EMMA LISTON
SUSAN BERARDI
RICHARD LYONS
JAMES CIANO
LINDSAY MOORE
MAIA ELSNER
JONATHAN SIMKINS
ANDREW GENT SUSAN GROVE OLIVIA HABERMAN KEN HOLLAND
with commentary by
VICENTE HUIDOBRO
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI
KATHRYN HUNT
The Carolina Quarterly
OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
L.S. KLATT
Vo l u m e 6 9 . 1 Fa l l 2 0 1 9 VOLUME 69.1
PUBLISHED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
FALL 2019
Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L
Fall 2019
V O L U M E 6 9 .1
E DI TO R- I N - C H I E F
Kylan Rice A SSI STA N T E DI TOR
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Calvin Olsen N O N - F I C T I O N E D ITO R
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INTERNS Blythe Gulley
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Contents
Fall 2019 | VOLUME 69.1
POETRY JAMES CIANO
Blood Orange on the Roofs 8
At Keats’ Grave 10
MAIA ELSNER
Against the wall of the old city 15
ANDREW GENT
Covered Bridge 16
KEN HOLLAND
The Bones of the Monks 18
KATHRYN HUNT
My Dead Speak—to Me. Do Yours—to You? 20
Cycling 21 Dr. Kildare 22 L .S. KLAT T
Penitentiary 24
Lazy Omens, Amens 25
RICHARD LYONS
Aquatint 26
JONATHAN SIMKINS | VICENTE HUIDOBRO Transfiguration 27
FICTION SUZANNE GROVE
Night Walk 32
OLIVIA HABERMAN
World’s End 46
LINDSAY MOORE
Inheritance 56
NONFICTION SUSAN BERARDI
The Chosen Ones 66
EMMA LISTON
Cadaverland 76
THE FRIEND GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI
On Oliver Baez Bendorf 88
OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
Dark Or All Lit Up, Depending Who You
Were And What You Needed 89
Rest 91 Cure 92 Service 93 Recreation 94 Appetite 95 Work 96 Colony Collapse 97
R E V IEWS DEBORAH BACHARACH Lima :: Limรณn by Natalie Scenters-Zapico 98 KATHARINE COLDIRON The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom 102 JESSICA Q. STARK Hour Book by Stefania Heim 105
JAMES CIANO
Blood Orange on the Roofs And now the sun a dead rose nailed to a wall, and the night going dark like wet denim. There’s a bag I mistook for a bird that keeps flapping from the branch outside my window and the neighbor boy begins to bang the one drum sequence he knows by memory over and over, but slower each time, so slow it sounds the way a heart sounds when you rest your head on a chest, or a door continually opened then slammed in the vacant lot of a Wendy’s by someone who has been driving a long time to reach their friend and has broken down. Once, when I was driving, a man stopped two-way traffic to beat a rug with a bat and the dust that rose was so thick the cars wouldn’t move. The rug rippled like the eel I watched a man pull out of the Hudson river. It writhed on the line before the man struck it once over the head with the dark handle of a broom and the eel went limp. It was like this, the limpness,
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the not moving, each time my father sat down for dinner, how little we dared to look up and the particular way we’d cheer when, after, we were sent to the basement. It was in the way we were still afraid to move and so only looked at each other very intently, like how someone might turn to look at a bird, only to find a plastic bag shaking in its place.
JAMES CIANO
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At Keats’ Grave There was a striped cat that stalked through the graves of the Protestant cemetery and I could tell it still had all its lives by the way it slept on top of their names. The crows were grey with black hoods and squawked from the pines. Judas petals lined the street curbs, they were purple, they were here for two weeks which is shorter than some people’s names. Behind the Porta San Paolo I stood in front of his slab with a camera and a bottle of water, sweat on the back of my neck. I remember the breeze was a boy learning to whistle. I’d never read one of his poems, I was eighteen, and couldn’t have told you why they mattered.
