Category: Issue 39

ART
Below, Beneath, and Beyond  — Elizabeth Awalt

CRITICISM
Duality of Race: Examining Adrian Piper’s Work Through the Lens of Biracialism  — Vanessa Gregorchik

FICTION
Medication — Eric Buechel
The Turn — Christina Craigo
The Dog Doesn’t Die — L Favicchia
Sky, Ladder, Cow, Lantern, Lake, Flowers, Heaven — Shane Jones
Durée  — Christopher Kang
Actaeon at the Movies — Eric Lundgren
The Diptera — Douglas Mac Neil
Double Happiness — Louise Marburg
Salt of the Earth — Vi Khi Nao
Mine — Darina Sikmashvili
Lights Will Not Illuminate the Exits — Greg Tebbano
Northeast Regional — Allison Titus

GUEST FOLIO
Edited by Allison Adair
Memorializing Nia Wilson: 100 Blessings — Yalie Saweda Kamara
Walking into the Distance — Maurice Manning
Sweet Cathedral — Philip Metres
Except for the cloud of doom that hangs over everything — Matthew Olzmann
Liberation War + On National TV — Leslie Sainz
A Dream — Mary Meriam
Plague Psalm 19 — Philip Metres
Soup — Maurice Manning
Prodigy — Gaia Rajan
Elegy for the CD — Philip Metres
Thousandlegger — Maurice Manning
Getaway Driver — Matthew Olzmann

NONFICTION
Fallow Periods — Brittany Ackerman
Rating Food I Purged in Sydney as I Walk Three Miles to Weigh Myself — Cara Lynn Albert
Agate — Ted Lardner
Time Passes: On Unfinished Things — Andrew Bertaina
No Exit: A Gallery of Existential Horrors — Matthew Burnside
The Summer I Nearly Drowned — MJ Clark
How Storytelling Gave Me Hope and Perspective — Diana Raab
Wreckage — Robert Warf

POETRY
Postcard from Home + Fledgling — Mike Barrett
WHEN I ASK MYSELF, WILTINGLY, “TO WHAT HAS MY LIFE BEEN REDUCED?” THIS IS THE ANSWER + AFTER I WAS RAPED THE SECOND TIME, I LOST 40 POUNDS — Katie Berta
Heimlich + Silkwood — David Moolten
Massachusetts + October — Tawanda Mulalu
The River + Landscape as Interior — Supritha Rajan
Uncertainty + Sparring After Sunset — SM Stubbs

RECOMMENDATIONS
On 17776, A Not-Book by Jon Bois — Leah Hampton
Daring to Be Different: The Merits of Narrative Ingenuity — David Philip Mullins
IMAGINE US, THE SWARM by Muriel Leung — Laura Villareal

THEATRE
The Architect, a play in one act — Mehdi M. Kashani

Below, Beneath,­ and­ Beyond

Elizabeth Awalt

“My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamozov

My work is rooted in the natural world: in awe at its intricate beauty and anxiety about its fragility. My paintings examine the invisible forces below our feet, beneath our oceans, and beyond our universe that affect our natural world. I seek out the interconnections across natural forms and between micro and macro elements: the uncanny parallels between brain coral and fungus, and the similar net-like structures of spider webs and neurons.

My process begins with gathering data as a naturalist might. These visual notes inform my studio work, not necessarily as direct source material, but because the process of creating them cements the experiences in my memory. Those experiences resonate as I paint, and I find myself drawing upon the memories of being in a place, my hand moving to the forms and sensations of my surroundings. From there, the paintings themselves evolve organically. I respond to the physicality of my materials, pouring, wiping, sanding, and applying large gestural strokes of paint until the work achieves a balance between the seen and the felt. The final work, then, is not a visual replication but more of an embodied memory, a reinterpretation of an experience. I create these paintings to invite the viewer to enter a world of beauty, chaos, and turbulence, and to impel them to notice what surrounds them and lies below their feet.

The Coral Reef series is a result of my experiences and memories of scuba diving in coral reef environments throughout the Caribbean. As a result of direct observation, I have become increasingly aware of the environmental impact of climate change, overfishing, and ocean acidi- fication on coral reefs worldwide. When a single element is affected, the entire environment is affected. Through painting these extraordinary environments, I hope to draw attention to the importance of protecting this critical ecosystem.

Duality of Race: Examining Adrian Piper’s Work Through the Lens of Biracialism

Vanessa Gregorchik

July 19, 2021

In every aspect of Adrian Piper’s work, there exists a dichotomy: between artist or audience, intent or impact, reality or metaphor. Her sense of self has been historically split in half, or in even greater fragments, as she explores the space between academic and artist, insider and outsider, and black and white. To this end, Piper’s collection of work avoids categorization. In 2018, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City dedicated the largest exhibit space ever for a living artist to display Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965—2016. It featured 291 pieces of art from architectural drawings to photo montages, LSD paintings to time-based media. Piper’s work captures refusals, rebuttals, requirements, and negotiations that she asks of viewers to force against complicit silence. Piper refuses passing of all forms, and if the people surrounding her beg her to box herself into a single classification, she forces the same back to them.

            Passing is a central idea and discussion that Piper provokes in her work. In relation to race, passing is the practice in which one is able to assimilate into a racial group that is different from their own. Piper uses the term in context with the United States, with the historical background of multiracial individuals passing as white to avoid racial discrimination during the Jim Crow era and beyond. Passing is a phenomenon that still exists in the 21st century, and one that is often seeped in shame, and dishonors one’s family. In Piper’s 1992 essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” she details how trying to understand her relatives who have chosen to pass for white “has been one of the most difficult ethical challenges of my life,” one in which she doesn’t consider herself “to have made very much progress” (“Passing” 13). In exchange for economic freedom, greater access to job opportunities, and privileges and liberties of the white community, one must abandon the history and solidarity of the black community. In a nonpermanent way to explore passing’s transcending effects, Piper began a 1973 project titled Mythic Being in which she assumed a male identity and explored society through a new lens, one that reduced its level of “otherness” down one from black woman to black man. In the video Mythic Being she asks, “What would happen if there was a being who had exactly my history, only a completely different visual appearance to the rest of society? And that’s why I dress as a man.” She costumed herself with an Afro wig, mustache, reflective sunglasses, and a cigar hanging off the corner of her mouth. After day-long assimilations and explorations as this alter ego, Piper would document herself in disguise with photographic self portraits later etched with oil crayon. Piper’s manipulation to the gelatin silver format reimagines the traditional dodge and burn process typically involved in the processing of such images. Traditionally, to darken or lighten specific areas of the developing film image, photographers utilize the light in the darkroom to either expose or hide areas of the photograph. Piper, rather, used crayon over the processed image to manually isolate herself as the subject by darkening either the background or an aura around the “Mythic Being.” She also drew a cloud of white that resembles a speech bubble, a traditional comics convention to indicate a character’s dialogue, above her character to illustrate typographic mantras that she inscribed in her journals and performed to the public. The limitations with manually dodging and burning gelatin silver—and with the prints as a whole—is their eventual deterioration that leads their shades to fade. Piper’s work in defining the shadows and highlights preserves their characteristics and temporarily prevents the blacks and whites of the image to read as a singular grey—a process that she literally and metaphorically injects in several of her projects and self reflections on racial identification.

            Typography remains a consistent character in Piper’s works across photography, performance art, and illustration. Whether hand-drawn or typewritten, language is inexplicably tied to Piper’s pieces. Like a script for a play, she uses words as the stepping stones for performance pieces and either audibly (like in Mythic Being) or in silence, they provoke the audience to react or disregard. In Catalysis III, Piper adorned a long-sleeve white blouse with a sign attached reading “Wet Paint.” She walked through the streets of New York without speaking, begging to tap into the audience’s unconscious desire to touch—to test their theory on whether or not her proclamation is true. Like famed Austrian performance artist Valie Export’s Tap and Touch Cinema (1968), in which Export invited passersby to touch her breasts through a curtained cube constructed over her chest, Piper offers herself as an object to her environment with a visual declaration that solicits touch. But unlike Export’s performance piece, no one touches Piper. Other differences include the artist’s skin color, racial identification, and site of the performance. Is it easier for strangers to touch a white woman’s body since they are surrounded by other white faces in a European city? Is the (outwardly) black body one that is only meant for private touch to the people of the United States? Regardless of the answers to either question, the audience’s reaction to Piper’s piece is another example of her quizzically uncategorizable medium. Export’s work reacted to medium of the cinema and through her facial expressions, in which she engaged the gaze of the viewer, broke the fourth wall—the space between audience and artist—that is typically hidden in male-produced pieces that feature the sexualization of women. She grins, laughs, or frowns to show bystanders or those who interact the consequences of their interactions. Piper remains stoic and uses her costume of the word to remain wordless. In comparing her work to that of a flâneur—a figure, typically male, who exists to simply walk within a city and merge into a crowd—James Trainor focuses on how Piper’s deadpan deliberation is key to her message. “The artist’s detachment and mobility seemed to deny the act’s interpretation as theatre,” he states, further distancing it from Export’s work. “Key to the event, it seems, was the uncategorizable and disorienting impact of what the street spectator was witnessing. The ambulatory nature of the confrontation was therefore essential in preserving the sense of hesitating bafflement and the fleeting, caught-on-the-fly aspect of the occurrence” (85).

            While the last example of typography in Piper’s work showcased words in motion, the next example is more static. Piper explores the assertive power and permission of text through her calling cards. My Calling (Cards) are typographic pieces printed on top of business card-sized stock paper. Both their form and title mimic a visiting card: a physical note individuals would leave at homes to notify the occupant of their visit. Piper utilizes the calling card to both call out and conceal her reactions to racist and sexist remarks by strangers who misinterpreted either her intentions or identity. My Calling (Card) #1 (For Dinners and Cocktail Parties) is printed on burnt tan paper with black type overlaid, addressing the audience as “Dear Friend, / I am black. / I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark…” My Calling (Card) #2 is a contrast, printed on light cream paper and explaining to the same “friend” that “I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here, ALONE [sic]…” Despite its printed medium, the piece remains a performance. Its meaning is not activated until its circulation begins, even with a call to action present with the line “my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks…and to distribute this card when they do.” The final line assumes responsibility and regret (“I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you”) and extends the same assumption (“as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me”) back to the viewer. To trace back the name—My Calling (Card)—one assumes that the medium of the card is perhaps variable since it is left in parenthesis and the true emphasis is on Piper’s calling. “Calling” is defined as the loud cries or shouts of an animal or person, or the strong urge toward a particular way of life or career or vocation; Piper is called to act even at settings of cocktail parties and dinner events when others are extended the luxury of not having cards at the ready, prepared to deal a deck or draw at any time. The physicality of the card “fights a stereotype by giving the offender a concrete experience of what it is like to be the object of one,” as Piper writes, without the need for Piper to speak. The exchange once more creates a dichotomy between giver and receiver, but this time remains muteless in order to reflect on the racist message that just took place—all catalyzed by an initial assumption or disregard of race.

            To contrast the calling cards’ voiceless premise, Piper’s The Probable Truth Registry, from 2013–2017, relies on vocal promise. Much of Piper’s work has been influenced by her studies of Immanuel Kant, and in the Truth Registry, she attempts to retrace his process of defining the categorical imperative in order to represent his ideas to the everyday person. Piper creates a set of three new imperatives through the Truth Registry, and she studies if she can get her visitors to participate within a new social contract. Kant’s categorical imperative is defined as a way of “evaluating motivations for action” while Piper evaluates individuals’ motivation to produce action (Canbaz 406). The interactive exhibit was displayed at the Hamburger Bahnhof, a Berlin art museum housed within a former subway terminal. In the piece, the arches that surround the large, gold-brushed cylindrical booths are cathedral-like, yet cold, perhaps due to their utilitarian grey steel structure with no ornamentation. The flooring is made up of steel grey tiles that consume a vast blank space among the booths. Each station is surrounded by a split-circular grey wall that contributes to the ominous steel arch structure. On each wall, a gold embossed statement is displayed, including: “I will always be too expensive to buy; I will always mean what I say; I will always do what I say I am going to do.” These declarations make up the three principles with which viewers can agree or disagree, and if their reaction is the former, they are invited to provide their e-mail address and digital signature to join the registry of the “trustworthy,” a new society that pledges to uphold these ideals. At the conclusion of the exhibit, participants are promised a printed copy of the registry and the full list of others who pledged the same promise.

            Within the principles, there is a compelling focus on—once again—the voice. The importance of visitors doing what they “say” makes up two-thirds of the imperatives, showcasing the significance of setting intentions and fulfilling them.

            To bring back these ideas back to the Kantian idea of the categorical imperative, one tenant of his principles is the static application of the virtues despite the situation. The categorical imperative cannot change and must stay constant. Despite Piper’s ever-evolving medium of work, her messages and motivations stay central and consistent. It becomes easier to understand Piper’s positioning toward passing, even if it promised family members a brighter outlook in life, when viewed through a strictly Kantian lens.

            And typography begins to take a backseat and moves from being the centerpiece of the artwork to being the commentary. Exploring self portraits to see the way Piper reflects on her own self image and manipulates different aspects to feel more or less like herself allows one to follow on the Kantian lens Piper has applied to her work. To begin, Piper’s Self Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981) follows in style with Mythic Being, in which she has captured a slice of self and manipulated specific characteristics to assimilate first within a different gender group and now a different—or rather, further into one she is already a part of—racial group. This portrait presents the self as something that is mutable, reflecting the fluid process of racial identification. Through presenting black stereotypes upon her visage such as a widened nose, full lips, and frizzy hair, she destabilizes “the very concept of racial identity,” as Holland Cotter puts it. Piper places distance between visual representation and racial recognition, forcing the viewer to negotiate the ground that lies between and challenge their sense of identification. If Piper were to stand next to this self portrait, would one be more likely to identify her as black? Is exaggeration the only way one is able to rationalize her racial identity? .

            Piper followed the 1981 piece with another portrait titled Self Portrait as a Nice White Lady in 1995, following Mythic Being once more in its path of identity manipulation but also medium manipulation. The work is a photograph altered with oil crayon that reintroduces the speech bubble motif that Piper toyed with in her 1973–1975 series. The background is colored blood red, introducing one of the only colors in her series of black and white photographs. I am interested in how the title of this portrait omits the term “exaggerated” as in the previous piece, curious if it is because Piper is able to pass for a white woman with far less difficulty than the identity of a black woman. In this portrait, is she still exaggerating? Or succumbing to what society so often assumes of her? In addition, the decision to capture the latter portrait as a photograph assumes a level of realism more distinct than in the former portrait, and hints that Piper’s physicality in a photograph is more similar to that of a “nice white lady.” The dialect in the speech bubble, as a departure from the Kantian declarations of Mythic Being, assumes an African American vernacular English tone that merges and satirizes the spaces between her identity as a black and white woman.

            In addition to satirizing the space between black and white identification, Piper calls out the prominence and likelihood of black heritage in every individual. Through a video installation titled Cornered (1988), Piper directly addresses a viewer via a small television screen and informs them of the history of miscegenation and calls on them to confront their mixed heritage. In a literal manner of “turning the tables”–the installation features a table turned on its axis in front of the television screen–Piper reverses the so-called one-drop rule, which is often invoked to discriminate against mixed-raced individuals who have “one drop” of black blood, to showcase its fallibility. In the piece, she is literally “cornered” in the intersection of the two walls where the exhibit is placed but also metaphorically in the space between black and white. Throughout the 15-minute video, Piper displays two birth certificates, both belonging to her father, one in which he is identified as “white” and one in which he is “octoroon,” the antiquated term for someone who is one-eighth black.

            In many of Piper’s former performances, the physicality of an object is to prove its existence. In this piece, the certificates prove that visual devices can be faulty. If this disparity exists between her black father’s physical record of existence, the document that issues his personhood, what’s to say that this disparity does not exist within yours? Another contradiction that exists within Piper’s performance is her assertion that her audience perceives her as white while she holds the same belief back at them. The audience for the piece remains white, casting the black spectator—the one who watches the show but never appears on the script—to the outside of the conversations that directly involve the fragmentation of their identity.

            Piper has plenty of pieces where she breaks through the walls of identity those impose around her. Performance has been a key aspect to plenty of her work, but in Adrian Moves to Berlin 2007, one has the impression that not all of her pieces require an audience. In a video recorded by Robert Del Principe, Piper is seen dancing in Alexanderplatz, a public square in Berlin, after her decision to permanently move to the city upon discovering her placement on a TSA watch list of suspicious travelers. For most of Piper’s work, she seemed to struggle to choose between two or more identities—but this decision to remove herself from the United States seemed an easy one, consistent with her work criticizing government authority and verdicts. Distinct from her Mythic Being or Catalysis performances, no one stops to gawk, interact, or stare at Piper as she dances through the square. People simply glance or acknowledge and continue with their day. The stills of her performance are breathtaking: the fluid shape and movement of her limbs tell a story as clearly as her writing. She transitions away from being didactic to poetic and meditative, as though every micro-movement holds a meaning greater than the last. The still sun rays captured elevate her body to a state of transcendence, and though it was written 20 years prior, perfectly capture the sentiment from her 1987 essay “Flying”: .

I spring from the ground, executing high leaps, tour jetés, turns, somersaults, twists, and twirls. I float effortlessly through these figures, can stay suspended in the air for as long as I like. My ballet and modern dance teacher, Miss Copland, watches, transfixed (223).

            The magisterial Synthesis of Intuitions exhibit ends with this looped recording, marking a finale to a floor filled with always shifting mediums and sizes and displays. The exhibit ends with a sense of unfiltered joy that escapes the battle with categorization that plagues her prior work. There was always an encounter or negotiation or question posed to the audience, and Piper was able to finally release that tension through dance.

            In the summer of 2017 as a student studying abroad in Berlin, I made a promise that I will always be too expensive to buy, I will always mean what I say, and I will always do what I say I am going to do. When I discovered Piper’s work through the Probable Trust Agency at the Hamburger Bahnhof, I was just on the hinge of discovering the variety of mediums she has utilized to express her multiplicity of identities—yet another dichotomy Piper is always teasing and toying with. Through her work, I have seen my own anxieties surrounding racial identification—as a mixed-race woman who can pass for white—synthesized to the point of recognition. In her work, I can survey the perspective of both the artist and audience. This uncanny duality feels almost intentional—it is one more way for Piper to pursue a dichotomy of intent and impact, or black and white.

            Even once the constant tension of negotiation is released, Piper moves forward with retirement. In a press release-style posting on her website, she announces, “Adrian Piper has decided to retire from being black. In the future, for professional utility, you may wish to refer to her as The Artist Formerly Known as African-American.” The announcement features a 2012 digital self portrait titled Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment. The portrait is visibly darkened over her skin, teeth, and wisps of her front bangs turning them either brown or orange. Overlaid on the image is typewritten text that explains for her 64th birthday, she has decided to “change my racial and nationality designations. Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my one-sixteenth African heritage.” I have chosen here to display the screenshot of the announcement from her website, which features a galactic image in the background due to their contrasting pairing. Both images feature a balance of shadows and highlights, but within the galaxy, there exists two prominent white circular patterns that potentially imitate the imagery of Piper’s eyes. Below the galactic highlights is a swirl of shadows that follow the pattern of Piper’s face. The relationship between the self portrait and galaxy is strong in both visual and metaphoric clues: Piper has spent her professional career exploring how her race affects her place in American and authoritarian structures, and at 64, after living in a different country for several years, she has resigned that battle. Piper is never able “to fully transcend these categories and the violence they inflict”—at least in a physical environment (Ro). But overlaid on a celestial silhouette, Piper hints at the world to come when she can shed the weight of her forced constellations and simply live.

Works Cited.

“Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016.” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2018.

Canbaz, Melissa. “Adrian Piper: The Probable Trust Registry.” ArtForum, vol. 17, 2017, pp. 406.

Cotter, Holland. “Adrian Piper: The Thinking Canvas.” New York Times, 2018.

Juno, Andrea. Angry Women. Juno Books, 1999.

Lammer, Elise and Karima Boudou. “Adrian Piper ‘The Mythic Being’ at MAMCO, Geneva.” Mousse Magazine, 2018.

Mercer, Kobena. ”Decentering and Recentering: Adrian Piper’s Spheres of Influence” in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 1999, pp. 56.

Pabst, Naomi. “Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs.” Cultural Critique, vol. 54, 2003, pp. 178-212.

Piper, Adrian in Out of Order, Out of Sight, vol. 1, Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, 220.

Piper, Adrian. “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” Transition, vol. 58, 1992, pp. 4-32.

Robinson, Amy. “By/passing Identity: A Response to Women and Theatre 1992.” Theatre Topics, vol. 3, 1993, pp. 75-80.

Ro, Lori. “Adrian Piper has done it all – what now?” Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, 2019. https://www.tribes.org/web/2018/8/27/adrian-piper-has-done-it-all-what-now-lori-ro.

“The Mythic Being.” adrianpiper.com, updated by Adrian Piper, 1973.

Trainor, James. “Walking the walk: the artist as flaneur.” Border Crossings, vol. 22, 2013, pp. 82-92.

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Vanessa Gregorchik is a designer and strategist in Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, she works at Upstatement where she helps people and publications tell their stories on and off the web. Previously she was with The Washington Post experimenting with design and technology. Vanessa cares about the way digital and physical spaces shape our communities.

Uncertainty + Sparring After Sunset

SM Stubbs

Uncertainty

That the body is a cruel steward
is not a revelation. For two straight weeks
you watch the staff take blood, x-rays, and MRIs,
watch them fill a fridge with vials
of your mother’s vital fluids and still
the doctors at St. Mary’s can’t diagnose
the swelling. They shrug at inconclusive results
while your heart fractures ever further,
tuned as it is to its own collapsing:
again again again.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
calculates the mathematical impossibility
of determining the position of a particle and
its momentum in a specific moment.
You can’t remember where you read about it
or why anyone needs to know
but in human terms it means
you know where you are yet can’t say
how long it took to get there
or even which path you followed.

Your father won’t have the strength for this
much longer. For ten years he’s been refilling
her water, heating up leftovers,
counting pills. He’s worn thin and pale
and bruised. When he jokes about you moving home
to help it does not feel like a joke.
No one can guess what next year will bring,
he tells me. Perhaps beaches and sunshine
will appeal more then, the ocean
the sort of music you’ll want to hear.

Sparring After Sunset

I’ve been married for fifteen years
            with a python-sized portion of joy
                         and a rattler’s share of misery.

Even so there are nights I’ll add up
            the sleep I lost worrying about
                         my parents. Every day they hissed

at each other while I was young enough
            to be confused by it. In the gloom
                         of the unlit porch their voices were

low pressure systems convecting
            the fading sunlight as I waited to eat
                         dinner, hour after hour, dizzy & weak,

unsure what their clipped fury meant.
            I did not see love in it. After all love
                         wasn’t tense shoulders and clenched

jaws but flowers and kisses, whatever
            lifted people toward happiness. There
                         was always too much for love to carry.

Which might explain dad’s ruined knees
            and mom’s broken hip, both of them
                         coiled now in separate beds. Maybe that

was how they soothed love’s rage—
            barefoot, surrounded by darkness
                         after a storm had passed, just beyond

the glow of the kitchen light,
            holding each other, arms locked tight,
                         neither willing to be the one to let go.

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SM Stubbs until very recently co-owned a bar in Brooklyn. Recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf, he has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, among others, with work forthcoming in December and The Rumpus.

WHEN I ASK MYSELF, WILTINGLY, “TO WHAT HAS MY LIFE BEEN REDUCED?” THIS IS THE ANSWER + AFTER I WAS RAPED THE SECOND TIME, I LOST 40 POUNDS,

Katie Berta

WHEN I ASK MYSELF, WILTINGLY, “TO WHAT HAS MY LIFE BEEN REDUCED?” THIS IS THE ANSWER

Checking the tracking for the package that has still only just departed Edison New Jersey, checking the tracking for the package that has still only departed Columbus Ohio, checking the tracking for the package that is lingering in Romeoville Illinois, checking the polls, checking the other polls, the approval ratings, the COVID numbers, checking the submissions—has one ticked over to In Progress? No.—, checking the submissions of others on the submission tracker, on the women’s poetry forum, by searching “copper canyon” and “manuscript” on Twitter, checking your estranged sister’s Facebook page—she has posted your favorite podcast, which airs whole sessions of couple’s therapy; coincidence?—, checking your husband’s Facebook page—still nothing—, checking the Facebook page of a long-reviled ex, checking the Facebook page of a long-feared ex, checking the puny academic job wiki, checking the AAUP job board, checking interfolio to see if that last rec has come in, checking the polls, checking the other polls, checking the COVID numbers, checking the package lingering, checking the Edison New Jersey, checking the “copper” “manuscript,” the reviled Facebook page, the progress, forum, podcast, ex.

AFTER I WAS RAPED THE SECOND TIME, I LOST 40 POUNDS,

and everyone began congratulating me. Men, previously ambivalent
unless coercive, became lascivious. I watched reruns
of The Biggest Loser every day. I saw the lines of my face deepen
and became convinced that though I used to believe I had a pretty face
and an ugly body, the opposite was true. I had sex with the man
I would marry and cried afterward, told him I believed this
was a function of my breath, and I believed that. I couldn’t remember
anything. I ran until I destroyed my knees and couldn’t run any more.
I ate a whole microwave-in-the-bag bag of broccoli for dinner,
with a little grated cheese sprinkled. I believed I was descending
into nothingness. I descended into nothingness. I used my iPhone
to disassociate, and to take selfies. My jaw line was impeccable,
my cheekbones, razor sharp. Everyone compared how I was then
to how I was before then. The other day, I saw a picture of what
was my arm. Like the tiny bones you excavate from the pellet
of an owl, the bones of a mouse.

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Katie Berta is the Managing Editor of The Iowa Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and Massachusetts Review, among other magazines. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She has her PhD in poetry from Ohio University.

Getaway Driver

Matthew Olzmann

In the movies, the getaway driver wears
sunglasses. He’s patient while waiting,
staring through the windshield as if bored
by all this tension. Never a bead of sweat.
Never a nervous glance in the rearview mirror.

Here come his conspirators, scampering
from the crime scene, diving into the car’s
open windows. Here’s the cash ripped
from the vault, or the briefcase
of black opals. Watch how he shoots

the car through oncoming traffic, careens
down every narrow alley. See how skillfully
he leaps a guardrail, crashes through
any well-placed roadblock, and never
flinches in the flare of some cinematic gunfire.

When I’m behind the wheel—I’m not
nearly so confident. I’m afraid of dying and,
basically, everything else. I’m always
ready to step away from the vehicle
with my hands raised. But not this time.

I’ve learned to appreciate how quickly
the smoke can clear. When I wake up, you are
dancing or laughing in the next room. Look
at the books on our shelves. Bread on the table,
sangria over ice. Your hand resting in mine.

On every “Greatest Heists of All Time” list,
you can always find Munch’s The Scream,
the fire from Mount Olympus, and all those
shimmery Antwerp diamonds. But I’ll hold
this life up there against any of them.

To keep what’s been stolen, I’m ready
to outrace every law that looks for me.
The sirens could be closing in. The credits
might be about to roll. But the tank is
forever full. The engine, always running.

---

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize) and Contradictions in the Design. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.