Category: Issue 43

Calendar

by Maeve Barry

The calendar will be a gift for our grandparents. All of their children will get one. The photographer will take the photos in the parking lot of an Irish restaurant. It’s where we eat after funerals. 

In the lot it’s raw with no sun out. We wear big coats but will take them off for the photos so it looks like it’s spring. Our parents are in a rush to take photos cause they’re worried about one of the grandparents dying. I’m not worried about either one of them dying. Last patches of gravelly snow jut from the ground. A pokey reminder. My teeth clack. We watch for my grandparents’ car. I’m fourteen. I am a computer. The hot pink thong that I wear is the one that I stole from American Eagle. 

My grandma hugs me and it smells like vagina and mildew. My grandpa hugs me and I flinch. He hits the side of my head like he’s showing everyone how high his hand is. 

I have an aunt who’s a doctor and a bitch. Her two daughters go to Wellesley and they go right up to my grandpa and kiss him. They complain really loud about how some guy spread out on the train on their way here. They love my grandpa. My older girl cousins go to Wellesley College and they don’t know anything. 

My mom knows, more than any of us, but she’s so busy acting like she doesn’t that she won’t look at me. She’s tried honesty. Now she wants siblings and a mom who will look her in the face. Now I’m the only person she can talk to about it. 

***

To Christmases and Thanksgivings I wear my tight red little dress so they can all see my tits. I show up with my hair high in a ponytail and my neck soaked in hickies. I know how to time it. This Christmas the hickies were from a boy who wore only one t-shirt. It said ‘Consent is Sexy.’  That boy kept moving his mouth down to my tits and I kept pushing it back up my neck. The next day in Worcester we sat at my grandparents’ table before midnight mass. They all sat there in the purple glow off my neck skin. Last week my mom said, None of that for the calendar. 

It’s February and my neck’s back to normal. I wear my tiny spandex skirt and black tights and the thong that I stole and a floaty t-shirt.

            I’m going to the bathroom, I say, and no one answers. No one is looking. They’re all leaning over the new red, screaming baby. Trying to corral the uncle who’s been drinking since he woke up. Trying to calm down the autistic cousin who is nineteen, red and screaming. My mom doesn’t look at me cause she’s busy looking all over, hoping someone will look at her. I walk to the door and feel my ass move through my skirt. Only my grandpa’s looking. 

The restaurant is called O’Connors. That’s not our last name but it might as well be. There’s a long sticky bar. The bartender was told not to serve my uncle until after the photos. Maybe my uncle knows about my grandpa. He’s never said. The bar is all cops. The bartender is young and his hair’s kind of red, not red like a siren, like my red-head cousins. Not like my grandpa’s was before he lost it. Now his head’s patchy snow. The bartender opens his mouth and he’s really Irish. 

            What can I get you.

            He looks right at me.

            A white Russian, I say. 

            It’s what my grandma drinks. I say it to seem older.

            The bartender smirks. His fingernails are so dirty. The celtic cross poked into his bicep is the same as the one on my uncle’s ankle. The same as the one on everyone’s graves.

There’s milk on my mouth. I stand. I wait for a second outside the bathroom door before I close it. When he opens it I see his face in sharp light. I see its grooves, bags, its raw eyeballs. Maybe a little older than my Wellesley cousins. I can’t imagine anyone would want to touch them. Our grandpa didn’t. The bartender’s grimey nail snags my tights. They don’t tear. We don’t kiss. He lifts my leg. The toilet paper dispenser digs my ass in a nice way. The nicest part of it, maybe. I stick my milk tongue down his ear and that isn’t clean either. My tights tie my ankles. I pull my pink thong to the side. I wrap all my arms and legs around him like I’m his baby. My ass hits the toilet paper. It pulls away. It hits again. I look at the brown stain on the white ceiling. It’s shaped like Japan, not Ireland. His breath sputters. I hate it the way that I hate my mom’s breathing and my brother’s chewing and my grandma two-foot-stepping every stair with her gout puffy ankles, pressing down on my arm, like she needs me to help her. My face scrunches. I never push or trip her.

            I don’t love my grandparents, I say in my head while he fucks me.

            What’d you say, the bartender pants.

            I said I want you to fuck me.

            I’ve never said that. I hear my own voice like through a screen in a movie.

            He presses his hands on my shoulders. I rip at his hair and pretend that it’s already white. He springs back with release. He keeps saying Jesus.

There you are, my bitch aunt says when I walk back to the photo stools and the guy waiting there with his camera. 

            Aren’t you freezing, my mom asks. What happened to your tights?