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Severn the painter is buried next to him, and Severn’s infant son too. His headstone is small in comparison to the others’. And because of its size I began thinking only small hands could’ve worked that stone, and chiseled that name, how it must’ve been the mason’s only son, who, not much older than Severn’s child, was forced to consider his own mortality, and in doing so may have carved his own name by accident into the stone. Maybe he ran his fingers through its swishes and the way those letters were chiseled there made his name feel empty and final and no longer his. ~ Your own name feels this way, empty, when your father gets it stuck inside his mouth. When he says both your first and middle names at once JAMES CIANO
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you fall down a flight of stairs into the space between the two. Once, on a morning in June, as a boy, each drop of sweat reddened the acne on your forehead as you trimmed back the boxwoods in the yard. That morning in the dirt you found a bird, its wing broken. Your father found you, handed you a bat from the shed. The sound the bird’s good wing made was the sound a clotheslined sheet makes when it panics in the wind. After you emptied the bird of its name it was silent, the way a clothesline becomes just a line when there’s nothing to hang, the way the bushes seemed less like bushes after you trimmed them. ~ The patch of ox-eye daisies was no one’s in the expanse of the cemetery that opened up to a larger lay of grass. There was a wood bench there in case
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someone wanted to stare at the graves so old now they’d become new again, or not even real, just slabs of stone in a field. There was one tomb with an angel wilted over like a wet petal, at the top of the graveyard’s slope, so steep, that at the bottom was a man who held a cane in his hand like a question mark. And if there’s an antidote for aging I think maybe it’s becoming stone. The angel’s wings hung round and out, and down towards the ground. When I touched them, they were cold and layered. They had chosen silence, the way the bird, before I dropped the bat, chose silence, didn’t move or flap its wing, just lay in the dirt. ~ No one ever mentions the three-stringed harp on Keats’ grave. I think at one time it had more strings, and beautiful music inside it. I want to say that it was the mason’s, JAMES CIANO
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and he played it so much that the strings broke one at a time, until it became the useless shape of a smile and good for nothing else than to be carved into stone by his son. After I put the bat away in the shed, we didn’t mention the bird again. A silence fell over everything finally. It was so heavy even the words we weren’t saying became harder not to say. But I could say something now about my father and the way he let his hands bleed as we worked. How he sang as he worked, how the friction of it sounded like it hurt him and how sometimes it lifted the leaves we raked out of their piles, and blew them into other people’s yards.
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EMMA LISTON
Cadaverland A medical school student in a white lab coat walks up to my desk while I’m entering Histology quiz grades into an Excel spreadsheet. “Table 17 has mold on the right shin and around the left ankle,” she says without preamble. She’s wearing a pair of splash glasses and holds her arms away from her sides, careful to not touch anything with her glistening blue-gloved hands. She tells me she couldn’t find the lab tech and didn’t know who else to notify. “Want to come see it?” I follow her down the hallway to the Gross Anatomy Lab. The room is distant enough from my office door that I can’t smell the formaldehyde, but near enough that students often queue up my threshold, scrutinizing me as they wait their turn to be quizzed on thoraxes and vertebrae. The lab is mostly unoccupied except for the small group gathered around Table 17, their body’s dissected and withered torso gleaming underneath the fluorescent lights. They’ve draped phenol-soaked cloths over the sections of the body they aren’t studying so they won’t have to look at the cadaver’s face. A gangly boy peels back the cloth covering the legs, and I notice it right away—a fuzzy green-gray-black patchwork across the exposed shin bone and the flayed remnants of the calf muscle. Everyone wrinkles their noses, rears back their heads. “Yeah, that’s nasty.” On the metal rim of the whiteboard near the front of the lab, there’s a stack of tangerine sticky notes that the students use to make notes in the anatomy textbooks stacked in the room. MOLD, LEG/ANKLE, I write with a Sharpie and press it to the side of the body tank. I double-pump the hand sanitizer in the wall dispenser next to the exit and use my elbows to push open the door.
