Category: Issue 43

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.

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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.

Alternative Education

by Abigail Carl-Klassen

 “You’re going to school?” he scoffed, overhearing the word high school. 

He clenched the steering wheel as we sat in the 1990 Chevy Lumina van, back windows forced open with PVC, the exhaust from all the other cars hoping to cross back into El Paso from Juarez sinking in around us. Abe, his wife Mary, and their daughter Leah, my best friend, travelled the four and a half hours to Juarez for doctor visits and cheap medications once a month. Over the years I went with them more times than I can remember.

“Well, I went to school too—the school of hard knocks,” he grumbled into the rearview mirror. When I said nothing, he turned his attention to the young man scrubbing the windshield with a dirty rag and promptly turned on the windshield wipers.

In his mind, at fourteen I was best suited for hard work and, in a couple of years, a husband. That evening when we were alone, Leah—who had left school the year before, after finishing the eighth grade, to work as a secretary in her father’s well-drilling business— approached me, eyes low, and said, “Don’t listen to him. He’s just a grumpy old man.” 

His moods, mere shadows of what they were twenty-one years before, when he was an alcoholic (“I was a drunk. I am an alcoholic. That’s why they call it alcoholism, not alcoholwasm,” he would always say, correcting us), were still unpredictable, and I knew that. And I knew that in a few hours he would slap us on the back, laughing at some ridiculous joke. An old man joke, the kind that was only funny because he wheezed and snorted when he laughed. Because we laughed at him, not with him. Sometimes I still feel guilty.

I did not question him—his fourth-grade education in a Mennonite colonia in Mexico, his conversion to Pentecostalism that left him strict but sober. His unrelenting willfulness and stubbornness that allowed him to survive as the youngest of nine children in an abusive family. He made sense. What didn’t make sense was my own education. “Yeah,” I thought, “high school is important, but what about the school of hard knocks?” 

As far back as I can remember I had been told by my parents—high school teachers and Bootstrap University graduates themselves—that I was going to college. Though I grew up in a county where the sale of alcohol was prohibited and church was the primary social activity (besides getting completely wasted in a caliche pit), my parents were not religious people. The Baptists and Church of Christ preached fervently against dancing, the Methodists said everything in moderation, the Mennonites fought with each other about what was considered worldly, and the Catholics and Holy Rollers danced, one in the flesh, the other in Spirit, but as for our house, we worshipped education.  

My parents grew up in the Midwest during the steel strikes and riots of the 1970s and fled the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt in the early 1980s. My dad’s father was a “mill rat” while his mother raised five children in a fog that we now know as postpartum depression. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t meet her father until she was in her twenties after having been raised by a single mother with schizophrenia. My family legacy, together with the fact that I was the daughter of government employees in a blue-collar community where illiteracy was not uncommon, reinforced my understanding from an early age that I was in a position of privilege. Education, my parents maintained, made all the difference. 

My friends’ fathers were truck drivers, oil-field hands, farm laborers, and carpenters, and their mothers were homemakers or worked long hours as home health aides, LVNs, gas-station attendants, Walmart associates, and as maids and school janitors. Their kitchens became like holy places to me, places not only of love but also of education.

Around their tables is where I learned the words “WIC,” “CHIP,” “free and reduced lunch,” and “Indigent Adult Medical Coverage Program.” We ate red and green birthday cake in July made from expired mix with Christmas trees on the box donated by the grocery store to the local food bank. While we ate, drank, and laughed, one of the favorite topics of conversation was rich people who didn’t know how to do shit. Lawyers who left their dirty underwear in their dry cleaning. Foremen who didn’t know how to hook up jumper cables. Doctors who didn’t know how to put on a sling. Bankers who insisted that their maids roll up the Persian rugs before dinner parties so they wouldn’t be stolen. Teachers who—well, they never said anything, at least in front of me, about teachers.

In the summers when I was a teenager many of my friends worked hoeing cotton with their families, and later, after they turned sixteen, they got jobs on spraying crews. They said they probably could hook me up if I wanted to come with them. They knew somebody who could talk to someone else who could talk to the boss. I asked my parents, but they said I couldn’t because the work was dangerous. I think they were ashamed that I wanted to work in the fields after all their hard work and education.

Sometimes at night I lay awake, afraid that I would grow up and not be able to do shit. 

But before my insomnia and the incident on the border, I sat in an assembly at Seminole Junior High, in my hometown, Seminole, Texas, population 6,000. We squirmed in the oversized auditorium seats because we were about to register for our middle school electives, which meant that after the summer was over we would practically be adults. But before we could mark an X on choir, band, or art, we had to listen to a bald, thick, administrative type talk to us about success and education. He launched into some platitudes about us becoming “young men and young women” and “thinking about the future.” I don’t remember much else because after his introduction he made a comment that still ranks high on my list of most ignorant statements I have ever heard, even after all these years. 

“Success,” he bellowed, before pausing for dramatic effect, “isn’t just something that you fall into. You have to work for it. As a matter of fact, you can tell who has been successful just by driving around town and looking at people’s houses.”

I was ten years old and I already knew it was bullshit. 

I slunk down in my retractable chair, narrowed my eyes, and crossed my arms across my chest. Who was this over-educated asshole, who probably didn’t know how to turn off the water when his toilet was overflowing, telling my friends that their parents were unsuccessful? Thus began my contentious lifelong relationship with authority and institutions—my activist education.

Now, a substitute teacher in El Paso, I sometimes walk into a classroom only to be greeted by a poster that showcases several luxury cars parked in front of a mansion with the caption “Justification for Higher Education” plastered across the top. The same poster that hung in my classrooms growing up. Each time I see it I want to rip it up ceremoniously and give students, teachers, and anyone else in the immediate vicinity an education that they didn’t ask for. But, the bell rings, I look into the spectacled eyes of an owl perched beside the chalkboard over a placard that reads “There’s no substitute for a great teacher,” and I know my place.

Some days when I sub, students stab each other in the face with needles, throw rocks at windows, and get up in my face and ask, “What are you going to do about it, bitch?”, giving me an education that isn’t pleasant but that I still want…most days. Growing up middle-class makes me shrink back sometimes, but dammit, I press on. I know my blood is lined with white trash women who can survive! I find the ability to go back to the classroom again and again when I am able to make a connection, an enemy, a friend, and sit down together to talk, to laugh, and to listen.

Last week I subbed at a GED center for students on probation. When I asked the room monitor if the teacher had left anything for the students, he pointed to a table of sixteen-year-olds with buzzed heads and white T-shirts and said, “These gentlemen have been socializing instead of doing anything productive. You can sit down if you want to hear about the gang life—who jumped who, who got busted by the police, and what party was the best. But, you know,” he sighed into his newspaper, “it’s whatever you want.”

I looked back at him and laughed, “Maybe I can get educated, right?” 

He smiled, shook his head, and returned to the morning’s headline: “Nine More Dead in Juarez.” I grabbed a social studies binder and pulled up a chair next to the boys.

I’ve come to understand that the most important moments in my life, the ones that shaped my values, my goals, and my day-to-day decisions, seemed to be about getting the education that I missed. The education that my parents tried to shelter me from but inadvertently propelled me toward. I can’t stop knocking on the door of the school of hard knocks. To see if I can make sense of what I see around me and to ask if I’m seeing the right things. To see if I can find my mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles. To see if I can find my friends who stayed behind when I went to college. To see if I can find my friends (Leah among them) who said, “Fuck this shit, I’m going to college.” To see if I can find everybody who never came back and everybody who never left somewhere inside.