            Nothing happened to my tights. I balled them and pushed them deep in the trash can. My brother kicks a deflated football. It goes nowhere. The photographer wears a fedora. My legs turn red when air hits them. 

They sit me in the front row on the stools. There was a break between me and the cousins who are older. The Barnard cousins get placed in the back. They’re mad you won’t see the pants part of their pantsuits. 

Once, on a plane, my mom sat next to a psychic. The psychic told my mom that she fell toward the middle of her siblings, and that she was one of eight. My mom is the fourth of six. To the three oldest siblings he didn’t do anything. My young uncle is drunk and my young aunt is dead. And I am sitting in the middle of the front row of grandkids. The sitting girls close their legs. The photographer tells my brother, Put down the football. 

When the camera clacks I snap my knees open. Every time, fast so no one will stop me or notice. Purple circles glow the inside of my thighs. From his slinky hips. The hot pink triangle of the thong that I stole. I flash the camera. Hot pink yells itself forward. It’s in every photo. It will hang in their kitchens, where they’ll all have to notice.

What inspired you to write “Soundings” and “Fable”? Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

“Soundings” began in a pandemic exercise suggested by the poet Rae Gouirand: each day before writing, spend five minutes or so “visiting with silence.” It’s meant to help you push past the everyday noise and connect to something deeper. I was having trouble with the connecting part, so I often ended up writing about the literal noise. It gave me a way to ease into writing even when I didn’t feel like it.

My Amsterdam apartment faces a green with a canal running along one side and a busy street along the other, and the zoo is only a short block away, so it was a rich soundscape. I began to notice how much my mood infused the descriptions of sounds. Intrigued, I took the most evocative ones, whittled them down, and played with the order to reflect the course of the pandemic and the changing seasons.

“Fable” was also to some extent a product of the pandemic—at least that was when I became invested in the reproductive success of a pair of magpies that returned each year to the mulberry tree outside my window. The mulberry leafs late in the spring so I had a clear view of their nest as did the crows. Crows will eat other birds’ eggs, even their nestlings, and the magpie parents were at constant war.

One day, when the magpies were trying to fight off an especially burly crow, I leaned out the window and clapped to shoo him away. Instead, I scared the magpies who took flight across the canal, leaving their eggs to the crow. Originally, the poem ended with the image of the magpies flying away. “How pretty,” early readers said. “But it’s supposed to be horrifying!” I said. So I added the final couplets.

It went through a lot of titles—“Plunder” and “Unintended Consequences” stuck around the longest, but both felt overdetermined. In the end, I settled on “Fable” because the poem reminded me of Aesop’s fables—the crow, hubris, consequences.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

I’m currently reading Mia You’s Festival  at the recommendation of friend and colleague Laura Wetherington. I love a poem that makes you laugh in the moment and has you still thinking days later. Mia’s a master at approaching weighty themes with a twisty sense of humor. 

Where we can learn more about you and your work? My author website is sarahcarriger.com – hopefully I’ll get around to populating it. Currently, it redirects to my bio at InternationalWritersCollective.com, the creative writing school where I serve as the director and teach.

What inspired you to write “Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War” and “Afternoon in theMeadow?”

Both of these poems were written at about the same time. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting our first granddaughter.  We were eager to be with her and anxious about the world she would inherit. I nearly always travel with the poets of the Tang dynasty. Why?  Nothing  about their life and times was easy. War, famine, vindictive emperors, sickness and personal loss were commonplace and still these Chinese poets find daily consolation through friends, nature, memory, the next destination. They subscribe to a simple yet profound aesthetic that you also find in Whitman, Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Merwin, and dozens of other poets:  pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.  The poems that interest me the most are the ones where the world intrudes on some private moment and you find in these poems a blending of external force and internal power.  In that way, both of these poems, Dusk in March and Afternoon in the Meadow, attempt to engage the world as it is without turning away.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

I am always in the hunt for what I think of as observational oddities, like a tongue seeking the jagged tooth, what Camus called writing that’s “heavy with things and flesh.”

This hunt always includes looking at the derivation of words.  I never tire of learning that words often begin in one place and like stones gathering moss, end up in another world of meaning.This process alone provides for discovery and astonishment.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

I read as much fiction as poetry.  Lately, I have discovered Irish women that I should have known about:  Jeannette Haien, Claire Keegan, Edna O’Brien.  I am always reading Linda Gregg who remains the most submerging of all contemporary poets.

