The Paris Review's Blog, page 85

Jamaica Kincaid’s Rope of Live Wires

IN HER STUDY AT HOME IN NORTH BENNINGTON, 2018. INTERVIEW STILL FRAME COURTESY OF STEPHANIE BLACK.

The first novel I read by Jamaica Kincaid was Annie John, the first novel she wrote. She drafted it—as I recently learned from a long-awaited Art of Fiction interview conducted by Darryl Pinckney, which appears in the Review’s Spring issue—out loud in the bath, while pregnant with her daughter, Annie Shawn. Reading Kincaid, I felt emboldened by her wild, inimitable sentences—an invitation to abandon some of the conventions I had learned in school (which no doubt made my own early attempts at creative writing hard to tolerate). Her work provided me and many other readers with something vital, as it did for Kincaid herself. “When I was young, younger than I am now,” she writes in My Brother, her devastating memoir of her youngest brother’s slow and too-soon death, “I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life.”

None of Kincaid’s books—five novels, a collection of stories, a children’s book, and five works of nonfiction—has been published under her given name, Elaine Potter Richardson. “Elaine couldn’t write about Elaine,” she explains to Pinckney, “but Jamaica can write about Elaine.” Jamaica writes about Elaine, who in the process becomes Annie, or Lucy, figures who run through Kincaid’s oeuvre like a stubborn rope of live wires. For me, the distinction between memoir and fiction in her work is not determined by proximity to documentary fact—it’s more a question, in each book, of just how much Elaine and her surroundings had to be remade in order to feel real. There is an obsessive quality to Kincaid’s storytelling, and also to her prose. The same anecdote about a mother who burns her daughter’s books might appear in a memoir as an account of the mother’s desire for control, or in an interview as a sign of the world’s unjust disposition toward writers. And in fiction, the daughter is permitted to fantasize about revenge: Lucy, the narrator of Kincaid’s second novel, contemplates burning her mother’s letters at the corners and sending them back unread. It’s a gesture she has “read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another.”

“I’m constantly folding my own memories into the things I’ve learned,” Kincaid tells Pinckney, “like when you’re adding an egg to batter.” Of course, if what she read as a child has since been altered in her memory, she has a better excuse than most of us: her stolen library books were literally destroyed. Kincaid has found ingenious ways to revive and reinvent some of these lost works, even the ones she hated. In school, she was forced to read Wordsworth, whose poems, as she puts it, were used as a “weapon of empire.” Lucy likewise has to read “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” and as a consequence despises daffodils. And yet, as soon as Kincaid had a garden of her own, she planted twenty thousand of them.

 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor at The Paris Review.

Introducing the Winners of the 2022 Whiting Awards

For the eighth consecutive year, The Paris Review is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2021 honorees:

Claire Boyles, fictionRita Bullwinkel, fictionIna Cariño, poetryAnthony Cody, poetryAnaïs Duplan, nonfictionAlexis Pauline Gumbs, nonfictionMegha Majumdar, fictionJesse McCarthy, nonfictionNana Nkweti, fictionClaire Schwartz, poetry

Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead.

Congratulations to this year’s honorees. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 winners.

• Craig

Does the Parent Own the Child’s Body?: On Taryn Simon’s Sleep

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Taryn Simon, detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021.

When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator.

The actual representational value of the parent’s photographs might be minimal compared to their narcissistic and artistic functions. Yet in the act of photographing, the parent does aspire to represent. How can the child be expressed in such a way that others will recognize in it what the parent recognizes? The parent, having created the child, belatedly encounters the moral and technical difficulties of creativity. Her instinct is that the photographic act ought to be a selective one, recording only what the parent-photographer wishes to be seen and remembered. The result is something no one else would especially want to look at. The photograph is a half-truth, because it has omitted large portions of reality. Generally speaking, the parent’s attempt to express what they see and feel in looking at their child, to universalize those feelings, does not succeed. The parent may have thousands of such photos, just as a failed artist may have a roomful of unwanted canvases, which can find no place in the world.

