Lot's Wife

Gary J. Whitehead

Sometime soon after the embers cooled,
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air,

they must have come, people of those three cities
remaining, to pick among the charred bones,
the rubble of what was once temple and house,

stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades.
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain,

cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning,
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder,
full of the scavenger's overabundant hope,

they would have found her—even as now
some men encounter the woman of their dreams
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture

with a camera's flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)—
found her, that is, not as the person she was

but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman,
each of them would have wanted a piece of her.
Standing in that wasted landscape,

she must have seemed a statue erected there
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized,
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl

she had been in the city she had known.
And they must have stood there, as we do,
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,

and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle,
chipped at her violently and stuffed their leathern
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which

to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.

The Quiet World

Jeffrey McDaniel
 
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

How Not to Ask Questions

Two weeks in, I decided I would not stay.

I got to class and I changed my mind.

And changed my mind again.

Everyone has told me to "give yourself time," to adjust or acclimate or get into the rhythm. They told me to "ask yourself again at the end of your first semester," and "the first sem is the hardest!" One of them has even congratulated me for surviving the first month of teaching a full load at a university known particularly as the school of hard knocks. I spoke to more people in one month as an instructor than I ever had as an editor. I'm five stories behind my personal schedule.  

Last Thursday, I stood on the curb waiting for a Katipunan-bound jeepney. I broke my own rules and allowed myself to stay in the university hours after my final class. My classes on Wednesday and Fridays were early and the students difficult to engage and among their staring eyes, I always see a specter of myself as I must have been in Pulan's MWF En12. 17, mute, smelling of smoke and sweat, bleary-eyed, and only half-awake.

What hasn't changed: the only part of me alive was the growing hard pearl of fear inside some raw, dark mouth.

Here is what I want to do: write research, write creative projects, publish, and produce books. I want to read, most of all. I want to learn. I want to know more than I do now, I want to understand more than I do now.

Last night with a friend in a dark corner of some busy place. We talked till half-past one. I tried to explain how different our lives were, how different the choices available to us and the options we consider in the daily business of living. I wanted to say: you talk about not compromising and polishing your plans while I have to live without a road map. Do you understand? That is how we are different. You have the luxury to procrastinate; I do not.

You dillydally trying not to make mistakes.

When I suggest--unfairly, I suppose, because you aren't ready and we both know it, we both know you will take your sweet time--that you move towards something, you shift until your body becomes a fence and a barrier. You cross your arms, you cross your legs, your feet point at a wall.

When I asked him about his favorite books he said he enjoyed Beckett, whose prose challenged form and language to reveal only illusions of true intimacy. Even at the height of physical pleasure, you/I/we are alone. There is no pain you feel that your body or your mind does not manufacture. The claim that we are together, without doubt, in our separation is laughable in its quaintness, how little comfort the truth brings: we can say nothing but bow our heads in acknowledgement and surrender. We were so alone.

I do not see myself changing my mind. What scares me is the next inevitable adventure into the void. Another bet, another gamble, another game. Another industry, even. Maybe. And yet more risk.  

surviving bouts of intense optimism

I've become one of those people who need people to be alone. It's Friday night and I'm writing in some coffee shop, another generic asshole-in-the-corner-bent-over-overheating-laptop. I prefer the large, communal tables over the small, circular ones. I'm sharing mine with two couples: four boys.

I felt almost unafraid this week. I mean: the pounding disappeared and the tremor in my hands receded farther up my arm. I found I could allow myself more time and fewer hours of work as punishment for my mistakes. I found I could be kind to myself, that opportunities for tiny acts of kindness existed within the twenty-fours already spoken for and apportioned according to tasks and completing three different to-do lists.

I began writing in my journal again. Not long, rambling entries the way I used to. Jot-lists. Mundane things: don't forget your keys! Eat lunch! Visit Sarah after class!

I allowed myself to overstay my welcome in kind company.

Fear and anxiety made me tighten my grip on myself and demand unscrupulous hours. I set the bar so high there was no way to succeed. When I can control nothing else, when I feel trapped in the eye of a whirling storm, my arms go around myself to hold myself steady. Like that will anchor me to the ground.

Secret pleasures revealed themselves in the space between large tracts of unremarkable but overwhelming fear. The universe intervenes, adept at parallel construction.

In my literature class this morning, one student asked a question I thought I'd answered properly via close reading: how do we know we've not over-read a text? or misread a text? 

Two nights prior, I found a suite of poems written by kids aged 9-12. The poems were written as part of the Booklatan sa Bayan Leyte, a National Book Development Board project.

Walang kamalay-malay
Si Tatay na may patay
Doon sa kapitbahay.

-Angelica A. Navarra, 9, Granja Central School 

I read the poems aloud and withheld critical, contextual information until the class formed its opinions and understood the tone and image and the beautiful ambiguity of the words. And only after the class had formed concrete opinions and understood the poems outside their context, did I reveal that the poems had been written by Typhoon Yolanda survivors, children who had learned to live with loss in an extreme environment. Children who continued to live and who turned to the brevity of this form to say, among other things, we are here, we are still here. Then I asked, did we misinterpret the poems when we read them even without the context? How then do we police our own understanding of poems not written with us in mind? By 'us' I meant the social and communal 'us' that is the product of living within the same society, having grown-up with the same set of beliefs. I didn't plan any of this but what I had brought with me on a whim was a good way to explain the difference between reading closely and misreading.

Sometimes, I am sorely tempted to believe in the guiding hand of some benign, higher power. Call it the Universe, call it by the name of a deity. 

laura kimpton and jeff schomberg

After the literature class I wandered up and down the faculty center. I forgot my keys on the dresser in my bedroom at home and the backpack was heavy with papers. I turned toward home my feet were leaden and disobedient. I didn't want to go. That was strange enough. I usually craved the empty hours by myself. Now, I was too afraid of the familiarity of my own room to look forward to another empty afternoon.

The fear expanded beyond its boundaries to conquer new territory: I keep finding small shards of it in unlikely places. On a Katipunan-Campus jeepney at seven in the morning, just before my Wednesday class. I'm afraid of the marks on my bedroom floor where the sealing wax has been scraped off where I drag the chair to and fro. I'm afraid of the floorspace beside my bed where I knot myself smaller still until my hand covers the width of my entire face. I am so small, so small, I remind myself, and you are small, you are small in the lives of the people in your own small life. You are tiny, I tell myself. I can shrink more, I say.

I am obsessed with taking up as little space as possible, hoping the fear will not find me.

To Lles2K13

I know, I know. You're doing it wrong, Lles2K14, you're supposed to write a letter to your future self.

I have nothing to say to the Lles of the future. Her hands aren't numb from the wrist down, she's relaxing in some faraway coffee shop where the cheerful barista has finally remembered to add an extra packet of honey to go with her Earl Grey. Lles2K15 is a regular at the corner cafe. Her phone connects to the wifi automatically. The man behind the counter understands she will stay at least four hours and he has taken to reserving the quiet table for her. Lles' hands are warm. Lles 2K15 is busy compiling notes for her thesis. The cafe is quiet but for a playlist of songs she's heard so often the music disappears into memory. 

You see? Lles 2K13 is in a darker place. Don't you remember?

So hello. I'm here. This time last year, Lles, you were more than half-way through a semester of undergraduate classes, a requirement you were secretly thrilled to fulfill. 

Every time you stepped off the jeepney and trudged up a flight of steps to the classroom, you fantasized about retracing the steps with a clipboard under one arm. Last August, your first classroom on your first day of class happened to be the room where your first graduate class met. The universe. Parallels and plotting. 

You use the tote bag Kim gave you a year ago. You use it for class everyday. The small room you've been given is a cell murky with dust and grime and you must inhabit it four times a week.

This is the latest in a long parade of mistakes.

That's not how you're supposed to feel.

You're supposed to feel excited that your plans are working, that you are part of an institution greater than yourself. You are understandably overwhelmed. It is cool in the shadow of some large, lumbering giant.

I should've written you several months ago.

Your notebook contains the phrase "take it one day at a time" repeated several times, under several dates. You feel guiltiest about this notebook. It travels with you everywhere, even when you go somewhere there is no possibility of light to write by and no scrap of time to scrape words together. You keep writing "take it one day at a time" because your vision has tunneled and the horizon has disappeared. You see nothing but the procession of days, straight and similarly clad in their uniform solidity. They are coming. You write "take it one day at a time" and account for the hours that must arrive in an orderly fashion. Number your days, marshal the hours at your disposal and be responsible.

Although I understand you will not understand the engulfing panic. You are watching this, after all, from some solitary peak.

I must be here to endure the tide.

You also write, "I want to understand this fear." Like it is some nebulous thing outside of yourself, some other alien thing that your body neither owned nor produced. The bile rises to my throat. You will write "I want to understand this fear" in the belief that knowledge will reveal your fears to be baseless. So you read Status Anxiety (Alain de Botton) and remind yourself that your actions are inconsequential in the history of all things, in the history of the universe that must be the only history we believe. There is nothing to fear, you can do nothing of consequence. There is no tragedy that engulfs the universe, there is no tragedy great enough that it must outlive those who suffer it. You also write "I want to understand this fear" because there is no other action available to you.

You are a fear-making, fear-consuming machine.