The OGQ

STUDIO VISIT

The Writing of Two Signatures

by Sara Ellen Fowler

Some psychics need to scry, some need to scribble wide, ugly pen marks into bulky sketchbooks in order to open their channel, in order to listen. In art school, as an undergraduate, I found my ear through my hands, ravenous as a raccoon, busy to unmake, unspool, and ruin—all manner of objects, garments, furniture I’d scavenged, second-hand. I was magnetized to dross and wielded permission to pull the pieces further apart. To give them air, give them light, the instinct to rend and rend until some essential element yielded—a new insight would race across my vision.

I made performances, videos, and sculptures: talismans of an inner world where language, too, was at the ready. There was always a notebook open in my studio. Spiral-bound, college ruled Bazic notebooks, product of Indonesia, with a pliant paper weight and seductive transparency that I found at Brown and Welin, a compounding pharmacy opened in 1946 in Pasadena, CA. What language sifted to the surface of my consciousness—in the trance of hours, days and weeks, I sat separating the orange and yellow warp and weft of a woven coverlet—I created a transcription. From this origin, temperature and texture and all the formal trappings of sculpture gained grammar. A confusion of sensory information and verbal impression earned a third wit; I touched an electric searching that I would come to understand as poetic mind.

There is a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling alive in Two Signatures (University of Utah Press, 2024), my first book. It is a document that traces dilations of desire and power in my life in the decade after art school as I learned to make a studio of language. I claimed poetry as an art practice, put my physical materials in storage, and set about reinventing how I recorded my attention and curiosity. By hand, in my notebooks, I began charting psycho-spiritual revelations homed in the body’s humble interface with the everyday.

In addition to tableau with lovers and self discovery, the animation of desire and power is found in my experiments in the field of ekphrasis, too. Utilizing details from an artist’s biography in addition to the lively physical stance of their specific practice, I home a searching persona in the particular psychological conditions of art making. Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin are my muses, in this method, in the book. The prose poem “Window” describes: “My canvases fain shudder in the temperature like a horse’s rippling will. I believe in the horizon only. O, let me be hulled in it. A mixed pulse, a wash of, I take the pills: silent dress circle of what care I need to keep painting here.” The poem imagines a galvanized Taos studio in the footprints of pioneering abstract painter Agnes Martin, who left New York and worked for decades in the desert, for its stabilizing sensory balm, while living with a schizophrenia diagnosis. The values that foregrounded Martin’s decision to find peace in the rigid and generous structure of her studio inspire me, as a bipolar person, as I build an expressive practice with candor and insistence. This poem sings an intimate stewardship.

The valences of my book’s title reach across multiple themes homed inside:

One of the foundational questions I was working as I began writing, revising, and sequencing this book: What are signatures of trust and how might they be held, faceted in language? In the trajectory of the book, a reader will find a speaker coming to terms with their own agency. Signatures of mood, psycho-spiritual conditions, and mental illness are expressed in the first-person and also as subject through honoring the legacies of poets Marni Ludwig and Sylvia Plath, who both alchemized psychic pain and succumbed to its torment. “There is a creature just beyond my sightline. / I mark our lyric time unhanded,” (“Blue-brown Morning, I Step Though Common Starlings”) is a line that articulates signatures of time, and how these might slide, another interest animated in the book. This poem was written on the winter set of a indie horror film in Joelton, TN, and shivers in its emotional cadence.

Also, signatures present on a contractual document that articulate devotion and/or power figure; the presence of the hand of each party that reifies an understanding or agreement. In the book, epithalamia hold the signing in ceremony. “We release our signatures like horses failing their bits,” is spoken in “Receiver,” the penultimate poem. Lifting off at the end of the book with a love poem is a decision to highlight the power of a bond that brings a person alive and makes them feel known and accepted.

Two Signatures was recognized with the 2023 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and is being published by the University of Utah Press. I would like to express deep gratitude to the judge, Joan Naviyuk Kane for recognizing my work’s rigor and imagination. In the spirit of my early discoveries with sculpture and clairaudience, it is my intention that this book makes space for readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one’s devotion to creative exploration.

Sara Ellen Fowler is the author of Two Signatures (University of Utah Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry (asselected by Joan Naviyuk Kane). A recipient of a 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, Sara holds a BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Publication credits include: The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Gigantic Sequins, and Cream City Review, among others.

TBD

by RJ Ingram

What the Original Authors are Saying

When I sat down to write the first Nancy Drew book my father Carson Keene had just passed away. Nancy was an opportunity for me to continue our adventures. Now after almost 100 years her adventures   continue. The Autobiography of Nancy Drew is one of the many adventures I had no part in creating. The poet uses Nancy & dozens of other “divas” to investigate his own relationships & struggles w/ the tools of a great detective: patience, a keen eye & a tall glass of presumption. The Autobiography of Nancy Drew opens w/ a dedication to the poet’s recently deceased mother who putters in a handful of times throughout the book. However, framing this collection of sonnets & thirst traps (whatever that means!) as both odes & elegies might better equip the reader for doing their own investigating. I’m glad Nancy’s stories are still being told & I encourage the author of The Autobiography of Nancy Drew to read a few more of them!

-Carolyn Keene, author of The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories

* * *

The last time I read a sonnet America was openly at war & smoking was good for you. When my dear friend & collaborator Carolyn Keene sent me a copy of The Autobiography of Nancy Drew inscribed w/ “What do you think, Frank?” I thought I was once again falling for a Nigerian Prince scam. Alas it was not a scam, but just a collection of poems. Fine poems. There was one about Baba Yaga on holiday that I quite enjoyed. But the whole time I kept asking “Where’s Nancy?” I asked Carolyn for help & she wrote back (the imaginary still send letters) “Read it again.” So I did & on the second read through I stopped looking for Nancy & started to pretend I was her. Sharp, smartly dressed, bursting w/ questions. And there she was! All of us become detectives when those around us die, the literary fiction industry is sure of that. And w/ every loss each of us gets closer & closer an understanding of who we really are. I very much liked what I found when I got there, if only I had a cleaner map to help me along the way.

-Franklin W. Dixon, author of The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories

* * *

Unavailable for comment.

-Edward L. Stratemeyer (1862-1930), creator of Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys

THE  SUITE WITH THE YELLOW HAT

VII THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

RETURNS FROM A WORK TRIP

 She cuts her hair w/out a mirror in a cabin

Aboard a large boat named after Calypso

The tin panel reflects enough of a face

Torn & ran to rags barely woman anymore

The Hat remains her only clean feature

Propped up on the bed a secret lover

Nearly lost both of them should be happy

But The Hat only knows as much happiness

She allows it & tonight they drink bitter

Water & eat stale smuggled crackers

She nearly lost The Damn Thing yesterday

In a series of events drawn like illustrations

She came to Africa looking for trophies

Curiosity sleeps all tied up under her bed

VI The Woman With The Yellow Hat

Sleeps Through Boarding

 The same dream: floating alone in a raft

In an infinity pool on the roof of a hotel

Cheap champagne rains down like darts

The glass surface disrupted like war zones

Ink blots fill the balloon less sky & men

Can be heard arguing about micro-dosing

Or micro-aggressions you can’t really tell

It’s one of those dreams where the smells

From the pretzel stand seep in like an Evil

Twin hair pinned to the side just the way

You try to do yours & she’s eating her way

Thru an artisan sourdough masterpiece

A kind they would never sell at airports

The beast spits gin right into your mouth

V THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

CRASHES YET ANOTHER BIRTHDAY PARTY

Sneaking into a party is easy w/ a monkey

Everyone wants to see you perform tricks

You oblige the little ones until they grow

Tired & bored hey! try to mingle w/ adults

Mr Martini makes chitchat about weather

A topic only Long Island Iced Tea indulges

Rum & Coke want to ask about monkeys

As if you’re some kind of fancy authority

You tell them monkeys can be dangerous

The horrible legends & stories are all true

Someone says they knew a man’s monkey

Wreaked havoc on an entire subway car

Yours looks like he wants to go after cake

The same party: always leave after cake

IV THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL A LITTLE AFRAID

The big city tucked into bays a fitted sheet

Men circle along the park sidewalk riddles

Drip out of their mouths the way precut

Proceeds a dreaded onslaught of How

Come you ain’t looking this way you’re so

Good looking but whey don’t you wear

Makeup god you’re just another tease real

Classy ignoring Do You Know Who I Am?