An artist, in the consideration of her material, also confronts the difficulty of separating it from the conditions of her own existence, yet her instincts are the reverse of a parent’s. Rather than trying to control or interfere with what the viewer “sees,” her aim is to give total power to the image, so that it is capable of living independently in the world. A baby is already an independent being: despite its many needs, it doesn’t exist solely as a condition of the mother. The baby is already important, but not necessarily in a way that the mother can see or find acceptable. It is important in spite of its mother, not because of her. The mother uses the baby’s image as a way of changing the basis of this importance, and of proving that she created—and is still in the act of creating—the baby. When she sets out to express her baby or child in photographs or stories, the mother-as-artist is trying to re-attribute the material to herself. Thus, “her” child is more important than other children: the mother-as-artist enters into an unending battle, in which the ground of truth will be repeatedly desecrated as she attempts to prove this is the case.

An artist who is also a mother, forewarned of the difficulties of creation, confronts in her child a different kind of test. Her process uses the self as a kind of lens—a tool for seeing and verifying, something both carefully and pitilessly handled—that automatically engages with the child in search of its truth. But there is a problem, both in her ownership of the material and in the conditions of her access to it. Here, the roles of witness and author have been reversed: in her child she is witnessing that which she has in a sense authored. The overwhelming subjective bias of parenthood makes the task of representation virtually impossible. In any representation of her child, she will have to be wary of her parent self, who believes her own child to be the “important” one. Also, her success as an artist would signify her failure as a mother: to see her child objectively—as she would have to do in order to create art—would be to jettison the whole psychological mechanism whereby the mother renders the child’s existence tolerable to herself.

Taryn Simon’s Sleep navigates these snares by proposing parenthood as a state of copyright: a custodianship and right of access that will expire after a given time. Her images engage with the central enormity of the child’s being: its mortality. In the fact of the child’s body lie also the facts of loss and of nonexistence, as well as the possibilities of harm. The child embodies the risk of being alive. The parent-photographer, too, circles the implications of corporeality, attempting incessantly to “capture” the child’s body and thereby ensure or immortalize it. Importantly, this transaction usually requires the child’s attention or participation. The child is asked to smile or look at the camera, to collaborate in the photograph’s illusion of positivity, in which the child’s aliveness belies the prospect of risk. By collaborating, the child appears to agree with the parent’s point of view and with their ownership of the child’s narrative. To photograph a nonattentive child is instead to see their vulnerability and aloneness, to see them as they are.

In Sleep, the children are not only nonattentive, they are inaccessible, sealed into the privacy of the unconscious mind. By photographing them in the dark and seeing only afterward what the camera has seen, Simon regains the objectivity of the artist, and puts it into correspondence with the child’s own objectivity. For the artist-as-mother, this is a form of radical honesty, for she is relegated to the role of bystander and prevented from shaping the image or story of the child to suit herself and make her fears tolerable. It might be felt that the child’s sovereignty is being in some sense breached or invaded, since the collaborative signs of the parent-photograph are absent. However, the child’s usual participation in its mother’s narrative being more or less compulsory, what Simon’s images in fact show are the possibilities of the child’s freedom. Here the child is temporarily oblivious to, and unreachable by, the parent’s artistic and moral control.

A parent quickly learns that “seeing” entails the danger of something unwanted being seen, and of the story being ruined or compromised: the act of seeing is therefore rigorously controlled, so that the parent’s private knowledge of the child is separated from its image, which has been prepared for others to see. In Sleep this control, and the intentions behind it, have been abolished, and the mother shares her true powerlessness, admits the dreadful nature of her fears and responsibilities and her knowledge of what the child is. Here, this knowledge has been gained by her as witness, not as author: it has been gained only by virtue of her being there, and seeing things—through the lens—that she is unable to control or alter. In this knowledge, therefore, lies the truth, and a set of moral responsibilities that are entirely different from the responsibilities of parenthood. Here she is representing the child not as her property or as an object of overwhelming personal importance, but as an autonomous—almost an anonymous—human.