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

I have been around a while.  I’m not that hard to find.  I have published two novels and seven books of poems.  More of me and what I’ve been up to can be found at jpwhitebooks.com

Two Poems

Elisa Gabbert


Life Poem 2

Beginnings of years, each random thing
is an augur. I sleep unwell, is that
life now? Make tiny adjustments
to furniture. Poem is a four-room house.

We walk several miles, see many animals
at the zoo. “What the living do”:
they pace around, eat, content enough
to be bored. A moon bear. A Bactrian camel.

This elephant stands there so casually,
one back leg crossed. She’s 39.
She’s younger than me—she
so enchanted/entrenched with time.

I want time that deep. A trench,
an intractable arrow. I want not
to know what I want, I want to
want nothing past tomorrow.

Caravaggesque

There’s a scene in The Hustler
you once heard described in another movie.
There’s a hole in the future, hope
rises up, hope you don’t want.

Years pass. You see The Hustler. The scene
floats out from the screen
like a soul leaves a body, a memory
of someone else’s dream.

Sunday now, train in the mist,
you look at the cars on the other bridge.
Is life always like this—doubled,
removed, and thus understood?

As in a famous painting of
the Magdalen, her candle positioned
to watch itself flame in a mirror,
which also is framed, it also is paint.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the On Poetry column for tThe New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

I’m Tom Hanks

by Mark Leidner

Once, while traveling alone to see family, I saw Tom Hanks at the airport. He was also alone, just walking with a coffee, and it was definitely him.

I love movies, and I even love most of Tom Hanks’s, so I was flooded with an urge to run up to him and ask what he was doing, where he was headed, and maybe what movie he was working on.

But the moment passed. I was too shy, and he kept walking, and I looked down. By the time I looked back up, I’d lost him to the terminal.

After boarding and finding my seat on the plane, I began beating myself up for my cowardice. I should’ve been brave and struck up a conversation with him or something. After all, Tom Hanks isn’t an alien or a god; he’s just a human being, and I’m a nice guy, and there’s no reason we couldn’t have had a perfectly normal conversation. Hell, maybe he’s lonely.

Maybe it’s like when there’s a car crash on the highway and everyone assumes someone else has already called 911, so no one does, resulting in no one coming to help the people who need it. Maybe Tom Hanks is so famous that most people are afraid to speak to him because they assume everyone else is always approaching him, resulting in him never having anyone to talk to.

Maybe what Tom Hanks longs for more than anything is a simple, friendly conversation with a fellow human being, assuming the person didn’t overstay their welcome, and since it was me, I knew I wouldn’t have. I would have bailed at even the slightest hint of his discomfort or annoyance. I should have risked it, but I didn’t, and now he’s gone, and when I tell people about seeing him, they’ll only ask if I went up and asked him for his autograph or something, and I’ll have to say no. I’ll have to look them in the eye and say nothing remotely interesting happened.

My thoughts circled thusly as the plane filled with passengers. To try and take my mind off my missed opportunity, I searched the in-flight movie selections for a Tom Hanks movie, but none were available.

That’s when I saw him again—Tom Hanks, the real Tom Hanks—walking down the aisle of my own plane, coming right toward me.

I had a second chance. Sure, it would be awkward. There were people behind him who wouldn’t have wanted to be delayed by our conversation, and I’m sure Hanks himself would’ve hated to be the one whose detainment increased the annoyance of those behind him. But maybe it was worth it. I’d just convinced myself I’d missed a big opportunity for me and for Tom Hanks by not engaging him earlier. What if the concerns about holding up the line of boarding passengers was just another excuse to chicken out?

I quickly tried to think of something better to say than simply asking him what movie he was making next, hoping I could come up with something that would seem like a valid item of conversation between any two passengers—maybe something practical and related to flying, like a question about frequent-flier miles or seating assignments, so the people behind wouldn’t feel like I was just fawning over a celebrity—but I couldn’t think of anything, and once again, and as soon as I’d seen him, he was gone, having walked past my row, into the depths of the plane.

You can imagine how my self-flagellation escalated in the next few moments, realizing I’d missed the same opportunity twice in a row. I wondered how I’d ever gotten anything done in my life at all, given my obvious predilection toward paralysis at the moment when the hand of fortune presented me with an opportunity to do something actually memorable and interesting. Had I lived my life in such a way as to specifically avoid having to do anything memorable? Was there anything memorable about me at all? It was going to be a long flight . . .

Or so I thought . . . until Tom Hanks sat down beside me, having returned from placing a bag of his in the overhead compartment two rows behind. 

