’re gone. We’ll post each day to remind you whose work you’ll receive.

We hope you’ll enjoy these carefully crafted artifacts and celebrate another year of HFR with us!

January 28: Geffrey Davis
January 29: Staci R. Schoenfeld
January 30: Lucas Southworth
February 3: Chelsea Biondolillo
February 4: Sandy Longhorn
February 5: J. A. Tyler

Contributor Spotlight: Lisa Hiton

PICNIC: On Stalking the Audacious

My current book manuscript, The Clearing, begins with this small poem (which is in the current HFR): 

PICNIC                                                                                                          

the youth take an afternoon fieldtrip to the fields

of Auschwitz    playing tag    bored by the flat flat emerald

“Wie viele?”     “Es macht nichts.”

brown bag    cola bottles    whumping heels

halt at a chaperone’s whistle    nitrogen-blown bags for potato

chips    the crumbs of which leave oil on denim    salt on dirt

I have never been to Auschwitz, or any concentration camp for that matter. Neither do I have family members who are Holocaust survivors. And yet, the Holocaust is all over the manuscript. I begin to reconcile this by considering the nature of American Jews from my generation and also the enigma of poetics. As for the former, I am absolutely an inheritor of Jewish anxiety from my grandparents and parents, which was also manifest in my Hebrew school experiences as a child. For the past two summers, I’ve gone with my mentor, Carolyn Forché, to Thessaloniki and the island, Thassos, in Greece. My mother’s family is Sephardic, and though her family’s diaspora spreads through many countries, the Greco-Turkish region around Thessaloniki is a significant one—I am named for my mother’s father, who I never met, and his father came from this place. Also, that 50,000 Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki died during the Holocaust is significant and mostly unsung. Spending time in the plaza where the Jews were gathered and at the Jewish Museum in Salonika, I began to understand the pain of history, which I get to experience because I somehow am alive. Writing this poem and other poems that address Jewish identity and culture—especially as an American Jew traveling around Europe, and perhaps also as a writer contemplating how to reconcile the 20th century—has forced me to a place of nostos, to remembering the fear I had as a child when learning about the Holocaust, and the kind of self-mythologizing and story making I participated in to begin measuring myself against the ideas of that portion of history.

Which brings me to the latter, the enigma of poetics. I’m reminded, often, when asked about many of my poems, of a title by Natalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down the Bones: “We are not the Poem.”  As a teacher, I use this title often, especially when teaching poets like Plath, whose biographies tend to cloud the task at hand: to let the poems speak for themselves. I have a poem in the voice of Russell McKinney (who murdered Matthew Shepard), for example, to which the workshop’s single response was to discuss whether the sexuality of the writer mattered to the poem. We don’t, however, ask ourselves this too often of fiction writers or filmmakers—does it matter to Inglourious Basterds that Tarantino is not Jewish? Or to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that Jonathan Safran Foer’s father did not die in the World Trade Centers? This is not a question we ask of fiction because it promises only spectacle, only disbelief.

But what of poetry? Reading poetry is a far more intimate endeavor, one that manipulates the reader into assuming the “I.” In writing, too, it seems that the poet must become the “I” of the poem—but the poet is the vehicle for that I, not the I itself. It’s a complicated mode of escapism. A teacher of mine once described selecting a chapbook to win a competition that was full of elegies for a dead mother. At the ceremony to honor the young poet, my teacher was introduced to the poet’s mother. He felt completely betrayed.

I wrote “Picnic” while I was in Greece. I was thinking about how Germany now prides itself on having the best Holocaust education in the world, how students are taken on field trips, etc. And how Auschwitz, despite its location, has come to be the predominant symbol for that part of history--a teaching tool by which we expose this narrative (which will turn to myth the more survivors we lose). Further, in contrast, how there is little to no sign of what happened during that time in Greece, that I had colleagues who taught in Thessaloniki whose students knew nothing of their city’s contemporary Jewish roots (before the Holocaust, Thessaloniki’s population was far more than half Jewish). The 20th century—and all that is irreparable from it—how are we to proceed? It seems the mode I’ve chosen so far is through the fictive spectacle of the 21st century—that if you can’t figure out how to bury the dead physically or metaphysically, perhaps from the fissure of dislocated time, something else can be made. For in the fictive, fantasy can explore audacious terrain, can think critically about our notions of altruism and goodness right next to notions of hatred and violence.

And so in that sense, though Auschwitz can only manifest as an idea having never been there, in another way, the idea of Auschwitz is as true to me as my Jewish identity. The acts of reading and writing are greatly related to practicing empathy. I want to empathize with that which I am not. I want to be brave enough to find new eyes, to be hated, to be forgotten, to have spoken—for myself, my history, my family. It is necessary to write these poems, to find the stones of history and turn them over, to battle solitude. These ideas turn into voices, into poetry, because I hope someday I am joined in this solitude by a reader, one whose own silence is disrupted by these speakers who I’ve needed to explicate both the world and the self.

The book, inevitably, fails. Neither it, nor the speaker, ever arrive in Auschwitz, in the physical clearing. The entire book is as involuntary as the dreams that assault its speaker. The poet—the vehicle for this speaker—begins to build this book because she believes poems are spells, which is to say, part of abiding fantasy, or the voluntary state. What she also finds is that she is as spellbound as her speaker, as destroyed by the involuntary in poetics as well as her human body. She cannot ever bring back the bodies she never knew, but she can be in the body she has—the one that cannot transform, even in metaphor, into something other than what it has been all along. And so The Clearing is not just the field, but the spiritual clearing. And though she begins in Auschwitz, the speaker has to learn to re-enter the 21st century as herself in order to survive.

Bodies have consequences in time in a way that poems do not. It is there in Poetryland, in Art—in the theatre of the mind—that we play in the most dangerous, harrowing, profound of human experiences, where we learn what to measure ourselves against. It is there where we can practice the audacious, where we can control its motives, where we can stalk it until we know who we are—this is why we read and write, this is how we attempt to have all the lives, all the deaths, all the bodies in the face of our very human truth: that we only really get one.

***

Lisa Hiton holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, and The Cortland Review among others. She has received the Esther B. Kahn Scholarship from 24Pearl Street at the Fine Arts Work Center and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize.

Contributor Spotlight: Chelsea Biondolillo

Grade school, junior high, and high school were all difficult for me. It always felt like I didn’t know quite how to act like other kids—though I had friends, I often felt apart from them. In the second grade, my teacher sent home the following note with my grades: “She’s a loner who gets along well with the other children.”

Once, I spent an entire afternoon on my stomach in my front yard, searching every clover for the four-leafs. The neighborhood kids had been teasing me and I hadn’t even noticed. I was too excited about all the luck I was amassing.

At school, however, and much more aware of my awkwardness, I felt like I was in a constant state of pre-embarrassment. I didn’t get people’s jokes; I believed everything people told me; I was often so focused on the trees, I didn’t realize the forest was actually a pep rally, and I’d taken a seat in the front row, where I was expected to know the fight song. I never knew the fight song.

By high school, I’d given up most of what I would realize later were naturalist pursuits because they embarrassed me, and I didn’t get them back for a couple of decades. I didn’t even fully realize I’d lost anything, until I lost my job and house in 2008 with much of the rest of the country. Suddenly faced with all the time in the world, I took a geology course at the community college. Then, astronomy. I dug out my old birding guides, bought some binoculars. I started hanging out at botanical gardens, going to talks at libraries, reading about bees and ecology.

When I first tried to write about how I lost science for all those years, the results were clumsy and insincere. It wasn’t until I started adding other voices and experiences that I started thinking maybe I hadn’t lost science like you do a favorite hat on the bus, but more like my own voice after a bout of bronchitis.

Getting this piece to work was as physical as it was mental. I would print it out and cut it up and move sections around and secure the new order with scotch tape. Then I’d type up the changes and do it again. I changed the tense, the organization, the other speakers. It went from second to third to first person. At one point, I had a whole page of astronomical calculations that I kept trying to find room for—in the end, I decided it was wishful calculus, since trig was as far as I’d ever gotten in math.

I think of this essay as a chorus of women all telling stories of encounters with the sublime—some of those encounters would seem to come on shining rays of light, and some on the tips of branding irons.

I think this is the essay that I write over and over.

***
Chelsea Biondolillo's prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Passages North, Creative Nonfiction, Flyway and others. She is currently completing an MFA in creative writing and environmental studies at the University of Wyoming and writing a book about vultures. In her spare time, she reports on the local flora and fauna for Wyoming Public Radio. Her essay "Phrenology: An Attempt" can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Michael Bazzett

A few thoughts on “Verisimilitude”:

If I could make short films using my mind, I would.