Sleep (2020-2021), installation view.

The world of forms in Sleep obtains a mesmerizing aesthetic: twisted in blankets and bed linens, the bodies at first resemble death. Their entanglement appears to suggest the end of resistance, a sort of drowning. The sight of their surrender immediately arouses our painful knowledge of mortality and of the ways in which we are forced to make this knowledge tolerable to ourselves in our daily lives. The bedclothes by turns shroud and reveal it, acting as a kind of frame or narrative structure, so that we are led deeper into the knowledge rather than rejecting it out of hand. The bedclothes represent familiarity and care: we recognize them, recognize what the act of covering signifies. A body is covered for the sake of modesty, of privacy—in waking life, in sleep, and in death. In Sleep the bodies have frequently fought free of or lost their coverings. Through this act of unconscious assertion, a new definition of the autonomy of the body emerges. In their entanglement the children’s bodies lose their unity, which is to say their identity. We see a limb, a hand or foot, a stretch of torso: the horror and beauty of these sights is offset by the bedclothes as medium, swathing or swaddling the identity-less limbs so that they regain a different kind of coherence. Like a domestic Sistine fresco, this swirl of bodies posits the spectacle of fleshliness against the intangibility of meaning. Instead of the miracle of identity and consciousness, we are offered the miracle of the body, its engineering and functionality, its ineradicable yet mysterious status as the domain of the self.

Having created it, does the parent own the child’s body? Who owns an artist’s work? The notion of copyright is helpful in understanding the way time creates and then destroys the illusion of possession. Having removed the question of identity—not just through the confusion of limbs but through the cropping away of faces—the images in Sleep return to this notion of ownership. The component parts of the child, and their altered meaning when divorced from the whole, offer the key to interpreting the child’s self-possession. Looking at these images, we acknowledge that the limbs must “belong” to somebody. What is a child’s leg, taken separately from the child? What would it mean for us to own it? We would never, for instance, photograph the leg—for the photograph, we must have the whole child. In this way we come to realize that the child is separate from ourselves and cannot be reintegrated into our creation of it. The child’s body can’t be broken up, however much its parents—in acrimony, for instance—might want to divide it. Likewise, a work of art suffers from an inviolable integrity that separates it from its creator.

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Detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021.

We begin to look for other signs of identity in the images: the nightwear we presume the children have had some hand in choosing, the occasional object they have taken to bed with them. One of them has drawn something on its own stomach: are they, in fact, beginning to collaborate in their own way with this nightly recording of their image, speaking back to the lens by exerting some choice in the matter of what it sees? Yet the mystery of sleep is as dense for them as it is for us: each morning they will wake up not knowing where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing. The camera can offer some evidence, some clues, but in the end only deepens the mystery. It is a child’s question—Where do I go when I sleep?—that is also our own unanswered question about mortality.

But it is for its portrait of time itself that Sleep is most unnerving and revelatory. The images convey a stark fact: that the basis of maternal time lies in repetition. The mother’s days and nights represent an accumulation that is barely perceptibly an advance: it is as though she is living the same moment over and over again. Her vigil, her tormenting attentiveness—occurring in the strange prison of love—is the extraordinary sacrifice nature exacts from her. Her children’s nightly escape from that prison in sleep is the foretaste of a greater desertion. One day, having taken what they need from her, they will leave. Summoned away into the night, they are accruing the growth and power that will make that transition possible, while she roams the abandoned landscape of her care of them. Time no longer exists for her in that place of repetition: in her confinement there, however willingly undertaken, she is no longer time’s subject. Just as the lens has no story to tell, no agenda beyond its mere presence, so her own story—her experience—lacks even the most rudimentary illusion of progression. Yet in documenting that state, Taryn Simon has also located its rare and valuable privilege: the opportunity to acquire a selfless knowledge. The mother, should she choose to take it, has the chance to escape the bounds of ego and perception, and to arrive at a new truth. What she does with that truth, when her children have gone and her copyright has expired, when time begins to flow again through her life, is as yet unrecorded.

