a cento pantoum using lines from Ronald Barthes’s Mourning Diary (FSG, NY, 2010)
Mourning—a cruel country where I’m no longer afraid. The formal beginning of the long bereavement. This terrifies me. I know my mourning will be chaotic.
The formal beginning of the long bereavement. Eighteen months for a mother, a father. I know my mourning will be chaotic. We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in.
Eighteen months for a mother, a father. Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in. Suffering, like a stone (around my neck, deep inside me).
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. This morning—the offer of lightness. Suffering, like a stone (around my neck, deep inside me). I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.
This morning—the offer of lightness. For the first time, I decide to wear a colored scarf. I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering. I limp along through my mourning.
2021 fiction alum Olivia Zubrowski was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Zubrowski’s story “City Life” below:
City Life
There was a photo of someone who looked like my voice teacher in the obituaries this morning. I was surprised: I had only just seen them a few months ago, and while they didn’t look well, they certainly hadn’t looked on the verge of death. I spent some minutes studying the uneven blue plaster on the ceiling, watching thin shadows of steam from my coffee bloom and fade. It was very bright for winter, the cold sunlight glinting off the dirty window, concentrating itself on my right temple. The kitchen used to be an attic: my apartment is small, with chalky walls and irregular, Victorian-looking windows. The voice teacher used to come here on Thursday afternoons. They always drank a cup of kukicha tea in the one nice mug I had, a solemn red LeCreuset. Just after I began the voice lessons, a few years ago, I started to dream that I didn’t have a face. These dreams stretched into months, then years. I always awoke to a sense of relief. I have no mirrors in my apartment. The times I do see my face–in old, yellowed photos, washed of detail; in the dull sheen of the lightbulb–there it is, obscene, ordinary. The voice lessons were the indirect result of my attempt to get over a past love. I thought I should take more walks, get out of my tiny apartment, the old plaster falling from the walls my only company. Most days I don’t mind the quiet much. When I was small, the neighborhood I lived in was crowded with houses. Trees tried in vain to take root between large driveways and boxy shrubs with poisonous-looking berries. In our backyard, the bedrock lurched up in indignation: a ten-foot granite face leered from the hillside; an eyeless face of mottled, grey scar tissue that shielded us from the highway. At the top of the hill, the rock dipped into a slight hollow. Often, I would climb up into that hollow and watch the sunset drain the color from the town, distilling the smog and neon to pale colors that gathered at the edge of the world. In that bower of thin, tough trees and blue moss, it was hard to tell the difference between raindrops and footsteps. One day, I watched a chipmunk slip into a gap in the rock I hadn’t noticed before. There was an opening: the mud was cool and silken. I pushed my body into the darkness, though I could only fit my shoulders inside. My breath came out in ragged, struggling gusts. I leaned my head against a protrusion in the rock: when I opened my eyes, the space was filled with rich colors. There were small scratches across the whole ceiling, half-words and rust-drawn figures, charcoal handprints and pale white outlines of unfamiliar animals. My walks often unearth silent and almost-forgotten memories like this one. In my efforts to forget my love, my walks got longer and longer, and I spent less time in that narrow apartment. I never had a particular destination. One afternoon, on the last leg of my journey back, I stepped into a cafe across the street from my apartment. What did it offer today, that it never had before? When does a piece of the world become something that invites you in?
In the meeting, James Halliday announced the company was being sold and then he couldn’t stop coughing. This was bad timing—both the sale of the company and the coughing— because everyone, including Mallory, had a lot of questions about the sale and the coughing fit seemed a little too prolonged to be real, theatrically timed and thus suspect, though James was well-liked overall and thought to be a straight shooter by the kind of people who used the term straight shooter and believed in such a thing. Mallory was also sick, though she wasn’t coughing. She had multiple doctor’s appointments scheduled but she kept canceling them and coming to work instead, because she, like everyone else, knew the sale was coming and wanted to be there when the news came out. She poured James a glass of water. He drank, his eyes wild and red and teary, then said, “As I was saying—” and started coughing all over again.
