Borealis (Spatial Species)

by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

It is as if you are trying to land your gaze somewhere, but the landscape won’t let you.

It was like something Marina Abramović might ask people to do to her.

Someone was wearing cowboy boots. It was me.

It was a gorgeous depression of a winter. I walked to the bookstore.

A fragment of an afternoon from that time: We took a walk from a friend’s cabin toward an intersection.

We were surrounded by a nostalgic version of the colors pink and green and yellow and light brown. Like experiencing summer for the first time.

ears like an art teacher’s haircut,

don’t wanna lose my freedom, but don’t wanna lose my sanity either.

When Sarah Palin said it, well, you remember that. But I dare you to go to Alaska and look at a map without saying something equally inane.

In our minds, which are collapsing, Russia can’t possibly be this close. And by Russia, I mean a lot of things.

My friend used to live in a room in a blue house on this mountain, or something was blue.

We were always on somebody’s porch. It was my first living room full of green-eyed lesbian firefighters, the first time I saw queerness has a kind of architecture, a tallness, if a White one.

There is something thrilling to me about a Black woman designing an intervention of a public space, directing how passersby are lit. Even if what she creates resembles a cage.

I begin to think of boredom as a glacier, a cactus flower that blossoms from your mind, inside of which you can look at the world, a lighthouse, a vantage point, a zone of safety.

She speaks of orbiting God in a way that makes me hear the word god differently, and I weep alongside the road.

Now I think crying is like touching time. A halfhearted attempt to crash into now.

Shit, I say to myself as the moose walks over to my rental car.

Is it just me, or have White men just screamed themselves awake into a murder mystery of their own making?

Iron & Wine is WAY TOO WHITE for right now.

Once, I looked at her from across the room and realized she was radiant with disgust.

What they’ve seen of the future in the past prevents them from registering my voice.

If a student wrote that description, I’d circle it and draw a question mark next to it.

A woman walks, kind of delighted by the ground, but maybe she is performing something for her grandson, competing with her husband for “best adult,” “adult most fascinated by the planet.” She reminds me of Joan Didion, but meatier.

She seemed always entangled in bad love.

The island was magical. We saw caves? It felt especially purple in places?

When I don’t leap, I wonder what I’m missing, as if worlds only open in the direction of the unknown.

a woman with a Jo attached to her name.

“You are in a national park. You are with one person but are remembering when you were there with someone else. There is a layering that you don’t want to reveal. You have nostalgia connected to someone else. Private memories emerge while you are trying to pretend that it is something new.”

What is it about the intractability of the past? Why does the mere fact of having been younger once feel so excruciating?

The front end of emotion, before you know what it’s for. Grieving for something ineffable. Just before or behind you.

I look up prices for bear tours. Just the idea gives me a jolt of adventure. Then I shower, wondering if it’s O.K. if the shower is my adventure.

Nay—bejeweled.

How are there so many lesbians here?

something clearly doesn’t translate, or something of the scene, decontextualized, hasn’t translated to me.

John Keene: “What I learned from you: how to glide out of fate’s schedule. Un-time oneself.”

Every dog looks like a wolf to me these days. Even border collies. “He’s a puppy,” one man says as his labradoodle bounds toward me.

“I am scared of pickles and dogs.”

Ilana Glazer, whom I still can’t help but read as Black, has this joke about how she was terrorized by Holocaust simulations in Hebrew school. It is and is not a joke.

The daughter morphs again into a different self, seems almost to coach her mom to follow her there. It’s like she’s dissociating. The mother turns to me and smiles.

Björk says that I should not get angry with myself. She will heal me. But she’ll be using razor blades.

The nineties were full of quasi-lesbians played by actresses with three names.

Despite the way our outfits were color coded and who had what weapon, intrinsic power still lives where it lives.

My boredom feels like an aesthetic challenge.

When I found out he was out of solitary confinement, I was teaching in the woods. I shot up from the table and ran outside. I told the first two people I saw, and neither knew what to say, as if they couldn’t share my joy until they knew why he was in prison in the first place.

Of his own body he writes, “I felt like a question mark at the beginning of a sentence.”

Each time I lay down for him to crack my neck, I wonder if my subconscious has me engaging in some kind of colonial S&M.

When we got home, I missed the hospital, so I started watching Grey’s Anatomy. It didn’t occur to me that this could be grief until season fifteen.

Anchorage has the exhausted quality of a place that spends most of the year in darkness and isn’t terribly concerned with making itself up once the sun is out.

I wanted to record how perfectly it framed the moment, but I knew I would die if I reached for my phone.