bicoastal collaborative narrative featuring danny crook, ava aodha, taylor rae, dani rivero, & sunmi
The Birth of Helen
by Danny Crook
1. Misconception Leda is tired of picking tics off strays. She tramps through mulch, quivering reflections of the alabaster moon. Traces of the lifting swan inspire no melody she can repeat. Refusal totals Leda. Desire no longer compels her to pursue what she had believed are life’s proper themes. This includes putting up with the bodily artifact—that scavenger bloated from road salt. A low-flying goose settles on a bench, feathering to rearrange discomfort. From her new egg, Leda projects, shooing the strays across spiked concrete as she splats the mud, running so that it won’t calcify her footprints. *** 2. Parallel Mothers The world groans after the creation of a new myth as its stories crowd, gel in new ways. Leda and Nemesis walk out of a clinic after sitting through paperwork post embryo transfer. Nemesis gave hers freely for comfort that will subside when she learns from the oracle how the procedure did not empty her womb. She was a nice girl, Leda’s teachers said of her, though some would change their minds knowing what she rigged against God. How, unable to weld their souls, she arranged to mother His child’s other half, its body. But oh the miracles of science! Many would do the same. At the end of the block Leda parts from Nemesis— always Her responsibility, the reworking of toxin into balm, the recognition of beauty and its leveling. To phantom kicks, her body responds, however crudely, with a phantom’s pregnancy. This is how it is done, Nemesis: drive 3000 miles away from the equator. If you’re asking why 3000, drive 4000. You will know you’ve gone far enough when earth is not muddled green, not even a patch for a day. Remission is unacceptable, relapse impossible. Only in His absence can one do without the God in whose image they were made. Substitute alternate form, chase it, then console with return when certain it’ll work. If you can wait until May wait until August. If you can travel 4000 miles go 5000. *** 3. Roads end, and the quality of silence increases. The only way through space was time, and the only way through time was memory, which I did until plucked raw, drawing shadows’ paths during the sun’s brief sally. The winter inhabitants labor to retain their strength—axe striking ice, then water. Water. Surface refractions fade uniform. Tessellate. Then, like a child peeing in a pool, I realize my own warmth and how in stillness it surrounds me. The water’s movement anyway. Earth is asking your name— how should I answer? One leg curled to grace the other, and from between them, smoke that hides a face turned into the crevice of both arms, heaving gently in the warm mud of an ancient shore, just meters from sun-crusted soil.
There is actually so little time. No, that’s not really right, is it? Time is a muscle. It flexes. Through pain and pleasure, it strengthens. Through disuse it atrophies. Shortens. Grows fallow and incapable of holding us.
I’m writing you from Ceremony Coffee Roasters in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. I first grew to know and love Ceremony at its previous location downtown back in November. I wrote there, too. About time, or maybe distance. The word is the same in Ojibwemowin, kind of.
11/7/22 — Ceremony Coffee Roasters — Downtown Baltimore
While I don’t believe in astrology, there does seem to be a cyclical element to this thing I’m beholden to, this narrative of frustration as it drives me to abandon everyone and everything I am—every few years. Sometimes—often—people need me, and the need pushes me out. There’s something perverse about being needed, being bound to one place, one person, at one time. Sun Yung Shin as Satan writes “Everything I make is unmade, a bed in the morning, your memory of me—” in Rough, and Savage, her immigrant retelling of Dante’s Inferno. I do not give myself over to the moment. I am stingy with myself, with Time itself, even as it slips over me in great translucent whorls of candy-scented lube, fucks the world with my hollow body and empty words.
Right, the cycle. I breach like a choked whale in November, even-yeared, although there are echoes of breathlessness in the odd numbers as well. The energetic buildup to these biannual climaxes remains the same, even as the context changes. This time it was the Place killing me. The Place and its People. I have lived in this place since the end of my last breach, early spring of 2017. I began my transition then in a kind of religious fervor, frenetic, holy energy vibrating from the cradle of my throat to the tips of my fingers. Even then, I was beautiful, but my voice betrayed my sex to the uninitiated, and I wanted to clarify myself, to be seen and desired not as a strange, angular girl, but as whatever I am now, all the way out here in Hell.
That’s part of the reason I’m writing this, I think. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon tells her students, “Write to think. Don’t think to write.” These days, writing inhabits a barren, alien realm within me. Miles of cracked earth and craggy mountains without a plant in sight. Imagine hues of indigo-grey, navy blue, perpetual twilight. I stand in this desert clothed in robes of burlap, armed, bloody, and try to conjure narrative from memory. There was a time when I would invent, but my inventions came true, always, and I was afraid. I felt surveilled. Well, I’ve always felt surveilled, especially when I go to church. Whenever I go to church I can feel one big eye on me, peering into my petri dish through its heavenly microscope. I hear a big, booming, genderless voice proclaim
THERE YOU ARE.