He didn’t even ask me if he had the right seat. He just sat down, and a moment after I thought my chance to prove something vaguely significant about my life by interacting with him proactively had flown me by, here he was a third time. Inches from me. I could smell his musk. I had the measure of the man in ways few do. Now there would be no excuse for me not to act.

The flight was three-and-a-half hours long. I had that long to come up with something to say to him, and I already suspected that a simple “Hello” and “I’m a big fan of your movies” would be sufficient. For me, there was no better feeling than to already have a good plan and then, on top of it, to have tons of time to come up with a better one.

Ironically, due to Tom Hanks’s own proactivity, I never even got the chance.

As soon as he saw me looking at him in a way that told him I recognized him, he smiled warmly and asked me if I’d seen his latest movie. I gave my honest answer—I hadn’t—though I did assure him that I’d seen most, if not all, of his other movies, and in the theater, too.

“It’s just that I haven’t been to the theater in a while,” I explained. “Just busy, I guess.”

He absolved me with a wave and told me not to worry about it whatsoever. Then he asked me if I wanted to see it.

“Your movie? Sure. I’ll see it as soon as I get a chance.”

“No,” he said. “Do you want to see it right now?”

I must have looked stunned.

“I’ve got the final cut saved right here on my phone.” He lifted it. “Want to watch it with me?”

“You . . .  want me . . . to watch . . . your movie . . . with you . . . right now . . . on this flight?”

“Only if you want to.”

“Oh my God. I would love to.”

We watched the whole thing.

I’m not a movie critic. I neither loved nor hated it. It passed the time, and it made me think, if only a little. Maybe it made me feel a little more than it made me think. But it was unquestionably thrilling to watch it on the phone of its star, with that star right beside me watching it with me. They say movies are best experienced in the theater, and until today I would have agreed. You’ve never really watched a movie until you’ve watched it with the star, almost touching, as they hold up the screen, tilting it toward you slightly so that you get the best angle, as if their whole performance is personal and meant for you.

After the movie ended, I still hadn’t gotten over the coincidence of Tom Hanks himself taking the seat next to mine on a flight and showing me his latest project.

Is this the greatest day of my life, I wondered, or just the oddest? Or is something exactly this odd simply something everyone experiences eventually? Lots of people have strange celebrity encounter stories. Maybe they’re just statistically destined to happen every now and again, even to people like me?

Just as I wondered this, I awoke—alone—in a comfortable bed in an extravagantly appointed apartment. 

The transition was so jarring, it made the comfort of the bed almost feel like a trap. Where was I?

I went instinctively to the bathroom, and looking in the mirror, I saw that I wasn’t me at all, I was Tom Hanks—the real Tom Hanks himself.

Of course the apartment was mine. This was where I lived when I was on the East Coast.

I took a piss and brushed my teeth and thought about my dream and what it was about—me fantasizing about being someone who was afraid to meet me, and then thrilled to meet me, and even more thrilled to watch me act in a movie with me beside them, holding up the little screen. Whatever it had meant, it wasn’t flattering. Was I too obsessed with my own career? My own self-image? Did I not have friends? Real friends that weren’t business partners or filmmaking collaborators? Did I secretly pine for random people to approach me and tell me they love my movies? After a career of playing different characters—from the comedic to the absurd, from the ordinary to the neurotic, from the stoic and heroic to the doddering and sad—was I anyone at all?

And after waking, had the fact that I hadn’t even remembered who I was until I saw my reflection in the bathroom mirror meant that I was no one at all until I was being looked at? 

And were the only eyes I trusted enough to tell me who I was my own?

Or was my slippery self simply proof of my talent as an actor? 

With no one around, with no prestige attached, with no consistent sense of self to accept it, was this moment of liminal amnesia the only awards ceremony that mattered?

As I finished brushing my teeth, I shook all these thoughts from my head and left them swirling away down the drain with the suds of toothpaste. I went to the kitchen and brewed some coffee. I sliced open a grapefruit, poured vanilla granola into a bowl of plain yogurt, and opened my laptop. I had several emails to review from various producers and agents regarding the project that lay before me.

By the time the coffee finished brewing, the dream was more or less forgotten. First, you become someone else; then you become yourself again, only to find you’ve forgotten who you are; then you finally forget that you forgot, and you’re yourself—I can think of no better distillation than this of the actor’s miraculous burden.

The upcoming movie was particularly exciting to me. Even though production was months out, the bulk of financing had already fallen in place, per the first email I read.

The script, too, which was already tight, was getting tighter, and the theme it explored was something I had no small amount of personal experience with. Best of all, the character I was to play was unlike anyone I’d ever played before.