Mr Who I Am retreats after a year or so

His lot in life is to be condemned writing

The same obscenities at more woman

Your monkey does nothing to stave his calls

If anything monkey encourages behavior

Best suited for greasy dive bar bathrooms

III THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

PASSES TIIME WITH YET ANOTHER GAME

OF LOTERIA

The Barflies have been staring at The Hat

Like a trophy to be won at a carnival game

A stetson w/ a secret the color of fictional

Lemonade mere cartoon of hat & woman

I used to let men win me prizes like the hat

Would let them toss rings until the bottles

Topple onto linoleum wet w/ carney piss

Would watch guns squirt right into the eye

Now the monkey is keeping men at bay

Frolicking too frilly for their grit & grime

I knew he was good for at least something

Like shuffling packs of cards & cockblocks

The lady passed a cemetery & finds herself

Do not miss me sweetheart: Hat of Queens

II THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

EXPERIENCES SEMANTIC SATIATION

When you said monkey all I heard was

Mommy as in the woman who nearly killed

Me before bringing me back to life w/money

For lessons to swim to ski to sail to drive

To type out Shakespeare on a typewriter

For all the shitty things not exchanged

As in the only way I could dress that way

Was to join a monastery bc even monks

Get more action bc keys evolved from cage

The same way many still deny our own

Moments alone minutes alone minuets

To play on the church basement piano

Listen I know the woman you’re talking

About the small one who refuses to smile

I THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT

FREES HERSELF FROM SLEEP PARALYSIS

The room shut off stacked like candles un-

Ignited yet the smell of cream & berries

Seeps in thru wax dripped on the dresser

Can he smell them? the golden monkey

A visitor his slant nose cut as if w/ twine

No which is why he presses his black hand

On my chest so much weight so much fire

In his sexless eyes as try as I try to scream

My body to wake but I cannot yell just spit

Gurgle & spit until sleep the monkey still

Presses his tiny spider hand that weighs

On like a stack of stones a cairn carried

Here from the bottom of the mountain

A stone for every moment stacked until

ON READNG POETRY TO WRITE NONFICTION

by Dashka Slater

New York Times-bestselling author Dashka Slater has been described as a “triple threat” for her success in journalism, fiction, and children’s literature. The author of fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction for children, teenagers, and adults, her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has won numerous awards, including the
2024 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from the Columbia Journalism School and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for her nonfiction narrative, Accountable, the 2023 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Award for her short story, “The Jeanines of Summer,” and the 2018 Wanda Gág Read Aloud Award for her picture book, Escargot. A 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a 2005 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dashka is a frequent speaker at schools, conferences, colleges, and universities. She lives in Oakland, California and teaches at Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. Learn more at www.dashkaslater.com.

WHY DECIDED TO WRITE MY MEMOIR AND SHARE MY STORY

by Rosa Lowinger

A version of this essay was published on October 10, 2023 in Women Writers, Women’s Books.

 In 2009, I was a Rome Prize Fellow at the Academy in Rome, researching the history of vandalism to art and public places. I had spent three decades working as a conservator of art and architecture, and I finally had time to write and think about a topic that was vexing me constantly- why people deliberately damage things of value.

Day in and day out I pondered the duality of damage and repair. Was there a common thread between unauthorized attacks on works of art? A connection between graffiti and the systematic destruction of monumental Buddhas, mosques, synagogues and churches? One day, while prowling through the Academy’s library, I came upon Primo Levi’s memoir “The Periodic Table.” Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist who had written several books about his time in Auschwitz. The Periodic Table used his work as a chemist was an organizing metaphor for telling stories about his ancestors.

I was immediately struck by Levi’s book, and excited by the possibility of using the same structure for a memoir about art conservation. No one in my field had ever done this before. Those of us who repair works of art occasionally show up in fiction; but we’re mostly depicted as part-time sleuths, or spies, or dewy-eyed ingenues who succumb to torrid passions with the owners of old master canvases. We are clichés in literature, but none of us had ever tried to counter those narratives by penning a memoir of our own about the way we think, plan, approach a treatment, or manage limitations. Levi’s book was the perfect model. Now all I needed was to tease out what the story was going to be about.

My first published book Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub had been a sort-of memoir. Written with Ofelia Fox, the octogenarian widow of the famous cabaret’s owner, it told the history of 1950s Cuba, the time and place where I’d been born, through the lens of its most glamorous performance venue. My editor, Tim Bent at Harcourt, suggested that I weave my relationship with Ofelia into her stories about dazzling nights of mambo, Celia Cruz, and mobsters in the place known as the “Paradise Under the Stars.” Ofelia’s so-called “housemate” Rosa Sanchez liked to hover around us as we worked, pouring martinis and coyly steering my inquiries away from anything that touched upon the well-documented fluid sexuality of Tropicana’s denizens.

Just as we got to the end of the writing, Ofelia and Rosa trusted me to tell the truth about their four decades of love and devotion to each other. “People can be more than one thing,” Ofelia explained sagely. “I just needed to be sure we could trust you.”

Around the time that Tropicana Nights came out, my 25- year marriage fell apart. So did my relationship with my business partner- the third such failure in two decades. I left for Rome, fell in love again, and started a new conservation practice upon returning to Los Angeles. Eventually RLA Conservation, LLC became the largest woman-owned conservation firm in the United States, and the only one Latina-owned.

Then, in 2019, my father died. Six months later, the world went into lockdown. To fill my days that summer of the virus, I began writing a novel about 1950s Havana. A fictionalized version of the Tropicana story, Paradiso Cabaret’s main characters are a showgirl who was been raised in an orphanage under destitute conditions, and a Romanian Jewish immigrant to Cuba who trained as an art restorer in 1930s Rome. One day during the dark days of the lockdown, I realized that the showgirl and the art restorer were stand-ins for my parents. Their fraught backgrounds and tumultuous marriage formed the emotional core of the novel. My father had wanted to study architecture in Cuba, but his Romanian immigrant father refused him. My fictional art restorer had his heart and personality.

Every night during the years of the pandemic, I ‘d call my widowed mother in Miami. She’d wail, beside herself: “I am alone, alone! No one cares about me. My life is worse now than when I lived in the orphanage!” She kept repeating stories about her terrible days of trauma. One of the most vivid was about having to clean 10 marble tables each day in the orphanage.

One morning, I wrote the words, “A five-year old’s hand drags a soapy rag across a marble table.” And then: “I, too, am an expert in cleaning marble.” That was the beginning of  Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, a book in which I explore the way repair of the material world can provide guidance for personal and societal healing.  Last summer, before Dwell Time was published, I workshopped Paradiso Cabaret I am back to writing about paintings conservation in 1950s Havana.

Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born writer and art conservator working in Los Angeles and Miami.  A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation and the Association for Preservation Technology, Rosa was awarded the 2009 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome to research the history of vandalism to art and public space. Rosa’s books include Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt: 2006), Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure, American Seduction (FIU Press, 2016), and Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House: 2023), winner of the American Institute for Conservation Kress Publication Grant and recipient of a Kirkus starred review. Short stories include Repairing Things and Buried Treasure for Bridges to Cuba, published by University of Michigan Press, and The Empress of the Waves for Una Isla en La Luz (TraPublishing: 2017). Her first play The Encanto File, was produced in 1991 by the Women’s Project and Productions at the Judith Anderson Theater and published in Rowing to America and Sixteen Other Short Plays, edited by Julia Miles (Smith & Kraus, 2002). Rosa is the author of the 2023 Lithub essay Life as a Conservator: Learning to be Grateful for Failure and many articles on Cuba, art conservation, vandalism, and contested monuments. She co-curated Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium at the Coral Gables Museum (2013), and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure, American Seduction at the Wolfsonian Museum. Rosa’s work has been featured in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including a November 3, 2023 feature in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. 

ON TITLES

by Jaclyn Moyer

I can no longer remember when I first gave a name to the manuscript that eventually became On Gold Hill, only that at some point midway through what would turn out to be a decade-long process I gathered up an unwieldy assortment of material— half-finished essays and sketches of scenes, lists of questions and passages quoted from other books— corralled them all into a single Scrivener document, and labeled the file: “On Wheat.”

At the time, I didn’t think of those two words as a title, more of a framing device to guide the contents that made its way inside the document. Nor did I consider the document to be a book. Instead, I thought of it simply as a project. Had I set out to write a book from the beginning, I almost certainly would have been too daunted to proceed. But a project I could undertake. A project had no definitive end point, no expected output, but was instead expansive, experimental, process-oriented. A book was a thing one made, while a project was a thing one did.

For the bulk of the ten years I worked on On Gold Hill, this way of thinking served me well. It kept me writing through periods of intense uncertainty, kept me at my desk in the throws of self-doubt. (It didn’t matter that I could not write a book, because I was not trying to write a book, I was just working on my project.) But at some point, when I had a completed narrative and was ready to have other people’s eyes on it—mentors and readers, potential agents and editors—I had to start thinking of “the project” in more concrete terms. Though it was well over 100,000 words, the prospect of calling it a book felt no less unnerving than ever, the noun struck me as both intimidating and pretentious at once. So I got comfortable instead with the word “manuscript.” A manuscript, like a project, exists in-progress, unfixed. A manuscript did, however, need a name.

At first, I considered sticking with “On Wheat.” After all, it had been there, faithfully heading the document all these years, and seemed deserving of a promotion to title. I liked the classic simplicity, how it payed homage to the essay tradition, they way is suggested an act of turning this one thing—wheat—over and over in ones hand to examine it from all angles.

My early readers did not agree. “You can improve the title, I think” wrote one.

“What will you call it?” asked another, to whom I replied, “The title is on the manuscript.”

“Oh, I guess I didn’t see it.“ She said.

“Its on the first page.”

“Where?”

“Right there,” I pointed to the words On Wheat, centered in the title position at the top of the page.

“Oh,” she said, and then, “That’s it?”

I began to cast about for a new title. One day, while reading about wheat morphology, I came across a passage describing the distinctions between various plant parts. “Roots,” a sentence read, “are underground organs.”

I wrote those words out on a sticky note and stuck it to the wall over my desk. Roots Are Underground Organs. That’s it, I thought, that’s my title. I liked the way the fact, out of context and isolated in that way, read like poetry. It fit the genre of my book—which was partly a heavily researched inquiry into aspects of the history of agriculture, and part-memoir—and it alluded to the main theme of a search for heritage. I erased “On Wheat” and replaced it with those four words. And for a few years, they remained.

But at some point the manuscript seemed to squirm out from under this name too. The title no longer fit in the way it once had, it struck me now as too narrow, too specific. Though it had come to me unsolicited from the pages of that textbook, it now sounded to my ears as contrived, over-wrought.

I erased the title, reverted once again to “On Wheat.”

It was in the course of another revision, that I found what I believed was the true and most perfect title of the project. The line was right in front of me, in a passage I had written about advances in plant breeding at the start of the 20^th century: Laws of Inheritance. For one, those three words strung together just sounded like a title. The line had that solid, full ring to it. But it was the double meaning, the deft joining together of the two threads of the manuscript that I found most beautiful. In one sense, the phrase evoked the project’s central questions: How are we bound by our personal and collective histories? What does it mean to loose, or to regain, ones heritage? In another sense, it referred to Gregor Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance, the groundbreaking biological theory that described, for the first time, the workings of genetic inheritance thus forever changing the trajectory of plant breeding and agricultural development.

I imagined the satisfaction a reader would feel, mid-way through the book, when she encountered the passages about Mendel and the second meaning of the title emerged. I imagined it would feel like the moment when, looking at one of those duplicitous images, what had been a duck suddenly becomes, with a shift of perspective, a rabbit.

I erased “On Wheat” and placed “Laws of Inheritance” at the top of the manuscript, where it remained through the process of finding an agent and, later, a publisher.

Over the many months my editor and I worked on final trims and revisions to the manuscript, we didn’t talk about the title. Though I’d been warned that editors tend to have a lot to say about titles, I assumed she, and everyone else at the publishing house, found mine just as perfect as I did. It remained on the title page as I made my last revisions in the weeks before we planned to transmit the manuscript to the production team, after which no more substantive changes could be made.

The date of this transmission loomed large in my mind. If I thought about it too much, it terrified me. For this would mark the moment when this thing that had been for so many years a malleable, fluid, work-in-progress would harden into its final and fixed form. Like a clay pot entering a kiln, I knew once we transmitted the pages to the production team, outside of fixing errors or typos, they would no longer be changeable.

A week or two before the deadline, my editor wrote to say the marketing and publicity team had some issues with the title. They found it too abstract, not evocative enough, not compelling. In short, they wanted something different.

At first, I pushed back. Maybe they just didn’t understand the title, after all not everyone had read the manuscript. I explained the double meaning, how it alluded to the central themes and to the history of plant breeding. They were not impressed. A title, they explained from the marketing perspective, had to do its work before a word of the book had been read. It didn’t matter if, halfway through the book, it’s meaning was suddenly revealed in a satisfying way: If a title failed, a reader would not get halfway through the book because she wouldn’t pick it up at all. A title must pull a reader in on its own.

I remained convinced. In part, I couldn’t get behind this idea because I still wasn’t ready to conceive of what I’d made as a book, to imagine it as an object on a shelf. Though the words would, of course, come at the very beginning, choosing the final title, I realized, was for me a kind of ending. Each of the former title iterations had served its time before eventually sloughing off like a shed skin, allowing space for the manuscript to grow, to change shape. But this one would remain, sealing the manuscript into its present form, transforming it from a fluid project to a static book.

Up until this point, the practice of writing this manuscript had been, foremost, a form of inquiry. From sketching the first scenes, to wandering the winding corridors of research, to puzzling out the structure, possibilities abounded. Even the last line edits offered up unexpected insights: While searching for a better adjective to replace one that didn’t land quite right I recalled a long-forgotten memory of my childhood home; when I called my Dad to fact-check a detail about the car he drove when he met my mother, the question sent him down a rabbit hole of memories and I found myself listening to family histories I’d never before heard; in re-writing a clumsy sentence, I arrived at a deeper understanding of the idea I was trying to express. Each time I read the manuscript, something new emerged, revisions were called for: how could I consign the project to an unchangeable state? I thought of a taxidermyed animal, a once-living creature rendered stiff and glass-eyed.

The days ticked by and I could not come up with a new title. My editor and I bounced ideas back and forth, some seemed to have potential but then, a day later I’d read them again and cringe. Nothing fit. The deadline loomed. I could not bring myself to settle on a name.

One day, with a flurry of unsatisfactory titles swirling in my thoughts, I took a tablespoon of sourdough started from the jar on my counter and began to mix a leaven. Perhaps baking bread would clear my head. For the past 15 years I’d made sourdough bread every week. At times, I’d baked professionally in batches as large as 120 loaves per day. Other times, I’d made only enough to last my family the week, three or four loaves.