“How do you feel about cadavers?” asked the woman who would become my manager during my interview for an administrative assistant position within the Anatomy department of a local medical center. I was underemployed and overqualified for the position—a mixture of a secretary, Body Donation Program liaison, and course coordinator for all anatomy classes—but I hadn’t been asked to come in for any other interviews since leaving graduate school with my diploma in May and I was desperate. I had moved back into my mother’s house and piled the furniture from my apartment in North Carolina inside her garage. I joined a gym and worked out four days a week
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so I would have a reason to shower. My sympathetic boyfriend took me out to dinner to cheer me up and we browsed rental homes online, but it was brutal to realize that I couldn’t afford rent or utilities. So when the interviewer mentioned dead bodies as a component of the job, I looked her in the eye and shrugged. They offered me the position the next day and I accepted immediately. On the first day of work, my manager took me on a tour of the Anatomy department. “Just so you know where things are and where they aren’t,” she said, giving me an encouraging smile. She unlocked offices and storerooms with her master key, showing me where they kept chemicals and extra gloves in all sizes. She introduced me to the doctors who worked on the floor, whispering their quirks and academic achievements in my ear as we walked away from their office doors. The final destination was the Gross Lab—she scanned her badge on the reader, waited for it to flash green, and then pushed open the door and motioned for me to step inside. Compared to the rest of the floor and the building – which had been built in the mid-Fifties and featured grey subway tile on the walls and grey linoleum underfoot, dimly lit and dungeon-like—the Lab was bright, modern, and remarkably clean. Wide windows on the far wall let in a sheath of natural light and motion-sensor fluorescents flickered on above us as we walked further into the space. Drains pockmarked the floor every six feet. The room had the aroma of cleaning agent paired with a sickly, cloying stench that I would soon come to recognize as formaldehyde. Thirty-two metal tanks on wheels crowded the interior of the room, each the dimensional size of a slim, shallow coffin. “They put them in there,” my manager said, hovering by the door. “There’s a crank on the side to raise them to the surface.” A stack of textbooks sat on a table next to the door, their pages warped with brown-colored fluid. I kept my hands in my pockets.
One day in early August, a few clinical anatomy graduate students brought up thirty embalmed bodies on the morgue elevator and wheeled them into the Gross Lab. I left my desk on the pretense of needing to use the restroom and walked towards the double-doors at the end of the hallway, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs. No one prepares you for your first encounter with the dead—the dead without the pageantry of funeral home makeup, the dead with open, cloudy eyes and slackjawed mouths. No one tells you that they look like naked mannequins with shaved heads, blanched and rigid after their blood and bodily fluids are drained away, discernEMMA LISTON
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ible only as male and female by the sex organs that lay exposed for all to see. The cadavers had been thoroughly cleaned, and the brightness of the room showcased every inch of their anatomy: their moles, their wrinkles, their birthmarks and scars, the contour of their fat and the droopiness of their flesh—all the physical characteristics people try so hard to conceal when they are alive. In the lab, death is brazen and unembellished and doesn’t give a fuck about your sensitivities. The smell of the phenol formaldehyde was overwhelming, the fluorescent lights hurt my eyes and the floor was tacky under the soles of my shoes. I stood there until a grad student asked if I needed anything, and I blinked and offered them extra gloves. When I stepped out of the lab, I leaned against the tile wall in the hallway and pressed my hand to my throat, feeling my pulse beat wildly under my chin.
What I like most about working in a hospital is that I was never meant to work in one. Hospitals had always been the place where relatives went to die, where they were snatched away from us and came back home in a box. Doctors and nurses were harbingers of terminal diagnoses and ominous reminders of the frightening ways a body could revolt against its owner. I had no desire to work in a clinical setting, and yet I walked alongside doctors down the shining hallways that made up the intestinal maze of the medical center. Now I was the one collecting dead relatives and placing boxes full of cremains into the hands of grieving family members. I was the one quoting the cool, detached vocabulary of lethal diseases to people who would rather hear better news. When I wasn’t processing the dead, doctors would stop by my desk behind the department’s printer for little chats now and then because they were curious by nature. “What are you writing?” they’d ask. “An email,” I’d say. “No, but what are you writing?” they’d reply. “Oh, I’m working on several projects,” I’d say. It was less messy than telling them the truth, which was that I abandoned most of the things I began. “That sounds interesting,” they’d say, and then they’d ask me how to scan a diagram of the cardiac system into a PDF file that they could email to themselves.