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Detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021.

 

 

Rachel Cusk is the author of eleven novels, including Second Place, Outline, Transit, and Kudos; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath; and Coventry, a collection of essays.

Taryn Simon’s works, which incorporate mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, are informed by research on and with institutions such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the International Commission on Missing Persons, and the Fine Arts Commission of the CIA. 

Ina Cariño, Poetry

Ina Cariño. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Cariño is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Cariño was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community.

***

From Feast:

balsam pear. wrinkled gourd.
leafy thing raised from seed.

pungent goya, ampalaya: cut
& salt at the sink. spoon pulp

from bumpy rind, brown half-moons
in garlic & sparking mantika.

like your nanay did. like your lola did.
like your manang braving hot parsyak—

you’ll wince. you’ll think of the taste
of your own green body—mapait

ang lasa. your sneer. masakit, dugo’t
laman. it hurts, this smack of bitter.

yes you’ll remember how much it hurts,
to nick your thumb as you bloom heat

in acid, sili at sukang puti—to grow up
glowering in half-light—to flesh out

& plod through your own grassy way,
unfurl your own crush of vines.

after you tip it onto a mound
of steamed rice, as you chew,

the barb of it will hit the back
of your throat. look at yourself,

square. you used to snarl at moths,
start small blazes in entryways.

woodchip fires, flaking paint.
look, tingnan mo—see your lip

curling in the glint of your bowl.
unruly squash. acrid vegetable,

you’ll flinch. you’ll want to see
nothing, taste like nothing. but

when you disappear your meal—
when you choke on the last

chunky morsel of rice—you’ll slurp
thirsty for more—a saccharine life.

huwag mo akong kalimutan,
you’ll plead—

taste me.
taste me.

 

Rita Bullwinkel, Fiction

Rita Bullwinkel. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House, The White Review, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an editor at large of McSweeney’s and a contributing editor of NOON. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts.

***

From “Arms Overhead”:

Mary read to Ainsley.

“Don’t pause between the pages,” Ainsley instructed. “It interrupts the story. You have to read ahead a little or slow down your speech while you’re flipping, so you can say the sentence that straddles the pages without a noticeable break.”

Mary read, “The ouroboros slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below at the same time.”

“That’s right,” Ainsley said. “That makes perfect sense to me.” “Does it, though?” said Mary. “How can it mate with itself?”

“It puts its tail in its mouth, that’s how.”

“So, it metaphorically reproduces,” said Mary.

“Don’t be dense, Mary,” said Ainsley. “It’s science.”

Mary continued to read and Ainsley continued to listen.

Mary was sitting cross-legged, balanced on a stool. Ainsley was lying flat on the wood floor, limbs and hair spread all around. They were both smart girls, but were young enough and pliable enough that it was not yet clear who was smarter. They were the only two people they knew who read a significant amount of books, so they read a great deal together, but they also took long walks in the forests that surrounded their houses and, during the summers, frequently swam and sunned themselves at the community pool.

They thought of themselves as many things, but mostly as humans who other people seemed to identify as young women, which appeared to come with a great many problems, most of which they knew, but some of which they were still in the process of discovering. They had a private joke between the two of them that they were not girls, but, rather, vegetation, plants whose souls were mistakenly rerouted toward the incorrect vessels, and that is why sex made very little sense to them, and why it required a great deal of discussion. In line with their vegetal alter egos, the girls sometimes called each other Red and White, in reference to their favorite fairy tale, because Mary had the dark, tight curls like Rose Red and Ainsley had the pale, blonde, water-straight hair like Snow White. Also, they lived in a part of the country where one had to walk through the woods a great a deal to get anywhere, which seemed to them how things were in the story, and they were, always, traversing the pine-needle paths to get to each other’s houses, so it seemed like a good joke, but also something kind of nice to fantasize about, the two of them someday shape-shifting into flowers and ending up in the same bouquet.

“How can something be above and below at once?” said Mary. “If it’s inside something else,” said Ainsley.

“Oh, I see.”

Jesse McCarthy, Nonfiction

Jesse McCarthy. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Jesse McCarthy is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?—a Time and Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year—and The Fugitivities, a novel. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, and n+1. He also serves as a contributing editor at The Point. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

***

From “Notes on Trap”:

Trap is what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists—completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music—assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology—a form-of-life.

The peculiar condition of being ceaselessly co-opted for another’s profit could arguably point to an impasse, to despair. But here’s the counter: the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

One result of this is that black Americans believe in the power of music, a music without and before instruments, let alone opera houses, music that lives in the kinship of voice with voice, the holler that will raise the dead, the power of the Word, in a way that many other people by and large no longer do—or only when it is confined to the strictly religious realm. Classical European music retained its greatness as long as it retained its connection to the sacred. Now that it’s gone, all that’s left is glassy prettiness; a Bach isn’t possible.

Meanwhile, in the low life of blackness, there is a running fire that even in the midst of its co-optation exceeds the capacity of the system to soak it up. Mozzy is not a tragedian for the ages, but he is closer to the spirit of tragedy, as Sophocles understood it, than David Mamet.

The people who make music out of this form-of-life are the last ones in America to care for tragic art. Next to the black American underclass, the vast majority of contemporary art carries on as sentimental drivel, middlebrow fantasy television, investment baubles for plutocrats, a game of drones.

In Memoriam: Richard Howard

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“The translator’s relation to his to-be-translated writer, or victim,” observed Richard Howard, the poet, translator, and longtime Paris Review poetry editor, in his 2004 Art of Poetry interview, “is essentially erotic and an exchange of mental fluids that cannot be entirely justified or explained.” Howard, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His impact on American letters was immeasurable. He published, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, landmark translations of Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, and André Gide, among others. You can find here an oral history of his life and work that appeared on the Daily in 2017, when he won our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada.

This week, we’re unlocking his 2004 interview as well as his poem “On Tour,” his translation of Baudelaire’s “Parisian Dream,” and an excerpt from his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, accompanied by a brief conversation with George Plimpton. As Craig Morgan Teicher, our digital director and a former student of Howard’s, writes, “To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, poems, and translations, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Poetry No. 86
Richard Howard

History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house—in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom. Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in.

From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996)

POETRY
On Tour
Richard Howard

It is the movement that disturbs the line,
Thickening the form,
Turning into warm
Compression what had once been cold and fine.

From issue no. 13 (Summer 1956)

POETRY
Parisian Dream
Charles Baudelaire

It is a terrible terrain
no mortal eye has seen
whose image still seduces me
this morning as it fades …

Sleep is full of miracles!
Some impulse in my dream
had rid the region I devised
of every growing thing

From issue no. 82 (Winter 1981)

PROSE
From a new translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Richard Howard

PLIMPTON

How many versions of the first line of Swann’s Way did you jot down before you decided what you wanted?

HOWARD

Oh, dozens. And people keep offering me more. Most of my correspondents are pleasant enough about their suggestions (though sometimes people are quite acerb: they assure me I am not qualified to undertake the task, and offer me the right version). I remember one that began: “Repeatedly I remained in bed … ” And I had a letter from one woman, a doctor, who admitted that she had never read Proust but who insisted she could tell from the French title that I didn’t understand the book’s subject. She had not read the book, but she knew … I must say I have given the matter a good deal of thought. I can’t imagine a new solution that would surprise me. But I still get suggestions from the most varied sources. And of course that’s fine. Perhaps everyone should translate Proust for himself—that would be a good way of reading him, no?

From issue no. 111 (Summer 1989)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-nine years’ worth of archives.

Claire Schwartz, Poetry

Claire Schwartz. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service, forthcoming from Graywolf, and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Claire’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. From 2018 to 2020, she wrote a column for The Paris Review called Poetry RX, with Kaveh Akbar and Sarah Kay. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize, and received her PhD from Yale University.