Mallory exchanged glances with Simone across the table. Simone looked panicked. Technically she was second in command because a sudden string of executive departures had left her there, designated-survivor style, but she was twenty-five and had confided to Mallory in the restroom, after asking her for a tampon, that she was applying to law school.
“I think what James was saying,” said Shyama from HR, “is that we deeply value everyone’s contributions here and the company will be looking to make this transition as smooth as it possibly can be.”
There was a silence strewn with James’s continued, though quieter, coughing.
“When?” Mallory said.
“When what?” Shyama said.
“When is the smooth transition? When is the sale? When is our last day of work?”
James Halliday finally subdued his cough. “It’s today,” he said. “It’s happening. It’s now.”
Some facts about James Halliday: He was exquisitely good-looking. He had high cheekbones and green eyes with notably long eyelashes. His mother was a Peruvian human-rights activist and his father was a cardiac surgeon who had met her while volunteering in the Peace Corps and the whole family, including James, returned to Peru for a period of time each year to do good works. Everyone at the company knew this from reading media profiles of him, though he never discussed it himself. When he was in Peru doing good works with his family, he was still accessible by email. He was always accessible by email. Mallory had never known anyone to return emails faster, on a regular basis, than James. On the evening she received her diagnosis, she wrote him at 10 p.m. to say that she would be taking a couple of personal days. She didn’t say why. He replied at eleven. I hope everything is right with you and the world, his email said, a message Mallory archived immediately so she’d never have to look at it again.
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Uncle Pete tells the story about his mother, my grandma, how when she was a kid, she climbed through her bedroom window with her little brother in tow to escape their father as he held a knife to their mother’s throat. Pete tells the story while grazing through the pickle tray at Christmas, while lighting the kids’ sparklers on the Fourth, while crossing his arms over his full belly after pie at Thanksgiving.
Uncle Pete provides no details. The house Grandma Donna and Great-Uncle Warren live in is not a gray cabin. It is not small and drafty. There are no spaces between the floorboards. There are no threadbare, once cheerful curtains hanging in Donna’s bedroom window. She does not squint at them to see the finch printed on the fabric perched in the only tree behind the house. There’s no mention of her maneuvering her body inches away from Warren’s warm, small back, stretching her arms above her head, grasping the white, cold metal bed frame, and wondering if tonight her mother will part the hair on her forehead and kiss it, or if the night air will part it as she runs.
Uncle Pete never asked about the children’s hygienic state. Donna’s fingernails, is there dirt underneath them? Are they left to grow long and sharp? Warren’s nose, small and bulbous, whose task is it to keep clean? What is the snot to dirt ratio on his face? Donna begrudgingly wipes his nose with the hem of her skirt, or the handkerchief with the pink embroidery floss coming loose around the edges, and stands, half-aware, biting at the hangnail on her thumb. Or, has Great-grandma Myrna set the routine? A good wash three times a day: morning, lunch, and bedtime. Noses are to be wiped, faces wiped, hair is to be combed and re-combed. The rags are to be rinsed out at the hand pump in the back.
Uncle Pete doesn’t consider the season of the year. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that it would happen more often in the swampy summer months, the air thick with gnats and moisture, the haze of pollen and sweat and heat threatening a kind of drowning that doesn’t come. Inside is stifling; outside is sweltering. The compromise, to sit underneath the tree in the shade with a pencil and paper, or a picnic of soda crackers and chokecherry jam, or the paper cut-out animals at the elaborately imagined zoo. The monkey rides the tiger again, to visit the penguin who’s called out to them from atop his snowy, snowy hill, through the jungle filled with giant beetles and worms, across the desert with the giant ants, until they reach each other and jump and dance excitedly.
The mosquitoes take off from the small, muddy puddles in the back field. The horsemint Donna had crushed and rubbed onto their skin wears off. A mosquito lands on Warren’s sweaty forearm, Donna careful not to slap, instead presses down with her thumb to flick it away. They dash for the back door of the house, up the wooden steps and over the narrow threshold.
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Faculty Member and Alumni, Daniel Tobin (poetry, ’90).
Hunter Gatherers
All this late morning in the newly winnowed trees squirrels are chirring, as though each one inside had a miniature fan rotating urgently, the impossibly rapid rpms of their language.
I can almost see through the thinned-out screen of leaves a few tails waving like metronomes— the wind lifting them? Or are they plumes, the nibs of scribes at their appointed work, glossing
the margins, fearful the raiders will come again? One, I watch him from my deck with the cats, flies in a wild prodigious leap to the pole (Be careful of the power box!) to tightrope across
this unsteady stave of lines to where they thread under the eave. And up he hoists himself now into the gutter, into the hole he’s probably chewed into the frame, into the attic, to set by his store.
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…My own struggle with chronic pain began in my mid-20s, in the form of recurrent migraines and back and neck pain. The first loss I felt when the pandemic began was the cancellation of my monthly massage sessions, on which, like my mother, I had grown dependent.
My pain is, of course, my rage.
It first took root in the hallways of my high school in Richmond, British Columbia, where I was chased and groped so frequently that I began stealing money from my parents so I could take boxing classes. In those years, I struggled against my own conditioning to not rock the boat every time anger moved me to action. I felt like I was disappointing my parents, who had raised my sister and me to distinguish ourselves academically, but to never fight back or show outward defiance, because that’s how people back home disappeared. In my sophomore year, I began offering massages to the most egregious offenders, so I could physically reposition myself out of their line of sight. It put me temporarily in a position of control. To survive the gap between my reality and my upbringing, I had to weaponize the skill I had cultivated for healing.
Years ago, I was physically attacked by a white man I had been dating for a couple of months. He tried to strangle me when I ended the relationship after he referred to me as his “Oriental rug.” Other people I dated racialized and sexually objectified me in less overtly dehumanizing ways,but their expectations that I would be agreeable and submissive became obvious the moment I said no to something.
Again and again, I have been advised to relax. But what does relaxation look like when I have to remain on guard, both in public, against virulent anti-Asian racism and murderous anti-Asian misogyny, and in private, against my own rage at a lifetime of violations?
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-04-02 18:15:352022-02-25 17:18:41“My Mother’s Pain,” by Cynthia Dewi Oka (Poetry ’19)
Near the end of the war, the general had to be strapped to his mount, having lost his right leg to the knee and his left foot to the ankle as well as the use of his right arm, which he fashioned in a sling. He wore an eye patch over his left eye and, as he was missing both ears, had to secure the band to his hair, the back right hemisphere of which had been scorched away leaving nothing but a purplish patch of scar. He wore a false leg made from wood and a false foot made from iron and leather. Around this time he also took to wearing a false mustache as his upper lip had been shot off, and so too, his four front teeth. He had no dentures cast, but the mustache was of a handsome, and some say, costly, weave. The general could be a vain man. His saddle had two extra belts that rose crosswise about his shoulders and kept him firmly affixed to his horse but also which, and much to the general’s annoyance, prevented him from standing in his stirrups whilst howling colorful invective as he dashed headlong to meet the enemy.
The enemy, in addition to having shot forty-five horses from under him, taken his leg, his foot, four teeth, both ears, an eye, a lip, and part of his scalp, had also filled him with twenty-six separate pieces of projectile and innumerable fragments of shrapnel. They were responsible for the death of his son, a young bugler in a separate brigade, had drowned two of his dogs, hung a third, grievously maimed a favorite boy messenger, and put to torch both his country house and his city office. Yet even if they hadn’t, they still would be, the general said, the worst kind of bastards. Jittery, weak-chinned, gutless, and cowhearted, physiologically speaking. Shifty, specious, spurious, blight weasels in regards to character. Their brains were witless, wileless, worthless pinches of fuzz. And concerning fortitude, they were spineless, sentimental, sanctimonious, pampered, privileged, parasitic namby-pambies. Also their policies were wrong. And thus, the war.
And thus it played out, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. He gave as well as he took. No other general had killed so many combatants in single melee, most having become accustomed to sheltering in a field tent and commanding via spyglass and signal. The general wouldn’t dream of it. And his men knew as much, for he daily told out his dreams, most of which consisted of graphic accounts of rendezvous with a whore mistress called Sweet Jenny. In fact, it would have been an odd day not to hear of how the general had made “Dear, Delicious Jen” mewl amidst his reverie. Still, only a secret few knew that the real Sweet Jenny wouldn’t go near the general let alone share an evening with him atop her settee, and that, upon his most recent visit to her parlor, The Lapping Cat, Sweet Jenny had locked herself in her rooms and sent out an under-whore called Eloquisha to manage the officers’ parley. But none of them would dare pronounce it.
The general’s petulance preceded the loss of his appendages and facial features. When he was still a major, he moved through captains at an alarming rate and for the most stickling of reasons. He once dismissed a man for the manner in which he had plucked a chicken that had been commandeered from a nearby farmstead. For the remainder of the war, and indeed, for an inordinate portion of his civilian life, the man was known as “Fluff-First Frederick,” later simply “Fluff.” Another unfortunate inferior was dismissed due to an uncontrollable whistle that escaped his nose during morning briefings. “Whistling Pete” enjoyed modest success leading a company in another regiment until he was shot dead during second watch, because, it was said, his whistle had given away his position.
The general, encamped at the time in a deep wood, read this account amongst his daily missives and came out of his tent to remind the men about his unerring instincts regarding substandard soldiers, whom he sought to “thumb out like weevils from a chestnut.” He then fired his pistol six times into a nearby tree to demonstrate the velocity of said thumb, giving away his position. When the nearby enemy scouting party returned with their full host in overwhelming number, the general, then the major, beset on both sides, led a courageous counter-charge, splitting his force and attacking both flanks simultaneously. His valor led to a succession of swift field promotions, and, as his leg needed amputating as a result of his part in the fracas, the general’s future likewise glittered with the promise of medals and other sundry commendations, the list of which only grew as his rank raised and body diminished. And thus it was, that at a contemplative thirty-four years of age, the general faced his first and final battle as general, though he could not know it at the time.
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Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation
LGS: When I was first trying to put a pile of my poems together in a manuscript—I’m not much of a crier, but I tried and tried, and I cried every time. Really. It became very clear that I had no idea what I was doing. How did these poems talk to each other? Did they even belong together? Did I even have anything to say? I had been thinking in terms of individual poems for so long, and there was no obvious form or narrative to tie them together. Or that’s what I thought. Now I believe that, as I insist to students when I teach, you may feel like there’s nothing connecting your poems, but each of them comes from the same consciousness. You have obsessions, and ways of thinking and perceiving the world, of making patterns; that is inescapable. And so those poems do talk to each other, more than you realize—they can’t not. Your job is to find out how.
The last semester of my MFA, I studied with Marianne Boruch, who is brilliant. I wanted to understand ordering poems, so she had me map out the flow of a bunch of first books. It was like following a trail through the forest with a magnifying glass, just mapping step by step. And I was suddenly able to order my work. In retrospect, that jibes with how I’ve ended up making anything I write. I try to get out of my own way and trust my internal compass. Eventually, it’s time to figure out what’s going on, what this new thing wants to be. I sort of reverse-engineer that understanding—being open to what’s working, finding the energy. Can the poem strike that spark elsewhere? And if I’m editing someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, then I also need to translate that intuitive process into a discussion of craft, without being overly prescriptive or killing the mystery.
AK: I do that reverse-engineering, too. You said two things I want to touch on. The first is the idea that everything that comes out of us as poems is related. I firmly believe that. And I think that more than anything else we’ll probably talk about, that intuition, that trust, is crucial. Because if it comes out of you from a genuine place versus, say, “I have to fulfill a promise that someone’s given me,” everything is going to be related.