The act of choosing a title, it occurred to me as I coaxed water into flour with my hands, reminded me of cutting the slash into an unbaked loaf before loading it into the oven. After the two-day process of preparing the dough—the precise measuring of flour, water, salt; the long bulk fermentation; the careful stretches and folds; the shaping; the second rise—the slash marked final moment in which my hands would alter the outcome of the bread. It was a small thing, yet it would have significant consequences for the final loaf: the depth and shape of the cut would dictate how and where the dough would swell as it rose, defining not just its outer appearance—the ears and pattern of the crust— but also the internal crumb structure. It was a swift action, occurring in less than three seconds, but its mark on the bread would be indelible. Titling my manuscript felt similar: it marked the last tweak, the final touch before things were out of my hands and what had begun as a blank page—all possibility—would become only exactly what it was.

This comparison sent a quake of nausea through my gut. Immediately I recognized the feeling: when I first started selling bread, each time I slashed a round of loaves and loaded them into the oven, a similar wave of anxiety filled me as I waited to see the bread in its final form, to pull the loaves out of the oven and slice a serrated knife through the crust to inspect the crumb. When a bake disappointed me—a batch left to ferment too long turned out flattish and overly sour, or another, proofed at too cool a temperature failed to fully swell in the oven, the crumb uneven and overly chewy—I was devastated, furious and overcome with a sense of failure. I determined to avoid this feeling by getting better, by mastering every aspect of bread. But as my skills as a baker increased, so too did my standards: I could not avoid disappointment.

The only way out of this mental minefield, I found, was to focus not on the outcome but on the process. Though each loaf I pulled from the oven had reached its final and fixed form, the larger project of baking remained a work-in-progress. Saturday’s loaves, imperfect as they might have been, would be eaten and soon enough next Thursday would roll around and I’d take my starter out of the fridge, feed it with warm water and fresh flour, and begin again. The starter itself evidenced the ongoingness of the process, a through-line that threaded each loaf to the ever-evolving practice of baking bread.

Perhaps I could think about writing in these same terms. A book had an endpoint, a final form, but the larger project continued. Of course I would look back upon these pages in a year—or five, ten—and see them differently, find them imperfect, riddled with changes begging to be made. But maybe that wasn’t evidence of fault, only proof of the ongoing evolution of myself and my work as a writer.

With only a few days remaining before the deadline, I considered again what my publishing team had advised: a title must do its work before a word of the book is read. It must compel a window shopper or library goer to pause, must evoke an image or feeling or question, must, as one writer told me, promise something.

I wrung my brain for ideas, to little avail. I wrote out the names of my favorite books—The Far Field, Lila, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Salvage the Bones, The Grapes of Wrath. This, I found, was equally unhelpful: Once I’d read a book, I could no longer read the title without hearing echos of the book itself, could no longer imagine what effect the words might have had on their own.

So I rode my bike to the library and walked the stacks, reading spine after spine. Some titles were poems in themselves: A Heart is A Muscle the Size of a Fist, others just a stark word or two: Aftershocks. The Orchard.

I wrote lists of possible ideas that spanned the spectrum from a sentence (Every Seed Contains a Root) to a single word (Diaspore) to actions (Saving Seed). I tried the classic phrasing of The ____ (The Common Field). I sent my ideas to my editor, and she shared hers. At some point the phrase “Gold Hill” entered our list. This was the name of the region where most of my manuscript was set. I recalled a piece of writing advice I’d once been given: When stuck, start in place. It was a trick I’d used over and over in the course of writing the manuscript. Perhaps this could work with the title, too. Perhaps “Gold Hill” was the place to begin. Still, something about this name wasn’t quite right, lacking somehow. My editor suggested “Grown on Gold Hill,” but this sounded to me more like a marketing slogan for regional produce than a literary title. So we scratched “grown” to find ourselves left with, simply: “On Gold Hill.”

I did not immediately love this title. There was no ah-ha moment, no instant feeling of “yes, that’s it!” It was not earth shattering, not even particularly catchy or poetic. It did, however, evoke something. It prompted a bit of wondering, some intrigue. All this pleased my publishing team, but what I found most compelling about “On Gold Hill” was the way those three words formed an incomplete sentence, one in which the ending remained unwritten. In place of resolution, it offered only possibility.

GROWING UP IN CHICAGO HOUSE MUSIC

by Marguerite L. Harrold

This essay appeared originally in the February 3, 2020 issue of Chicago Review. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Some people go to church, I go to the disco. I was baptized by Chicago house music back in 1983. Yes, I am a heathen, in the purest sense.

For those of us who live in it, those of us who were born in Chicago between 1964–1980, house music was an ever-present staple on Saturday night radio. If you were too young to get into a club, WBMX, Saturday Night Live, Ain t No Jive, Dance Party, featuring “The Hot MIX FIVE,” was the club. Me and my cousin Carol would turn up the radio and practice our best moves. Grandma Gert would peek her head in and sometimes come in to show us how to really get down. Sometimes a group of us were all hanging around, sitting on somebody’s car, in Markham, IL, and the mixes would start. All of us would be dancing in the street. It was a party.

By the time I turned fourteen, I was allowed to go out to Markham Skating Rink on Saturday nights. A friend named Derrick would shuttle carloads of us back and forth. There was a tiny little disco, with an even tinier dance floor in the back of the rink that played some of the best house music I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t really dance back then, but I had to be there.

Some of these dancers had Soul Train moves, I mean twists and kicks and the high jump kick and twirl! People made a circle, taking turns, one at a time, showing off what they could do. Sometimes they turned into battles, not as aggressive as break-dance battles, which were also happening then. These were more sensual and stylistic. I never reached that level, but there was a point, when a song dropped, where everyone got on the floor and the place was so small, there was no wall to stand on. You just got swiped up and you had to move something. Our bodies were so jammed together, it was easy just to follow the beat of the one in front and the one in back of you. Sometimes I was sandwiched between two boys and sometimes it was two girls. Yes, there was humping, but it wasn’t lecherous. It was just people, eyes closed, hips pumping, swaying, hands in the air, high on the rhythms in the music. You felt that beat from the ground up.

When an older friend, Johnny Williams, told me about this place underground that played the best house music he’d ever heard, I had to go. I was fourteen and the party didn’t even get started until 2 a.m., and it was in the city. It was The Muzic Box on Lower Wacker Dr. and South Water St. It was literally a long black box, with nothing but a strobe light, steam, and bodies moving. I had to sneak out. I went to the Muzic Box a total of six times, each time grounded for a month, but it was worth it. Eventually, I learned how to “spend the night at a friend’s house.” When I met Honey Dijon in high school, she took me to all the house music parties at The Playground, The Power Plant, Club LeRay, Medusa’s, and Smartbar. By that time, I was completely obsessed.

House music validated my experiences as a Black person, as an oddball, as a bisexual, and as a human being. The music put my pain into healing song. The songs reflected love lost, liberation, and freedom. The people, mostly Black gay men, were welcoming and supportive. They cared for me as if I was part of the family. Way too young to be in the club, they watched me to make sure I stayed out of trouble. I was pretty straightlaced. I didn’t smoke or drink. All I wanted to do was dance to the music.

When I found house music, I found something that my soul needed. I found a space where the anger and pain, the brewing sexuality and violence in me could be soothed. I found a place where the abandoned oddball, the freaky nerd, could be free and accepted. I’d lose myself and find my heaven in a black box in a basement with sawdust on the floor. The center of me, dancing on a speaker, dancing all over the room, with everyone and no one in particular. Just as comfortable in a silky dress as I was in cutoffs, a Fishbone T-shirt, and five-holed, steel toe Doc Martins. I was there for the music. To dance and sweat until it ran down my face like a sun-shower. Until my arms and legs felt like wet noodles. Stop. Drink water. Repeat.