***

From Civil Service:

Apples

The townspeople paste wax apples on the trees,
glow shyly out their windows as the Dictator
struts past the monument of his father strutting
past nothing at all. Yesterday, the Dictator dressed
the Butcher’s boy in the uniform of his own son.
Today, at the orders of the Dictator, guards shot the boy.

In the town of his childhood, the Curator is a tourist.
He touches his mother with the language
with which he does not touch his work.
In the painting, bored bored Eve chomps on an apple.
In the tongue of his work, he acquires her.

At the banquet: music wrung from the townspeople’s anguish,
pigs choked with apples.
The meat in the soup is human meat.
The Dictator’s rings are made of gold
yanked from the teeth of corpses.

The Censor bloats with what he knows.
His sons bloom in neat rows.
An orchard grows inside his wife.
He prunes her on Sundays.

Under the earth, the Butcher’s boy, laughing,
eats an apple. The core rises, light with rot.
The Dictator admires the fruit of his land.

 

Letter by Letter

In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,
the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case
of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.
He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,
the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago
love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.
His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange
to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street
in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower
the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph
languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind
into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand
brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,
the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting
a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,
around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs
through the road. The road which runs through
the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother
only in that she is a story the Archivist tells
himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,
two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.
The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.
Of course, the village burns again. History is
the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter
is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!
The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.

 

Preferential Treatment

The Censor uses the black crayon
to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes
his wife and son to Shake Shack. Whatever
you want, the Censor says to his wife
when she asks what she should have.
The Censor crosses provide for your family
off the list he keeps tucked in his billfold. To track
the time, the Censor sings ”You Are My Sunshine” twice
while his son brushes his teeth. The boy shows the glass
his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear. No,
he is a boy. In the boy’s drawings, the zebras
are purple and white. His mother hangs
them on the fridge. What beautiful horses,
the Censor says. His wife’s wit trembles, then ebbs.
The children’s nails are clogged with black wax.

Nana Nkweti, Fiction

Nana Nkweti. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Nana Nkweti is the author of the story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells. An AKO Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and Clarion West, among others. She has studied international law and trained and practiced as a nurse, and is now a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

***

From “Night Becomes Us”:

Night veils and reveals—her dark face tarted up with stars. Neon-lit. Flossing.

In alleys, on corners; users parlay with pushers. Johns politic with pimps, haggling for discount strange. Hip-hop and synth-pop coat the stained-glass windows of Cream, NYC’s hottest new club—a deconsecrated church where bouncers in muscle tees play Saint Peter at the pearlies. Access granted. Or denied. Zeinab, the ladies’ room attendant, sees none of this from her perch on a high stool in the bathroom—its inky, lacquered black licorice walls shine like mirrors, yet reflect nothing. But it is her job to see. To be ever vigilant in attending to others. She offers a paper napkin, then a shoulder to lean on, to a teary-eyed girl mumbling about that motherfucker who thinks he’s the shit, but he ain’t shit. The aforementioned motherfucker is in the VIP stash, blitzed on Ace of Spades, grinding on some shorty’s phatty. At 3:00 a.m., he will wake up groggy, cuffed to a bedpost, wallet and Air King Rollie long gone, remembering his girlfriend—his ex now probably—had slapped him on the dance floor. Then stormed off to God knows where. Christ.

Zeinab is holding said girlfriend’s hair back, a lace front weave unlacing in the steamy bathroom as the girl dry heaves into the sink. Preoccupied, she fails to see the woman in the purple-sequined mini stealing a fresh pack of spearmint and twenty-eight dollars of her hard-earned tips from the countertop. Her dream fund money.

Zeinab has purchased everything on offer herself: the candy and gum, mouthwash and mints, the combs, hair gels, scrunchies, safety pins, tampons, Band-Aids, Kleenex, lip gloss, snacks, stain sticks, a lint brush, aspirin, and antacids. Her tip jar is full to bursting with crumpled bills pulled from bras and teeny bedazzled clutches. She is well paid and well regarded for her insightful attentions: her crazy glue fix-its for broken stilettos, plastic slippers ready should the bootleg shoe surgery go bust. There is lotion on hand, redolent of water lilies and lemongrass. An appletini air freshener she spritzes in each stall. A crystal garden of fragrances: designer perfumes in vintage atomizers sourced at the variety store off the subway stop in her hood.

The first time she spritzed him with honeysuckle, her cousin’s friend Sa’id told her that her name, Zeinab, meant “fragrant flower” in Arabic. This she already knew but she allowed him his moment, smiling sweetly, rewarded when he leaned into the crook of her neck—close yet not quite touching, an innocent, air bisous-bisous—inhaling deep. She laughed then, taking in his own scent—the honeysuckle, yes, but mixed with something native to him yet familiar, a heady musk that reminded her of evenings back home, lit by blazing stars and the blood orange embers of soft sissoowood fires, burning bright. As a child, while her mother secreted away to their garden to ritually bathe her naked flesh in seasoned smoke, Zeinab dreamed of a different starlit haj, longing to steal away from home, cloak herself in men’s garb, shadow the steps of her nomadic Bororo distant cousins as they tended djafoun cattle in the highlands. Roaming and untethered, whiffs of their scent on the wind were intoxicating.

“You smell like nighttime,” she told Sa’id. “Like freedom.”

“Shukran,” he replied. “An oudh mixture my mother made before I came to America. ‘Let it always remind you of home,’ she told me. I dab it on my beard to remember where I come from.”

Anthony Cody, Poetry

Anthony Cody. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest and the 2021 American Book Award. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award, and was longlisted for the Believer Magazine Editor’s Award. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, he has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and as a poetry editor for Omnidawn.

***

From Borderland Apocrypha:

El Arpa, a Mexican Lynching, No. 53

“The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”

—Jeff Sessions, former U.S. Attorney General, February 12, 2018 to the National Sheriffs’ Association

 

1. The inheritance of the heir is never a dandelion disbursal. Scattershot. Floating beyond fences. Growing elsewhere.

 

2. The inheritance of the elsewhere is a cave of collapse.

 

3. The cave of collapse is work.

 

4. The work is never inheritance of the heir’s or of the heir’s heir, as well as the heir’s heir’s heir.

 

5. The inheritance of repetition is a soundless gavel buried in a shallow grave.

 

6. The shallow grave is the redness of the bouquet a florist selects.

 

7. The bouquet is a leaning into the quiet of a funeral.

 

8. The quiet of a funeral is the Americas.

 

9. The Americas is a platform, built by the settlers, sheriffs, and miners, for the lynching of the other.

 

10. The lynching is in a vigilance committee of NAFTA, Operation Wetback, Maquiladoras, ICE, silences, the agricultural prison industrial complex, and US presidents.

 

11. The silences is a gerrymandering of census data.

 

12. The census data is learning about the word incarceration through the storytelling project playing on public radio.

 

13. The incarceration is an ombligo of shirts in a forest of screams.

 

14. The ombligo is feeding again and never hungry.

 

15. The feeding is a church of excommunications inside a cage of teeth.

 

16. The cage of teeth is elected into office.

 

17. The elected are voting to eliminate whatever and everything.

 

18. The voting are no longer asking permission.

 

19. The permission is trafficking.

 

20. The trafficking is now asked to self-report.

 

21. The self-report is now asked to fill out a binary form in ink, online.

 

22. The binary is seeking a fourth option during the election.

 

23. The election is a wall.

 

24. The wall is a type of silence.

 

25. The silence is a type of America.

 

26. The type of America is in the arrest.

 

27. The arrest is defined as the cessation or stoppage of motion.

 

28. The cessation or stoppage of motion is the fabric veiling the artifice.

 

29. The fabric veiling the artifice is a factory of harps.

 

30. The factory of harps is a maker of a stringless harp.

 

31. The stringless harp is the mute progeny.

 

32. The mute progeny is now the inheritance of the heir.