Scar

Robert Lopez

This Deborah talks out of the left side of her mouth, as if she’s trying to keep what she says secret from her own right ear. She wears three or four earrings in each one. Two hoops of equal size and little silver balls that trail up her lobes like tracks.

I see the tracheotomy scar immediately. She leaves the top two buttons of her blouse undone like she’s saying, Here I am, beaten and scarred, take it or leave it.

I’ve decided not to say anything, pretending either not to notice or care. Whichever she decides.

She talks a lot out of the left side of her mouth, which is good. The little I say I’m tired of hearing myself say it. And this Deborah doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, which is even better. Match made in heaven.

Just as we are pulling up to a red light she says like she is accusing me of something, You’re not wearing the seat belt. I answer I only put it on when it rains. Out of the left side of her mouth comes, You’ve never gone through the windshield.

There are only a few cars on this road to wherever it is we’re going. Some exotic barbeque place well off the beaten path. She spends most of the ride going through her purse like she is looking for something. She pretends to be preoccupied most of the time, I think. Otherwise she is preoccupied most of the time and I’m making her out to be clever in a way she isn’t. I turn the radio on and scan the stations, pretending that finding a good song is important to me. She stops going through her purse without having pulled anything out of it.

I don’t know whether or not she is expecting me to defend myself, my position on car safety. I just keep going up and down the dial, pausing to hear the end of a Willie Nelson song and most of “It’s All Right” by the Impressions.

Because I don’t have a lot to say people tell me I’m a good listener. But I don’t think that’s right, either.

I haven’t gone through a windshield, never even come close. I’ve never been injured or seen anyone seriously injured. I was at a party once as a teenager where someone was killed in a backyard brawl but it happened after I had left. He got his shoulder or his neck slashed with a beer bottle and bled to death.

All during dinner I try to imagine this Deborah going through the windshield, the mechanics of it, what actually happens when one goes through the windshield. I try to see her head making contact with the glass and shattering it. I try to see her body careening off the hood and landing on the concrete.

The thing is she doesn’t look like someone who’d gone through a windshield. If anything she looks like someone who’d been robbed at gunpoint, maybe assaulted. (One of those women that takes a selfdefense class and carries a gun afterwards.) Nothing where she was hanging on by a thread, hooked up to machines with one foot in the grave. I’m just guessing about that part, but it stands to reason.

She wears a lot of makeup but not enough to cover up any facial scars. She flaunts the one on her neck like it’s a piece of jewelry.

We go back to her place, which has two bedrooms and hardwood floors. On the ride over I fastened the seat belt but I don’t think she noticed. She opened her purse but didn’t go through it like she did before, probably just making sure the gun was loaded and accessible.

This Deborah’s hair is thick, more or less straight and dry to the touch. There’s a spot on the back of her calf that’s irritated from shaving. I think her left leg might be longer than the right leg but that could just be my imagination making her more interesting. The feet are bony so I leave them alone. Stomach needs work. I’m guessing the nipples aren’t sensitive because she seems bored when I work them.

I try to decide if she reminds me of someone.

I don’t know what she sees in me, if anything. My body is smooth and unbroken. No runs, no hits, no errors. I don’t have anything to say and though I listen to people when they talk, I don’t know if that makes me good at it.

She searches me up and down, says, I’m exploring you. Who knows what she is looking for but her exploration feels good, so I let her explore me. I tell her to let me know if she finds anything worthwhile. For whatever reason the line, Close your eyes and think of England, comes to me. I am Queen Victoria or whoever it was with my eyes closed and she is Magellan in search of god knows what.

She pushes her tongue against mine like she’s angry at it. The sound she makes is between a moan and a sigh. Every so often she pulls back and has a playful grin on her face. Eventually I start mimicking her, so that each time our lips are about to touch I pull back.

She smiles, tells me out of the left side of her mouth that I’m the first one to pass her test.

I say, I guess you’ve met your match.

I start behind the ear. She makes her sound and grabs hold of the back of my head, digging her nails into my scalp. Eventually I get to where we both want this to go. I run my tongue back and forth over the spot. The skin feels dead.


Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the WorldKamby Bolongo Mean River —named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant, All Back Full, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. A new novel-in-stories, A Better Class Of People, will be published by Dzanc Books in April, 2022. Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere, his first nonfiction book, will be published by Two Dollar Radio in March, 2023. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including BombThe Threepenny ReviewVice MagazineNew England Review, The Sun, and the Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction – Latino. He teaches at Stony Brook University and has previously taught at Columbia University, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Call for Submissions: A Picture’s Worth 1000 500 Words

Between September 15 and October 31 2022, we’re soliciting flash fiction, lyric essays, prose poems or single-page comics inspired by the (untitled) image below by artist Mary Lum. This image will also appear on the cover of Issue 41, and Guest Editor Elizabeth Graver – in consultation with Post Road’s editorial board – will choose selections from the submissions received for that issue’s Folio.

Please click here to learn more about Mary Lum’s work, and here to submit your work to be considered for the Post Road 41 Guest Folio. We look forward to reading your submissions!

ART:
Elizabeth Awalt

CRITICISM:
Vanessa Gregorchik

FICTION:
Eric Buechel, Christina Craigo, L Favicchia, Shane Jones, Christopher Kang, Eric Lundgren, Douglas Mac Neil, Louise Marburg, Vi Khi Nao, Darina Sikmashvili, Greg Tebbano, Allison Titus 

GUEST FOLIO: Edited by Allison Adair:
Yalie Saweda Kamara, Maurice Manning, Philip Metres, Matthew Olzmann, Leslie Sainz, Mary Meriam, Gaia Rajan

NONFICTION:
Brittany Ackerman, Cara Lynn Albert, Ted Lardner, Andrew Bertaina, Matthew Burnside, MJ Clark, Diana Raab, Robert Warf 

POETRY:
Mike Barrett, Katie Berta, David Moolten, Tawanda Mulalu, Supritha Rajan, SM Stubbs

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Leah Hampton, David Philip Mullins, Laura Villareal

THEATRE:
Mehdi M. Kashani

The River + Landscape as Interior

Supritha Rajan


The River

It remembers everything.

White tufts the cottonwoods shook free.
Leaves that papered its face with gold
and vermillion eyes and in their afterlife became
wine-red cargo the light
at every depth cycles through.
How a sky of barely moving clouds
each day made legible the history
of its evanescence. Impossible
to lie still with the future’s repeatable knowledge,
for such stillness not to be the condition of
its flight from shadow from sun-glare from
night after night in the panic of privacy
turning from one bank then the other to say
I know you’ll mock me for saying this,
but each day I reach rock bottom.

Impossible to speak and not sound like
something else—the night’s whistle midsummer
or the song a child sings to herself as she strings
purple butterflies. Its real voice resembling the force
of pleasure troubled neither by rocks nor reeds nor driftwood
but its recollection of them—the phantom
body its body here outraces, there in a flush
will release—what rowing across its back we name
current, meaning now a moment foreclosed
of promise, now a moment weighted with promise.
The tempo of regret a cool backwash
of moonlight and asters and marsh marigold eddying
in then out to the sea its muddied mouth refuses
to change into saying my bed armored with smooth stones,
my willow curtains, my shards of blue
—the recurring
landscape it knows itself by and so
will not leave. Impossible to contain
a body everywhere entered by light, mint-orange flesh
that daily drinks itself to remember itself
as the body that never once was its own.
Purple and porous, a small sea within the possible
sea, some part already tastes of salt, some part
(even in the rehearsal of not knowing) knows
it will soon be lost to the mouth through which
it enters and exits.


Landscape as Interior

Bird-space. Wingbeats
of October flight.

Autumn’s crisp perfume
barely descending.

There is a lake before me
too thick with algae

to mirror anything.
A vaporous tissue

veils the distance
while a worn music slides

off nature’s varnished instruments.
Slowly, in the slowed

rhythm of even regret, I step
into the mired surface.

Leaves shelve then
reshelve along the banks to form

tomorrow’s wrecked residual.
Under a layer of lily pads and molten leaves

I crouch and hug my knees
like a morose child, attuned

to a low-murmuring acoustic,
my hair flowing up

like blanket weed
as I observe through

squinted eyes
the progress of formless

flow. Mint-green
understand

not only the color
of regret

but also the body’s light
deconstructed and

into further light
decanting.


Supritha Rajan is presently an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in such journals as New England Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, New American Writing, Bennington Review, Conjunctions (online), Washington Square Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.

Index

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Wade, Barry K.
Winter Sky (fiction): PR21, 127

Wagoner, David
The Other Man (poetry): PR26, 113
Spending the Night (poetry): PR26, 114
The Categorical Imperative Poem (poetry): PR26, 115

Waite, Urban
The Lost World (recommendation): PR25, 57

Waldman, Ayelet
An Ice Cream War, By William Boyd (recommendation): PR14, 17

Waldrep, G. C.
Lullabye for My Sister (poetry): PR12, 163
Feast of All Wounds (poetry): PR12, 164
Die Fledermaus (poetry): PR16, 191
Sisyphus in Paradise (poetry): PR16, 192

Waldron, Nicola
Afterbirth (nonfiction): PR33, 15

Walker, Nicole
Drought-Tolerant Tamarisk (Tamarix) Aphylla (nonfiction): PR17, 133

Wallace, Eric J.
The Child Shaman (fiction): PR25, 167

Wallaert, Josh
Upcountry (fiction): PR26, 251

Walsh, William
Recommending “First Love” By Samuel Beckett (recommendation): PR21, 55

Wamsted, Jay
Sticks and Stones (nonfiction): PR38, 243

Ward, Nicholas
The Backyard (nonfiction): PR28, 115

Warf, Robert
Wreckage (nonfiction): PR39, 65

Warloe, Constance
Introduction to From Daughters & Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said (etcetera): PR2, 129

Warrell, Laura K.
Becoming Abigail, By Chris Abani (recommendation): PR28, 235

Warren, Robert Burke
Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell (recommendation): PR32, 73

Warren, Suzanne
The Raspberry King (fiction): PR33, 136

Washington, Thomas
Have You Read My Manuscript? (nonfiction): PR9, 83

Wasow, Oliver
Hay (art): PR24, cover

Waters, Lindsay
Rebuilding Aesthetics From The Ground Up (criticism): PR20, 21

Watson, Brad
Willard and His Bowling Trophies, A Perverse Mystery, By Richard Brautigan (recommendation): PR10, 159

Watterson, Zachary
Open Late Hours (nonfiction): PR23, 167

Webster, Kerri
I Am Become a Blunt Instrument (poetry): PR35, 11

Weinberger, Eliot
At the Sign of The Hand (etcetera): PR9, 188

Weitzel, Wil
How to Sleep With Lions (fiction): PR29, 125

Welle, John P. (trans.)
Translating Brecht, By Franco Fortini (poetry): PR4, 30

Weller, Anthony
The Works of Robert Dean Frisbie (recommendation): PR12, 151

Weller, Sam
The Illustrated Man, By Ray Bradbury (recommendation): PR15, 147

Wells, Brandi
Gather the Daughters By Jennie Melamed (recommendation): PR36, 23

Wheeler, Theodore
Uwe Johnson (recommendation): PR33, 105

Wheelock, Jennifer
Talking Faith With A Friend (poetry): PR31, 142
Regarding His Alzheimer’s (poetry): PR31, 144

Whitcomb, Katharine
Early Medieval (poetry): PR11, 202
Dream On His Birthday (poetry): PR11, 206

White, Derek
Coati Mundi (fiction): PR11, 207

Whiteside, Jim
Cento (poetry): PR29, 151
Saudade (poetry): PR29, 152

Whitney, Kim Ablon
Ann Patchett (recommendation): PR31, 183

Wickenden, Andrew
Story (fiction): PR127, 151

Williams, Dawn
Directing Grand Guignol (theatre): PR1, 61

Williams, Diane
Well-To-Do Person (fiction): PR6, 103
My First Real Home (fiction): PR16, 247

Williams, E. Genevieve
Solstice 6 (art): PR26, 42
Solstice 7 (art): PR26, 47

Williams, Greg
Blue Angel, By Francine Prose (recommendation): PR12, 199

Williams, Jenny D.
Baho! By Roland Rugero (recommendation): PR34, 175

Williams, Tyrone
How On Earth (poetry): PR25, 99
Wah Wah (poetry): PR25, 100

Williamson, Sean
Fever On Good Friday (fiction): PR37, 193

Wilson, Jason
What Is the Color of Hope In Haiti? (etcetera): PR3, 168

Wilson, Jonathan
Chiara (fiction): PR28, 225

Winn, Tracy
Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s Cold Snap (recommendation): PR21, 153

Winthrop, Elizabeth Hartley
Dirt Music, By Tim Winton (recommendation): pr14, 81

Wisdom, Alison
What Can a Ship Do for an Island? (fiction): PR34, 169

Wise, Marie Gray
Pennsylvania School of Ballet Closes Due to Snow + About Girls Standing On Steps (poetry): PR37, 117

Wisniewski, Mark
Calculus (poetry): PR14, 37
Land (poetry): PR14, 40

Wolff, Rebecca
Mamma Didn’t Raise No Fools (poetry): PR2, 96
A Good Idea, But Not Well-Executed (poetry): PR2, 98

Wolos, Gregory J.
The Wild Pandas of Chincoteague (fiction): PR27, 89

Wood, Ann
The Road to Los Angeles, By John Fante (recommendation): PR14, 215

Wood, Monica
We Need to Talk About Kevin, By Lionel Shriver and George Eliot’s Later Novels (recommendation): PR13, 179

Woodward, Angela
Carnality (fiction): PR31, 166

Woodward, Kristine
Knox Martin – Woman: Black and White Paintings (art): PR21, 33
Richard Hambleton: The American Pop Expressionist (art): PR27, 33

Worden, Olivia
Delivery (fiction): PR30, 179

Wormser, Baron
Fictional Essay: John Berryman, B. 1914 (etcetera): PR13, 95
Southern California Ode (1969) (poetry): PR26, 101
Climate (poetry): PR26, 103

Wright, Carolyne
Betty Carter at the Blue Room (poetry): PR27, 157
Dixie White House Photo (poetry): PR27, 159
Not On My Resume (poetry): PR35, 193
Don’t Tell the Flies (poetry): PR35, 195

Wright, Charles
W. G. Sebald (recommendation): PR2, 179

Wunderlich, Mark
Device for Burning Bees and Sugar (poetry): PR8, 13
It’s Your Turn to Do the Milking, Father Said (poetry): PR8, 15

Wuori, G. K.
The Home for Wayward Clocks By Kathie Georgio (recommendation): PR27, 177

Wurth, Erika T.
Brandon Hobson: The Cherokee Novelist Who Quietly Kicked Off the Fifth Wave In Native American Fiction (recommendation): PR38, 97

Spaghettification

by Ali Raz

Spaghettification is a scientific word. It refers to the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (i.e. spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field. A black hole would generate such a field, for instance – and not much else. This means that the phenomenon is purely imaginary. It is a hypothetical. Even the name suggests this.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Turku claimed to have witnessed spaghettification. They wrote a paper about it. In this paper, they discussed having ‘seen’, via high-frequency radio waves, the debris of a shattered star. The star had been shattered upon contact with the gravitational field of a black hole. The star had been spaghettified.

In support of this, the researchers offered printed sheets of readings from their radio receivers.

A character is spaghettified in High Life. It happens towards the end. After she is harvested, impregnated, soaked in breast milk, nearly raped, slapped around, and called an insulting name – she offs herself by leaping into a black hole. She doesn’t leap exactly. What she does is, she hijacks a space craft (a small craft which one drives like a go-kart). She cracks the pilot over the head with a spade (the pilot’s brains splay out like intestines) and then makes away with the go-kart spaceship. At first she’s laughing. After all, she is where no one else had been before – an explorer, an adventurer. Then her face begins to change. The mouth is pulled to one side. The cheek to another. She makes grunting noises, like one exposed to great tearing pressure. Then her head explodes.

In the spaceship, they ate soft vegetable soups.

What is space? By rights, there are times when I doubt that it exists.

One gets lonely all alone. One gets lonelier than lymph, a vital fluid no one talks about.

I had been talking to my grandmother. Our conversation was enabled by globe-spanning satellite networks and regimes of power decades (and more) in the making.

Consider a song by Daft Punk. Put on their album RAM.

A violent storm begins, full of lightning and wind.

The visualizations of space in High Life are animated effects. Colored swirls and strobing lights stand in for things that can’t be said. These are cheap effects. They don’t connote (except to designate the unsaid). I much prefer an earlier move. There is a moment, very early in the film, when a character (a man named Monte, whom the others call a monk) drops a spanner from his perch atop the spaceship. He had been performing mechanical repairs, tightening lug nuts and such. Then he knocks, by mistake, a spanner off the side of the ship. He begins to lunge after it – then stops. The spanner falls an infinite fall. Slowly and steady, at one even rate, it falls into the unrelieved black. There is no depth to its fall. No background against which to sense it. It becomes, to the poor stricken character and also to us, as flat as a cardboard cutout, dimensionless as a video game. It is an effect of the mind to derealize what it can’t understand. And it can’t understand an object falling outside of time.

Sensations of scale.

The near-vertigo of scale.

A storm in space would be an invisible, battering, particulate wind.

I would eat an apple in it.

Drop the core down your rotten throat.

The girl I loved would not be here. She would not be anywhere at all.

Not in the gaps of each synapse, virulent and spreading, more motile than bacterial fins.

There are some people – some actors – who are, how should we say this, soaked in such charisma – such personal force – their aura is so reaching and strong – that the hand simply itches to photograph them. Even the camera wants it. The camera itself wants to film them.

Buster Keaton for instance, have you seen him? Getting repeatedly hit on the head with the spinning handle of a well. He doesn’t look like much. He looks like another grain of sand from the desert behind him.

Or Robin Williams. He is a better example. The flickering of that fluid, vital face.

High Life is less frightening than Solaris and less infinite. In its center is a specter of sex; this specter inaugurates, inside the film, another film.

The split of a schizo, hapless structure.

Or the passage, unmarked, of fear between my breath.

My teeth. Your hands.

My teeth, carious. My hands, removed by your sparkling blade.


Ali Raz is co-author, with Vi Khi Nao, of Human Tetris (2020, 11:11 Press), a kooky collection of sex ads. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, The Believer, 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Firmament, and elsewhere. Her first novella, Alien, comes out in Spring 2022 from 11:11 Press.