Born in Chicago, house music is the granddaughter of gospel and soul, the daughter of disco and blues, the sister of jazz, funk, and new wave. Her children are techno, freestyle, jack, juke, trip-hop, EDM, trap, and all the others who claim her.

House music originated at The Warehouse circa 1977. It was created by Black gay men. Combining city innovations, southern roots, and African heritage, it was a culture within a culture, yet it was not exclusionary. If you knew where the party was, you were welcomed in. Come as you are. Wear what you want. Be as you are or who you want to be. At a house music party, everyone is a freak and all the more precious for it. House music is what we want to be in the world and how we want the world to be.

Originally, house music was not necessarily about resisting or restructuring the dominant culture. It was about creating a space where Black gay men and other gay men of color could be free, safe, and expressive among themselves. It was a communal space, a safe haven in Chicago, which was often oppressive and repressive of gay and Black people. White gay culture was not accepting of Black gay men, despite a common otherness. Black gay men were often required to present three forms of identification in order to gain entry into North Side white gay clubs. It was necessary for Black and Latino gay men to create spaces of their own. In doing so, they made spaces for all of us. The music quickly spread throughout Chicago, New York, London, and Detroit.

Different from house music in London or New York and from the rave scene, Chicago house music was not about drugs. The music is the drug itself, and in Chicago it is the drug of choice. The feeling of music moving through you is the kind of euphoria people who do drugs are trying to get. There is an almost surrealist style to the way people move: legs kicking in the air, spinning, back bends, grinding, jacking, and jerking. There is someone with a tambourine, a whistle, a hand drum. To an outside observer it may look ritualistic, tantric; these bodies, this communal art. The energy is so addictive. The release so complete.

House music is ecstatic, in the way a Black Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal church service can be. It is participatory. The bass pops pieces of asphalt up off the street and you feel the music before you even get to the door. The kick drum surges your heartbeat. The cymbals rustle the butterflies in your stomach. It’s rapturous and the waves overtake you. It is the church choir, a juke joint on fire, a sonic tattoo. House music etches itself into your skin. Bodies ribbon together in the savory heat.

Like church, Chicago house music was and continues to be a central force for social interaction, spiritual liberation, and community. For those of us who grew up in Chicago house music, it is very personal. You’ll hear the phrase, “Some call it house. We call it home,” and in Chicago that is the truth. To be called a house head is a badge of honor and a way to locate your own people. Like church, the Black church in particular, house music parties are accepting of all who come through its doors, hear the 4/4 beat, feel the bass coming up from the street into the soles of their feet, and find their body moving.

Like a preacher, the DJ is the leader. The congregation and the crowd feed the service. When the preacher’s sermon causes him to bounce on his heels, the congregation bounces with him and the vibrations shake the room. He calls out his refrain and the congregation responds with an Amen or a Yes Lord. As the choir sings, something within you is released in the rhythm and the assembly of voices. The creaking of the floorboards and the heat of the congregation swaying together, rocking side to side, hands clapping, feet stomping, creating a wave of sound and movement that takes a singular body and pulls it into the collective. At a house party, you will hear the same call-and-response, though it may be a collective, Oooh Shit, or an Alright, or a Hell Yeah. There will be hands raised in the air in praise and eyes closed as bodies move in unison.

If you listen to the lyrics in most house music songs, you’ll see that they are about love and finding peace and freedom. They are about people finding their way out of stereotypical roles, or bad relationships. It’s about coming out, yes, sometimes out of the closet, but in more ways than sexuality or gender identification. It’s about coming out of the walls society has built for us. Songs of triumph over the pain in the world. Songs of loss and grief and survival. Songs that truly represent the Black experience, the gay experience, the human experience, such as “Promised Land” by Joe Smooth:

Sisters, brothers. One day we will be free from fighting, violence, people crying in the streets. When angels from above fall down and spread their wings like doves. As we walk, hand in hand, sisters, brothers, we’ll make it to the Promised Land.

Many house music songs are actually gospel songs, such as “I Want to Thank You” by Alicia Myers, or “I Get Lifted” by Barbara Tucker. People are likely to get the Holy Ghost on the dance floor just as they would in the church aisles, often with the exact same dance moves. In church you shake your neighbor’s hand or hug your neighbor. At a house party, you dance up close, juke or jack your neighbor, or the nearest speaker, body pressed up against it, feeling literal wind from the vibrations of the sound. The Spirit is unleashed in the gathering. People who’ve never met one another hug, smile, give dap, dance arm in arm, sing in unison, and raise their hands in praise. This unifying energy is the essence of Chicago house music.

At a house party, someone either drags you out on the dance floor or the DJ plays a song that has you tapping your feet, and before you know it there are people dancing around you and you are swept up in the crowd. When you go to a house party, you are part of something, not just a bystander. You are part of the creation of the work of art happening at that moment. You are welcomed and encouraged to participate.

House music is a place, a state of being, but it is not tied to any particular venue. A house party can pop off anyplace. It could be in any neighborhood in town, an underground black box room with only a strobe light and steam, a hotel ballroom, an abandoned warehouse, a beach, or a car radio with seven teenagers dancing around it.

The party followed the DJ, no matter where it was. (We still call any house music function a party.) Sometimes a club didn’t even have a name, or it wasn’t quite a club at all, but a restaurant rented out on a slow night, turned into disco heaven. There was a place called Kings & Queens, which was an empty loft space on Lake St., that literally had a giant hole on the dance floor where you could see three stories down. We just danced around it. This spot only lasted a month.

Chicago house music traveled the world and came home to show us all the things she has in her bags. The first time I heard house music played by a live band, I lost it. It was a dream musical collaboration on the level of Kate Bush making a record with Prince, or Anthrax together with Public Enemy. There was Peven Everett and Tortured Soul (from New York) and the New Orleans brass band The Soul Rebels playing an entire set of Chicago-style house music. It was a whole new level of experience. The live drums vibrating against my body, the walls, the floor. An electric bass grooving a house lick. I was filled up and taken over as I watched the room explode with the kind of shared energy that can only be described as spirit.

“Oooh shit,” I said out loud, bouncing up and down, waiting for the bartender. A beautiful, hefty queen my mom’s age looked over at me. “Sorry,” I said, realizing I nearly screamed in her ear. She smiled, laughed, and said, “That’s all right baby. That’s what it’s all about.” She was bouncing too and gave me a big hug before she swished her way to the dance floor.

House music is constantly in motion and ever changing. It is a dynamic art form. It does. It makes. It becomes. It takes hold of your insides and finds brightness. It finds your pain and brings you joy. It finds your weirdo and brings out your sassy, your funky, your truest you. There is freedom and liberation and hope in this music. Created out of marginalization and segregation it continues to bring people of all walks of life together.

To say what house music is can never really be completely accurate because house music means something unique to every person who experiences it. But once it takes hold of you, it will never let you go. And I am truly grateful.

Marguerite  L. Harrold is a poet, writer, educator, community activist and ecologist, originally from Chicago. She is the author of Chicago House Music, Culture and Community. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is an Associate Editor for Prairie Schooner, and the Educational Promotions Manager for African Poetry Book Fund at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Chicago Review, RHINO, Anti-Heroin Chic and other journals.

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WHY PEOPLE HATE MIMES

by Ismet Prcic

Portland. Pioneer Square. Polite precipitation. People.

People just being people: alone, in duos, trios, in groups. Alone people in duos, trios, groups. A larger gathering slowly assembles around the square’s center, eyes up from their I- phones, giving reality a chance. Not a long one. The phones are not off. The phones are still in hand and at the ready, facing up, gaping still. But the eyes are off the screens for the moment.

In the center, on the cement, a street performer. Female, forties, sinew leaching on bone, agile. Sensible loafers, navy blue pants, latitudinally-striped T-shirt, white caked-on face make-up topped with a French beret—a uniform. Eerily make-uped white eyelashes. Three small black triangles drawn upon each cheekbone, each pointing back to the irises, watery blue them. Beautiful. Other face orifices dark places as if hacked and punched into dried papier-mâché face-like surface with angular objects. Keep Portland Weird button where her left boob isn’t, pinned upside down to be weird. An amputee perhaps, or just naturally like that. Only stripes where her right boob isn’t.

She seems to be inside an invisible box, the old popular. Wherever she turns, in every direction, she’s limited by the edges of what people cannot see but it’s really there for her to feel. Despite the fact that the box cannot be seen people can gauge, glean that the box is there. So to speak. She is helping them gauge the borders of where the box ends and reality begins.

I’ll believe it when I see it, people sometimes say, blinking their fallible, human eyes.

__

I returned to Portland from my annual sabbatical to the motherland with a horrific Bosnian sunburn and sourness in my mouth. The day before my flight back I had decided to skip visiting my father’s grave once again (trip # 3 already) for… well, for a lot of things really, and this guy I knew during the war – a berserker of a soccer hooligan turned respectable banker – told me he would teach me how to fish for chub. He paid for everything, the trip, the equipment, the bait because I know how much you writerly schoolboys get paid in capitalist America, ha-ha-ha. He drove us to the worst fishing spot in the history of the sport, and we spent the whole day untangling our lines with grimy, inebriated fingers, swearing at the water, facing the sun and the reflection of the sun in the river. We ended up driving home lobster-red and chubless.

But there was drinking cold Tuzlansko on the gravel beach and frying chevapi on the fire built from driftwood and shards of vegetable crate, and reminiscing about the early 90’s, our wartime high school years, so it wasn’t all so bad. Faruk had once demolished a bully of mine on the steps from the first to the second floor of our Gimnazija and I felt indebted to him. He head-butted this kid in the mouth so hard the kid’s baseball cap flew off his head as if nabbed by Poltergeist. My bully collapsed against the railing, sat down. Faruk placed a couple of quick uppercuts into his face for good measure and one pretty wanton sneaker to the ass. The kid scrambled downstairs on all fours when Faruk picked up the baseball cap in a manner of an obliging Good Samaritan and ran after him.

“Hay, man,” he called with such an eerie civility after such a demolishing. “Don’t forget your cap!”

On the way back to town, careening drunkenly down narrow, pockmarked streets of northeastern Bosnia he made me feel a hefty bump on his beer belly, a place where some of his intestines had spilled out of the sack they usually sit in – a big-ass hernia, somehow simultaneously tight and squishy to the touch.

“It’s my little Alien,” he said gleefully, pulling up his shirt and showing me his gnarly scars. “I call him Bruhich. They had to cut through my abs to get to the tumor.”

Tumor?

Being a secret hypochondriac, I hated the word and as soon as I heard it my body cringed and tightened. A throng of awful, unstoppable thoughts went through my head. And even though one of them was in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger saying It’s not a toomah – a line from his dumb-ass movie – I became hyperaware of every part of my body. I looked at my sun-inflamed arms and almost saw tiny singed cells starting to divide in a wrong way.

“Whoa whoa,” I said when Faruk started to talk about something else. “A tumor?”

He proceeded to laugh and tell me the whole history of it in disgusting detail: a week and a half of constipation followed by numerous fruitless attempts at defecating, with only a single successful bout, upside-down in his bathtub while propped on the back of his neck, holding onto his toes in earnest and shitting up into the air like that. He said that the nurse on duty the night of his emergency operation ended up being his eighth-grade girlfriend, a girl who he had only kissed, and how embarrassing it was that she was doing the prep work for the operation and trying to chat, holding his scared, flaccid penis by the tip with one gloved hand and shaving around it with the other.

It was a benign bastard the size of a bocce ball that they later plopped out of his abdomen. It had been pressing on all the piping down there, causing trouble. He of course let go of the wheel with both hands to show me the size of the tumor and his Passat veered off into the opposing traffic, which was fortuitously nonexistent. Seeing the fear on my face he chortled, said:

“What?”
I stared at him, unable to speak.

He went on bitching about the lack of “real” football fans and ultimate fighting and I realized just how saturated with fear I’ve been my whole life. The word tumor took away all the effects the alcohol had on me. My face was on fire and the veins in my wrists pulsed visibly, bubbled up like something was boiling in them, and I kept pressing at the tender flesh of my arm with my finger and counted how long it took my white fingerprint to blend into the surrounding redness.

Seven seconds.

—

I found Portland where I left it but like I’ve never seen it before. An epic heat wave had scorched all the moss on church steps and trees and walls, and the cars danced the spaghetti-legs dance with the pavement set on high heat, and all the hipsters’ seasonal beards were gone-gone. Tattooed white girls with pixie haircuts and dreads rolled around the knolls of Couch Park in bikinis, reading earmarked yellowed paperbacks of Marguerite Duras, no micro-fleece in sight. Every business had a bowl of water outside the entrance; every dog had a protracted uvula-pink tongue; every dog owner’s mouth was kidney- shaped with misery. An uneven sign in the window of an appliance shop read OUT OF AC’S – MORE ON MONDAY.

My room was spacious with a lot of light and therefore uninhabitable. The floors and the walls radiated heat and, with my sunburn now in full bloom I decided to sleep on the floor in the bathroom, bare skin slapped onto white tile just to wake up clammy and ashiver and despite the fever decided to work. I had a little office space in northeast Portland inside a cube-shaped co-op building where I would go to do my writing. Geography of the cure, they call it, this idea that if you change where you are, it will also change you and in a positive way to boot, the fresh-start effect kind of thing, you know: pure bullshit.

But it was a beautifully designed, big, open room, divided into quasi-cubicles and occupied by other artistic types, photographers, graphic designers, graphic novelists. These people were self–employed professionals who took their jobs seriously and worked hard and I felt like I didn’t belong there. The bathrooms’ doors had these whimsical knobs to separate the sexes and I had to reach for a brass dick-and-balls knob every time I had to go take a slash. The women officemates handled brass breasts.

On this—oh shit already a—Saturday the only folks there were the odd couple, a boyfriend and girlfriend pair, he starched and buttoned up and narrow of ass, constantly on the phone and she smooth and well-stretched in her yoga pants doing this Cirque De Soleil shit while hanging off a long silk scarf wrapped around one of the high beams in the cube. She was so good at it that it made me feel awful about my life.

Her boyfriend turned around on his swivel chair as soon as I entered so he didn’t have to say hello and I went to my desk, flipped that curmudgeon of my PC on, and waited for it to wake up, staring at his girlfriend twirling around in the air to those oooooing sounds that some people like to relax to. Would he turn around if her hands slipped and she dropped on the back of her head from all the way up there, I wandered.

On my pinup board among some articles and random shit there were three obligatory black and whites of my family in Bosnia (How quaint, one of my officemates once said): Mother on her sweet sixteen in traditional Bosnian attire holding an ibrik in the garden, her face adolescently upturned and pissed (number one), me and my sisters in knitted-woolen outfits holding cheap wooden flutes and crinkling bags of candy against our chests in front of the tipping, cotton-ball-decorated plastic New Year’s tree (number two), and my father with his late 70’s lambchops and wind-fucked-with combover and crooked teeth holding the hand of a smiling boy, the boy’s tongue in the corner of his lips as if he’s really concentrating, trying to do something right – me (number three).

The thing between my father and me was that I was some kind of like a shitbug and he was a sort of a gastropod mollusk. We could see each other, kind of, bump into each other physically, but we were a bug and a mollusk in the world and that was it. He just sat there beaming his secret mollusk beams. I scuttled around him screaming questions in my shitbug language but all his mollusk ears heard was, and I quote: slkdghsjavnilavhrvlkfdnvl…

A thought: As a writer of children’s books, it’s your job to find the way for these two species to communicate.

Thankfully, my fucking PC came around with a pop to the screensaver of a dead mime in a coffin, a hack-job, Ernie’s idea of a hilarious prank while I was gone.

By the time my neighbor Ernie, a neighbor both here and in my apartment building, actually showed up all I accomplished was to force myself to type the word “tumor” in Cambria font and stare at it. He came in from behind and smacked my sunburned shoulders and my eyes actually watered.

“Tumor?” he boomed, reading what I wrote, “That’s nothing. My mom has cancer right now!”

I beamed at him, watery-eyed. This smiley white-boy from Detroit.

“Yeah, it’s flippin’ sad, man,” he continued, nodding his head.

“That’s a too simple, cutthroat word for it,” I said.
“Cancer of everything by now. Stage four for damn sure. But how was freakin’

Bosnia, douche? Take any pictures?”

The switch from “cancer” to “douche” was so cheery and void of irony, so normal, so extraordinary. I wanted to be in his head just for five minutes, to process stimuli with his shit-processing apparatus. There seemed to be no fear in the way he did it. Tumor, cancer, to him these were just words to use to communicate.
__

Inside the box, the mime moves in fixed, familiar ways – wax on, wax off. People of Portland watch her, phones in hands. Palms out flat, her right hand traces a circle against the box, followed by her left, not at the same time. She then pushes against the barrier, her sinewy biceps atremble, puts her scrawny back into this effort, sticks her face against the unseen obstruction (the face grimaces in a funny way but no white make up smears against the inside of the box). She steps back unnerved, thinks for a second, has an epiphany, taps herself on the forehead as if to say What a fool I’ve been, points with her thumb to the right, then confidently walks in the pointed direction just to encounter another invisible wall.

Thump goes her forehead against nothing.

People look around, trying to figure out where the sound came from, how they are being deceived/entertained, but the mime has no helpers. People return to watching her, their phones now slightly downturned, here and there. She goes through another set of waxing ons and waxing offs before she realizes that there’s no escape to her right either.

Despite the caked-on make-up, despite the artifice of this kind of performance and its stock mannerisms, the fact that she has no other choice but to repeat herself and go to her left, and then to the back, doing the same movements again and again in increasingly more exaggerated fashion, getting increasingly more and more unnerved, demoralized, powerless is not lost on the people of Portland. A shudder goes through them when her head thumps against nothing to her left. Thump.

__

Ernie showed up at my place (the apartment, not the cubicle) with two heaping pints of beer because his mother was dead. It was seven in the morning. He said he was on hold with Detroit trying to arrange things and if I could come and keep him company in this time of need. We were both in our underwear, him in boxers and me in holey boxer briefs. I took the offered stout and some of it splashed on my hand. I licked at it mechanically, slurped it, probably betraying the rules of decorum of the moment.

“I’ll be there in a sec.”

He hobbled down the communal hallway, drinking, pressing a Motorola to the side of his head.

He lived one door down the hall, in apartment seven, a bachelor pad. His couch was plaid and sported a discernable ass groove at an angle to the domineering plasma TV, which was muted and showing a hook-beaked bird of prey snatching a surface fish in slow motion from several different angles. He sat at his sad desk with a monitor from another era, but facing the room now, legs spread with one of his melancholy testicles getting a breath of fresh air. Intelligent design, I thought. Let’s put the sensitive reproductive organs on the outside of the body, why don’t we?

Tinny Musak cut off mid-verse somewhere in Detroit and a voice sibilated information into Ernie’s ear, and he smiled, his eyes raw. I drank my beer, watching a raptor hold down a fish that was trying still to breathe. The bird postured like an old-school professional wrestler. Species communicating.

“The reason people hate mimes and clowns,” he said, switching the Motorola off, “is because they remind us of how ridiculous it is to get up in the morning, put on make-up and clothes, go do these ridiculous, repetitive things we think we have to do every day, day after day after day. It’s a slap in the face of the audience. It says, hey dummy, this is you, you flippin’ moron, this is you in your stupid make up, in your stupid uniform, doing mindless flippin’ things for no reason.”

“Is that what that Marcel squared taught you in Gay Paree?”

Ernie had been a drama dork all his life and couldn’t shut up about the semester abroad he spent studying mime from the-king-shit-of-mime-fuck-mountain himself, the granddaddy of them all.

“No. I just thought of it while I was on hold.”

Our pints were empty, and Ernie went to the kitchen visible across the bar, opened and closed some cabinets. There was a gentleman’s magazine on the coffee table with a Ukrainian young lady on the cover in a pose designed to turn off a man’s brain altogether. What if she had a big ole Ukrainian bush down there, I thought, if one can call that a thought.

“Wine okay?”
“What kind?”
“Grape kind.”

I snorted. He didn’t but rinsed the pint glasses and poured chardonnay halfway in each. He did this puppeteering trick he always did at get-togethers, this thing with one of those corkscrews that looks like a robot with a head and arms and with a simple twist of his fingers this inanimate object came alive in his hands, went from happy to sad somehow, from sad to happy.

“They say it all goes black when you die,” he announced across the bar, disappeared around the pillar and appeared next to the couch with a glass, went back for his own but stayed there. “What if you’re blind already?”

“What made you think of that?”

“My dead mother.”

“She was blind?”

“Actually, both of my parents are visually impaired. Were.” He twirled the wine bottle against the counter.

“Wait a minute. Both of your parents…Noo.”

“Yeah.”

“Whoa.”

“What?”

I stared at him.

“Both of your parents are blind and you choose to study one thing that neither of them can ever actually experience in any way?”

Ernie stood in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, and cried. Loudly, like a mime wouldn’t.

The eagle soared silently. The lumpy plaid couch hurt. I sipped the cheap oaky wine, envying him for the ability to cry for real, from the soul.

He came back into the room, wiping his eyes, sighing. I was staring at the TV.

“I never had a TV growing up,” he said, sniffled, chuckled. “When they made me pray at the table, I would whip out my ding-dong and make faces at them in silence and they would stare right at me solemnly, like my flippin’ head was bowed, like I was doing what was right.”

“Say faahk!”

“What? Why?”

“Just say faaaahk!”

Ernie licked his lips, eyes darting. He hid behind a sip from his glass, two.

“I’m sorry I’m being weird, but I think the reason you can cry at this moment is because you don’t say fuck,” I said and drained my glass. “I never cried when my father died. Not once.”

“You don’t understand, man. My parents, they would always know what I was doing. They would read the flippin’ wind, taste the shenanigans, hear my dumb meanness across the studio, just sense it in the air, like that Daredevil. But they never,” and here he started to cry again, that lucky asshole, “they never said anything.”

__

The invisible box in the center of Pioneer Square appears to have a ceiling as well.

The mime, she can reach it if she goes on tippy toes. And she does: she goes to all four corners, gets on her tippy-toes and scrapes the invisible ceiling. The scrapes, like the thumps before, are audible to the public.

The phones of people of Portland are now cameras, shooting footage from every angle. They are mostly silent, hoping that their phone’s microphones will be able to catch the scrapes. Their faces would be showing that they are in awe only if they weren’t focused on getting it all.

The mime’s hands are not flat against the surface of the ceiling but at an angle, because she can only reach it with the full length of her fingers, not with her palms. So when she, in the middle of the box this time, gets on her ballerina toes, stretches up and with the fingers of her right hand presses against the imperceptible ceiling, body fully extended and wedged in between two hard surfaces, and when she leans out and her body curves in this unachievable way, and her bony hips and ass swing in one direction then in the other as if really there was a ceiling to prop against and she manages somehow not to fall but keeps this impossible balance in the middle of the square, few people who are without phones breathe in sharply and recoil.

How is she doing this? they murmur to one another.

 __

The next morning, in the cool shower, while I was soaping up my left pit – apart from the balls and the eyeballs the only place my skin wasn’t still pealing – I confronted a deep, fat lump. Nothing like Faruk’s hernia-alien, but still – a deep fat lump in the flesh. My hand pulled away from it immediately and I knew – so. fucking. perfect. – I KNEW, that I deserved it.

Through the shush of the water eroding the grouting and bouncing off tiles, I heard my father’s laugh from long ago, a play Dugonja, Trbonja i Vidonja I did for the wartime youth drama club and him laughing in that distinctive, hissing way to let me know that he was out there in that ill-omened darkness. A ghost of a presence.

My knees buckled and I had to press my palms against the shower walls to steady myself. The scolding water shushed at different pitches as it hit different parts of my body at different angles.

Tumor, I thought, and it might as well have been manifested into the world, implanted right into my armpit by the power of suggestion. Let there be tumor.

Four years ago, in grad school, I wrote a literary-shiterary fictional story in which the narrator’s father dies from kidney cancer – a single, specific, random, innocuous detail to make a sentence at hand believable and get the reader through the paragraph – kidney cancer. A year later my seventy-year-old father goes to a hospital for a colonoscopy, passes with flying colors, then the doctor, due to due diligence, asks him to do a simple ultrasound before he signs off on his physical, finds a shadow on his kidney, runs more tests and finds out that the same shadows are cast on the lungs and on the liver, on the spine and inside his head too. Stage four shadows.

Father weeps on the phone, can’t speak. I try to get him to speak, ask him about the floods in the country. He cries, cannot speak. I get an e-mail. He tells me that he’s going to Germany for a second opinion. I say let’s do this, let’s write to each other every day. Now is the time for you to tell me everything you always wanted to but couldn’t. Every day. It’s me who needs this, mind you. Craved this all my life, to hear what goes on in that head of his, to find out if he loves, hoping to find that his love was always there, that I just didn’t know how to glean it because I was indoctrinated against his version of it by my mother perhaps. I prayed that I just couldn’t feel that frequency of it and that our letters would give me key to finally vibrate in it with him.

And it starts off that way for a day, but soon enough, the third day, and his responses are short, curt—shrapnel sentences. I open up more, complain about the shortness of the messages until they become scarce, then non-existent, and I’m still so pissed off at him and will not take anything but perfect communication from him, which I know he cannot deliver, never could. But I want my quid pro quo, regardless. I want him to bare his soul, as I’m willing to do the same. But he can’t string four sentences together. Chemo or fear or is there a difference? So I stop writing too and he stops, and his side of the family asks why did you stop and I say because he stopped, I can’t write e-mails to my fucking self, and his side of the family asks me, orders me to order some natural herbal remedies because they’re gonna try to fight this cancer with nature, milk thistle and some such crap, and I do, I order it from a farm in Washington State and it comes, four bottles, and I send them home, and he still cries every time I call, says nothing or becomes a chatterbox when the morphine runs free, bullshits about basketball and I’m too arrogant to hear or understand his silences, to understand his drivel, to see past my ego. I’m too shitty, too hurt, too pissed off to listen to a human being just fucking cry.

I’m in bed when I get the call. I hang up and glower at my cuticles. How does everyone else get to keep their hands so presentable? My nails are jagged. The more I try to bite them into shape the more jagged they get.

I lay there awhile until a car alarm goes off someplace close, and I get up because that’s what you’re supposed to do, get up and look through the shutters when alarms go off, watch the neighborhood. You’re supposed to keep watch and think of the dear departed one, the loved one, the good shit about them, and although there is some, good shit I mean, you’re so incensed that you don’t think you deserve to think of it, or remember it, and since you’re the only one sentient at the moment, and he, the loved departed one, he gets to think nothing while you’re supposed to think of good shit, which is how it pretty much was your whole life, you just don’t do it, out of anger, spite, you instead think of how pissed off you were when you last saw him, so livid but pretending you were ambivalent. You made a point of doing that ever since you left Bosnia, to act ambivalent with him, to show him how much you didn’t need him. You’d ignored every single thing he had ever told you, ever taught you, and succeeded in a way you wanted to nevertheless, knowing he would never forgive you for it.

The day I found the lump – way before, trembling, I finally went to a doctor who put on some rubber gloves, squeezed it until a spurt of pus came out of it and diagnosed it as a glorified zit, way before the natural remedies I sent to Bosnia for my father came back unopened in a box and marked with a single checkmark next to the word “UNCLAIMED” even though right bellow there was an unchecked box next to the word “DECEASED”, way- way before I finished taking all those remedies, one a day, which I took either instead of praying for my dead father or as some kind of personal punishment or a desperate way to chemically communicate – that night actually, as I sat petrified in my room, hammered on Pinot Grigio I sucked through a spigot straight out of the three-liter box and pretended to watch a cop show after cop show on my laptop, which did not alleviate my fear at all, I became aware of a real-life commotion outside my window. Real Rose City cops put on a real colorful light show out there and I turned on my lights too, pulled up the shutters.

Three, four cruisers pulsated out there in the night, and a smileless jock cop was searching the thick hedges across the way with a cop dog, and what they found was this scruffy, skinny woman with a hat on. The cop dog barked, and the handler handled him or her, before his friend, another jock-type, ordered the woman to stand up, not to move. She stood thigh-deep in the hedges with scabbed-over scratches on her face, her arms up as if a child would put them up, as if she was bored with all these annoying rules, and as the cop searched her jeans and talked to her, her eyes met mine in beauty across the street. And she smiled.

And I smiled.

And I waved.

And then she waved to me too.

The cop looked at who she was waving at and didn’t appreciate the complication, continued with the protocol while shaking his head, pissed that I was legally allowed to stand there in my lit-up room and wave and smile across the street at this woman who looked somehow less scared in that moment than I ever was. Less pissed, less gutted, less sad. Less crazy.

Less drunk too.

__

Out of nowhere, the invisible box in the center of the Pioneer Square in Portland starts to shrink, to encroach upon the breastless, breathless mime within. It’s not a slow deal either and the mime, she’s seriously freaked out now. She drops the mime act and pummels the invisible walls with her fists, gracelessly. There’s nothing theatrical about her movements now. This is reality now. The fleshy parts of her hands flatten out against nothing. Thump- thump-thump! goes the fist.

She’s real good! a spectator says to a spectator, dicking with his phone.

The mime screams, attempts to. The chords in her scrawny neck pop up, bubble up with blood, swell with the voice that doesn’t come. Mimes have no voice.

How’s that possible? someone asks herself, or her phone, or whomever.

The mime seems to mouth words now: please, perhaps and then you fuckers and please again, but it’s hard to say what she’s mouthing because of her heavy clown make-up. The walls come in some more, steady-like, and she’s on her bottom, arms around her shins, neck cranked crooked against the shrinking ceiling, watery blue eyes in beauty, in desperation, squirting tears, tears that bounce off or run down in streaks of nothing walls.

It isn’t until, as the box keeps on shrinking, her bones start to silently, visibly crack and her blood blurts thickly out of severed blood vessels, until one of her eyes balloons out of her crushed skull socket and meets the flat surface of a box barrier made out of nothing that people of Portland really start to lose their shit.

Ismet Prcic (Izzy) was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, after the war. His debut novel Shards was published in 2011 by Grove Press to critical acclaim, winning numerous awards. His second novel Unspeakable Home arrives in August, 2024 from Avid Reader Press. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Imperial Dreams. Prcic lives in an Airstream in San Fernando Valley, CA.

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