Mom doesn’t like to hear about my work. She wrinkles her nose when I enthusiastically describe how a real human skull feels when cupped in your palms, or how a brain went missing from its assigned bucket only to turn up inside of the skull from
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which it had been taken. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time together at dinners on the weekends, so I understand how trying to eat while thinking about dissected body parts could make one squeamish. My friends think my stories from work are ghastly and humorous, and their faces morph in fascinated disgust when I tell them about severed arms used for clinical workshops and the orange Home Depot buckets that cart around free-floating appendages. I roll my shoulders back and pretend as if a bisected head with its eyes removed is blasé. I find a distinct pleasure in the spookiness, a sense of pride when the details that make others cringe make me grin. A toughness towards the macabre begins to develop inside of my mind: I hardly notice the smell of formaldehyde floating down the hall. Picking loose teeth from the bottom of a skull box doesn’t make me shiver. I can look death in its physical eyes, watch the way that people who once breathed, talked, and walked among us turn into instruments for education, and the mystery and unease of the cadavers is ripped away. But it’s strange to associate the bodies on the tables with the people I speak to on the phone. I talk to old ladies from the Delta, who tell me that their physical form is of no importance to them once they have passed. “I’ll be in heaven if it’s the Lord’s will,” they say. “It doesn’t matter what they do with me down here. My soul’s gonna be with Jesus.” Others are a little more self-conscious. “Will I be out on the table for everyone to see?” I attempt to quell their anxieties, their insecurities, explain our treatment of donors’ bodies in technical terms that are easy to swallow. Things often turn to the spiritual, the emotional, and I become fluent in the jargon used to smooth over the harsh reality of death. One woman talks to me for fifteen minutes about how she knows she’ll be with God, but she’ll make sure to check in and see if those medical students are treating her body right. Others don’t want to speak of their passing at all, which makes for difficult conversation when I begin to inquire about the return of cremains to family members. I try to be as amiable and accommodating to people’s needs as possible— death is unfamiliar to them and a frightening concept to swallow. Helping the donors approach it with kindness feels important to me. It makes me hopeful that one day, when it’s my time to go, someone will show compassion to me. “God bless you, honey,” they say before we hang up the phone. “Have a wonderful day.”
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The worst days are when we have to deny a donor. Everyone is automatically accepted into the Body Donation Program when they apply, but the donor’s bodies have to pass a physical assessment in order for us to accept them. There are certain conditions that disqualify people from our program: jaundice, edema, infectious blood borne diseases, severe wasting, as well as death from extreme trauma or suicide. If they had fresh surgery and died from complications, we cannot take them. If they had a feeding tube, we cannot take them. Over six feet tall? Over two-hundred pounds? We cannot take them. Families forget to make a backup plan, even though we tell donors that acceptance is not guaranteed. The program pays for all costs associated with embalming and cremation—for the families who can’t afford a funeral, a denial from us is another blow on top of the stinging loss of their father, their mother, their grandparent. On the phone with the nurses, going over times of death and social security numbers, we utilize a clinical vocabulary to help them understand why we cannot accept the deceased. But the families don’t want scientific terms—they demand to know why we’re turning their loved one away. They feel betrayed. “I cannot believe the audacity of your program.” “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.” I’m sorry, but the application states that the donor must meet certain criteria at the time of death, and we tell everyone to make back-up arrangements just in case, the criteria has to do with the preservation of the body… But no one wants to hear that when their mother has just died. I listen to them cry on the phone and yell at me and repeat that they don’t understand, and eventually they hang up.
I’m a month into the job when I pick up a spare copy of Gray’s Basic Anatomy and wonder if I could have been a medical student. The answer is: absolutely not. How can anyone identify the differences between the Piriformis muscle and the Quadratus femoris muscle in real time, on a human leg, and not in a book where they are colored red and purple? How can anyone survive eight hours of classwork and lectures every day, endure at least three tests a week and still enjoy life? How can anyone press a knife into the flesh of another human being and peel back skin, cut through
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layers of another person’s body? The first-year medical students are around my age, most two years younger than me, but there are familiar faces in that sea of 165 people: friends from high school, people I knew in college, the younger siblings of old acquaintances. I strike up tentative rapports with a few of them, but it’s difficult to be a component of the authority that dictates their grades as well as their buddy. We make promises to get drinks on the weekend that never come to fruition since they’re always studying. A few of them ask about me, ask for my story: I tell them I just graduated with an MFA, that I moved home for love, that I’m working on a novel. “So like, not a real Master’s degree, then,” one of them states. I’m so taken aback that I only remember to feel angry after he walks away. There’s a sense of superiority that radiates from the medical community that gives me a feeling of incompetence which haunts me in every conversation. Pretending to know what a student is talking about when they mention the popliteal fossa and contributing to the conversation are two different things. I feel small, unintelligent, and irrelevant.
The end of the semester approaches and Gross Anatomy nears its completion. The head professor stations me inside of the Lab to receive the Bone and Skull Boxes that students return before their final exam. Check-in sheets rest on top of the body tank nearest the door and I pull up a chair next to it, open Instagram on my phone and lean against the cold metal lid of the tank. The students come in small groups, dripping rainwater all over the floor. They mark off their names and group numbers as they stack their boxes full of femurs, metatarsals and humeri in the corner. When all of the boxes have been collected, I wander around the lab, making sure everything is in its right place. A tank in the back is open and I see the arcs of exposed ribs peeking over the metal rim. Curiosity gets the best of me and my feet move of their own accord towards the far corner of the room. The remnant of a cadaver is propped up, headless and skinless and weathered. Only the bones remain: the rib cage with pieces of dried, flaking tissue, the spine and the vertebrae of the neck curving underneath the bones. The edge of the pelvic bone rises from the bottom of the tank, but the lower extremities are concealed under a thick brown fluid. My immediate reaction is to cover my mouth. The smell is potent, and for EMMA LISTON
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the first time in months, I gag. “Wow, you look rough.” It’s a knee-jerk reaction and I giggle, the revulsion vanishing. The gallows humor dissipates when the bones shift in the tank of their own accord, rattling against the metal siding. I know it’s just gravity—maybe the tank shifted due to my heavy footfalls, perhaps I knocked it with my elbow—but I bolt for the door. My mind conjures an image of the skeletal remains clambering out of the tank to follow me back to the world of the living, to lurk in the frigid, shadowy hallways outside my office door.
That weekend, I visit my mother at her house. “I think I want to enroll in the Body Donation Program,” she says to me as I play with the cat in the living room. She has a file folder that she keeps in the two-drawer cabinet on the floor of her bedroom closet. A note that reads “EMMA—OPEN IN CASE OF MY DEATH” is paper clipped to the front. I’ve never been tempted to look inside. I grimace when I picture my mother—cold, naked, head shaved—inside one of those tanks. My mother shouldn’t be one of those mannequins that the students cut open. I don’t want to think of her body in pieces. I lose my appetite for dinner, but I don’t try to talk her out of signing up for the program—it’s her choice, and I explain the application process to her over my fried catfish and mac and cheese. But in my mind’s eye, all I see is the rib cage of that half-skeleton, all I smell is the tank full of dirty chemicals. My fearlessness towards death does not apply outside of the Lab. I realize that I don’t want any of my family members to be in the program. “What are we going to do with me instead?” my mother asks. “Don’t die,” I say.
Classes are over by December and the work days become lethargic. The only time someone needs me is when they want to print out a lengthy document or when there’s a leak in the ceiling that has to be reported to Maintenance. The hours tick by uneventfully: I read the New York Times every morning, watch Hulu alone in the conference room on my lunch break, and spend the afternoon half-heartedly brainstorming new writing concepts. I discover that looking busy is key when reading a Buzzfeed article about Kardashian baby daddy drama, and I discover that I can smuggle a Jasper
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Fforde novel under my desk in the afternoon and no one will notice. Life passes quickly—one day I look at the calendar and realize that I’ve been in the Anatomy department for seven months, and I panic. Where did all that time go? How did I sleepwalk through all those days? My reflection in the bathroom mirror has a permanent line between the eyebrows from grimacing. I open Word documents and stare at the blank pages, trying to conjure up sentences worthy enough to fill up the white space. The numbness creeps into my hands, fogs up my head, and filters through my bloodstream – I feel as stagnant as the bodies in the lab. There’s no growth for me here. I shrink into myself. My boyfriend spends his weekends away from the house, fixing up his classic car, and I spend hours laying on the couch in front of the latest episode of Queer Eye when I could be and should be writing. Daydreams of alternate choices and alternate realities play themselves in my brain on a loop and I can’t seem to turn them off. I’m obsessed with the feeling of missing a key part of myself, a necessary ingredient that will magically add happiness to my job and my life. None of this—the cadavers, the humble move home, the low-paying position, the rising anxiety inside that should have been manageable after years of therapy— none of this is what I had planned for my Twenties. I have a reoccurring dream of digging a hole in the ground and trying to bury myself under the layers of freshly-turned silt—something is chasing me, and I have to hide, I have to play dead. There’s peace in the stillness I feel under the dirt, but there’s a presence above that waits for me to come up for air. One night I play the role of the predator, trying to sniff out where I’ve hidden myself, but I can’t find my prey. I wake up in the middle of the night, angry and covered in a sheen of sweat.
This job has changed me. Sometimes I look at people’s faces and imagine the bones that lay beneath the smooth flesh. I’ve gotten used to asking people about major decubitus, or bedsores, that are present on fresh bodies. I look at a skeleton and think, neat. I’m still afraid of what will happen when I die and when my loved ones die, but I can formulate the physical process in my head step-by-step, understand what happens to the rest of me here on earth. That is a comfort, in its own way. A week ago, I accepted another job inside of the hospital, working in the Graduate School office where I’ll be in charge of the administrative tasks for anxious Ph.D. candidates. It comes with a pay raise and the opportunity to edit graduate theses—not quite a dream job, but at least something within my skill set, something familiar to me. EMMA LISTON
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But that’s the funny thing: what’s most familiar to me now are the smells of chemicals and a skull sitting on a cabinet shelf, bearing its broken teeth in a manic grin as if to say, Welcome to Cadaverland, I’ll be your guide! I’m used to coming home in the afternoon and shedding my clothes and washing the patina of grime off of my face before commiserating with my boyfriend about work woes, mine tinged with a lurid hue. It feels wrong to abandon my comrades in the department, to leave them behind to deal with the daily chaos while I sit in a warm, cadaver-free environment downstairs. I’ve seen more of human beings than I had ever wanted to see—I’ve measured the weight of a heart in my hands and the lightness of a metatarsal between my fingers. Wasting time frightens me more than anything now—it’s a byproduct of witnessing death’s bizarre shelf-life, the way a person can become an object once the heart stops its beating and the soul dissipates. But there is a part of me that will miss the quiet, the predictable days, the knowledge that the dead will always remain the same. There is a steadiness to the lab that is comforting, that lulls a person into the methodical work of taking people apart. I walked into the Gross Lab today, just to say goodbye. It was cool and silent as always, the only sound the low humming of the fluorescent lights above my head. I stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed over my chest, and turned to look at the thirty metal tanks that surrounded me. “I’m going now,” I said. There was no reply.
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THE FRIEND
G A B R I E L L E C A LV O C O R E S S I
On Oliver Baez Bendorf I’m such a huge fan of Oliver Baez Bendorf’s work. When I was asked to kick off The Friend in The Carolina Quarterly it took me approximately three seconds to know whose poems I’d like to see in these pages. Oliver is a hero of mine both on and off the page. His poems are an embodiment of his commitment to compassion, justice, and healing both on and off the page. In his new book, Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver imagines the kind of world I want to live in: a world where we are all free to be the exact kind of animals we are. In that work, and in all the new work I’ve seen and heard since, I feel that Oliver is making a new realm for us, a kind of portal in which no matter how afraid I am to be alive I also know that I’m protected. I’m tired of poems that look away from the dangers most of us face just because we want to live in our bodies in the world of humans. I’m also tired of poems that refuse to imagine there might be a way to live where everyone is seen and safe. To me, just me, I think we live in a time where poems need to open their eyes to the wide view: the beautiful terrible all of it. When I read Oliver’s poems, with their formal rigor and experiment and their emotive rigor and experiment I feel I am in the presence of poems that build a new world as the words unfurl. I fear this could so easily sound like some easy compliment someone just writes for the heck of it. I mean it as the most serious truth. The power the poet has is, to some large degree, the magic of spells. With precision, care, and an understanding of the power of every detail, Oliver is making a new poetics and a new world. My light body feels his light body making a new space for me to land. A new space for so many of us to land. I’d love it if you’d read these poems but also I’d love it if you’d let these poems make a new kind of landscape open for you. We can all be safe. We are all afraid. We can all benefit from letting the light of these poems enter us. Gabrielle Calvocoressi Carrboro, North Carolina October 1, 2019
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OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
Dark Or All Lit Up, Depending Who You Were And What You Needed But you were light. You were precious, little lamb. Small antenna, professor. Easy to love. Your eyes flutter when you rummage for the right word. Never let a mourning dove go one night without seed. I see you want to live. Carrying the worst of it, green bile in your palms. Let go. Don’t forget to thank roses, you thick as pitch soft convocation. Daddy, little lamb. Back to the lake, shoulders open to dunes. Clamshell rosary on flotsam straw. Touch not paved through words (how it was good)— real time: what’s come available. Not taking more than you need, but taking it. Little bandit, give back source of strength. How shame becomes an offer that becomes OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF
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more interesting. Little holes burrow where sand becomes grey. High and held. Entire hive. Shook the house. I got angry and called the flat chest and they answered. Nothing woke me even bear skin on my bare back. Then something slept in me and I awoke. Gave rear entry to the lineal rod of light. We safety net safely wept. I could love what entered.
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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY