From NonBinary Review Issue #40: Epiphany

22 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." 2 He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." 3 And Abraham stroked the length of his graying beard as he considered the grave commandment. 4 "No thanks," said he. 5 The Lord God tilted his great head in confusion. "What do you mean, 'No thanks'?" he asked, his voice thundering off the hillsides and trembling the well water at the refuge of Beersheba. 6 Abraham made sure to breathe steadily as he measured his words. And he spoke, saying, "I am signaling that I've heard and understood your request, and I am politely and respectfully declining to murder my child for you." 7 So Abraham went about his day, guiding his donkey back toward his home as The Lord God remained in a furious silence. 

8 The next morning, Abraham rose early, saddled the donkey, and brought Isaac with him to gather water at the well of Beersheba. 9 Abraham had taken The Lord God's commandment as a sign that he should speak with Isaac about the treaty that resulted in the well being dug and their salvation in the hard land being vouchsafed. 10 Yet before they could reach the well, God spoke to Abraham again, warning him that he would cause a great damage to come to the land if the elder refused to kill his child upon the altar. 11 And Isaac did thus say, "Oh, hold up?" 12 And Abraham said, "Now why would you do that, my God? You who has gifted me Isaac and gifted us this water and gifted us this land? I mean, what possible reason could you have for wanting my son dead and for wanting to destroy the land if that doesn't happen?" 13 "Because this is a test of your loyalty which you have already failed," said God The Creator Of All Things In The Universe And Lord And Master Of Dominion Over Them. 14 "But, like, what a weird test, Lord," said Abraham. "And loyalty to whom?" 15 "To me, your God!" The Supreme Being said. To which Abraham in his wisdom responded, "It seems to me that I've proven loyalty to my son, who cannot defend himself and needs me to guide him to understand both this world and his place in it. And since you keep pressing the issue, I've gotta say it's a pretty shitty thing to ask a father to do to his child. It makes me question your strength as a God.”

16 The Lord God Almighty On High Leader Of Heavens attempted to interject, but good Abraham cut him off, saying, "And, holy hell...threatening me when I wouldn't kill my son for you? Forgive me if this is out of line, but that makes you seem incredibly weak, Lord. Like, super thin-skinned. One would hope your ego wouldn't be so easily penetrated." 17 And God The God Of All Gods let out a mighty eruption that shook the earth and brought down large stones off the hillside such that it blocked Abraham, Isaac, and the donkey's path. 18 "Oh, here we go again," said Abraham. "Is violence and destruction the only solution you've got in the grab bag, O Lord? If you ask me, you have rage issues to work out. Find a healthy outlet for it like pickle ball or Krav Maga and let go of whatever insecurities are plaguing you." 19 The air was still and silent, except for the donkey braying. 20 "Oh, come on. I know you're still there, so just talk to me. Don't shut this out. Lean into the pain. Let your walls tumble down, O Lord."

21 And Praiseworthy God boomed, “Insolence! My mind is on a quadrillion other things more important than one barefaced worm! I am keeping the heavens and earth aloft while you mumble about feelings!” 22 Then did Isaac speak up, saying, “Let’s start there. That seems like a ton of pressure, O Lord,” and Abraham did nod, patting his child on the shoulders in encouragement and praise. 23 “Will you just kill your son already?! Stop disobeying your Master and threatening your God!” Abraham’s Master and God proclaimed. The very atoms of existence trembled.

24 “Legitimate criticism should not feel threatening to the confident mind,” Abraham shouted back into the sky. “If it will help, I’ll say something first, and we can take turns.” 25 When the valley lay still, Abraham continued, saying into the wind, “I still regret how everything went down with Lot but remind myself daily that he’s an adult, and I can’t make his decisions for him. Your turn, son.”

26 “I feel like I can’t be a kid sometimes because our family drama is so consuming,” the Isaac said, and Abraham did listen – really did listen – to his son’s worry so that he might try to alleviate it over time. 27 As they waited for the Lord to speak, a ram burst from a nearby thicket, running off across the valley and out of their sight.

28 The Lord God of All Creation sighed deeply. “I’m lonely,” He did avow. “You’re right about the immense pressures of maintaining the complexities of this imperfect universe, and there is no one who really understands me, so I have no one to lay down my burdens upon, so sometimes I lash out in extreme ways. This behavior goes back a long way, and often it consumes me. I can't even remember why I asked you to kill Isaac in the first place."

29 Then Isaac lifted his outstretched hands toward his father as if to say, "What the fuck?" And Abraham calmed him before saying to his God, "I don’t get it, but I get it, if that makes sense.” 

30 And Abraham and Isaac did sit to talk it out with God and to snack on dates and honeycomb. When they were done supping, and the Lord had gotten everything off his chest, he apologized and vowed not to seek petty violence ever again. 31 As Abraham and Isaac made their way down the pathway toward the well to share in the lesson of the treaty of its creation, God spake one final time to them both, saying "Thank you, wise Abraham and farewell, dear Isaac." As their Lord departed, thankful Isaac took his loyal father's hand and mouthed, "Oh. My. God." and Abraham did say, "Seriously. I know, right?" and they continued in peace to gather water from the well at Beersheba.

From NonBinary Review Issue #39: Mistaken Identity

People say they love my honesty, but honestly,
I’m a liar and a thief. I would steal your mother
and help you look for her. What was she wearing?
Large breasts or small? Truly I have a prurient
bent. I sometimes incline toward pure prurience.
But at least I’m honest about it. I am up front
at the adult movie theater. I’m in the first row
where there’s nothing between me and these
fine actors, some of whom are really very fine—
I mean they’re so convincing I believe they are
in love. I believe I am in love. I mean that’s how
good they are. But me, I’m not a good person. I would
pocket your twenty if I found it on the floor of
your car. I would borrow your car without asking you.
I would steal your line and put it in my poem without
crediting you. I would sleep with your mother
if she were good looking enough and willing. Honestly,
I am not an honest person and this poem is not
an honest poem. It expresses feelings and beliefs that
I have never felt or entertained. It’s a sad day when
someone like you lets someone like me get away
with something like this. What were you thinking?

From NonBinary Review Issue #36: Heredity

“I think my brother came back as a crow,” I say to the young woman at the flea market stall. The pretty, quiet one with good skin who sits indifferently at a table full of bones and crystal balls. “He’s haunting me.”

She nods as if she has heard this one before. She probably has, this or some variation of it. After all, her booth, “Raven’s Requiem,” proclaims to be “Baltimore’s foremost purveyor of occult trinkets and treasures.” I trace the fraying edge of one of the tapestries that hang from the side of her table, wolves howling in vain at a yellowing moon.

“I’m not crazy,” I continue. “In fact, I’ve never been more lucid. Ever since his death, it’s like my senses are heightened. I notice things. I can hear things most people can’t. And see things too. It feels like I’m sitting up high, watching everyone else from above.”

“It started about the same time as the crow appeared. It’s always watching me. Every time I look up, I see it. It perches on the skylight of my bedroom. I wake up in the morning and it’s the first thing I see, looking down at me with its black, unreadable eyes. Staring at me, like it’s trying to send me a message. Or like he’s accusing me of something. And I keep thinking, if I could just get to him, you know, maybe I could figure out what he wants. We were close, once. And so I can’t shake this feeling that he’s come back. He came back for me.”

This is what happens with grief. You can’t stop talking about the dead, to practically anyone, anywhere you go. As if divulging such personal details will bring him back to life.

I try to will this woman into asking how he died. Most people do. Then I’ll say, matter of factly, that he swallowed poison. That he took a bottle from the factory where he worked, one of the many bottes of chemicals he used every day, and drove back to his apartment, stirred the crystalline powder into a tall glass of tap water, and drank it. Deliberately. I will say he killed himself. I will say all of this while looking her directly in the eye, as if without shame, although I am very much ashamed.

She does not ask.

“Sometimes he brings me things. Yesterday, I woke up to this terrible pounding sound. He was right there on my skylight, rapping at the glass with a watch in his beak. My brother used to collect antique watches. And guess what I found, later that afternoon, sitting in the grass in my front yard. The watch was badly cracked, but it was still ticking. He dropped it there. Intentionally. He wanted me to have it. That’s my brother for you.”

I shift my gaze to the neat little rows of Victorian apothecary bottles. Tinted glass. “My brother would’ve loved this stuff,” I tell the woman. And I know just what he would have said about them: “Built to stand the test of time.” He worked in plastics, but hated it. He manned the blow molder, the machine they use to make plastic bottles. He’d make thousands in one day. I can imagine him still, in his truck after work, muttering about all the waste. “Where does it all go?” he’d ask. Litter, it turns out. Straight into the Chesapeake.

I pick up an amber tincture vial. It’s so slight and beautiful. I wonder what it was used for in its day, what chemicals it has harbored. I view my distended reflection in the beveled glass. I see my brother staring back. He looks like he’s been crying.

I see my brother bring the glass to his lips. I watch him drink the misty white liquid inside. It is tasteless and empty. I watch him set the glass down gently and lay in his bed. He pulls the sheets up to his neck. It’s getting cold. The watch at his bedside keeps ticking. I look on as hours pass, as life leaves him and he dissolves into nothing.

I sift through a mass of coins housed in a faded cigar box beside the vials, pick out a few of the newer-looking ones. “Do you think I could lure him down somehow, maybe if I set out something shiny in my front lawn? Would that would work? I need to get to him. The noise he makes up there is awful. His talons on the glass at all hours. It wakes me up, and all I see are his insistent little eyes in the dark, watching me. Not telling me why.”

The woman takes the coins from me, gently placing them into a small brown paper bag. She folds down the edge, avoiding my gaze as she hands it over.

“Do you think it would work? If I could get him to come down, maybe it would be easier…If I could just get a little closer…”

***

I see my brother in a body bag. He is not quite human now. Still, this will forever be the point in time that I am closest to the old him, the living version of him. The medical examiner had wheeled the body out on a gurney, hoisted it into the back of a white, unmarked SUV. A final slam of the doors, and then all I could see was my own reflection in the tinted windows as they drove him away. As the next of kin, the police gave me the key to his apartment. It was the first time I had set foot in it, even though we lived in the same town. When I stepped inside, I saw the sign written in his methodical hand: “Caution: Body Upstairs. Do Not Resuscitate.” He had written this on a whiteboard and propped it on a chair at the base of the stairs. When I went up to the loft, I beheld the full extent of his plans. The typed-up note by the bedside table. A spilling box of anti-emetics, so he would not expel the poison he had ingested. The still-ticking watch. A tidy stack of unpaid utility bills. He did not leave hastily, he had planned his departure. For how many years? How many times did he look me in the eye and laugh and smile, full well knowing what he was going to do? How long had I been deceived? These were the thoughts that plagued me that afternoon, as I crawled into his bed. The sheets were rumpled but cold now. Laying my face on his pillow, I noticed a tinge of blood comingled with a smattering of downy black feathers. They were so fine, so foreign that the police must have missed them. That’s when I first suspected my brother was not who he seemed. He’d become something else.

***

I pick up a stick of incense from one of the tables, dozens of glassy eyes watching me.  A placard advertises, “Tarot Readings: $5.00.” The young woman catches me looking. “Do you want to know your future?” I shake my head. I’m not crazy. I know what the future has in store for me. Not much.

“Or your past?” Something about the way she says “past” stops me cold, the hard slap of the t as it catches in her teeth. “I can see you have unanswered questions.”

 As she takes my money, the light hits her face, and I am struck by her youthful complexion, the smooth features of her skin. When I see young people now, I am always judging them against my brother, who was still young when he died. And who will now be forever young, immortalized at thirty-five, having decisively ended his own timeline. Meanwhile, I’m left here to go on, grow older, watch the world crumble around me.

The woman pushes some bones aside and lays down three cards on the table. All swords. Now it’s her turn to look to me for an answer, to explain this sudden onslaught of violence. I refuse to.

The last time I saw my brother, in his embodied, human form, he had been dead for four days. In a small side room, off the main hall of the funeral parlor, they had laid him out. The mortician greeted me. She said, “I don’t know what they told you about the manner of his death. I did the best I could with the makeup.” I hated the way she said that, as if I’d be oblivious to the manner of my own brother’s death. I am a smart woman; I am not blind to the pain of others. We were close, once. I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

 They had set him out on a raised table, with a blanket tucked tightly up to his waist, hands folded neatly across his chest. I noticed his fingernails were blotched black and blue. His eyes were glued closed, but he did not look at peace. The skin had a stretched-out appearance, like a thin veil had been draped over his bones. When I touched his arm, it was cold and rigid. He had been stuffed with something. It did not feel human. On his forearms, tiny black slivers poked out through his skin. I touched them. Inky little feathers. The white powder of the mortuary makeup came off on my fingers.

***

Of course, thinking back, I see now: he’d been turning into what he would become for many years before he died. His demeanor changed first. He would blame it on work, the constant ringing in his ears from the factory machines, or the new medications the doctors prescribed. I had no reason to doubt him back then. Still, when he withdrew, I did not bother to follow. Even though I knew that life was breaking his heart, I thought it was a temporary despair. I presumed he would learn to bear it as I had. So I brushed it off when he would say, as he often did towards the end, “If we only had lived in a different time!” He viewed our present world as a bomb waiting to detonate. The poles heating up. Mutating fish in factory-polluted rivers. Microplastics invading our very bodies. As a boy, he would pretend to build time machines. He wanted to live a hundred years ago. The past was safer because you knew what would happen next.

Not for me. The past is a dangerous assembly line of regret, one after another. Here a betrayal, there a stab in the back. Each a colossal failure to see what was coming. Now,  all I see are dozens of alternate timelines: If I had answered that call. If I had arrived earlier. If I had said something before it was too late, said that I understood. If I had begged him to stay.

But instead I am stuck here, in this god-forsaken timeline, where my brother is dead, and I am alone, and the world is still the same ticking time bomb. Where I am forever haunted by his eyes, inscrutable in the dark.

***

The woman puts the cards away. A heavy gust of wind pulls at the wall of tapestries. Whatever she had foretold, I’d missed it.

“What’s the secret?” I ask her. “To keeping them so alive-looking?”

I point to the animals arranged on the edges of the tables. The real reason for my visit to this booth. A taxidermied squirrel with a cowboy hat, a checkered bandana, and a holster. A red fox perched delicately on a stump. A great horned owl, midflight, wings outstretched.

She looks at me from the dark wells of her eyes, a reproaching tilt of the head. Baiting me. What are you up to? But I will say nothing more. I will not reveal what I have planned. I understand now what my brother was trying to tell me. I must be careful. Life is a fragile, flying thing.

When I see that crow again, I will trap him. And once I have him, I will hold on to him, hold him still enough to cut a thin long line down the length of his breast. Then I will peel back the skin and scrape out the organs, the eyes, the leftover meat. Inject the talons with a chemical solution: 50% glycerin and 50% formaldehyde. Once he has dried out, I will stuff his insides with cotton balls and wire, sew him back up. With a mortician’s care, I’ll fold his wings neatly in repose. I will kill him to keep him with me. He will not get away again.

From NonBinary Review Issue #35: Old Friends

I’m sorry, Peter, but I really wanted to write this letter to you, last night, around two in the morning, over my third martini, after not thinking of you for three-fourths of a century. More accurately, I felt like writing about someone totally repugnant, creepy, and grotesquely impelling; then you popped into my head.

I’ve always known that being Peter Petro would be a continuously painful experience. Even at eight years old—you always will be eight to me—you are nothing but grief. The fanaticism in your little gray eyes is intensified as it pierces your thick lenses—how can you wear glasses like that when you’re only eight? For God’s sake, Peter.

And then there are your bangs, plastered limply against your damp, pulsating forehead like seaweed on a rock. In our whole third-grade class there is no one more awfully awful than you. From another planet, I’d say if I knew about other planets—but honestly I don’t. I’m eight and a girl, so I haven’t gotten into the outer-space thing; that obsession is typical of you. What I’m actually into is the awfulness of Peter Petro. Apparently you have made a strong impression on me.

Peter, the incident of the swing, for instance. When I was swinging at recess? Happily? And you stood there and wanted the swing? Wanted it to the point of insanity, screaming for it and stamping your Buster Browns until Mrs. McFall had to come over, lame as she was, and make me give you my turn. After that, you swung and swung. Never mind that there was a whole line waiting, your clear intent was to keep the swing until the very end, till the bitter clanging of the recess bell.

But you can’t ever live down the worst part, because it is etched unchanging on my memory even into old age: There in the gravel under your swing appears a sudden drip of water, and now everyone can see it seeping wider, puddling. Look how fast the news of this event rushes through the schoolyard; hear the hoots from the boys, the scandalized gasps among the girls. Only when Mrs. McFall has hurried the last tittering straggler back into class do you relinquish the wet swing, a swing that no one wants now—oh God forgive you, Peter Petro, for that sorrow in your young life.

It was our mothers who decided we ought to be playmates. Of course, I don’t have many friends either, so I guess it seems inevitable. But compared to you, I live on Earth, a planet I do know and care about. Nevertheless, here we are, thrown together. Here we lie on the floor, head to head, drawing furiously with our Crayolas. At least you are furious; your fury has brought out in myself a certain imperious detachment.

I am working in color on my picture, which—Christmas being three weeks away—shows the Virgin Mary cradling little Jesus within her (periwinkle blue) shawl. The flying (white) things are angels, and here are their (goldenrod) harps. I’ve even done the Three Wise Men with their (burnt sienna) camels—the camels were hard to do, not my best work—and at the upper edge a (yellow) star with a single long ray lighting the Wise Men’s path.

You work in dimension. Perspective. Your first drawing, which was of the Lincoln Tunnel, took a long time, but since then you’ve been going faster and faster—eleven pieces of paper so far. First you draw a square at the center of the page, and from the corners of the square you draw straight lines radiating outward toward the four outer corners of the page. You add a few details, furiously I might add, and shove the picture to face me. “Look,” say you. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes,” say I. “It’s a tunnel. You already asked me that about every single picture.”

“Yes, but which tunnel?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! Lincoln.”

“No,” you triumph once again. “It’s the Holland.”

And next time I will guess Holland because it looks exactly—to me—like the last one, and you will say it is the Lincoln, staring at me as if I should know; as if any moron should know; as if discerning between pictures of the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln is a valid test of my worth as a human being.

Now, actually, Peter, in retrospect I think it was a very good test, and I failed it. But I did not come here to apologize. I will mention, in passing, one other scene from your miserable life: Your mother has come to pick you up. You don’t want to leave. You have had the best time ever, at my apartment, though who could tell? You are distraught. I see your mother’s hands trying to get a grip on your balled fists. I see your Buster Browns hooked tight around a chair leg. I see you stretched out between her straining arms and your L-shaped ankles across our hardwood floor like a powerless yet writhing human catastrophe—oh, may God forgive you for that, Peter Petro, and myself for bearing witness to it. I see your eyes without their glasses. I see you and your mother frantic on hands and knees, searching. And oh, woe, the now-found glasses are broken; shock and surprise, how can this be?

Peter, you are too awful to exist. How can your shoes be that brown, your trousers that short, your socks that mismatched, the striped shirt that wrinkled? ‘He’s a genius,’ grownups say in your defense. Maybe; but your intelligence is like ragged fire, blazing up, smoldering, unfed. I cannot go where you are—I will not.

What, am I writing a letter of first love? No, it’s a love that has been creeping up over a long life, my long life of not seeing people’s hearts, of only noticing from the corner of my eye that they are imprisoned by being themselves. I don’t know whether we choose what vessel will carry our share of the universal soul for a lifetime. If we do choose, apparently I chose to be me, while you (incomprehensibly) chose to be Peter Petro. I’m sure you’ll understand, Peter, my scorn at first sight of you, my dread when first faced with the specter that I might—to others—resemble you, my outright horror in realizing that I might even be you. That you and I might be one.

I saw you in your shame. I looked away, with a shame of my own, but still I saw you. Now you are condemned to live forever in my personal history as your most shameful self. Even if later you managed to survive high school, and New York University, get contact lenses and a hairdo, learn to use a napkin, become a computer millionaire, and father three healthy children, here in my memory you must forever sit on your dripping swing, hands raw from the icy chains, going down with the ship. Here you ever seek your glasses, broken by your own furious disempowerment. I can kneel down and thank God He didn’t have me marry you, the way our mothers dreamed. Yet as I write, I see that I am actually forgiving you, that in fact my reason for writing is to forgive you. Forgive you for what? For being just one speck in the human condition?

Yes, I know, exactly like me. So therefore, in forgiving you, will I myself finally feel forgiven?

From NonBinary Review Issue #32: Epic Fail

For the love of everything good 
do not watch the slaughter film 
like an old-master painting it reaches in and twists 
I fell into walls within walls 
hammers and pliers at my face 
a hundred pounds of eyeballs fell with me 
rolled into One  
one great Eye that judged 
my eighteen brothers fell with me 
through the castle chute their intestines dropped 
then slithered back to life, found each other 
latched onto my legs and chewed 
because I watched the slaughter film  
no more happy little world 
I dozed on the Judas Wheel 
and understood why God won’t visit the Earth 
I lasted thirty-six years in the emperor’s vault 
if I could wash my brain with a scouring pad and bleach 
if I could delete my eye history 
centurions said “We have a present for thee 
a cutout of Mary Poppins to abide with thee” 
centurions said “We bring thee Newcastle honey” 
they covered me with honey funneled it into me 
after thirty-six years I fried in sunshine 
they called out to the flying-things of the empire 
to partake of my sweetness      
a swarm rode to the castle turret  
my body became a thriving grey chain mail 
of ravenous flies and locusts 
for Mother Teresa’s sake do not watch  
I came unprepared to the slaughter film 
because I was just eleven years old it will break you please 
when the swarm was sated and most of my flesh devoured 
the emperor set me free 
they put me on a galleon to the extreme ice coast 
where I preach against the slaughter film 
to this day disciples reach out to the hands of my ears 
to this day they hold samples of my bones 

It’s just the two of us now
here in our spaceship
on the brink of a black hole.

It won’t be long, Anna,
before we’re in its throat, perhaps
swallowed into its infinity.

Computer. Engage ship’s
‍ ‍ magnetic field, counter-rotate
‍ into swirls of that monster’s maul.

I quiver. An old prayer spills off
my tongue onto my lips as I brace,
my hand in yours:

Barukh hashem Adonai
‍ Melekh ha`olam,
‍ Hoshanah!

I was ten the last time I said that.      
My sister, my mother, my father
told me to go, to go quickly

and ride my bike as fast as I could
pedal through the cobbled alleys
to my uncle’s house—other side of town

while they created a diversion
for me. I wish my family could’ve run
and hid like me. That prayer failed.

We’ll be okay, Yacob, God is
‍ with us no matter where
‍ we go, even in the darkest place.

We slip past the churning,
our spaceship electrified,
cocooned in a web of fields

where gravity and magnetism
entwine inside the event horizon.
We can no longer escape

into our world, but space and time
twist into each other more tightly
than our own hearts’ entanglement—

a quantum entanglement ensuring
us that who we are here will prevail
as our phantom selves. We’ll still be

alive when our ship punches through
to another universe, another time.
Maybe in this one, there will be

no Hitler, no Holocaust...
but if there is, we’ll know better
what to do.

It’s good to finally meet you.

No, you don’t know me. But I’ve been around.

Oh, lots of times. Like when you were accidentally locked out of your family’s hotel room. You, a four-year-old, looking down the corridor, the pale red and white hexagons interlocking on the carpet, shrinking into the distance. The scent of bleach and pool chlorine. A labyrinth of vending machines, housekeeping carts, conference rooms, closets stacked with tiny shampoos, all longing to be explored.

The ditch behind your housing development. When you were eleven, you watched rainwater flow into the big concrete pipe that ran beneath the road, carrying the water to the other side of four-lane traffic. A heron stood, knee-deep, watching for fish and frogs passing in the current.

The arched overpass, the one that scared you when you were learning to drive. Lined with orange-globed streetlamps. It rose up, up in the dark, curving, like the Rings of Saturn. Nowhere to pull over. One wrong twist of the steering wheel could send you into Space. The night-city gleaming gently far away.

Gas stations and truck stops on turnpike roads with quarter-operated laundries and showers you can rent in fifteen-minute slots. Stacks of VHS tapes, instant oatmeal, crystal dragons in glass displays.

The airport, which glittered with chrome and white tile, except in that empty hallway, where it was dingy brown, where half the overhead lights were burned out and it was, somehow, still too starkly lit. No turnings or doors or terminals. Just one long straight hall leading through or under or beside or over whatever was beyond the walls.

I know because I was there.

You felt your soul shift in those places, didn’t you? Those non-places. You lingered, or you wanted to. To absorb the in-betweenness. But you couldn’t, because you were late for your connecting flight and a strange man was staring and you can’t stop on an overpass or live in a ditch with a heron and your mother opened the hotel room door and pulled you inside. Safe. Arrived.

You always had to arrive.

That’s never really what you wanted. But no one is supposed to long for the in-between. Not anymore. Oh, your ancestors exalted me, at Solstice and Equinox, at birth and death, at dawn and twilight, with bridges spanning mountains over river-rushed canyons, on the wood and stone lintels of their homes. Now, I am a god ignored. Relegated to utilitarian shipping docks and warehouse distribution centers, narrow alleys and flimsy bus stop shelters.

No one attends to the liminal. The thresholds are shabby and the gateways derelict. You rush past them, unseeing, unfeeling, to the destination. The journey is a hardship, a series of logistical hurdles, and the suitcases growling and biting at your ankles to hurry hurry hurry.

Because if you do anything but hurry past, shuttering your soul, then those strange, ambiguous landscapes might begin to seep inside. You become dizzy, then afraid, and so instead of falling into that disorientation—that liminal space—with open arms, instead of letting yourself be changed, you step aside. You avoid the discomfort. Refuse the unknown. And keep walking, and fast; you’re late to work.

So you never make it to the other side of anything. You only belong to one place. Static and one-dimensional. Satisfied with the illusion of external movement.

Well, not you.

I know you. You understand.

Or you might, or you could, or you think you will, once you see what lies on the other side of the hill where the highway spools and spools like a ribbon unravelling beneath a sky filled with clouds like whales, swimming on the wind.

You’ve never belonged anywhere. Not in the giggling little-girl circles of childhood, not in the whispering boy-crazed huddles of teenage-dom. Most comfortable alone, where there is no one to remind you of your not-belonging, or rather, no one to make you think not-belonging is wrong.

You want to belong, but to everywhere and nowhere. You can. You already do, every time you breathe—which is never a finished task, not until you die (and dying isn’t an arrival either, not really).

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

You belong, in that still moment between the end of the inhale and the beginning of the exhale. Between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the inhale.

You breathe the liminal, the neither here nor there. The almost.

You exist in the liminal. In between, in the breath. You are always passing through. The in-between is where you are alive. Does that make you uncomfortable? And does that discomfort feel good? Familiar? Nostalgic in its ungraspable, slipping-away-ness?

Ignoring that discomfort—ignoring me—is folly. To do so is to cast the most important parts of living into the landfill to rot, to waste what short lives you have.

Well. You know. I don’t have to convince you.

It’s nice, to talk to someone who understands. I get lonely. I don’t know what kind of a god that makes me, admitting that to you. But in this famine time where I am mostly forgotten, your moments of ablution, of awe, of wordless wonder… They matter. You matter.

I wish I could stay, but staying isn’t my forte.

You might see me again. Maybe. Keep moving. Be in between, belonging and not-belonging. Take it all into yourself. Change, and being changed, learn, not with words, but with something deeper and more ancient, something you’ve known since before you learned to speak, when your eyes had not yet lightened with the sun.

Then, tell them. Tell about the potholes, the roadkill, the mirage of wavering heat on the asphalt. Tell about the rainbow, the smell of the cattle lot, the toll booth like a little witch’s house on the edge of a forest—on the edge of the turnpike. Tell how you stood with awe in the shadow of a highway, traffic roaring by, bearing witness to the tadpoles flickering in a puddle in the gravel.

Fig. 1

Girlhoods die side-by-side in a Bed
Big enough to hold amnion and Chorion
Soft leather shells pulled up to Necks
Pooled like sheets at our Waists

I saw you through pinkish Membrane
Like sunlight behind soft closed Lids
Stirred from thin finger to shaking Spine
Knocking gentle on our calcified Wall

Fig. 2 

I shared a bed with a girl once before I didn’t sleep on her floor or on the bottom bunk no I laid restless next to her like my parents but with our stuffed animals lined like soldiers at our backs witness to us speaking hushed fingertips against fingertips exchanging static shocks from cotton or inches of hair or proximity she asked if we could play mommy and daddy get married like mommy and daddy love like mommy and daddy I let her fold against me a single piece of wrinkled construction paper creased and creased triangles against triangles until we’re a crane or a fortune teller or half an airplane this is how adults love each other she says all I can do is nod and let my girl heart pound oh god was this it was this the feeling that men got when they looked at women because this can’t be the way girls feel about girls gasping and laughing under false writhing a caricature of intimacy tiny hand puppets fumbling bashful secrets in the dark 

Fig. 3

perlite teeth
wired shut
soft enamel
like shale
bird chest
plush ribs
no bras
not yet
blue seams
trench throat
hollow neck
wet sigh
in sleep
thin lips
pink rim
dry spots
but lush
still soft
I think
I think
I think

Fig. 4

I thought maybe /
if I soaked myself in vinegar long enough /
I could make myself pliable /
plucking boys fresh from the incubator /
ticking off traits from the breeding chart /
that hangs next to my kitchen door /
tracking generations of smiles and eye colors /
comparing them against the broods of my friends /
scribbling clinical notes in the margins /
about feet and mouths and knobbed knees /
dissatisfied with chickens /
their feathered noisy forms /
still seeking reptiles.

Fig. 5

We are embryos, dual zygotes occupying
the same ossified chamber. If I could reach out
and tear your sac I would, but we float too close,

too delicate for that. I watch you malform
beside me, stunted, sprouting scant cell clusters
instead of fingers and eyes. You gestate reluctant,

tiny heart hammering through molasses yolk, wary
of life and love before either has happened. Blinking
takes eons but I find you when light has been shown

through our shell, the beam as long as my body.
We limbed blobs, mere infants, with nothing to compare
our emerging bodies to. I am peeled from you, rent 

from congruity, pried flailing, wondering why it is
that one half must always be left behind. I, survivor,
salvaged, spot you tailless and nerveless below. 

We were supposed to look the same. 

Fig. 6 

I wanted to kiss you while your parents Slept
But that would mean reaching slow across the Gap
Bridging nerve to tendon to trembling Scale
Forming hesitant life organic from Nothing

I watched you swallow albumen and Wondered
Parenthetical to your resting nascent Form   
Whether love could be carved from Want
And want could be kept somewhere Quiet

You’ve asked me outside to have a Very Important Conversation, even though you’re an idiot and I already know what you’re going to say. I so badly want to run away and leave you—all of this—behind, even if leaving isn’t survivable, that’s how tired I am.

It’s against our guidelines, exiting the bunker, which is why you’ve asked me. To confer Importance. And for Privacy, in case I make a scene, which I probably will.

“Here,” you say, righting and patting a half-melted tire for a seat. But I don’t want to sit, so I turn and stare into the crackling sky.

Ever since they—I was going to say arrived but no, not arrived—showed themselves to have had arrived, long ago and in every place we thought we were alone, their curiosity giving way to a deeply-rooted disgust, it’s been like they turned on a catastrophe-spigot and removed the knobs, hid the instructions on how to turn it off. The wind has teeth. The water is punctuated by falling stone. We’ve watched friends disintegrated, evaporating into a smooth orange mist, while others were scooped whole and screaming into eldritch jaws. The fortunate dissociated in the beginning, and never came back.

You cough, and I hate you. I so deeply fucking hate you. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve felt since watching Cora get dusted in the Glow, or when her sister, already half-unhinged, stopped speaking and wandered into the cold and you just let her.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say,” you say. I roll my eyes, thinking of saying it for you, to humiliate you, but then—over your shoulder, out there in the middle of one of the black Continent Storms, the water lifts.

And lifts and lifts, shifting nearer.

You see the look on my face and think I’m frightened of what you’re about to say, offer two fingers to my knee as if this might, somehow, be comforting. It’s so stupid and yet so unbelievably tender, the kind of thing that only mildly annoyed me before, back when we were a couple, parents.

There’s only a breath before it’s on us. But as you finally start speaking, I decide not to interrupt.

Once, the mills made paper. And then, decaying behind the floodwall, the mills just sat and waited. But a paper mill was not the first place I entered 

simply for the thrill.

The first was a house growing just outside the neighborhood I was born in, one in a string of houses that had begun to sprout quick like mushrooms along my tree-stalked and stone-crossed hillside. I was a teenager.

I hated that invading house frame and I scuffed the dirt, kicked the earthmover, climbed monkey-style through the two-by-fours. Then the walls came up.

When the locks went on, I cracked the electronic code, 1-2-3-4. The garage door rolled open. I caught my breath.

Is it really this easy?

Again and again I went back to hear that illicit rumble, to enter, to lay on the freshly varnished floor. To hear the echoes, to feel the emptiness — it was my American dream. That access and aloneness were the most liberty I had known.

Eventually a family moved in. They might have changed the code but I never checked; I wasn't interested anymore. Inhabited, the house was like all the rest.

Now I'm the Paper Queen. I infiltrate a different kind of potential. I stash my headlamp in deep pocket jeans, slip on black bicycle gloves. I don a hood.

I spy the uninhabited mill decaying
behind the floodwall.

From the floodwall’s turret — I spy on her.

I pry into the building
memorize her potential.

Now I am an adult, a professional, an ivy-league graduate. I’ve run this activity by my attorney.

None of this means necessarily that I am not a criminal, I understand, or even that I’m not sometimes stupid. But knowledge helps construct an air of authority that allows me to proceed, with confidence, where I do not belong.

I aim to commit no crime and I never break, only enter. 

When I swing my hips—
I’m walking that scene—

I never break but when I enter
I’m the Paper Queen.

I go into the Sherwood Forest of dark paper mills on the edge of the city, along the river bend and the floodwall. I see things. I am one of only a few who know about this thrill—

despite the many ways there are
to enter
an abandoned mill.

1.

Sometimes, it really is so easy. The building invites me inside.

She says, “I’m waiting.

You’ll never know
if you don’t try.”

The front door was unlocked so I was in and had closed the door so fast behind me, then paused to let my eyes adjust to the darkness.

The mill was big enough and dim enough to seem endless — all wide bays and boarded windows. Its disuse was palpable. The white noise of the building’s existence did not include voices or footsteps. 

It may be an illusion that this is a room.
It is a canyon.
I am a crow in a canyon. 

I was rooted in place. My own sounds slowly blended into all the rest — animals and ghosts.

It may be an illusion that this is a room.

Perhaps, I have opened the door and stepped
into the belly of a whale.

His ribs arced high above me, the colors all rotted brown and bloody black and bleached bones. I was unsure where to put my feet, disoriented by the room’s darkness after the sun-bright sky. 

The building said, “I’m waiting”
so I stepped my way inside.

2.

As I swung my hips, I imagined what I would say to anyone who saw me spying around—

I just stumbled in here.

Sometimes, there was no easy code, no unlocked door. Buildings can appear impenetrable — the elements of weight, space and texture lock them down.

Take the bricks. They were laid double row into walls so thick that even where they crumbled there was still more surface. Bricks provide weight. The building is heavy and heavy things are hard to move into openness.

I am not a magician.

Space could be just as impenetrable. The upper windows were not boarded and many of them were missing panes. Some of the roof was vulnerable to the sky — but these openings were far overhead.

If only I could saunter in from above—

I was walking in the sky and
the roof was wide open

  I imagined telling the owner.

  The roof was wide open
I just stumbled in here. 

I climbed iron rung ladders up the floodwall between the river and the mills, and walked along it like a castle wall. Flat bastions stood where water from the canal flowed back out to the river. 

I made the climb to sit and look back in. To map the texture of a row of mills.

I am a crow on a cliff.
I spy on the mills decaying—

From the floodwall’s turret
I pry into the buildings. 

The lower windows were pirate-style plywood — boards over loading dock cargo bays and collapsed-in places where there might be a way. 

Some openings led nowhere. A crust of bay fell down into a hole, a dungeon. A dead end. I skirted anything with a dim reflection of oil slick some meters down. 

If the weight and space conspired to keep me out, texture would lead me in.

A crack just in the back, low to the ground, not a window or a door but a gap in some larger boarded-up once-opening. A hole a couple of feet square and just enough to shimmy into. 

Most times, that hole would go nowhere. A break in some boards that covered cinderblocks built strong from inside. 

But I found the right one. An intimate way. 

Head and arms first, fingertips gripped the cool cement as I hoisted myself up and in. My thigh scraped and I leveled and pulled,

pried myself in.
Crawling,

Face near the oil-stained and musty floor. I righted myself in a push back to standing.

The guts of the building were stone and less inclined to rot so close to the subterranean water crevice of the canal.

There was so much weight

to wade through.

3.

Later, plywood overlapping two sheets thick had been sliced right through with something sharp, creating a hole just big enough to stoop into. A hobbit door—

Who goeth?

Of course I am not the only one

who knows about the thrill—

given the many ways there are
to enter an abandoned mill.

This portal had not been there before.

All along, I knew people could be nearby. The raceways under some mills still made electricity and the historical commission toured others before approving their still yet-to-be-scheduled demise.

I’d found a mattress and other evidence of human presence, a small portable heat source and trash. One mill had yellow construction lights strung and although I never saw anyone there, the lights were always on. A mill closer to City Hall had graffiti in each window but the mills I preferred were unused in this way.

The cut-through plywood surprised me then, like the mattress that made me look over my shoulder a few more times than usual.

Who goeth?
Who goeth a borrowing, goeth a sorrowing—

Someone working was one thing. Someone who broke when they entered had also now slid in. I never break but I do enter.

It could be squatters or city kids sneaking around. But power tools? Perhaps thieves, there was copper in the guts if these buildings. It could be anything including a sneak up, brick-in-the-face knockdown (there were plenty of bricks), the darker part of my brain told me.

When I’m walking that scene
I quicken my step—

Put on some bravado
as the Paper Queen.

4.

One evening in City Center where the buildings are less derelict and just as empty. We peered into windows. We watched the progress of a small building that during daytime was being gutted and scrubbed.

The building said, “I’m waiting”
and I spied an easy way inside.

But my friend felt edgy            
and asked me not to try.

For a long time I wondered if it was a lack of arrogance. Why not just decide that you belong, and step your way inside?

But it seems that my friend had been persuaded by the civilizing nature of human nearness. In the center of town, it’s neighborhood rules versus wild.

Sometimes the only way to go
is to pass the building by.

I was pretty sure that theory was true because other times, the tone was different. I let him force our way inside.

Boot against plywood — I did not make that kick myself.

If not going in is a subjective choice, so too breaking quickly becomes a clear intent—

I never break, only enter.

My world was smaller for my lack of force and I admit I was a hypocrite even in my resolve. I entered buildings through these illicit holes made by others. As long as I did not break them open myself.

The roof was wide open
I just stumbled in here.

I was only looking for liberty at first, and that teenage house had been mine for a mere moment. But I opened the door and stepped into an alternate

self.

When I walk that scene,
When I swing my hips—

There are many ways to enter
as the Paper Queen.