Truth it is, then, even as I work to warp the personal and political into the fantastical. I feel very lucky to have lived such a short and horrific life. Again, summoning Sun Yung Shin:
I wanted everything about me to outlive me
I want to leave threads on the ground so I might return
without the pinch and itch of memory
9/3/23 — Ceremony Coffee Roasters — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
We’re coming up on a year. I still want everything about me to outlive me. I love the way Sun Yung Shin writes the grotesque nature of being alive before, during, and after colonialism. The world burns and someone says “God cleans with fire” but I don’t see God when I look at those fires. If there was such a God I think I would kill Him or try to and I wouldn’t care how bad it hurt me.
My God is other people just like my hell. Everything is here, right now, stacked or intertwined or otherwise enmeshed. Would it kill you to acknowledge just how powerful and insignificant you are? Or is it more comforting to relinquish everything to an invisible force? Nothing can hold you. Nothing can hold everything. Nothing can hold all the sin in the world and nothing can even hold the mallet that hammers us into the ground or drives the nails into our hands, into our feet, cuts us open and invites the vultures to feast.
Sorry. I’m not making much sense, am I? Let’s go somewhere else.
9/5/23 — Aunt Mary’s Kitchen — somewhere outside D.C.
September is here and everyone is talking about time. People forget September is summer, too, but this bitter heat wave forces us to remember. Yesterday I left Baltimore in a hurry. I woke up sick from my friend’s cat and needed to get away as soon as possible. Before I got in my sauna of a car, I turned to look at my friend.
“I live here now,” I said. My own voice surprised me. It was oddly flat, with a little bit of wonder and some dark undercurrent. A threat, maybe, or a challenge. Like this whole summer’s promise had been one long game of chicken.
“You do,” he said. “Come over anytime.”
I prickled and smiled in a way I despise. There were reasons for the smile and reasons I shouldn’t have smiled at all, but what was done was done and I needed sleep and food and, most importantly, my own space. Somewhere to put all my books so I wouldn’t have to put on the fake smile and play like I’m a person. Sorry, that was melodramatic. September does that to me.
I used to think I caught an attitude every September because of all the unmet summer fantasies. Here’s where I excavate and resuscitate all of my most embarrassing wants because I’ll bet you anything you wanted some of these things, too. I was a kid and summer was a punctuation to the school year, a pregnant pause within which gestated such terrible possibilities, imagined first-kisses last-kisses and bruised bodies and going to the fair.
Summer embittered me because I was a child of divorce and spent its every occurrence in Seattle, an insurmountable distance from Wisconsin. I knew full well everyone else in Hayward would spend summer clarifying their friendships and relationships with each other, strengthening their bonds until they were nigh unbreakable, whereas I became something of a ghost. Nobody got back to me on Skype in a timely manner and nothing outside was mine to keep except maybe the sun damage. Still I wanted to be loved by anything outside of our core family group. Still I wanted to be wanted instead of this thing I was being spoken into, this unattractive beast child who, in the words of my high school best friend, felt “like you belong to someone else already.”
September rolled around and if the most thrilling thing that had happened to me was sort-of touching hands with my crush because an all-black ladybug with two little red hearts on its wings landed on us, I would go into the school year upset and convinced I’d never be held.
I’ve made some grave mistakes in summer’s receding shadow. I remember I moved in with someone, years ago now, and the night I left, my father looked at me and said, “Everything about this feels wrong, but okay.” He was right, of course. Everything about it was wrong, went wrong, let me drop like an apple falling off of a cart, let the worms fill me.
I’m not moving in with anyone now. For anyone. Anyone but me, I guess, but I’m such a shotgun shell of a person. One big circle and a bunch of little holes around me in a speckled halo of absence.
Anyways. Despite my illness, this summer had no unmet fantasies. I loved and was loved in turn. I did what I wanted to do with the people I wanted to do it all with. So now I begin to wonder if there’s something about September that just pisses me off.