And if we all had USB ports in our temples and could share those images, strung together by white cords, like two kids sharing earbuds on the bus, what then?

Would those images be a semblance of our desires? How terrifying or transcendent might that be? How tender or tyrannical?

Would our primary goal as creators and composers become receiving a knowing glance?

Applause seems an odd response to art. It stirs the air, then same old silence. Yet I love it when people clap at the movies, which can’t hear.

We dream in images for months before we learn to speak, and I often wonder what those dreams might look like, unfettered by the syntax of either language or story-structure.

A lot of my favorite poems share the terrain of inside jokes: i.e. what’s most delicious remains unsaid.

***

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Best New Poets, and Forklift, Ohio. He is the author of The Imaginary City, published in the OW! Arts Chapbook Series last year, and The Unspoken Jokebook, coming soon from Burning River. His verse translation of the Popol Vuh is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2015. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. His poem “Verisimilitude” can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Grace Bauer

PHRASES STIRRED (NOT SHAKEN)

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind:

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

Wallace Stevens

“Mellow Drama” began with the epigraph – a pronouncement I overheard a woman gleefully declare one late afternoon as I was walking along the Jersey Shore. The beach was already clearing out for the day, only a few people around. The sun was slowly sliding toward the horizon – that seam between sky and sea I’d had my eye on, hoping to spot some dolphins in the distance, as one occasionally does that time of day. I was reveling in the play of light on the water, the incessant serenade of the crashing waves, thinking the kind of ah, the beauty of nature; the majesty of the ocean kind of thoughts that anyone with a soul might be thinking at such a moment, when – out of the blue, so to speak – came this woman’s voice, my South Jersey version of Steven’s solitary singer who (dis) ordered his ideas in Key West.

The setting, of course, provided necessary context. In that split second before I turned to see the woman who had made the declaration happily lounging in the sand with the “all” that she needed, and the friend she had hollered to a few yards off, heading back toward the dunes, flip flops in one hand, the arm she had waved in response not quite lowered yet to her side, I could already picture some version of the scene behind me.

The woman lingering on the beach was living la vida leisure, commenting on how little it takes sometimes, to make everything in life seem perfect – at least for the moment. She did, indeed, have a towel – brightly colored. She did, indeed, have a sizable cup of something in hand. I took her word on the martini part, and admit I may have made up the little umbrella on the rim, though the cup was, like the towel, brightly colored – of that part, I am certain – as was the bathing suit the woman so generously filled.

Back in Nebraska, the state I’ve lived in now for many years (its state motto is: the good life), someone overhearing that phrase might struggle to conjure a meaning for it. What the hell could you possible do with just those two things in hand? (Magic tricks, possibly. Now you see it; now you don’t!). But on that beach, at that moment, the words made perfect sense – to the woman and to me, even though I don’t really drink martinis. Nor would I take valium unless I absolutely had to, though I’m sure I would prefer it to bad art – the kind one sometimes sees in dentists’ offices (occasionally even an ocean view); the kind that hurts almost as much as the drill because it does so little justice to the real, renders the scene as so much less than one might imagine.

One thought leads to another; one word to the next. Wave-like and wandering. Wondering. Sometimes sound for the sheer pleasure of it. And so, sometimes, poems are made. “Mellow Drama” will appear in my forthcoming book, Nowhere All At Once, which includes other poems that explore the delightful possibilities of chance encounters, snippets of ordinary speech, or common turns of phrase I attempt to turn over again in unexpected ways, explorations of place and displacement, “praise and agitation”—as Daisy Fried says in the blurb she generously supplied for the book. “Mellow Drama” begins in pun and ends in a moment of pondering I hope a reader might feel inclined to share with me.

***
Grace Bauer is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Retreats & Recognitions, Beholding Eye, and The Woman At The Well, as well as three previous chapbooks (Field Guide to the Ineffable: Poems on Marcel Duchamp, Where You've Seen Her, and The House Where I've Never Lived). She is also co-editor, with Julie Kane, of the anthology Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox. A new full-length collection, Nowhere All At Once, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin University Press, and a new chapbook, Café Culture, was just released by Imaginary Friend Press. Bauer teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and could not survive without coffee and the occasional glass of wine. Her poem "Mellow Drama" can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Ruth Joffre

In times of distress, I open up The Mine, a folder on my hard drive where I store my early writings, things I produced before I turned twenty. It’s an embarrassing folder in many ways, full of pastiche and self-indulgence and three or four ridiculous, unambitious novels I started writing, but thankfully never finished. But every time I dig in, I manage to find something worthwhile. In the case of my HFR piece, “The Ithaca Moment,” that “something” was a rough draft of a story I had written about Cornell. The narrative itself followed an undergrad through the year-long affair she has with a grad student– and here I should probably say that I went to Cornell, Class of 2011, and that I was writing the story there, junior year, while I was still having the experience (though not, in fact, having an affair with a grad student). The affair was never the important thing. It was always a means to an end, the story being more concerned with loneliness and dissatisfaction and a deeply critical view of academia, which I still for the most part espouse. But of course the story failed– I was too young and too close to the material. I set it aside in frustration and didn’t pick it up again until this past spring. I was still in grad school, then, my second year at Iowa, and it was thesis time. I was so sick of the stories I was writing. By March, I was burnt out and I knew I had to find something to get me excited again. Hence my visit to The Mine.

On a sentence level, the rough draft I found was largely unusable. There was one line, the bare and brutal description of falling “in love with someone older– and meaner,” which I knew I had to use– but also earn, which felt like the more important of the two. One of the main reasons the original story failed was simply that I didn’t understand, didn’t have enough experience even to begin understanding how nasty love can be. How cruel and cold-blooded we can get when we feel slighted. And how to get this across without condemning my characters or stripping them of their humanity. I didn’t, for instance, want the younger woman to get away with calling her lover mean and portraying herself as innocent, which was more or less the original intent of the line, it being told from the first person by a young narrator who clearly doesn’t understand her actions. I think even as an undergraduate I understood that by calling someone meaner, you imply that you yourself are mean, and that was what I wanted to explore in the new draft.

The old manuscript saw this young woman going home for winter break and having a sad sexual encounter with a man a few years older than herself– the character we now see as Eli. She can’t explain why she has this encounter. And for a long time, I couldn’t either; but I knew it had to be the backbone of the story. It’s the one time we get to see her away from Cornell, away from the affair she’s been having with this older and meaner woman. That distance is supposed to give her perspective; but when I rewrote the story the first time, it didn’t feel removed enough. At that time, the story was still being told in the first person, and that point of view was giving it the feel of false apology, like when someone asks to be excused for their bad behavior without bothering to understand what was hurtful about it in the first place. So I decided to try something I’d never done before: write in the second person. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, except I’d just taught a couple of Lorrie Moore stories to my students at Iowa, and I had that “you” on my mind. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it felt more urgent, at that point, than my thesis did, so I sat down on the first day of Spring Break and started writing. It took most of the week, and it was painful and exhilarating in a way I’d forgotten writing could be– but also strange and different, and I had my doubts, as I always do. Luckily I sent it off anyway, and I had the great pleasure of being able to announce to my students on the last day of class that HFR had accepted my story that morning. I wouldn’t normally share this kind of thing with my students (didn’t tell them when another story of mine won a prize only a month before), but I was in a state of euphoria, and I guess it seemed appropriate to share with them, given that it was in some ways inspired by work we’d read in our class. Now, I can’t remember if I told them this whole story, if I explained to them about the bad draft I wrote when I was their age and how I dug it out and polished it up– how they could do the same, one day, when they’re older and kinder and less afraid of putting themselves on the page. I hope they know: they’re capable of so much. Just you wait and see.

***

Ruth Joffre's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and Fence. Mary Gaitskill selected one of her stories as the winner of the 2013 SLS Unified Literary Contest. She's a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she lives in Iowa City. Her story, "The Ithaca Moment," can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Sandy Longhorn

Both “Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country” and “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep” appear in my narrative sequence, Fevers of Unknown Origin, currently making the rounds with publishers. Before this project, I had never written a book-length manuscript featuring one speaker and a clear story; however, I had often looked on those poets capable of doing so with wonder and curiosity. In fact, I didn’t set out to write this type of “project” book. Instead, the first poems in the sequence took shape one after the other, until they built a certain momentum, and I had to keep writing them.

The woman at the heart of these poems became known to me as the sickly speaker, and as I blogged about the poems, I had to reassure many folks that I was not sick, that these were persona poems. I was fortunate to experience a speaker who took control of the poems and led me to what she wanted to say, another new experience for me. As I worked through the poem sequence, much of it written in chronological order, I didn’t know myself the fate of the sickly speaker until I wrote the final poems, but I came to know her world, that of “a woman [she] called mother by mistake” who brought her to this medical facility / institution, of the “whitecoats” or doctors, the nurses, the “mystics” or orderlies / non-medical characters, and of her mentor to whom she writes letters addressed “Dear Madame.”

In these poems, readers will find echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Emily Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” along with Lucie Brock-Broido’s book, The Master Letters. In writing, I often turned to Dickinson, Brock-Broido, and a few other poets for generating my titles in particular. Usually, after drafting a poem, although every once in a while before writing anything, I would re-read those inspiration texts until a phrase caught my eye / ear and could be reworked into a title.

Throughout the process, I posted draft notes on my blog. In these posts, I commented on the genesis for each new poem in the sequence, eventually discussing the compilation of the manuscript as a whole. (For those interested, process notes for “Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country” can be found here, and notes for “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep” can be found here.) In the end, the sequence became a commentary on what I call “the medical-industrial-complex” and the way, in the worst cases, the medical industry sees a person as a body disconnected from the mind and the emotional core.

***
Sandy Longhorn is the author of The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, winner of the 2013 Jacar Press Full Length Poetry Book Contest, and Blood Almanac, winner of the 2005 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, North American Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at Pulaski Technical College, where she directs the Big Rock Reading Series, and for the low-residency MFA Program at the University of Arkansas Monticello. In addition, she co-edits the online journal Heron Tree and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty. Her poems can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Matthew Baker

PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR THAT MAY BE SOMEWHAT RELEVANT TO THE STORY

– As a young child, the author was raised by a single mother, who, when she needed to go to the supermarket, had no choice but to bring the author with her. The supermarket was a sprawling labyrinth of racks and aisles. And, once, she lost the author there. The author, at the time, was obsessed with cereal boxes—the bizarre designs, the colorful images, all of that illuminating text—the author could stand there forever, in that seemingly endless aisle of seemingly endless boxes, just gazing, awed. One night, after letting the author choose several boxes of cereal, and then giving the author several additional minutes just to stand and gaze, the author’s mother said to come on, and pushed the cart off toward the aisle’s end. The author began following, then stopped, distracted by a box of rainbow cereal. The author’s mother turned the corner, calling back, warning the author to keep up. Jazz music played over the speakers, quietly. She, the mother, found a bag of rice in the next aisle, selected a jar of marinara. She inspected a jar of alfredo. She turned—to ask the author to quit making kapow noises—then saw that the kapow noises did not belong to the author. The kapow noises belonged to a different child altogether, following another cart. The author wasn’t in the aisle at all. Annoyed, she pushed the cart back to the cereal aisle, to collect the author—but the author was not in the cereal aisle. The aisle was empty. The author was gone. She checked the neighboring aisles. This one, that one, empty, empty. Her heart began pounding. She raced with her cart from aisle to aisle, searching for the author. The author was not in the dairy aisle. The author was not in the spice aisle, or the aisle of jams and jellies, or the aisle of detergent and mops. The author was not in any aisle whatsoever. A kidnapping. She abandoned her cart, raced toward the exit, faster, faster, faster, until, suddenly, the jazz music cut out, and she heard her name being paged. Her name, over the speakers. She was being asked to come to the deli. Had the author taken shelter there, to report a missing mother? Yes, she found the author at the deli, in the care of the butchers, eating a slice of salami.

– The author’s first job was in a deep-dish pizzeria, scrubbing pots and larding pans. The pizzeria was attached to a gigantic suburban shopping complex that was centered around a movie theater. Now, listen: at the back of the pizzeria, just past the sinks piled with dirty plates, there was a plain white door. Where did the door lead? Out of the pizzeria—but not outside. Rather, the door led deeper inside—deeper into the complex—led into a deserted hallway, with no windows and no furnishings, just vivid bright carpet and plain white doors. All of the businesses in the complex were connected, secretly, by this maze of deserted hallways. The author liked to wander those hallways, sometimes, through all that empty space. The doors had no knobs, but if you knocked, someone was sure to answer. In the pizzeria, any leftovers, any messups, the author was given to eat. There was a stereo, with scratched discs of pirated songs. There was a server the author was in love with, who didn’t love the author. The author had all the teenage essentials: pizza, music, unrequited love. Some doors in the hallway opened onto shops with ice cream, who would trade for pizza. Some doors in the hallway opened onto shops with iced coffee, who would trade for pizza. Some doors opened onto cinema screens. There was a shower, were washing machines and drying machines, adjoining the conference rooms above the movie theater. It was actually never necessary to leave.

– Once, in the food court of a shopping mall, the author snuck aboard a carousel.

– Every day, the author wears the exact same outfit. This year, the outfit is: a dark blue sweater with light brown buttons; a threadbare gray shirt found lying on the dirt at a reservoir in the mountains; and light blue pants that turned light pink in certain places after once hiking through snowdrifts without the proper gear. The author does have other clothes—but, still, every day, that is the outfit the author decides to wear. Sweater, shirt, unintentionally pink pants. The only real exception to this is costume parties, which the author attends as often as possible, which is not often enough. The author does own one coat, which can be seen in the included picture.

– The author once stole a gray wool coat from the basement closet of a sorority house that the author had been hired to paint. The author wore the stolen coat every winter for three years until the inside silk lining was ripped and buttons were missing and the seams of both shoulders had been torn clean through. The next winter—still wearing the stolen coat—the author went to a giant department store. The author tried on several coats in a changing room. Then the author chose one to buy. Before heading to the checkout counter, however, the author found an empty hanger, and hung up the stolen coat—on a rack of new coats—as if the stolen coat were for sale. The author can explain this only by saying that it felt like the right thing to do.

– The author was born in a very, very, very cold state, where winter lasts about seven months, and there is snow, and there is ice, and there is sleet, and there is a murderous windchill. Thus, the author, who walks everywhere, invented a method of travel called buildinghopping. Here is what buildinghopping is: instead of walking from your location to your destination via the sidewalks like everybody else, whenever possible you cut through buildings, which are heated. This method takes much longer than traveling exclusively by sidewalk, but is much warmer. Thus, every day, that is how the author traveled. Now, one of the buildings along the way was a fancy hotel—the author would cut through a side entrance, down a very long hallway, through the lobby, down a very long hallway, out a side entrance—and, every morning, as the author passed through the hotel, the author would stop where the continental breakfast was set out, and would drink a cup of tea. Sometimes, also, the author would eat an orange.

– Once, in a foreign country, the author was accused of shoplifting. The incident occurred in a massive grocery store. The author was—yes—wearing the unintentionally pink pants, and the shirt, but not the sweater, because the weather in that country was absolutely sweltering. The author was shopping for rations for a very, very, very long journey. After paying, the author was met at the exit by a pair of gigantic men employed as security. One was the boss; one was the backup. What did you take? the boss guard said. I paid for this, the author said, waving the bag of rations. I don’t mean that, the boss guard said. Oh, the author said. I was watching you on the cameras, the boss guard said. Oh, the author said. The boss guard hesitated. Then the boss guard said, I saw you put something into your pants. The boss guard seemed ashamed to say this—like he had been hoping to resolve all of this without having to bring up that the allegedly stolen goods were now allegedly somewhere in the author’s pants. What? the author said. The author actually had heard what the guard had said, but wanted to make the guard say it again. I saw you put something into your pants, the boss guard said, seeming simultaneously to grow both bolder and even more ashamed. Do you want to see? the author asked. The guards took the author to an isolated corridor, possibly for the sake of privacy, possibly anticipating a disorderly arrest. Okay, let’s see, the boss guard said. The other guard seemed to be bracing himself for whatever was coming next. The author smiled. It’s a secret wallet, the author said. The author reached into the unintentionally pink pants, rooted around, and then took out a canvas wallet—the canvas wallet was attached to the author’s belt, and could be tucked into the author’s pants, to be hidden there from thieves. Within the wallet were a passport, a train pass, and about nine hundred euros. The boss guard looked shocked, and confused, but mainly embarrassed. The other guard, however, seemed impressed—like he had never realized how much he wanted a secret wallet, before, but he really wanted one. A secret wallet, the other guard murmured, as if memorizing wisdom from a sacred text. That was that. The guards led the author back to the exit. Thanks, the author nodded. Sorry, the boss guard said, still embarrassed. The author walked to the train station and ate a loaf of bread.

– The author was accused of shoplifting another time—not just in the author’s homeland—but even in the author’s hometown. The author was trying to buy a glass bottle of root beer from a wine shop. However, at the checkout, instead of ringing up the root beer, the manager accused the author of shoplifting. The author was wearing a gigantic coat with innumerable pockets. Search me then, the author dared the manager, but the manager refused to search the author. Then here, the author said, waving some cash, but the manager refused to take the money. The author resorted to making a threat. This is the last time you’ll ever get my business, the author said. We don’t need your business, the manager said. The author was kicked out, and apparently the manager wasn’t lying, as that wine shop is still in business even today.

– In college, the author lived with a pair of freegans: people who subsist solely on food that has been thrown away. Each night, sometime around midnight, the roommates would bundle into hats and mittens and then leave the apartment to go forage through local dumpsters. Much later, the roommates would return to the apartment, wearily, smugly, lugging plastic garbage bags loaded with bagels. Bagels—yes, bagels—that’s what the roommates liked. There was a bakery in town with a strict policy: bagels could be sold only on the day that those bagels had been baked. So, each day, after the bakery closed, all the unsold bagels got tossed out. Hundreds, typically. Then the roommates would raid the dumpster. Upon returning, the roommates would gorge themselves on the bagels, and salvaged tomatoes, and salvaged yogurts, feasting happily, urging the author to partake. Now, once, the author did try a bagel—no, not sesame—no, not pumpernickel—no no no, absolutely never onion—yes, that there, cinnamon raisin walnut, that’s what kind the author chose. And how did the bagel taste? Dry. The bagel would have been better with butter. But, that night, the harvest had yielded none.

– In college, the author was not a freegan, and whether the author is now will not be included in this account.

– The author has never been marooned on an island.

– The author sews poorly, but can sew.

– But here is a thing the author did do in college. In college, on weekends, what did people do? Some people liked to party. Some people went clubbing. As for the author, the author would hike through the snow to an enormous chain bookstore, and then read books there. Fantasy novels, usually. For hours. The books were meant to be bought, but employees would not stop you from peeking, or even reading through. There was a cafe, where you could buy a drink so you at least had paid for something, but the author never did. Perched in a plush armchair, headphones tinkling with koto, the author read stacks of books and paid for nothing. The author loved that. The author could have done the exact same thing at the public library, but, on weekend evenings, the public library was closed.

– Sometime after graduating college, the author’s mother gave the author the startling news that—regardless of how convinced the author may have been of the contrary, regardless of what intuition may have been telling the author for years—that the author’s birth had not involved a fetus in fetu: that, while in the womb, the author absolutely had not absorbed the body and soul of an unborn twin brother.

– Once, in an apartment, the author and a roommate lived in tents. Each set up a tent in the bedroom, on the floor, which was carpeted, and slept in the tents, in down sleeping bags. One tent was bluish; one tent was yellow. For about five months, the author and the roommate lived that way.

– The author is amazed by hummingbirds, and dreams of someday owning a birdfeeder.

– The author has never had a mortgage, or loan, except once did borrow thirteen francs from a friend, in a country that for some reason believes in francs.

– The author has never understood coupons.

– The author has never worked retail.

– The facial markings are not permanent.

– The author has spent exactly one night on the street, and has always regretted not spending more.

***

Matthew Baker translates the interlinked novel The Numberless, the randomized novella Kaleidoscope, and the intentionally posthumous Afterthought. Although a story writer by day, his primary medium is the crop circle. He lives in Peoria, Illinois, but was not born there. His story "Goods" can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Christopher Kempf

The first Friday of every month, the City of Oakland shuts down twenty blocks of Telegraph Avenue for a night of street performance, open art galleries, and food trucks during which upward of 20,000 people, most smoking weed or drinking PBR tallboys, descend en masse on downtown Oakland. Known as the “Art Murmur,” the night is a kind of Bakhtinian carnival in which the rules of normal social interaction are suspended in favor, as Bakhtin writes, of “a special form of free and familiar contact” between people usually divided “by barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.”

These divisions are particularly pronounced in Oakland, where gentrification spurred by the latest Tech boom has exacerbated long-simmering racial and class-based tensions, and where the ethnically segregated east (Latino) and west (African-American) sides of the city frequently clash with each other and with the police in gang-related violence. But once a month during the Art Murmur, in a part of the city located almost exactly between East and West, the residents of Oakland come together, in peace, on the streets, setting aside their daytime differences for a night, if only just one, of utopia.

It is for this reason that I quote from Thomas More’s Utopia in my poem “Art Murmur,” a 16th century work of fiction which, while laying out the promise of utopian society—there is no private property, no one goes hungry, etc.—subtly undercuts this promise through a kind of tongue-in-cheek satire in which, for example, chamberpots are made from gold as a way to encourage disdain for wealth. What More, as well as the work of Hieronymous Bosch—also alluded to in the poem—suggest is the way in which all utopian schemes are from the beginning suspect, a falling off from a mythical prelapsarian perfection; our supposed “civilization”—and the Art Murmur is one aspect of this civilization—doesn’t banish violence and inequality but, to maintain the illusion that it does, simply shunts them elsewhere for a night.

“A block/ off Telegraph,” I write, “the police press/ the mouth of a man we/ do not know to the curb. We consider/ the bloody display.” The lines are meant to suggest the complicity of the poem’s speaker, who watches this instance of police violence as if considering a work of art, and who then walks through a kind of de facto homeless encampment toward his own home.

But I’m wary—and weary—of the way in which we, as poets, talk about “complicity,” as if showing the speaker’s complicity somehow excuses the poem from taking an actual stand against political and economic injustice; too often it seems as if the “point” of socially-committed contemporary poetry is to show how we are all culpable in systems of exploitation. But of course we are! Thoreau said as much when he opted not to pay taxes; why are we still, almost two-hundred years later, making the same point in poetry which fancies itself avant-garde? Shouldn’t we ask more of poetry? Shouldn’t we demand real intellectual and political work from that genre, more than any other, committed to innovation and to philosophical rigor and to linguistic awareness?

The ending of the poem, then, is an attempt to push beyond mere complicity. It’s an indictment of sorts, a kind of hallucinatory or visionary moment in which our supposed civilization, built on violence and economic speculation and systematic disenfranchisement, is instantly erased. The earth, free now from a human race which has so betrayed its promise, returns at last to its original state, returns, without us, to utopia.

***

Christopher Kempf is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He received his MFA from Cornell University, and his work has appeared recently in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and The New Republic, among other places. He currently lives in Oakland. His poem “Art Murmur” can be found in HFR53.

Contributor Spotlight: Carol Guess & Kelly Magee

Carol Guess: “With Animal” is the title story of a short story collection co-written by me and Kelly Magee, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2015. All of our stories focus on humans who give birth to animal babies. We’ve got hippos, unicorns, dragons, horses, sloths, and cats giving their parents trouble. The stories were fun to write because we let our imaginations run wild. Our process was simple: we each wrote half a story, then passed it along to the other person to finish. Starting and finishing offered different challenges, demanded different kinds of attention. My biggest challenge in writing “With Animal” was deciding what was in the suitcase. Originally I wanted her to open the lid to reveal an underground tunnel, but as I developed the characters I realized that this animal baby needed a human disguise. And that told me what was in the mysterious suitcase. I’m still haunted by the idea of the tunnel, though, so maybe Kelly and I will need to go underground eventually...

Kelly Magee: Carol and I started with the idea that humans were going to become pregnant with animals, and as we began writing stories, our interpretations of what those pregnancies -- and those baby animals -- would look like got wilder and wilder. I think pregnancy and childbirth are times when surreal and sometimes unexplainable things really happen, so I had fun thinking about a modern-day manifestation of one of the most well-known and magical pregnancy stories of our time: the virgin birth. The big question for me was, What was going to be born? What kind of creature? With the other stories in this collection, I’d always had a particular animal in mind. In this story, the fun was writing toward that moment of reveal, and then being surprised myself by what happened.

***

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Tinderbox Lawn and Doll Studies: Forensics. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University.

Kelly Magee’s first book, Body Language, won the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, Literary Mama, and others. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.

Their story "With Animal" appears in HFR53.

TONIGHT: 21st Century Reading: DEPARTURE

Here we go folks! One hour until the greatest futuristic reading event of the holiday season. You can find the channel where we will be airing the reading here at 8 PM EASTERN. There may be an ad (or choice of ads) before each reader. Simply choose an ad and watch for five seconds until the Skip button appears, and then you can go straight to the reading. Check out our roster below, featuring a last minute addition: the one and only Emma Sovich! Please join us in the cyberworld come 8 PM for a fantastic reading of poetry and prose!

8 PM—Introduction by Sam Martone
8:10—Kelsey Ronan
8:20—Brandon Amico
8:30—Benjamin Goldberg
8:40—John Holliday
8:50—John James
9—Sandy Longhorn
9:10—Ruth Joffre
9:20—Ray McManus
9:30—Kelly Magee
9:40—Chelsea Biondolillo
9:50—Emma Sovich