How they relate is a big piece. But for me, it’s also about the arc of the manuscript and the eventual “so what?,” the “what happened next?”
LGS: Yes. And that can happen outside what we usually think of as narrative; it’s more like mapping movement of thinking and feeling, how a consciousness evolves over the course of the book.
AK: Right. I don’t know if “clarity” is the right word for me here, but it’s making that pencil line darker and darker. Making more and more of a contour so that consciousness becomes more developed on the page, more real.
LGS: Self-aware but not self-conscious. We’ve talked about therapy before—how you get that deepening understanding over time. There can be similar movement through a book of poems, even if the aim of the book is different.
Having struggled so much with what eventually became Tulips, Water, Ash, I was nervous about putting together the manuscript of The Greenhouse. But it was such a different experience. All that practice and analysis Marianne had me do had soaked in and fermented. I’d finally ordered the earlier book in a way that worked; maybe I could do it again. And The Greenhouse had a strong chronological element—all the poems at least touch on the intense early years of parenting, which gave me a default to push against. I listened to my intuition, and there was something there to hear. And when I backed up and tried to figure out why I had made certain choices, they still made sense.
So I’ve just finished the manuscript of Annihilation, and I’m at a stage of casting about, seeing if anything happens. For me, that can mean very little happening for a long time. I mean, I’m still putting notes in my journal and dumping them into a folder and not looking at them. Eventually, I have to trust that something new will happen, and I will write actual poems again, and they will be somehow different from my old work, and I can follow their threads to make more poems. This gets less stressful each time, since it somehow happened before, right?
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If you want to be an artist, is it condemning yourself to mediocrity even to think about craft? That’s the question that came to mind when I was asked to write something about craft. Craft is what those academic MFA types worry about, not real artists, isn’t it? As Allen Ginsberg famously said, “First thought, best thought.” But we can see this romantic thought embraced long before the Beats. One of the most damning remarks ever made about craft was in a letter by Keats: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”
Nevertheless, we may be grateful that Keats revised “The Eve of St. Agnes” so that instead of the embarrassment of watching Madeline “unclasp her bosom jewels” and “loosen her bursting bodice” (yes, that was Keats’ first draft!), she “unclasps her warmèd jewels” and “loosens her fragrant bodice”—changes that enhance not only the sensuality but the precision of the images, even if the bursting bodice came as naturally to Keats as leaves to a tree.
*
In 1997 Dustin Hoffman received the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech he talked about an artist’s craft:
I remember being in a hotel room in 1967 in San Francisco one night and I’m flipping the TV dials after doing all this promoting all day long, and there is this little old Jewish guy with a bald head sitting at a piano in his living room and he’s being interviewed. And I suddenly realize I’m looking at Igor Stravinsky, the great Russian-American composer.
The interviewer is saying to him, “So Mr. Stravinsky, what is the greatest moment for you? Is it when you finally write your symphony?” And Stravinsky says, “No, No, No.” He sounds like a New York cab driver. “Is it when you’ve heard it played the first time by a symphony?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “What about opening night when they premier it and herald it as being one of the great works of the 20th century?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “So what is the greatest moment for you?”
He’s there sitting at the piano with some music on the thing there and he says, “I’m sitting here at the piano all day long, and for three, four hours I’m trying to find a note. I can’t find the note, and I’m going bum bum … bum Bum … bum BUM for three hours. Finally after three hours I find that note. Bum bum! That’s the moment. There is nothing like it. That’s everything.” So I started crying ….
That’s a perfect description of craft in the service of art. The art, after all, is in knowing which note is the note. But it must be done without becoming too obsessive. I once had a fantasy that if only my brain was a computer that could scan the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a fraction of a second, then writing would simply be a matter of picking out the perfect word to follow the last word, then picking out the perfect word to follow that one (perhaps Keats’ warmèd jewels).
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