The Nature of Things
words and sculpture by Taylor Rae
The crisp air of Fall’s promised arrival reminds me of death The decomposing of leaves and berries and the leftover remains of small game. It reminds me of the hooves I held in my hands as I saw your sinew glisten in the light It reminds me of my fall from grace into the pits of my own mortality With the return of the season I begin to break The hard shell fortified by the applause of others And the solemn smile upon my lover’s face, crumbles away To nothing I drown in my visions of the past, transformed into shackles for my future. Fluorescent lights and the sterile smell of my corner room The drain placed precarious in the side of my abdomen next to the hollow from which my sanity was stolen Their words weighed on me heavy, barely held by the body that smelled of death and was reduced to bone. She is so lucky. So now I ponder. What shall be done? I find my way back, slow and circuitous, on a path forged for me Grounded in the clay the plants and the water Held by the ones who cradle my powdered remains like sand cupped gently in their hands I craft the vessels of my homelands and whisper my story to the wind My torso and the medicines growing where I used to be Not because beauty has come from the pain, but because Where there is death life always follows Such is the nature of things.
9/26/21 – Pike Place Market, 2016 – in the pinch and itch of memory
Gargantuan yellow cranes hang their hooks low. Hazard-bright vultures on concrete, brick, and iron carrion, they crisscross the city, block out the sun or cut clouds open with their spines. You remember Kay saying something vague a couple months back, something about two millionaires playing tug-of-war with Seattle. Whoever breaks the city first wins.
You’re sprawled on the stained grass of a green hill on the edge of Pike Place. There’s a woman a stone’s throw from you. Growing up, you’d see her around town, always the same, always pulling a cart of copper earrings behind her tiny, stooped body. Just like you, she’s Native, with deep set brown eyes under furrowed brows and a wide mouth turned down in a sweet frown. Unlike you, her clothes are ornate, velvet regalia beaded with the colors of her aura. Her pepper hair stays braided thick and clean under a black velvet cap. You reach up under your beanie and scratch at your scalp, trying to remember if you even have hair.
The woman is asleep under a sun untampered by cranes. Her mahogany skin glows almost crimson in the golden light. Your lonely eyes trace the innumerable lines of her face. They run dark. They run deep. You are a scrawny teenager, sharp, genderless, a thing so thin and slight you might as well be a line yourself, a line on the skin of the earth. You can’t remember how long you’ve been on the grass. The crane casts a shroud around you. Your calloused hands caress and mutilate the ground in equal measure. Torn blades of grass lay around you in the war zone of your fingers.
You are a ghost. Nobody notices you. Those who do look away quickly, troubled, ashamed. Of you or for you, it doesn’t matter. You were never meant to be here.
Seattle is paradise, though. Last week, you fell asleep on the express from Ballard to Edmonton and woke up just outside Tulalip. The sun was so bright, the whole station shone white, almost blinding. You were exhausted and the light entered you slow. You thought about angels taking human hosts. In your half-awake mind, you floated up in broad daylight toward the sun, which was a god, an eye, a portal. You came down to earth and no one hurt you. You belonged to the sun, your skin kissed brown and freckled as your ancestors. You remembered your name in this moment of warmth.
Now you’re on the edge of the harbor. Puget Sound glitters in the sunlight, every crest of wave a different color. Sometimes the killer whales break surface. Sometimes they jump and curve across the sky, an upside-down smile sent direct from the vast, dark deep. You don’t look for these blessings, but you pray for days after they happen, just “thank you, thank you, thank you” until you run out of breath.
“No visitors today,” someone says.
You barely flinch. It’s the old woman. Her leathery hands gently hold the guardrail as her dark eyes flit across the horizon.
“How do you know?” you ask. Your voice whistles a little in your throat from disuse.
She shrugs. “Just do, I suppose.”
There’s a long pause as you both watch the unbroken sound. Small waves splash against the blunt edge of the harbor. There’s an unusual dearth of boats on the water in this moment. All you see are whitecaps and rainbows interrupted by empty docks and eroded posts. You take a deep, sea-salted breath, and let yourself imagine a world before or after. No millionaires fighting over who gets to pierce the ocean first. Just a stretch of open sound and the possibility of visitors.
Late Poems
by Danny Crook
A child hands me a drawing of a figure standing on an insect, the two roughly the same size. She was very delighted when I told her that a human with the strength of an ant would never fall from the monkey bars. She then asked if the bug-sized human would still have to watch their little brother, and I told her of course not as she ran off. More and more, I think I am simply too far from her grandfather’s account of the burning barn— listening hard to the old poet wanting to start from the beginning about growing up in Brooklyn as he held a framed portrait of Tsar Nicholas II with his finger pinned on the village in the background and staring above my head. Meanwhile my thermometer and compass are telling me yes, yes, there is a match and it is being held very close.
ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ 